Performing Shakespeare’s Women: Playing Dead 9781350002593, 9781350002623, 9781350002609

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Performing Shakespeare’s Women

Performing Shakespeare’s Women Playing Dead Paige Martin Reynolds

THE ARDEN SHAKESPEARE Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square , London , WC1B 3DP , UK 1385 Broadway , New York , NY 10018 , USA BLOOMSBURY, THE ARDEN SHAKESPEARE and the Arden Shakespeare logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in Great Britain 2019 Paperback edition published 2020 Copyright © Paige Martin Reynolds, 2019 Paige Martin Reynolds has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identifi ed as the author of this work. For legal purposes the Acknowledgements on pp. xi–xiii constitute an extension of this copyright page. Cover design by Irena Martinez Costa Cover image: Pippa Nixon and Charlotte Cornwell as Ophelia and Gertrude in Hamlet, directed by David Farr, 2013. Photo by Keith Pattison © RSC All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Reynolds, Paige, author. Title: Performing Shakespeare’s women: playing dead / Paige Martin Reynolds. Description: London; New York, NY: Bloomsbury Publishing Plc, 2018.  |  Series: The Arden Shakespeare  |  Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2018055734 (print)  |  LCCN 2018058713 (ebook)  |  ISBN 9781350002616 (ePub)  |  ISBN 9781350002609 (ePDF)  |  ISBN 9781350002593 (hardback) Subjects: LCSH: Shakespeare, William, 1564-1616—Characters—Women.  |  Women in literature.  |  Death in literature. Classification: LCC PR2991 (ebook)  |  LCC PR2991.R49 2018 (print)  |  DDC 822.3/3—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018055734 ISBN: HB: 978-1-3500-0259-3 PB: 978-1-3501-7096-4 ePDF: 978-1-3500-0260-9 eBook: 978-1-3500-0261-6 Typeset by Integra Software Services Pvt. Ltd. To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com and sign up for our newsletters.

This book is dedicated to Bert, Anna and Max.

CONTENTS

Preface viii Acknowledgements xi

Introduction: Hunger Artists

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1 Performing Death and Desire in Othello 2 Playing Parts in King Lear

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3 Being the Female Body in Macbeth 4 Making Love in Hamlet

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5 Falling and Rising in Richard III 6 Dying in Romeo and Juliet Notes 153 Bibliography 175 Index 187

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PREFACE

As a woman performing in Shakespeare’s plays, I have died often. And that is how this book was born. The player from Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead could even be referring to the frame within which the female actor of Shakespeare must frequently work when he says, ‘They have to exploit whatever talent is given to them, and their talent is dying.’1 Though I cannot claim to have died ‘heroically, comically, ironically, slowly, suddenly, disgustingly, charmingly, or from a great height’, as the player describes, I have died reasonably well. I have expired by poison, suffocation, suicide and grief. When I recently played a character originally gendered male, I even got to give up the ghost by stabbing myself with a dagger. At times, I have died, and then have remained dead onstage for what has felt like its own sort of eternity. The afterlife of Shakespeare’s dead women is one of this book’s central concerns. Sometimes a female character’s afterlife aligns with her life in ways that are palpable for the actor playing her, even if not apparent to those observing. In this book, I use some of my experiences as an actor playing dead in Shakespeare’s plays. Situated at the intersection of the creative and the critical, this work uses experience as evidence to explore the corpsing of Shakespeare’s women – and the actors who play them. Death has influenced this work in more ways than one. My maternal grandmother – Nanny Nelson, we called her – died in 2009. Five years later, my mother handed me a small, delicate pillbox she had found among Nanny’s jewellery. She wanted me to have it because the tiny portrait on the front of the tiny container was of Shakespeare. The truth is I’m not sure that my grandmother thought much at all about Shakespeare. She was supportive of me, always showed up to watch me perform and knew that I had an advanced degree related to Shakespeare. And I want to think maybe this is why she kept that pillbox. I felt a deep loss at her death. Indeed, I grieved not only the loss of the life she lived but the one she did not live, the one in which her full potential would have been gloriously realized. Just like she sewed many of my clothes (even, I am loathe to admit, during the hideous bubble romper phase of my middle school years), my grandmother also crafted me, I think, in ways she would not have consciously chosen to. She would have never called herself a feminist, and, indeed, I recall her holding what registered to me even at an early age as blatantly sexist beliefs. When I got pregnant with my daughter,

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she said she knew I was having a girl, because I was ‘so feminine’, it just seemed like I had to have made a girl. She was gone by the time I had my son, and I wondered what she would have thought of that. Nanny openly disapproved of women in leadership positions or in careers deemed ‘masculine’ in some way. My mother tells a story of visiting the office of the surgeon who was to perform her tonsillectomy when she was a child. Upon arrival, my grandmother, in her early forties at the time, panicked when she saw the doctor’s name: June Yates. She took my grandfather aside before they approached the registration desk and pleaded with him not to allow a woman to operate on their daughter. He emphatically agreed. When they asked the receptionist about the gender of the doctor, she assured them June Yates was a man, but said new patients often asked that question because ‘no one wants a woman surgeon!’ This is a far cry from feminism. And yet, sharp and self-assured she finished high school at the young age of sixteen. As an adult, she owned her own business (this woman who feared the incompetence of a female surgeon) and she was the sole breadwinner for her family almost all of her married life. She was savvy, witty and had an unstoppable work ethic, something that has undoubtedly influenced my approach to my own professional challenges. She had been born into a fervently conservative religious family and she married a fervently conservative minister, to whom she believed she was required to be wholly submissive, even in matters concerning the babies she bore, the business she managed and the money she single-handedly earned to support the family. She was a model of perseverance, which did not always work in her favour – her commitment to principles that reinforced her own oppression was as persistent as it was perplexing. Happiness was hard for her, I believe, though she tried to find it just the same. My Nanny Nelson was a woman too strong for the script of her life. So it is that when I approach many of Shakespeare’s women, I think of my grandmother’s constrictions and contradictions, her stubbornness and suffering. The female characters I find myself trying to resuscitate are often corpsed from the beginning of the plays in which they must still, ironically (and impossibly, it might seem), find a way to live. Their historical context conflicts with their human capacity – for love, for honour, for bravery, for intelligence – and their textual parameters prescribe their potential. Such characters have ‘that within which passes show’2, a truth spectators trust when Hamlet says it about himself, but may fail to acknowledge as something of a prerequisite for performing Shakespeare’s women. Female characters are often denied the privilege of intimate conversation with the audience in which they may explore and explain their contemplations, desires and decisions. This book is about women who die in Shakespeare, to be sure, but also about how they are dying long before they are dead. In this way, the book is about women starving in Shakespeare – on the stage, in the rehearsal room and in the criticism that outlives them. Those of us who know Shakespeare

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PREFACE

know that his works provide plenty of sustenance to nourish more than just a selected group of its practitioners. As Roxane Gay says of gender inequity, ‘the time for outrage over things we already know is over’.3 The time is here for change, and in Gay’s words, ‘change requires intent and effort. It really is that simple’.4 Some of Shakespeare’s women are too strong for the script of their lives. Recognizing the ways in which the plays corpse such characters is a matter of responsible analysis. Acknowledging the ways in which we corpse them too – along with the female actors who play them – is a move towards equality.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

My life changed when I took ‘Acting for Shakespeare’ as an undergraduate theatre major. Adam Hester masterfully taught that course, and he remains, along with the incomparable Donna Hester, among my favourite people in the world. Also from those days, I owe immeasurable gratitude to Jeff Berryman, Gary Varner, Sandy Freeman, Steven Pounders, Daryl Tippens and Jeanene Reese. One of the best breaks I have ever gotten is being hired at the University of Central Arkansas, where I work with wonderful people. I am thankful to my colleagues in the English department, who continually challenge, inspire and support me. I offer special thanks to Jay Ruud and Maurice Lee, each of whom played an integral part in the conception of this project. For their superb assistance at various stages of the project, I thank Molly Edwards Nabors, Christa Wilson and Megan Saville. I gratefully acknowledge Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Taylor and Francis Group, Medieval and Renaissance Drama in England and The Hare: An Online Journal of Brief Essays and Untimely Reviews in Renaissance Literature for my use here of material previously published (and their willingness to publish it in the first place). I am happy to be a member of the Arkansas Shakespeare Theatre Artistic Collective and thankful to have an artistic home like AST – my work there has made this book possible. I am indebted to and inspired by the remarkable women who run this company, Rebekah Scallet, Mary Ruth Marotte and Geneva Galloway. I have learned whatever I know about performing Shakespeare from working alongside some astonishing actors, including Bob Anderson, Nisi Sturgis, Jordan Coughtry, Dan Matisa, Chad Bradford, Jess Prichard, Angie Gilbert, Monica Clark-Robinson, Heather Dupree, Courtney Bennett, Christopher Swan, Chris Crawford, Adam Frank, Jordy Neill, Matt Duncan, Taylor Galloway, Tracie Thomason, Tim Sailer, Josh Rice, Laura Yancey Burford and Steven Pounders, to name a few. And I have been honoured to work with directors whose artistry I deeply admire, such as Adam Hester, Robert Quinlan, Matt Chiorini, Jeffrey Fracé, John Davies, David Alford, Kristine Holtvedt, Rebekah Scallet and Robert Ramirez, among others. I extend a warm thanks also to those actors who kindly answered interview questions for this book: Sarah Fallon, Nisi Sturgis and Melissa Maxwell. Many gracious friends and colleagues offered their invaluable feedback on portions of the work in progress, including Mary Ruth Marotte, Jess Prichard, Quetta Carpenter, Chad Thomas, Jacqueline

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Vanhoutte, Catherine Loomis (again and again!) and Paul Menzer. All of them have shown their support in ways that still overwhelm me, and I am grateful. I had what I now know was a charmed graduate school experience, and if I have found a way not to age, it is in my eternally youthful admiration of my former professors. I still strive to emulate my dissertation director, Jacqueline Vanhoutte, in more ways than I will ever be able to. I have always known how lucky I was to train with Dr V, and am now stunned by my own good fortune in being her friend. She has seen me stumble my way through tumultuous times of all sorts, and I have learned about a great deal more than Shakespeare and Elizabeth I from her. The first time I tried to explain my thoughts on this project, it was to Paul Menzer, who promptly clarified what still seemed muddled to me and then convinced me I was capable of authoring this book. I am indebted to Paul many times over. He has been a model of mentorship and generosity not only throughout this project but the many that have preceded it since my days as his graduate student. I am also ever thankful to Alexander Pettit, Robert Upchurch, Karen Upchurch, Diana Benet and Chad Thomas, whose influence on me has been profound and perpetual. And I am thankful to have called Pearla Marquéz my colleague and my friend. When she died, Shakespeare’s words were the only ones I could use to mark her passing. For merrily joining me on the writing retreats that enabled me to write this book – and reminding me every step of the way that I had a story worth telling – I express my heartfelt thanks to my lifelong comrade in countless ways, Heather Stark. For going out of their way to cheer me on at so many of the performances discussed in this book, I am thankful to Donna Reynolds, as well as my dear friends Kelly Strzinek and Patti Airoldi. I am ever beholden to my siblings, Ash, Matthew, Tyler, Ryan and Hunter Martin, their partners and my nephews for sitting through untold hours of Shakespeare and showing their support for years on end. For so thoughtfully talking through ideas for this book in its early stages (and for unknowingly providing some sweet anecdotal material for it), a special thanks goes to Tyler. I am eternally grateful to my parents, Wayne and Connie Martin, for finding their way to the theatre over and over to witness my work, for supporting my endeavours, for encouraging me to persevere when the going gets rough and for loving me in a host of other ways. For time and time again running lines with me over the phone on my morning commute and bearing with me as I wrote for hours each day on a mother/daughter visit to the beach, I owe an extra debt of gratitude to my mom. This book was written (as I suppose many are) in the wee hours of the morning, on fast and furious weekend retreats and in the stolen moments between running to committee meetings and running to rehearsals, prepping class materials and packing lunch boxes, grading term papers and reading bedtime stories, waiting (and waiting) on set and waiting (and waiting) in the school pickup line. I have made sacrifices because I believe in this project,

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and my family has made sacrifices because they believe in me. I am forever grateful to Bert, whose love and partnership have been my privilege for more than half my life. I am thankful to Anna for always inspiring me with her passion and to Max for always invigorating me with his joy (and for sometimes calling me ‘Your Majesty’). I love you all beyond measure.

Introduction: Hunger Artists

My days as an ingénue were over almost before they started. My consistent casting as figures twice my age throughout high school and college had prophesied as much. By the time I finally got to play a character of my own generation, I was already sailing towards leading lady roles a little more swiftly than I would have liked. Even as I began attending callbacks for mothers rather than daughters, I could not help but notice that many of my male peers were still playing sons. I skipped over, in some ways, my theatrical adolescence – a gendered problem in Shakespeare casting not unique to me – and missed a number of parts. Ophelia is one of them. The summer I played Gertrude in Hamlet, one of Ophelia’s lines stopped me short each time she said it. In her first appearance following the murder of her father, between singing ‘snatches of old lauds’ she says to the king: ‘Lord, we know what we are but know not what we may be’ (4.7.175; 4.5.43-4). The line – and the actor’s reading of it – reverberated in the way recognition often does, with clarity that can be as startling as it is satisfying. When Ophelia, overwrought and distraught, speaks of expectation (‘what we are’) and limitation (‘not what we may be’), she tells a story that rings true for many of Shakespeare’s women. She will soon be dead, the image of her corpse captured in the poetry of the playwright who crafted her and then disseminated in the fetishized paintings of famed artists, inspiring production choices and informing criticism ever after. The character’s artistic afterlife will often deprive performers who embody her of what they ‘may be’, dictating instead what they ‘are’. Like so many of Shakespeare’s women (and the actors who play them), Ophelia reveals that she is alert to her own constriction – and aware of her powerlessness to overcome it. Such circumstances can be maddening indeed. The performance heritage for female actors of Shakespeare is, in one way, a study in deprivation. The performer of Shakespeare’s women faces the constant pressure to bring her body into alignment with (historically male) critical assumptions about that character or risk critical assault. Because the female characters Shakespeare shaped occupy less textual space and

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function with fewer privileges than their male counterparts, criticism has made it easy to deny the artistic appetites of female performers. Women performing in Shakespeare’s plays may therefore find it difficult in practice to defy – or even discuss – their own theatrical starvation (as characters and as actors). To do so would be to argue with history, some may say, or to make Shakespeare’s plays into something they are not, others might object. Shakespeare’s women may thus end up like the ‘living skeletons’ or hunger artists whose popularity surged in the nineteenth century, starving under the scrutiny of spectators eager to witness and analyse their demise.1 Of course, the spectacle of self-starvation predates the nineteenth century, since it is found in famous stories of medieval fasting saints like Catherine of Siena and early modern miraculous maidens like Catharina Binder of Germany.2 In 1603, François Citois wrote of A true and admirable historie, of a mayden of Confolens, in the prouince of Poictiers that for the space of three yeeres and more hath liued, and yet doth, vvithout receiuing either meate or drinke.3 And in 1669, John Reynolds published a piece on the well-known case of nineteen-year-old Martha Taylor, entitled A discourse upon prodigious abstinence occasioned by the twelve moneths fasting of Martha Taylor, the famed Derbyshire damosell.4 In the history of humanity’s relationship to food, fasting has taken on multiple meanings, persistently provoking the curiosity, scepticism and wonder of those observing it. I pursue this dynamic at more length in this book’s final chapter; here, I use it as a deliberately grotesque image of what is at stake for women performers of Shakespeare. Accidental hunger artists, famished by the playwright, restricted by casting conventions and regulated by critical expectations, actors who perform Shakespeare’s women can feel like the corpses that their characters become. Having been that body on and in several stages, I have discovered how playing dead can emblematize some of the challenges a female character faces even while still alive. The corpses of female characters become props in the hands of their male survivors (or murderers), are effaced and erased, are exhibited under a spotlight or simply disappear from the stage. Whatever happens to the body of a dead female character, the body of the actor playing her proves a powerful mediator of the space between dead and alive, passive and active, object and subject. The subjectivity of a live actor playing a dead character can therefore draw attention to the ways in which the untroubled acceptance of gendered privilege and oppression is not only detrimental to analysis and performance but also poses profound ethical problems in modern practice. Because playing dead is, of course, not the same as being dead. And deprivation is not the same as a desire to starve. Whatever agency Shakespeare’s women are or are not allowed, and whatever historical-critical consensus suggests, the real women who embody such characters may share with Ophelia the awareness of their own constriction – ‘we know what we are but know not what we may be’.

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Such insights are, I suspect, contingent upon embodiment. That is to say, my physical, emotional and intellectual experiences of performing female corpses onstage, under the scrutiny of watchful audience members and at the mercy of the characters still alive (and still acting), are not merely the catalyst for this work, but comprise the core of it. The actor who embodies Shakespeare’s female characters, dead or alive, finds herself repeatedly defending those characters from reductive representations. The critical afterlife of Shakespeare’s women is thus a crucial component of this conversation. The actor playing one of Shakespeare’s women must justify behaviours that are deemed too active (Lady Macbeth) or too passive (Desdemona), counter charges that her maternity is negligent (Lady Capulet) or narcissistic (Volumnia), or qualify grief that is considered insufficient (Gertrude) or excessive (Olivia). In doing so, she tackles a task that has been gendered twice over – first by the dramaturgical and linguistic parameters of the text, and second by the legacy of critical and theatrical claims about it. This work is one actor-scholar’s response to the messages such dynamics might preserve from the past and the dangers they can create in the present.

On being a corpse I was in rehearsal for a production of Othello in which I played Desdemona when the director and I began discussing the difficulties of performing death, especially for lengthy scenes like Act 5, Scene 2. He shared a story from his own experience playing Laertes in Hamlet some years earlier. Moments after his death he heard a tipsy audience member on the front row say, in a whisper that reverberated throughout the house, ‘Laertes! Laertes! I see you breathin’. You ain’t dead. I see you breathin’!’ While the drunken spectator’s denunciation affirms Cassio’s assertion in Othello that when men ‘put an enemy in their mouths’ (booze) it can ‘steal away their brains’5 (well … yes), it also emphasizes the impossibility – and the absurdity – of the job for the actor playing dead. The experience of watching an actor play dead can be equally absurd, as the author of The Comedy of Stage Death (1922) emphatically asserts. Indeed, ‘that stage deaths are funny no observant playgoer will deny’, Thornton Shirley Graves declares, adding that ‘a few of us have smiled at Lear’s happy corpse leading out its daughter to listen at the applause’.6 To be sure, nobody is fooled. The artificiality of the enterprise simultaneously amuses and annoys the aptly named Graves, who claims that ‘the presence of dead bodies on the stage has frequently been the occasion of mirth’ while also chastising the ‘theatrical audience’ for its ‘perversity’ at laughing ‘because a dead body lies exposed upon the stage’ and also ‘because the corpse is borne away’.7 Anticipating the outburst of that boozy Hamlet spectator, Graves mocks the actor for not actually being dead: ‘almost everyone who has attended a stage funeral has observed the corpse assisting

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in its own exit, but probably only a few of us have actually laughed at the coughing or sneezing of a dead actor’.8 Graves neatly (if unwittingly) encapsulates the primary dilemma of playing dead in his reference to ‘a dead actor’ – it is the character who dies, after all, not the actor. Bodily functions like ‘coughing or sneezing’ (or visibly breathing) seem inevitable when doing so is prohibited – or, to be fair, when one is alive – a concern voiced by many actors who worry over being dead onstage. The ‘female corpse’ presents its own unique liabilities, according to Graves, when ‘too large a portion’ of it is exposed due to ‘scanty skirts on the stage’ (resulting in a ‘boisterous’ response from ‘the gallery’).9 For women performing Shakespeare, the absurdity of playing dead is amplified by an apparent fascination with the female corpse, one that entails risks of ‘exposure’ extending beyond the perils of ‘scanty skirts’. Shakespeare is one of the ‘many early modern dramatists’ who ‘chose to blatantly showcase the female corpse’.10 Being an active (living) object of the audience’s gaze and being a passive (dead) one are, for actor and character, different things. For the actor, embodying a passive presence onstage frustrates the creative impulse to play action, to work towards objectives and to pursue goals, the tasks actors are trained to do. In Carol Chillington Rutter’s words, ‘speechless, motionless, reduced by death from somebody to the body, the corpse, the actor’s body occupies a theatrical space of pure performance where it has most to play when it has least to act’.11 For the character, being ‘dead’ means not only ending an onstage life but also losing the advocacy of the actor – that is, being embodied by a performer with no agency. To a female performer, this ground – trying to act without being able to take action – can feel familiar. Female corpses in Shakespeare engender meaning and mean something about gender, not just for the past but also for the present. As Rutter asserts, ‘For us, as for Shakespeare, the experience of death is gendered, and death is a site where the work of gender gets (finally) done.’12 For example, the ‘work of gender’ in Hamlet – dismissing, diminishing, dementing and damning  – culminates in the corpse of Ophelia and in her questionable burial. This book’s cover photo features Charlotte Cornwell as Gertrude and Pippa Nixon as Ophelia in the 2013 Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC) production of Hamlet. Director David Farr placed Ophelia’s shallow grave at the front of the stage. Evoking John Everett Millais’s famous painting of Ophelia just before she drowns, Nixon’s body remained visible in the grave from the time of her burial all the way through the end of the play. When Kirk McElhearn interviewed Nixon about what it was like ‘lying dead on the stage for those twenty minutes’, she replied: I’m totally used to it now. At first, when David [Farr] told me, I did think, ‘You’re kidding me.’ I thought I would be able to have the last act in my dressing room. Now I just get myself into a place of feeling very relaxed, and, to be honest, I try to get myself into that sort of sleep place,

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so my breathing is very shallow so I’m not focusing on, ‘Oh, I’ve got an itch here.’ Sometimes that feels really nice and relaxing, and other times it’s quite terrifying … You zone out from the stage but you still have to remain present. You have to hear what’s going on.13 Nixon admits to having made the reasonable assumption that dying earns an actor a little time off – the ‘last act’, in Ophelia’s case. Even if she had a little restorative yoga in mind, she had likely not envisioned maintaining corpse pose in front of an audience for an extended length of time. The ‘place of feeling very relaxed’ where her ‘breathing is very shallow’, which Nixon describes as either ‘really nice’ or ‘quite terrifying’, animates the play’s image of Ophelia’s drowning body. Further, the incomplete burial makes manifest the ‘maimed rites’ Hamlet observes (5.1.208). Only half buried, this Ophelia lacks access to the tranquility Nixon must somehow learn to manufacture. This Ophelia is, moreover, vulnerable to the audience’s voyeurism for an agonizing amount of time. Another interviewer indicates surprise at this aspect of the staging decision – ‘I have never seen Ophelia being forced to be so prominent … dead, in a grave’14 – and Nixon offers a response similar to the previously cited one: ‘When David first mentioned it to me I thought it was a joke … what had worried me was how do I look … like I’m not breathing? What happens if I cough or sneeze? … The grave I’m in, they made sure it was very comfortable and flat.’15 Even if Nixon is spared the attentions of drunken louts (unlike that poor Laertes), the truth is that onlookers will know she is ‘breathing’ no matter how good she is at concealing it, much to the dismay of playgoers like Graves. They will understand she is playing dead. And she will understand – unlike ‘one incapable of her own distress’, to quote Gertrude (4.7.176) – that her position is a particularly vulnerable one. Nixon’s concern about breathing, coughing or sneezing thus makes sense not because onlookers will actually believe she is dead but because she will be unavoidably subject to the audience’s scrutiny. After all, that is precisely why Farr places her in a shallow grave at the front of the stage for the last twenty minutes of the play. At least it is ‘very comfortable and flat’. Nixon’s extended exposure recalls the susceptibility of Millais’s Ophelia model, Elizabeth Siddal, who posed for the painting in a full bathtub warmed by lamps below it, a process that lasted four months during the dead of winter. Because the lamps occasionally went out, Siddal ended up seriously ill (and Millais ended up with a legal threat from the young woman’s father).16 Nixon’s dangers are admittedly less severe than Siddal’s, but her body is nonetheless at the mercy of the male artist’s vision and the audience’s gaze. While she may register her worries about the staging (or her disappointment at not having downtime in her dressing room), whatever she is feeling or thinking, she must play peaceful and passive in performance. Ophelia does not have the privilege of expressing the rage behind her suicide; rather, the men who fight in her grave get to do so while she lies lifeless beneath them. If anything

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about Siddal’s story is more chilling than hours of repose in a tub full of freezing water, it may be that, as Jill R. Ehnenn notes, her ‘work as a painter and poet has been eclipsed by the fame attributed to her face’ and anecdotes of ‘her misfortune’, including the strikingly resonant one about ‘Rosetti’s exhumation of her coffin in 1869 to retrieve manuscripts he had buried with her in a fit of guilt and grief’.17 Ehnenn goes on to describe ‘the creative work of a woman’ whose potential for renown far exceeded ‘her delicate pallor, striking beauty, and long, red hair’,18 creative work that has been overshadowed by stories recounting her tragic demise – and the labour of a man over her dead, buried body. ‘Lord, we know what we are but know not what we may be.’ The alluring aesthetic of the female corpse onstage effects a kind of erasure, both of the character and of the actor. Elisabeth Bronfen discusses the aesthetic of the female corpse in art, wondering if ‘we see the real, while denying the representation’ or if ‘we see the representation, thus putting the real under erasure’.19 Bronfen interrogates ‘this act of anesthetization’, exploring ‘what is being sacrificed’ in it – ‘the real violence of dying, the woman, or femininity?’20 As a corrective to this sort of sacrifice, Rutter imagines a film version of Hamlet in which ‘a revisionist funeral scene’ would work towards realizing ‘the black comedic dissidence of Ophelia’s performance narrative’.21 Rutter suggests an account of Ophelia’s funeral that makes ‘the ugliness of her death painfully legible’: Ophelia’s skin, mottled blue like a fresh bruise, would look like wax; her jaw, pulled shut with a linen band, but her eyes wide open, the scene’s most harrowing effect. Neither would the shroud conceal the abdominal distension that comes with death by drowning. Ophelia would look pregnant.22 Contrary to Nixon’s beautiful, serene corpse – the materialization of Millais’s painting – this dead Ophelia would disturb, distract from and decentralize Hamlet’s story. When spectators (film viewers, in Rutter’s suggestion) fixed their gaze on this Ophelia, they would see the deteriorating and disgusting effects of death rather than the peaceful perfection female corpses normally portray. After all, as the Gravedigger notes, ‘your water is a sore decayer of your whoreson dead body’ (5.1.161–2), the results of which would both derail the fantasy of the enticing female corpse and draw attention to horrors inflicted upon the female body, undermining the dangerous misconception that the damage Ophelia has suffered has no real consequences. Although neither Ophelia nor her corpse is the primary focus of the chapters that follow, she nevertheless graces the cover of this book. She plays opposite Hamlet, after all, ‘who has become, in most cultures of the world, the most eloquent voice of humanity’s psychological condition’, as Dame Harriet Walter puts it.23 Yet, as Walter further observes, she is ‘given practically nothing to say’ to defend herself against his mistreatment

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and his misogyny.24 Ophelia articulates her awareness of her repression and restriction, her unfettered speech in the latter parts of the play serving as a signifier of her insanity. Artistic imagery capitalizing on the aesthetic appeal of her corpse erases the trauma of her life and death, putting her deprivation on display for others’ delight. And so, even though I never got to play her, it seems difficult for me as a practitioner to talk about dead women and starvation in Shakespeare without talking about Ophelia. Similarly, Cordelia is representative of the female corpse in Shakespeare. She is most renowned for her silence and most recognizable in iconic images of King Lear holding her lifeless figure after she has been murdered – adored after dead, her body the object of Lear’s messy, manic emotions. The value attached to Cordelia’s corpse, and the powerlessness of the actor playing her, epitomizes the common conditions of playing Shakespeare’s women, as a video clip of Act 5, Scene 3, from the RSC’s 2010 King Lear demonstrates.25 Greg Hicks’s Lear enters, carrying Cordelia (Samantha Young), who remains limp in his arms, suspended in the air, for several lines. He lowers both her and himself to the ground, leans her head against his torso and discovers a feather in her hair just in time to prompt his, ‘This feather stirs, she lives.’26 What happens next is so striking to me that I can hardly pay proper attention to anything else in the scene – Hicks lightly brushes the feather, multiple times and in various directions, across Young’s face. ‘Poor Cordelia’, indeed (1.1.77). The portrait of a perfectly cooperative corpse, Young does not flinch. But I could not stop thinking about the implications of such a choice on her Lear’s part. Cordelia is a corpse without feeling, to be sure, but the woman playing her is not. Being dead onstage entails pressure enough without the added torture of tickling by feather (though this would surely have delighted Thornton Shirley Graves). Was the featheron-face contact so integral to the moment that it could not be altered for the comfort of the woman playing dead who is already at the mercy of the actor controlling her body? While I trust that Hicks did not intend to torture Young – presumably she would have objected if the plume choreography had presented too great a technical challenge for her – the example encapsulates one of the realities confronting the woman playing Shakespeare: her character’s corpse frequently becomes a man’s prop. While she is resting ‘in peace’, he will kiss her, caress her, hold her, hug her, jerk her and joggle her. He will weep on her, spit on her and sweat on her. And he will repeatedly tickle her face with a feather if he so chooses. The corpse of Cordelia is ‘Lear’s sole speculation’, in Rutter’s words – ‘a theatre prop’ for ‘Lear’s performance’.27 Shakespeare’s women thus go from being ‘property’ (of the male characters to whom they are connected) to ‘properties’ (of the male actors with whom they are working) and then back to ‘property’ (of the largely male critics who have long defined them), in a process that emphasizes the precarious position of the female body onstage, in life and in death.

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On being a female body Women have always had to confront, when it comes to Shakespeare’s plays, the precondition of their preclusion. That is, since boy actors originated Shakespeare’s female roles, the woman who steps onstage to say Shakespeare’s words is always already pushing up against an unspoken accusation of usurpation – or a spoken one, as in Harley Granville-Barker’s wistful fantasy of ‘the restoring of the celibate stage’ (a fantasy frequently fulfilled by modern all-male performances). Warning female performers that Shakespeare ‘has left no blank spaces for her to fill with her charm’, Granville-Barker cautions, ‘Let the usurping actress remember that her sex is a liability, not an asset.’28 Noted. If her ‘sex is a liability’ even when cast as a female character, as Granville-Barker asserts, a ‘usurping actress’ who plays a male character has considerable bias to overcome. Perhaps this is why the callback for my first professional Romeo and Juliet was at once a bit bewildering and a bit breathtaking – the director wanted to see me read for Capulet. Just Capulet. With no ‘Lady’ in front of it. It was only the second time I had been seriously considered for a substantive male role – a few years prior I had come close to Malcolm in an all-female Macbeth – and I could not have been more thrilled. Knowing the director was at least tinkering with the notion of casting a woman in this pivotal role made me an instant fan. As he explained during the callback, he was considering combining both Capulet parents into one powerful mother. Yes, please. In the end, I was offered Lady Capulet, and got a taste of that role’s challenges for the first time. My Capulet was a handsome, talented man with a booming voice and a convincingly terrifying temper. I wore gorgeous period dresses and loads of jewels. My Juliet was merely five years younger than me. Some of my lines were cut, including, astonishingly, from the scene in which Lady Capulet discovers Tybalt’s dead body. Further cutting the already spare lines allotted to women comes at a high cost; in this case, Lady Capulet was deprived of her voice in the scene in which she is most empowered to use it, at least in public. Still, in this production, I learned a great deal about acting in Shakespeare from a gifted company of performers and a great deal about the power of poetic images from a visionary director. The experience was a pleasant and enriching one. But it differed dramatically, I suspect, from what it would have been had I played the conflated role of Capulet for which I had been called back (though one can hope the gorgeous period dresses and loads of jewels might have remained the same). The prospect of playing Capulet was so captivating that I became curious about what that meant for me, as a woman and as a performer. After all, I do not resent being cast as a female character. On the contrary, like most female actors I know, I struggle and strain to do so, in conditions that are ever more competitive, even when resilience and tenacity do not render the desired

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rewards. This is every actor’s story, to a degree; but that degree is much higher for women who want to play Shakespeare, even in more modest regional markets, like those in which I have worked. Part of the appeal of being considered for roles beyond the traditionally female ones is, then, that there simply are not enough of those to go around. To be fair, this is true of theatre contracts in general. In the spring of 2017, Actors’ Equity Association (AEA) released findings from their study on hiring biases based on data from 2013 to 2015. Among the study’s discoveries is that the ‘industry is hiring more men – sometimes up to 20 percent more – than women’.29 The report goes on to reveal that ‘more than 50 percent of the contracts were offered to men’.30 Not surprisingly, the report also exposes a wage gap between men and women, who ‘are often hired on lower paying, lower minimum contracts’.31 And this study does not include the countless professional actors who work on contracts outside of AEA’s jurisdiction. Challenges for the female actor are certainly not limited to those who perform Shakespeare. Gender equality when it comes to Shakespeare casting specifically has, however, been in the spotlight more and more. Charlotte Higgins cites findings from a study conducted by The Guardian in partnership with Elizabeth Freestone, a former artist-in-residence at the National Theatre, to show that ‘women are seriously underrepresented on stage, among playwrights and artistic directors, and in creative roles such as designers and composers’.32 The statistics are startling, even if expected: at the theatres investigated for the study, only 38 per cent of the actors employed were women (female artistic directors fare even worse, at 36 per cent). Higgins identifies the root of the problem as Shakespeare and the world for which he was writing – ‘and, though he wrote transcendent parts for women’, she admits, ‘there aren’t very many’.33 When it comes to Shakespeare’s plays, female roles account for 16 per cent of the complete casting potential: ‘of his 981 characters, 826 are male and 155 female … Women have less to say, too: of roles with more than 500 lines, only 13% are female.’ Higgins asserts that such inequity is ‘culturally engrained’: ‘we have become used to not seeing women equally represented, arguably aided by a culture of complacency’. She proposes that the solution to the problem lies in ‘gender-blind casting’. My enthusiasm at being asked to read for Capulet (or Malcolm, or any other male role for which I have since auditioned) is thus both personal and political, reflecting and responding to social circumstances that extend far beyond my own acting career, which like that of most Shakespearean actors has been local and regional. What emerges from dialogue about gender-blind casting are some of the most deeply embedded and doggedly guarded biases against women playing Shakespeare today. The notion of women playing male roles on the stage (as in real life, if we’re honest) elicits not only arguments for traditionalist Shakespeare but also exposes alarmingly fixed assumptions about women. Terri Power identifies some of the anxieties that regendered and selective

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casting can provoke: ‘when women perform in roles traditionally played by male actors, they destabilise tightly held beliefs about male privilege, patriarchal positions of power, the performativity of masculinity and the subversive nature of cross-dressing’.34 Dominic Cavendish wrote for The Telegraph in February 2017 of his ‘growing concern’ that ‘men are being elbowed aside’ in efforts to equalize the stage, risking, as his title says, ‘the death of the great male actor’.35 The impending doom of classical male actors will come as a shock, no doubt, since so many of them routinely play leading roles. Someone should warn them. Thankfully, they can count on Cavendish, who indignantly wonders if we will ‘even start to view plays that figure men in main, or majority, roles as detrimental to the cause of equality’.36 Well … if by ‘equality’ he means equality, then yes. He then questions if ‘every production that follows “conventional” casting’ will ‘now be deemed regressive’.37 Again, Cavendish seems here to have answered his own question – that which is ‘conventional’ is by nature ‘regressive’, whether ‘deemed’ so by these troublemaking ‘female thespians’38 or not. By definition, standing still is not moving forward. Declaring that there are ‘great roles galore for women’, Cavendish determines to ‘urge restraint’ and ‘issue a plea’ to female performers ‘to get their mitts off male actors’ parts!’39 And there it is. The imperative under which Shakespeare’s women find themselves starving – for love, for power, for sympathy, for agency – Cavendish explicitly demands of the female actors who play them: ‘restraint’. He puts us in our place, back in the roles that Shakespeare wrote for women (which, of course, he wrote for boys who would go on to become men … and potentially gain access to those grand male roles). What critics like Cavendish are really denying women is thus the prospect of ‘maturing’ into certain major roles, a development that has always been anticipated for male actors, even when they played female characters in Shakespeare’s all-male theatre. Women should keep ‘their mitts off male actors’ parts’ and keep their minds on ‘restraint’. There is nowhere for the female actor of Shakespeare to go, that is, except down – into a grave that, if she is lucky, will be ‘very comfortable and flat’. While some enlightened critics have praised the virtues of specific instances of gender-blind casting, others have conceded the tolerability of its neutrality, and still others have reacted with derision that is downright vicious. In 2003, for instance, the all-female Richard III at Shakespeare’s Globe featuring Kathryn Hunter in the title role garnered a full range of such responses. Lyn Gardner of The Guardian likens the audience’s acceptance of ‘the gender reversal’ to ‘the suspension of disbelief that makes us feel that we have been whisked back to the 15th century’.40 Gardner asserts that having ‘Hunter at its centre’ is what saves the production – ‘she carries all before her’ – comparing what she calls ‘some of the lamer performances’ by the all-female cast to ‘a school play at some posh girls’ school’.41 Writing for The Independent, Paul Taylor says that Hunter ‘succeeds admirably’ in convincing the audience (through ‘sorcery’) that

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‘a woman can play a male murderer’. 42 Applauding Hunter’s ‘antic and often nicely understated monarch’, Taylor, like Gardner, cannot resist noting the ‘slight danger of the proceedings resembling a girls’ school play’ – a danger he says is ‘always’ present when the cast is made up of only women. 43 Though the tone of such reviews is largely positive, particularly about Hunter’s performance in the leading role, these writers also highlight one of the critical obstacles facing women who act as men, especially in all-female productions – namely, the risk of being reduced to ‘girls’ putting on a ‘school play’. As Melissa D. Aaron observes, ‘“girls’ school” is a fairly common pejorative applied to theatre productions with all-female casts’. 44 There is a way in which such comparisons not only rob female performers of their professional status but also reduce them to the boy actors’ position again. That is, if women refuse to keep ‘their mitts off male actors’ parts’, criticism will find a way to remind them that they are imperfect versions of men, a notion disturbingly reminiscent of early modern views of both women and boys. In contrast to companies comprised of all men, which are perceived as authentic in their recall of original practices, all-female companies are, according to Aaron, ‘treated as a novelty in the mainstream community’ and are thus subject to more scepticism and scrutiny. 45 Other reviewers of the same production push the resistance to genderbending much further. Charles Spencer, for example, starts by wishing he’d ‘had Dr. Johnson at my side to give his opinion’ since he is known for having proclaimed that ‘a woman’s preaching is like a dog’s walking on his hind legs. It is not done well, but you are surprised to find it done at all.’46 It gets better. He continues: And though the programme refers to the all-women companies that briefly sprang up after the Restoration, I suspect the chief reason for this distaff show is that artistic director Mark Rylance feels guilty about offering so many all-male productions (following Shakespearean practice) and morally obliged to give the chicks a chance … When it comes to the climactic battle scene, the monstrous regiment prove a total washout – a hen-night fight with handbags would be more exciting – and though Hunter undoubtedly has her moments, the whole production seems like a perversely modish exercise in political correctness.47 It is difficult to know where to begin – but I suppose a good place could be where Spencer begins, with a reference to Johnson’s comment about ‘a woman’s preaching’, recycled from a review Spencer wrote about a production of King Lear a few years prior to this one (and which he rehearses once more in his review of the 2012 all-female Julius Caesar at the Donmar Warehouse).48 Incidentally, that production also featured Kathryn Hunter in the title role. In both reviews, he praises parts of Hunter’s Lear performance, while mocking the artistic moxie of putting a woman in a man’s place.

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Problematic assumptions permeate the above excerpt, in which Spencer refers to the professional female actors as ‘chicks’, terminology employed to depreciate and deride our work. He evokes this belittling image again when he suggests that ‘a hen-night fight with handbags’ would have been better than the women’s version of a battle scene that is meant to be ‘climactic’, insinuating the impotence of the female soldiers. Like his description of the production as a ‘distaff show’, his reference to the female company as ‘the monstrous regiment’ relies unapologetically on early modern patriarchal perspectives, specifically recalling John Knox’s infamous tract condemning the rule of women, The First Blast of the Trumpet Against the Monstrous Regiment of Women (1558). Knox anticipates Johnson’s mockery of female preachers, citing St Paul’s scriptural injunction that ‘women kepe silence in the congregation’.49 Spencer audaciously claims and perpetuates a 400-yearold legacy of misogyny regarding women’s speech. Further, Spencer assumes the only reason Mark Rylance would allow such a ‘perversely modish exercise in political correctness’ is because he ‘feels guilty about offering so many all-male productions’ (which Spencer is sure to note is sanctioned as ‘Shakespearean practice’). Rylance would argue otherwise, and Elizabeth Klett cites the artistic director doing just that: ‘it’s unjust that men should get many more opportunities than women to show their strengths in classic roles’.50 Rylance also addresses the ‘Shakespearean practice’ argument that would prohibit all-female casts while allowing companies made up of only men: ‘Shakespeare’s original actors were not limited by the gender of the parts they played but enjoyed a revolutionary theatre of the imagination where commoner played king, man played woman and, within the plays, woman man’.51 Whether or not women are cast in male roles, however, the fear of ‘men being elbowed aside’ by female actors has its roots in that ‘Shakespearean practice’ Spencer recalls and Rylance revises – and the concept of ‘the usurping actress’ by which Granville-Barker and others like him have felt so clearly threatened. Such critics simply will not allow equality into the discussion. Or onto the stage, it would seem.

On performing Shakespeare’s women As an actor, scholar and teacher of Shakespeare, I am invested in philosophical intervention that has practical implications. My scholarship enriches my acting, to be sure, but my work onstage also affects my scholarship. Embodiment creates problems in practice that research can sometimes neither predict nor preclude, and such problems lead to insights only accessible from inside performance. The combination of my professional pursuits thus makes my perspective in this dialogue a distinct one. This particular critical work only exists because of my creative engagement with Shakespeare’s texts in production – that is, without performing Shakespeare’s women, I could not have written Performing Shakespeare’s Women.

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As anyone who has survived faculty meetings on the subject knows, the value of interdisciplinarity is not ‘a truth universally acknowledged’, to borrow Jane Austen’s phrase (plenty of pride and prejudice involved in such discussions). Some actors are suspicious of scholars, and some scholars are sceptical of actors, especially those whose professional pedigree is humble, like mine. If I were the celebrated Dame Judi Dench, my experience might be a different one. Since I occupy both dubious categories – actor and scholar – what I imagine as building a bridge between the disciplines can feel like treading a tightrope instead. I have sometimes found my status as a scholar an obstacle with certain practitioners, just as my experience as an actor is to some scholars. In this way, I know as much as anyone might about the dangers of deprivation and dismissal when it comes to Shakespeare and women. My experience as an unknown female performer of Shakespeare’s plays qualifies me uniquely to participate in this crucial conversation. Most productions of Shakespeare are local and regional, featuring performers who are, like myself, not celebrities (and never will be). Though these unknown performers do not share the burdens, privileges and other concerns of celebrity with their famous counterparts, they will engage the same texts, embody the same characters, confront the same questions and face the same critical preconceptions. Unlike many of my fellow actors I am also a scholar, but still I have found my lack of fame a hindrance to expressing the ways in which my experiences might challenge critical convention. And this is precisely why it is important that I do so. My work in this book desegregates the critical space of textual analysis, the creative space of performance potential and the moral space of ethical inquiry. The chapters that follow effect a reconciliation – in the same way that the actor’s body onstage mediates history, textuality and materiality, these chapters merge historical evidence, textual analysis and personal narrative. To express unorthodox views one often has to rely on an unorthodox methodology, and so this work is a hybrid in which I combine my own performance experience with close reading and theatre history. I investigate the implications of performing female death in Shakespeare’s plays through insights illuminated by frequently playing dead myself. My personal experiences with the roles explored in this book thus function as evidence of an admittedly unusual kind – such evidence requires embodiment, and thus is not immediately available to all. Each chapter focuses on one character I have portrayed, complementing more conventional approaches to the production history of each play I discuss. I have selected other performances to supplement the discussion about playing Shakespeare; however, I do not treat each play’s performance history exhaustively, since that would make for a different sort of book. My work builds on a tradition of actors’ accounts like Anthony Sher’s Year of the King or Harriet Walter’s Brutus and Other Heroines, which offer readings of characters informed by the experience of rehearsing and embodying them. I diverge from such works, however, by also including scholarship,

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criticism and other performance accounts that locate my reflections on portraying Shakespeare’s women – and ‘playing dead’, specifically – within a broader historical and critical context. The celebrity of writers like Sher and Walter marks an undeniable distinction between their work and mine, both in performance and in publication. Since my engagement with Shakespeare is both creative and critical, however, my aim reaches beyond giving readers insight into my artistic journey as a performer; rather, I hope to provide an insider’s view that puts flesh on abstract suppositions. My creative engagement with Shakespeare is precisely what has enabled me to approach critical questions from the new perspectives considered here. The narratives I share aspire to unsettle stereotypes, to validate and give voice to the performance potential of female characters who find themselves in plays that seem to require their silence and submission. Further, the anecdotes I use address issues of perception and reception, and the ways in which reductive understandings of female characters can re-energize sexist attitudes and assumptions here and now. Throughout the chapters that follow I have also scattered personal stories, partially because this is one way I embody the characters I portray. This is empathy of the variety Susan Glaspell so well articulates in her one-act play, Trifles. Mrs. Hale, one of the play’s main characters, has an epiphany inspired by a tragic discovery about a female neighbour, prompting her to conclude: ‘We live close together and we live far apart. We all go through the same things – it’s all just a different kind of the same thing.’52 For me, crafting a character begins with recognizing the ‘different kind of the same thing’ both she and I might understand. And this requires accessing the parts of my own past that have made me who I am. I have chosen to interweave personal narrative with the theoretical and the theatrical for other reasons as well, despite the risk doing so entails. My narrative, like those of the female characters about whom I write, cannot be written out of the history from which it has come and to which it contributes. I bear witness as a female body who moves not only on the stage but through the world. Putting one’s body on the line, in Shakespeare’s plays or otherwise, is always profoundly personal. And so the interventionist work of this project is threefold: the book is an ethical intervention in the conventions of casting and critical response, an interdisciplinary and personal intervention in the theoretical dialogue about theatrical practice and a feminist intervention in the history of how we talk about women in Shakespeare. Each chapter investigates the ways in which playing some female characters dead can resonate with playing them alive, along with how criticism can perpetuate the corpsing of such characters and the actors who play them. My professional experience has determined the parameters of the book – each chapter is based on a role I have played.53 The first chapter, ‘Performing Death and Desire in Othello’, focuses on the male-authored narratives Othello tells about Desdemona, and the ways in which she resists them, first when she is alive and then when she is dead. In the second chapter,

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‘Playing Parts in King Lear’, I discuss dissection in King Lear – its effects on Regan, to be sure, but also its implications for the actor playing her ‘part’, who confronts the inevitability of critical anatomization even as she is pushed up against the play’s many other ‘parts’. In the third chapter, ‘Being the Female Body in Macbeth’, I explore the haunting of Lady Macbeth not only by the blood she cannot wash from her hands but also by theatrical and critical tradition. Again considering the haunting of a character’s critical lineage, the focus of the fourth chapter, ‘Making Love in Hamlet’, is Gertrude, as I consider how both the character and the actor embodying her must find ways to ‘make love’ in a text and context that continually villainize female desire and sexuality. The fifth chapter, ‘Falling and Rising in Richard III’, emphasizes the corpsing of Lady Anne and also addresses the frequency with which women are, in broader ways, diminished – that is, coached, shamed or forced into occupying less space than the men around them – as a communal concern rather than only a personal one. The final chapter, ‘Dying in Romeo and Juliet’, asserts the pressures and pains of invisibility and constriction for Lady Capulet (and sometimes for the actor who portrays her). All of the chapters bring to the surface the ways in which an actor playing one of Shakespeare’s women may feel as if she is ‘playing dead’ before the curtain even goes up.

On playing dead My daughter has long been mesmerized by maps. While her peers filled up their wish lists with trendy toys and smart devices, the only Christmas present she requested at the age of eight was a globe. I have many times had the experience of exploring a new environment – a city, a botanical garden, a theme park – with Anna excitedly navigating, thoroughly empowered by an unfolded map in hand. Such occasions would inevitably culminate in a momentary clash of theory and practice. A landmark would emerge unexpectedly, a path would stretch out longer than it should, a roller coaster would seem to have shifted in anticipation of our arrival, and my daughter would doggedly insist upon a reality defined by her reading of the map, despite the reality right in front of her: ‘That’s not right. That’s not what the map says!’ She had envisioned a version of the landscape based on a set of symbols and signals she confidently believed herself to have decoded. And when the landscape did not match this vision, she felt swindled. The alternative – acknowledging the possibility of miscalculation, recognizing the potential flaws of theory in the face of practice, allowing for unforeseen changes in the territory – was just too painful for my young map enthusiast. Shakespeare’s scripts can be similarly spellbinding. Readers may feel so sure they have a handle on one character’s function or another character’s flaw before seeing a performance that they feel dismayed when the

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production landscape does not match their imaginative map of the play. They may argue with the narrative in front of them – ‘That’s not right! That’s not what the map says!’ – or, they may fail to acknowledge the discrepancy at all, overlaying the performances they watch with their predetermined readings. But acknowledging the possibility of miscalculation, recognizing the potential flaws of theory in the face of practice, allowing for unforeseen changes in the territory – these are things an investment in ethics and equality demands. If we fail to do them, we will likely end up lost or stuck in the same spot indefinitely. Maps do not usually predict future progress nor should they be expected to. While they may show the way things were before – which is valuable to our understanding of where we have come from – they do not undo the way things are now. My daughter could not deny the existence of an object right in front of her by vehemently waving around her map as evidence; similarly, those of us who practice Shakespeare performance, as well as those who watch it and write about it, must acknowledge – and actually traverse – the territory in which we now play. Otherwise, it is all too easy to recycle misogynistic assumptions, the way Spencer recycles Johnson’s repulsive comment about female preachers, and we may never know ‘what we may be’. As Kathleen McLuskie puts it, ‘sexist meanings are not fixed but depend upon constant reproduction by their audience’.54 Harriet Walter speaks to this reality (one she has lived out onstage many times) in a poignant direct address to Shakespeare himself: Dear William, because you are so famous and wonderful, you have cast a long shadow over the theatrical tradition, and despite the fact that the world has changed enormously since your day, the stories we tell about ourselves still tend to follow your template, with male protagonists whose thoughts and actions matter – and females who only matter in as much as they relate to those men.55 Now that the ‘template’ has changed, so should ‘the stories we tell about ourselves’, Walter implies. One of the countless ways some practitioners are doing so is through showing, as Klett says, ‘how female bodies can appropriate male privilege’ by assuming a position generally denied to them: that is, ‘by claiming the right to retell history’.56 Employing ‘an all-female cast’ or placing women in traditionally male roles can facilitate telling a ‘familiar story in a markedly different way’,57 as can re-evaluating which perspectives any given production – whether conventionally cast or not – privileges and which ones it silences, reduces or invalidates. Some cases may call for revising conservative readings by empowering female characters in new ways; conversely, others may require fully exposing the cruelty female characters must suffer, refusing to shy away from the severe consequences of such misogyny. While we cannot blame history for being history, or Shakespeare for being Shakespeare, for that matter, we can take care to not

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participate in the ‘constant reproduction’ of ‘sexist meanings’ that typify those ‘templates’. The perspectives of Shakespeare’s male characters – ‘whose thoughts and actions matter’, as Walter puts it – have shaped the cultural narratives surrounding his plays. And, because of this, the world of Shakespearean theatre comes with a built-in mechanism by which men maintain centrality and dominance, even today – in casting rooms, in rehearsal spaces, on stages and consequently, in print. In Actors Talk About Shakespeare (2009), a book whose cover boasts ‘Interviews with Today’s Greatest Actors’, only two of the ten actors featured are women.58 The Routledge Companion to Actors Shakespeare (2012) does better, with seven out of twenty featured actors being women – but still almost twice as many men as women.59 So, there is inherent in criticism and scholarship another level of ‘playing dead’ for women, whose voices are limited compared to the surrounding masculine voices. This book is about how the corpsing of female characters impacts the women who play them as well as the spectators (male and female) who watch them as they are ‘playing dead’ (sometimes while they are still alive). In the words of actor Nisi Sturgis, ‘as artists, we want to challenge what we’ve settled for’.60 This book similarly invites scholars who write about and practitioners who produce Shakespeare’s works to ‘challenge’ what they may have ‘settled for’, interrogating and interfering with misogynistic origins for the sake of modern ethics. For the potential problems of performing Shakespeare’s women, starvation is neither a sound solution nor a sustainable one – and there is artistic abundance enough in this world to prevent it.

1 Performing Death and Desire in Othello

Once she is dead, Desdemona has some time on her hands. And she has some hands on her body. As she lies lifeless (yet lovely) for the lengthy final scene, Desdemona’s body is repeatedly bothered, jabbed and jostled. In my experience playing the role, being Desdemona’s corpse can feel like an afterlife of its own kind – presence without power, cognizance without control, sensation without speech. In some way, Desdemona’s conspicuous corpse may figure forth what it means for a woman to put her body on the stage in Shakespeare’s plays. This is, in the end, how it all began. Since ‘Othello is thought to be the first of Shakespeare’s tragedies staged during the Restoration’,1 as Ayanna Thompson notes, the first paid female performer of Shakespeare, as the story goes, played Desdemona. Though it is unprovable, this ‘unnamed woman’ who ‘took to the stage of the Vere Street Theatre’ in December of 1660 ‘may well be the first Englishwoman to play Desdemona’, according to Clare McManus, ‘prompting reflections on the play’s relationship to the history of women in theatre’.2 McManus demonstrates how Othello’s concern with ‘the risk of allowing women into public spaces’ aligns with ‘the unknown actress’s move into the public theatre’.3 I would like to expand this point further, suggesting another thing Desdemona has in common with the first woman who played her, along with the legacy of female performers who have followed her: she must play dead. That is, in the way that being a corpse – along with all of the vulnerability and voyeurism it invites – is a defining condition for the character in Othello, being a corpse is, on some level, a defining condition of being a female performer in Shakespeare’s plays. When I portrayed Desdemona in 2011, the rehearsal during which we staged her murder was the first time I considered how long I was going to have to be dead onstage (in bed, in a nightie, in a spotlight). But once she is dead, there must the ‘divine Desdemona’ stay (2.1.73). The enduring image she leaves with the audience (and critics) may have more to do with her

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post-murder posture than any other aspect of her performance, as reflected in Henry Jackson’s frequently cited observation that the Desdemona of a 1610 production moved the audience ‘more after she was dead, when, lying on her bed, she entreated the pity of the spectators by her very countenance’.4 Jackson’s description has become something of a prescription – indeed, it reads almost like a casting call in the context of the play’s performance history. That is, until she is dead, the actor portraying Desdemona has seemed doomed to be … well, lifeless. The ostensible inevitability of being upstaged by one’s own corpse presents an actor with a special sort of predicament. An additional ethical challenge is embedded in the language of Jackson (and many other critics and practitioners to follow). Desdemona is most compelling not because of what she says or does while alive, but how she looks – her ‘very countenance’ – after she has been brutally murdered and is ‘lying on her bed’ (in a nightie, in a spotlight, perhaps). The play’s ending thus exemplifies Dympna Callaghan’s assertion that ‘female corpses are constructed as focal points for ocular inspection by other characters on stage and by the audience in a way that male bodies are not’.5 Desdemona’s (the actor’s) body is scrutinized, covered, uncovered, touched, groped, kissed and sweated upon as the remainder of the plot unravels. Since the plot demands that the actor be simultaneously passive and active (and remain alluring while doing both), playing a dead Desdemona almost parodies playing a living one. Further, in a play that is, as Carol Chillington Rutter asserts, ‘constructed out of narratives: tales, stories, reports, news, gossip, prattle’,6 Desdemona dies because of the stories the men in her life tell about her. Defying a world in which her body was ‘made to write “whore” upon’, Desdemona’s death in performance reveals her subjectivity in a way that unsettles the male-constructed narratives that lead to her demise in the first place (4.2.73). Even so, the tales most often told about Desdemona (by critics, spectators and practitioners) remarkably reiterate the stories the play’s male characters tell about her. Such narrative reproduction is worth interrogating – especially since the conclusion of Othello works to deconstruct the Desdemona stories its misguided men have authored. In what follows, this chapter surveys and unpacks the various narrative strategies that critics, spectators and practitioners often deploy to describe Desdemona, strategies that echo the men of Othello, rendering Desdemona dead before she even begins.

O, these men, these men! After Othello has called her a ‘Devil’, physically assaulted her in public, verbally assaulted her in private and ‘so bewhored her’, to use Emilia’s phrase, ‘that true hearts cannot bear it’, Desdemona cries out to her female companion in a rare intimate exchange between the two: ‘O, these men, these men!’ (4.1.239; 4.2.117, 119; 4.3.59). Such a theatrical moment is

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extraordinary on many levels. For one thing, the scene is notable for its ‘unique privacy’ between women, especially in the hyper-masculine world of the play, since, as Rutter asserts, it ‘privileges women’s talk, women’s bodies, women’s thoughtful work upon the cultural imperatives that organize their lives’.7 A centrepiece of this scene is, after all, Emilia’s famous declaration that women have ‘affections’, ‘desires for sport’ and ‘frailty’, just like their husbands do (4.3.99–100). Before Emilia’s bold speech, however, in this line – ‘O, these men, these men!’ – Desdemona insinuates an indictment that reaches beyond Othello (and Othello). In the lines that follow, she turns to the implications of the accusations levelled against her, imploring Emilia to tell her if she ‘in conscience’ believes ‘that there be women do abuse their husbands’ through infidelity (4.3.60–1). But first, Desdemona issues a charge of her own. Both character and actor may reveal in this line an awareness of ‘these men’ who determine Desdemona’s destiny, ‘these men’ who dictate which bodies are ‘made to write whore upon’ (4.2.73), ‘these men’ who craft the cultural stories about women. And maybe even ‘these men’ whose gaze will soon find delight in the beauty of a dead Desdemona, ‘lying on her bed’. That is, it’s not just ‘these men’ (the ones driving the drama that will lead to her death), it’s these men (the ones simply watching it). The repetition of ‘these men’ anticipates the reiterative strategies of narrative about Desdemona’s death that can only reproduce that which has come before. Even if Desdemona does not fully realize she is damned from the start, the actor playing her undoubtedly does. Desdemona’s ‘O, these men, these men!’ is thus not only evocative in its convergence of performer and character but also provocative in its protest of misogynistic patterns both within the world of the play and beyond it. Lynda E. Boose claims that to watch Othello is to enter a ‘world of images centered upon the availability of Desdemona’s body’, which is ‘the voyeuristic object that the language of the play has endlessly invited the audience to violate’.8 Asserting the resonance of the play with contemporary pornography, Boose explains: Pornography in its original literary manifestation is by definition maleauthored and subscribed – not only authored by a male but subscribed by a culture which deprecates the feminine and invests the masculine with sexual desire accompanied by fear, guilt and loathing of female sexuality … the primary job that pornographic literature fulfills … is providing a medium for reconstituting and circulating the society’s norms about male power and male dominance.9 Boose explains Desdemona’s extreme subordination and passivity as a product of ‘the only erotic fantasies the culture knows how to construct’.10 Indeed, Desdemona is constructed by most of the play’s men, out of their ‘fantasies’ and for their benefit. And, if the production history of Othello is to be believed, it seems that audience reception and critical perception have not simply responded to the play’s stories ‘about male power and male

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dominance’, but have had a hand in ‘reconstituting and circulating’ them. ‘O, these men, these men!’ is an outburst that signals Desdemona’s alertness to the play’s precarious pornographic imperatives even as it confronts the violent impulses of the voyeurs who make it work – both onstage and off, again and again.

Iago’s Desdemona Iago spins the play’s earliest tales about Desdemona, and, to be sure, they are the stuff of the cultural dreams Boose discusses. The first representation of Desdemona that Iago creates is an image of her having sex with Othello meant to scandalize the unsuspecting Brabantio: ‘even now, now, very now, an old black ram / Is tupping your white ewe!’ (1.1.87–8). Iago’s subsequent descriptions are equally animalistic, aggressive and suggestive: he tells Brabantio that Desdemona is currently ‘covered with a Barbary horse’ and that she is ‘making the beast with two backs’ with ‘the Moor’ (1.1.110; 114–15). Brabantio, it turns out, is not so unsuspecting after all. He responds to the allegations of Iago and Roderigo by admitting, ‘this accident is not unlike my dream’ (1.1.140). The uneasy spectre of a father dreaming about his daughter ‘making the beast with two backs’ thus pollutes the air of the play’s first scene alongside Iago’s other constructions of Desdemona’s sexuality. The crudeness of Brabantio’s dreams notwithstanding, it makes sense to conclude that Iago uses such outrageous imagery for shock value here specifically to appall the defied father into action. Searching for Iago’s authentic view of Desdemona, however, is a tricky task since he so often fashions his speech to simultaneously agitate and titillate his listeners. At times he does so by provoking the desire to possess and penetrate Desdemona’s body; he tells Cassio she is ‘a land carrack’ that Othello ‘hath boarded’, for example (1.2.50). At other times, he does so by implying the transgressive yet tantalizing voracity of Desdemona’s sexual appetite, such as his assurance to Roderigo that when she is ‘sated’ with Othello’s ‘body’, she will be once again available to him because ‘she must have change, she must’, along with his later reiteration that ‘her eye must be fed’ (1.3.351–2; 2.1.223). And still at other times, as with Brabantio at the play’s beginning, he arouses his audiences with animalistic images of Desdemona in the sexual act. When Othello demands that he show him proof that his wife is sleeping with Cassio, for instance, Iago generates such evidence simply by asking Othello if he would ‘grossly gape on’ to ‘behold her topped’, adding that such an opportunity would be hard to come by, even if she and her lover were ‘as prime as goats, as hot as monkeys’ (3.3.398–9; 406). Mission accomplished. Remarkably, Iago gets away with eroticizing Desdemona to her face, as when he playfully tells her and Emilia that they ‘rise to play, and go to bed to work’ (2.1.115). So effective is Iago’s sexualization of Desdemona that

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even his attempts to emphasize her benevolence become somehow sensual. When he tells the humiliated and outcast Cassio that ‘she is of so free, so kind, so apt, so blest a disposition that she holds it a vice in her goodness not to do more than she is requested’, he manages to articulate another of those culturally constructed ‘erotic fantasies’: a woman who is not only subservient, but driven to gratify through her service by doing ‘more than she is requested’ (2.3.315–17). Later in the same scene, Iago reveals in soliloquy that he knows ‘th’ inclining Desdemona’ to be ‘framed as fruitful / As the free elements’ (2.3.335–7), resonating with Othello’s earlier description of how Desdemona did ‘seriously incline’ to hear his tales (1.3.147). Even as Iago vows to ‘turn her virtue into pitch’, the implications of ‘inclining’ come into focus – an inclining Desdemona will inevitably give way to a reclining one (2.3.355). In the end, however, whether Iago honestly holds Desdemona in high regard is beside the point. He remains relentlessly responsible for her sexual objectification throughout the play, regardless of his motives for doing so.

Cassio’s Desdemona As they anxiously await the arrival of Othello in Cyprus, Cassio tells Montano that Desdemona is a maid That paragons description and wild fame; One that excels the quirks of blazoning pens And in th’ essential vesture of creation Does tire the inginer. (2.1.61–4) He stands by his claim that she ‘excels the quirks of blazoning pens’, and instead of itemizing the particular features of her splendour, he describes its ability to seduce even the strongest natural forces: Tempests themselves, high seas, and howling winds, The guttered rocks and congregated sands, Traitors ensteeped to clog the guiltless keel, As having sense of beauty, do omit Their mortal natures, letting go safely by The divine Desdemona. (2.1.68–73) The truth is that Cassio need not detail the awe-inspiring ‘beauty’ of Desdemona because the audience has already seen her (and the actor embodying her) in the flesh. Cassio’s emphasis on Desdemona’s beauty, however, is a new element at this point in the play. That is, although such

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physical charms have long been assumed in the casting of Desdemona, her attractiveness is actually authored by Cassio – after she has already asserted herself, quite capably, in the play’s first act. The beauty of Cassio’s ‘divine Desdemona’ is a dominant (and dominating) force, commanding not only the deadly enemies of travellers on the open sea – ‘tempests’, ‘high seas’, ‘howling winds’, ‘guttered rocks and congregated sands’ – but also Othello himself, as Cassio makes clear to Montano when he terms her ‘our great captain’s captain’ (2.1.74). Significantly, Cassio’s last mention of Desdemona just before she enters is an echo of Iago’s previous sexualization of her, one of the ‘images centered upon the availability of Desdemona’s body’ to which Boose refers: Great Jove, Othello guard, And swell his sail with thine own powerful breath That he may bless this bay with his tall ship, Make love’s quick pants in Desdemona’s arms … (2.1.77–80) Othello making ‘love’s quick pants in Desdemona’s arms’ conjures, though more gracefully, a vision of the same business Iago earlier calls ‘making the beast with two backs’ (1.1.113–15). Admittedly, Iago’s phrasing lacks the poetry of Cassio’s, but then, both men seem to know this about one another. It is Iago who claims that Cassio’s ‘prattle’ excels his ‘practice’, while Cassio asserts that Iago ‘speaks home’ and is more of a ‘soldier’ than a ‘scholar’ (1.1.25; 2.1.165–6). What Cassio shares with Iago, despite the differences in their language, is the urge that both men have not only to imagine Desdemona having sex with Othello but to inspire their listeners – Brabantio, Montano, the audience – to imagine it with them. Cassio’s flare for romantic rhetoric continues to flourish in his subsequent characterizations of Desdemona, a notable contrast to Iago’s tendency to talk dirty, especially evident in the conversation the two have about her in Act 2, Scene 3. Iago’s first attempt at inciting (and exciting) Cassio is a reminder that Othello ‘hath not yet made wanton the night’ with Desdemona, who is ‘sport for Jove’; but Cassio coyly replies, ‘she’s a most exquisite lady’ (2.3.16–18). That Cassio finds Desdemona enchanting is clear (as Iago later points out), but he carefully avoids eroticizing his boss’s wife, instead calling her ‘a most fresh and delicate creature’, and ultimately, declaring her to be ‘perfection’ (2.3.20; 25). Even when Cassio seems to succumb to Iago’s temptation in his admission that Desdemona has ‘an inviting eye’, he quickly recovers by redirecting his focus to her virtue: ‘and yet methinks right modest’ (2.3.23). Here, Desdemona’s virtue is a safe substitution for her sex appeal. Notably, he will describe Desdemona as ‘virtuous’ again – after his fall from Othello’s grace (2.3.324–5; 3.1.35).

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Othello’s Desdemona The first thing Othello says about Desdemona is to Iago, as he assures him that if he did not ‘love the gentle Desdemona’, he would not surrender his ‘unhoused free condition’ as a bachelor for the ‘circumscription and confine’ of marriage – not ‘for the sea’s worth’ (1.2.25–8). Desdemona represents to Othello, among other things, a kind of captivity. And although he is a willing prisoner to this ‘circumscription and confine’ at the play’s start, his initial interpretation of his marriage as something for which he has chosen to sacrifice his ‘free condition’ – only because of his ‘love’ for ‘the gentle Desdemona’ – later informs his response to the prospect of her infidelity. Othello legitimizes Desdemona, from the beginning, merely by loving her. In other words, Desdemona’s validity is contingent upon – even created by – Othello’s feelings. She is often a descriptor of the subject Othello, as when he calls her his ‘soul’s joy’ (2.1.182). He clarifies this further when he consciously chooses his ‘love’ for Desdemona as a measure not only of her value but of his own integrity: Excellent wretch! perdition catch my soul But I do love thee! and when I love thee not Chaos is come again. (3.3.90–2) Part prophecy and part threat, Othello’s declaration of love seems also a confession of fear and is self-absorbed either way – his ‘soul’, his ‘love’. This love story is made, after all, of Othello’s words. At the close of the courtship tale he relates to the duke and senators, Othello concludes that Desdemona became enamoured of him because of ‘the dangers’ he had ‘passed’, while he fell for her because ‘she did pity them’ (1.3.168–9). In Othello’s narrative, Desdemona is a woman who would ‘seriously incline’ with a ‘greedy ear’ to ‘devour’ his every word (1.3.147, 150–1). Even when he reinforces her request to go to Cyprus with him, Othello claims he wants her there so he can ‘be free and bounteous to her mind’ (1.3.266). He will speak and she will listen, relishing a married life that plays out as a perpetual loop of the courtship that led to it. Early in the play, Othello calls Desdemona his ‘fair warrior’, a revision of her father’s characterization of her as ‘a maid so tender, fair and happy’ that transforms a ‘tender’ young woman into a ‘warrior’, yet retains the emphatic claim that she is ‘fair’ (2.1.179; 1.2.66). Othello reiterates how ‘fair’ Desdemona is later, when he calls her an ‘impudent strumpet’: ‘was this fair paper, this most goodly book / Made to write “whore” upon?’ (4.2.82; 72–3). And, if he is referring to the color of her skin, as is often concluded, he does so one more time just before he murders her, wishing not to damage ‘that whiter skin of hers than snow’ (5.2.4).

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For all the play’s talk of Desdemona having sex with Othello, it is worth noting that Othello himself is reluctant to sexualize his wife until he suspects she may be fooling around with someone else. He takes pains to assure the duke, for example, that he does not request Desdemona’s presence in Cyprus in order ‘to please the palate’ of his ‘appetite’ or ‘comply with heat’ (1.3.263–4). Once the plausibility of her infidelity has entered his mind, however, Othello authors the play’s most graphic vision of his wife’s sexuality, claiming that he would have ‘been happy if the general camp’, all of his soldiers, ‘had tasted her sweet body’, as long as he ‘had nothing known’ of it (3.3.348–50). Reinforcing the notion that she is a product only of his ‘love’, Othello’s projection of Desdemona being ‘tasted’ by all of his subordinates serves not only as a lamentation bewailing the loss of his tranquility but also, it would seem, as an invitation to onlookers to objectify his wife’s ‘sweet body’. As long as they don’t tell him about it.

Critics’ Desdemona Gāmini Salgādo cites an account of Covent Garden’s 1822 production of Othello in which the leading man occupies most of the writer’s views (and the brief article’s space), with one cursory mention of his leading lady: ‘Miss Foote in Desdemona, acted as well as she looked.’11 After using terms like ‘grandeur’, ‘beauty’, ‘consistent’, ‘harmonious’, ‘richness’, ‘passion’, ‘poetry’, ‘natural’ and ‘varied’12 to describe Macready’s Othello, the writer seems suddenly at a loss for words when it comes to Foote’s Desdemona. The ambiguity of his assessment – she ‘acted as well as she looked’ – leaves much to the discretion of the reader. What the statement lacks in description (and conviction, for that matter), it makes up for in prediction. That is, a troubling truth emerges from the writer’s association of the female actor’s physical beauty with the quality of her performance. As if Cassio had forever fated the actors who embody her, Desdemona can only ever be as good as she looks, in some way. An 1888 review from The Drama punctuates this point in its praise of Marie Wainwright’s Desdemona: ‘she is very pretty, perfectly natural, and played her part with a womanly tenderness that realized Cassio’s description of the Moor’s bride’.13 And, of course, Desdemona’s death preserves ‘Cassio’s description’ of her. So, in contrast to a part like Hamlet, which has been played by men of wildly varying ages (or the same man at drastically different times of his life) – or Othello, for that matter, a role James Earl Jones has played ‘seven times, from the age of twenty-five, in 1955, to the age of fifty, in 1982’14 – Desdemona is embodied by a woman one day who will likely not have the opportunity to play her again over twenty years later. The insistent focus on the appeal of Desdemona’s corpse has fostered some criticism that echoes Othello as he marvels at the sleeping Desdemona:

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‘Be thus when thou art dead and I will kill thee / And love thee after’ (5.2.18– 19). A review of an 1888 production of Othello, for instance, describes Minna Gale’s Desdemona as ‘a character only possible to a forgotten era, because no woman of to-day would endure, without protest, all that came to this poor, unfortunate girl’. The writer ultimately concludes, however, that ‘if one looked as pretty after one was smothered as did this special Desdemona, it might prove that, if marriage was a failure, death certainly was a success’.15 That the aesthetic of the female corpse as embodied by the ‘pretty’ Gale – ‘this special Desdemona’ – is so compelling as to render the violence of her murder ‘a success’ reveals one way in which criticism has often replicated the masculine perspectives in the play. In addition to reinforcing the association between death and desire expressed by Othello, the reviewer also reproduces Jackson’s investment in the physical attractiveness of the actor playing Desdemona. Gale is so ‘pretty’ that her dead body makes smothering look like a ‘success’, just like the Desdemona whose ‘very countenance’ Jackson found more compelling ‘after she was dead’. What Jackson’s comment has that the 1888 review is missing, however, is the mention of ‘pity’, an omission that gives the review an erotic undercurrent unmitigated by empathy or ethics. Some reviews commend not only Desdemona’s beauty as a corpse but also her conduct (the actor’s choices) when confronted with her imminent death. In 1909, for example, a writer for The Journal praises Miss Marie Drofnah, who ‘as Desdemona was … especially good in the death scene in the last act’.16 Another reviewer agrees, claiming that Drofnah ‘rose with commendable power to the occasion’ in ‘the arduous scenes of the last acts’, while simultaneously lamenting that her Desdemona ‘was not quite satisfying’ early in the play.17 A reviewer for the Telegraph similarly complains that Drofnah’s Desdemona leaves ‘something to be desired’, although she ‘is still appealing’ (i.e. ‘something to be desired’). The performer’s downfall, according to this reviewer, is her strength: ‘Miss Drofnah’s voice is unfortunately too robust for effective reading of the lines.’18 In other words, Desdemona’s victimization – at odds with a ‘voice’ that is ‘too robust’ – is the measure by which such reviews deem the performance a success or a failure. The tone of some critical responses to the way in which Desdemona dies is downright giddy. In April of 1851, for instance, a writer for Tallis’s Dramatic Magazine articulated the following fantasy of female submission to male violation in its response to Charlotte Vandenhoff’s portrayal of Desdemona: ‘It is an unalloyed delight … to see her sad, fearful, yet gentle as a bruised dove bend meekly to the implacable jealousy of the swart Othello, and receive her death, while kissing the hand which gives it.’19 This review not only lacks ‘pity’ but actually replaces it with pleasure. The writer considers the sight of a ‘sad, fearful’ Desdemona who succumbs ‘meekly’ to Othello’s ‘implacable jealousy’ to be ‘an unalloyed delight’. This is Iago’s Desdemona, the one who ‘holds it a vice in her goodness not to do more

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than she is requested’ – she will not only ‘receive her death’ but will do so while ‘kissing the hand which gives it’ (2.3.316–17). O, these men, these men! Some critics unwittingly echo Othello’s emphasis on Desdemona’s ‘whiter skin … than snow’, such as the following reviewers of Cecilia Loftus’s 1914 portrayal of Desdemona. One calls Loftus ‘a colorless but sweet nonentity, an object of pity but nothing more’,20 and another similarly renders her performance ‘colorless’, though ‘gentle and sweet’.21 Though these reviews specify Cecilia Loftus’s Desdemona as dull, literary critics have often used similar language and imagery to deride the character herself. A. P. Rossiter, for example, calls Desdemona ‘a nearly-blank sheet’,22 resonating unnervingly with Othello’s reference to his wife as a ‘fair paper’ upon which he believes ‘whore’ to have been written. In agreement is A. C. Bradley, who deems Desdemona ‘helplessly passive’, explaining that ‘she can do nothing whatever. She cannot retaliate even in speech; no, not even in silent feeling … She is helpless because her nature is infinitely sweet and her love absolute.’23 Not only does Bradley presume to dictate Desdemona’s capacity ‘even in silent feeling’, he blames her own ‘nature’ for her ‘helpless’ passivity – her ‘love’ is simply too ‘absolute’ for her own good. Bradley goes on to characterize Desdemona as both weak (an ‘incapacity to resist’) and stupid (a ‘certain want of perception’).24 One can only be grateful that she is ‘sweet’, apparently. Desdemona as ‘colorless’ – a reiteration of Brabantio’s and Othello’s ‘fair’ Desdemona – is a notion that is also commonly manifested in costuming to signify her innocence. In her review of Shakespeare Theatre Company’s 2016 production, for example, Lauren Katz points out: From the moment we meet Desdemona, she is dressed in white, emphasizing her innocence. In contrast, all of the other characters were seen in a variation of brown, green, and other Earth tones. Even when Desdemona is accused of adultery … Rebholz’s costuming choice accentuated the idea that this woman is the only character who remains pure.25 The association of white with ‘innocence’ and black with guilt, however, is a dichotomy that the play disturbs. And part of the problem with such stress on Desdemona as ‘pure’ is the insinuation that had she been guilty, her murder might somehow be more justified. So much has been made of Desdemona’s innocence that Stephen Reid laments, ‘it is difficult to find a critic of Othello who has a harsh word for Desdemona’ and claims instead that ‘her very proclamation of innocence reveals the sense of guilt’.26 Similarly weary of hearing about Desdemona’s purity, it seems, Julian Rice blames her ‘idealistic zeal’ for her murder: ‘her overconfidence in the power of virtue to triumph … may be simply a self-righteous obliviousness to sin and frailty’.27 Rice pushes Desdemona’s

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culpability further, in a statement that remarkably (and reprehensibly) recirculates Iago’s ideas about women: Desdemona shrinks with horror from, or ‘abhors’, the word ‘whore’. The obvious pun also suggests that she shrinks from the reality of the whore within her, the potential whore which exists within all women … Desdemona is bound to the whore within.28 So, while some deify Desdemona for her purity and others disparage her for her passivity, Rice clarifies what may be, in fact, the disturbing reality at the heart of most readings of and responses to Desdemona: she is a ‘potential whore’. That is, she is a woman.

Spectators’ Desdemona When Anthony Sher played Iago in Gregory Doran’s 2004 RSC production, he waited, he says, for ‘the performance when someone would stand up and shout, “Stop it!”’29 Perhaps part nervous anticipation and part wishful thinking, Sher’s hypothetical scenario – an audience member so distraught over the behaviour of the characters onstage that he or she cannot help but to try to intervene – falls into a genre of story that makes an impressive contribution to Othello lore. From the violence of male actors to the vulnerability of female spectators to the vehemence of audience response, the performance mythology of Othello functions much like the mystical curse of Macbeth. That is, both plays have bred a body of anecdotes that reproduce the folklore they claim to record.30 And if, as Paul Menzer asserts, ‘the most persistent anecdotes’ surrounding any of Shakespeare’s plays ‘do something for the play that the play won’t do for itself’,31 it is worth asking what the replication of stories about real men endangering real women (and stirring real onlookers to intervene) might be doing for Othello. Othello’s performance history privileges stories about its leading man in which, in the words of Edward Pechter, ‘the intensity of engagement seems to have erased the line separating the performer and the part’.32 One such story features Junius Brutus Booth as Othello in 1824: On Friday night he [J.B. Booth] played Othello …. In the dying scene we are informed he even excelled himself: but before the drop of the curtain, he turned over, facing the audience, raised his hand upon his head, and said, ‘There, what do you think of that?’ These circumstances were looked upon as very strange at the moment, but no further notice was taken of it at the time. About 11 o’clock on Saturday he was in the entrance of the Theatre, conversing with Mr. Woodhull, when suddenly, but with an air of calmness, he said to Mr. Woodhull, ‘I must cut somebody’s throat today, & whom shall I take? Shall it be Wallack, or yourself, or who?’

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Woodhull asked what he meant? ‘Why, I mean what I say,’ replied Booth. Woodhull then observed that he was grasping a dagger under his coat; and the very moment Wallack passed along. Booth made a pass at him, but as Woodhull called him at the same instant, by turning round, the blow missed its object. Wallack then rushed into the street, and Booth after him: and Woodhull after him. Booth gained upon Wallack, and just as he was making a plunge at his back, Wallack providentially stumbled and fell, Booth passed over him. He was then seized, disarmed, and secured. In the evening he was taken to the house of a friend, where he is treated with every kindness and attention …. Miss Johnson, in Desdemona, certainly ran a risk of being murdered by the jealous Moor in good earnest, and may felicitate herself upon her escape.33 After a performance of Othello the night before in which ‘he even excelled himself’, Booth, according to the anecdote, feels the compulsion to ‘cut somebody’s throat today’. The story conflates character and actor, concluding that the woman playing Desdemona would have been in danger ‘of being murdered by the jealous Moor in good earnest’ had Booth not been sufficiently calmed down before that night’s performance. Charles H. Shattuck, who includes Booth in a chapter entitled ‘The Wild Ones’, recounts an instance in which Booth’s leading lady does, in fact, narrowly ‘escape’ harm, alleging that ‘he would have smothered Desdemona in earnest if the other actors had not rushed in from the wings and pulled him off his victim’.34 Such stories are, according to Menzer, ‘not built to convey facts’ but rather ‘designed to deliver truth’.35 In anecdotes about the likes of Booth – male actors who have come dangerously close to hurting ‘in earnest’ their leading ladies – someone intercedes to save the day (and the woman). That is, the intervention of both the ‘friend’ to whose house Booth was taken and ‘treated with every kindness and attention’ and the ‘actors’ who ‘rushed in from the wings’ to get the Othello actor ‘off his victim’ is necessary to separate Booth from the character he plays. In this way, the stories are about the perception of Othello as inherently savage (and the risk of an actor playing the character somehow absorbing such savagery). But, each anecdote ends with another ‘truth’ it is trying to ‘deliver’: Desdemona ‘certainly ran a risk of being murdered by the jealous Moor in good earnest, and may felicitate herself upon her escape’, according to the first story, and Booth ‘would have smothered Desdemona in earnest’ in the second. Desdemona is always on the brink of destruction, vulnerable to Othello’s violent whims not only in the play but ‘in earnest’. In the anecdotes, spectators can save her, while in the play, no such opportunity exists. And though these stories may reveal a desire on the part of their authors to rescue Desdemona from the hands of a murderer deemed essentially barbaric, they also uneasily exhibit a kind of exhilaration upon the narrow ‘escape’ from violence that always wants to end in the Desdemona actor’s death ‘in earnest’. Putting the female performer at real risk is, it would seem, part of the point.

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Alongside stories of Othellos gone wild and Desdemonas in danger, anecdotes abound in which audience members verbally or physically interrupt the play, particularly in the last scene. Like the legends in which the violence of Othello bleeds over into the behaviour of the actor playing him, such stories ‘may not all be true’, but as Ayanna Thompson notes, ‘they reveal a desire for agency on the audience’s part: a desire to protect Desdemona from an unjust death’.36 Among other instances, Lena Cowen Orlin cites Samuel Pepys’s description of audience response to the play in 1660, for example: ‘a very pretty lady that sat by me, called out, to see Desdemona smothered’.37 Similarly, a report of an eighteenth-century production describes the chaos that erupted in the house upon the murder of Desdemona on the stage: Tears, groans, and menaces resounded from all parts of the theatre; and what was still more demonstrative, and more alarming, several of the prettiest women in Paris fainted in the most conspicuous boxes and were publicly carried out of the house.38 Just as Pepys specifies that the distraught woman sitting beside him was ‘very pretty’, the description of the French production emphasizes the alarming effect of the murder on ‘the prettiest women in Paris’. The notion that attractive audience members would be more negatively affected by the play’s tragic ending than less attractive ones is, of course, absurd. Equally absurd (but often insinuated) is the notion that the murder of a less beautiful Desdemona might somehow be less heartbreaking. The persistence of this detail, then, is not an accurate account of events so much as another iteration of the value attached to Desdemona’s physical beauty – first by Cassio and Othello, and then by critics and spectators. Another version of this anecdote focuses not on the beauty of female spectators but on the vulnerability of their bodies. Johann Friedrich Schütze asserts that an eighteenth-century German performance of the play ‘exceeded by far what the nerves of the men of Hamburg, and even more so those of the women of Hamburg of 1776 could bear’. Schütze cites an eyewitness who reported: Swoons followed upon swoons … The doors of the boxes opened and closed. People left or, when necessary, were carried out; and, according to trustworthy reports, the miscarriages suffered by various prominent ladies were the result of seeing and hearing the overly tragic play.39 The witness describes a kind of war zone that replaces the one anticipated in the play, a scene of mass victimization – spectators going down at alarming rates, ‘swoons … upon swoons’, the most vulnerable of the injured being pregnant women (‘according to trustworthy reports’, anyway). Othello’s murder of his wife in their marriage bed prevents not only her maternity but

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apparently affects mothers-to-be who watch it happen – in particular, those who are ‘prominent ladies’ – resulting in multiple ‘miscarriages’. While observers like Jackson found the dead Desdemona’s ‘very countenance’ one of the most memorable images in the play, and countless reports emphasize the palpable (even physiological) effect of her mistreatment on audience members, other spectators’ responses seem somehow to forget her entirely. Abraham Wright, for instance, wrote in his seventeenth-century commonplace book that Othello was A very good play both for lines and plot, but especially the plot. Iago for a rogue and Othello for a jealous husband, 2 parts well penned. Act 3, the scene betwixt Iago and Othello, and the 1st scene of the 4th Act between the same shew admirably the villainous humour of Iago when he persuades Othello to his jealousy.40 Wright registers the play as a vehicle for the two male characters whose names he mentions three times in the space of two sentences. Apparently, Desdemona does not merit comment. Even when the performance of Desdemona ‘authorizes unfading remembrance’,41 as a review from Theatrical Inquisitor says of Eliza O’Neill’s nineteenth-century portrayal at Covent Garden, the character is deprived of critical space. The reviewer claims to ‘sincerely believe that a more complete or interesting personation has never been exhibited’ and admits that such a performance ‘would even justify minute description’ – but, tellingly, no ‘minute description’ of O’Neill’s Desdemona follows.42 Young’s Othello and Kemble’s Cassio are the focus of the review instead.

Actors’ Desdemona Ellen Terry played Desdemona in an 1881 production that featured Henry Irving and Edwin Booth alternating the roles of Othello and Iago. Working with two actors who approached the role of Othello differently alerted Terry to the constraints of her own role. As Lois Potter notes, ‘playing opposite two different Othellos in quick succession made her aware of the extent to which her performance depended on theirs’.43 Even with only one Othello, if the actor playing Desdemona is not matched with a director predominantly invested in her particular plight, her characterization can be as conditional as volitional. She may not be able to materialize in the collaboration of rehearsal and performance whatever approaches to the role she may have neatly worked out in the isolation of study. That is, despite her predetermined goals and tactics, the actor can only behave believably if she responds to what her Othello actually does – if he is ‘raving and stamping under her nose’, as Terry described Irving in the role, then she must react as a woman confronted with (and threatened by) such rage.44 The actor’s position thus

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mirrors the character’s when she says to Othello, ‘Whate’er you be, I am obedient’ (3.3.89). Whatever her Othello chooses to do, Desdemona must, on some level, comply. In reality, the performance of the actor playing Othello might be informed and impacted by the choices of his particular Desdemona as well. Even if this inevitably happens, however, narratives of rehearsal and performance reflect the female actor’s influence far less often than her leading man’s. Like Abraham Wright’s commonplace book entry or the Theatrical Inquisitor’s review, these stories emphasize the male characters while essentially erasing the play’s women. In an interview of Patrice Naiambana centred on his portrayal of Othello, for instance, Darren Tunstall mentions the name ‘Desdemona’ only three times in the span of several pages.45 The point is not whether Naiambana’s (or Tunstall’s) indifference to Desdemona in this interview is good or bad, but that his ability to have a meaningful dialogue about his portrayal of the role with minimal reference to the character – and to the actor playing her – is a singular feature of Shakespearean masculinity. That is, a woman discussing her experience as Desdemona would be hard-pressed to do so without frequent mention of her Othello. But then, according to Potter, ‘comments on the role of Desdemona, from the women who actually played her, are hard to come by’.46 Discourse surrounding productions of Othello seems to have recreated the vexing silence of Desdemona at the play’s end. Even when a Desdemona voice does emerge, as in Helena Faucit Martin’s 1881 On Desdemona, it cannot brush over the centrality of the character’s (and actor’s) relationship to and reliance on her Othello. Faucit resists readings of Desdemona as ‘a merely amiable, simple, yielding creature’, claiming she ‘did not know in those days’ that the character was ‘generally so represented on the stage’.47 Such a portrayal ‘is the last idea that would have entered my mind’,48 the performer insists. Yet, for Faucit, Desdemona possesses an innate ‘nobleness’, one ‘surpassing that of all the knights and heroes’ she ‘had ever read of’ precisely because of her reaction to being smothered by her husband: ‘that she should, in the midst of this frightful death-agony, be able not only to forgive her torturer, but to keep her love for him unchanged’ proves her nobility.49 Of her own performance in the death scene, Faucit recalls, ‘my friends used to say, as Mr. Macready did, that in Desdemona, I was “very hard to kill”’.50 Her motivation for being ‘hard to kill’ is entirely Othello-focused, as she explains: ‘how could I be otherwise? I would not die dishonoured in Othello’s esteem …. Then I thought of all his after-suffering, when he should come to know how he had mistaken me!’51 Though Faucit challenges the portrayal of Desdemona as a ‘yielding creature’, she cannot quite escape Othello’s construction of the character, one that is legitimized by his ‘esteem’, one whose chief concern while being brutally murdered is ‘his after-suffering’. The intensely frustrating fact of Desdemona’s dependence on the choices of the actor playing Othello is rhetorically emphasized by the character’s

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persistent, redundant compliance throughout the play – rarely does she speak to Othello without rehearsing her submissiveness with some iteration of ‘my lord’ (which she says over thirty times). Even the interaction with Othello during which she assertively sues for Cassio’s reinstatement begins and ends with ‘my lord’ (3.3.41, 86), and her attempt to later explain Othello’s strange behaviour relies on the contradictory construction, ‘my lord is not my lord’ (3.4.125).52 Perhaps even more than some of Shakespeare’s other female characters, Desdemona’s rhetorical redundancy demands her restraint, forecasting her passivity long before she is dead. The ways in which directors and actors historically have conspired to demonstrate this compliance is at least one reason that, as Potter notes, ‘by the end of the eighteenth century it was already agreed that Emilia was the better of the two women’s parts’.53 Like Rossiter’s ‘nearly-blank sheet’ or Bradley’s ‘helplessly passive’ victim, Francis Gentleman’s Desdemona has ‘no shining qualifications’ while he claims for Emilia ‘much more life than her mistress’.54 Michael Billington’s review of the 2011 production at the Crucible Theatre exemplifies this critical preference for Emilia: For a prize piece of Shakespearean acting you have only to look to Alexandra Gilbreath’s Emilia. She offers us a complete character: a professional soldier’s raunchy, sex-starved wife with an eye for a young lieutenant but also a deep attachment to Desdemona. You see the growing guilt on Gilbreath’s face when she realises that, through the stolen handkerchief, she has hardened Othello’s suspicions about his wife.55 By contrast, of this production’s Desdemona, Billington says only, ‘it seems fitting at the end that the dead Emilia should take her place on the bed alongside Lily James’s spirited Desdemona’.56 The review subordinates Desdemona to Emilia, to be sure, and its lone reference to Lily James cannot quite keep from (inadvertently) corpsing both character and actor: ‘spirited’. When compared with Emilia, who has ‘much more life’, Desdemona seems somehow already dead.

My Desdemona The summer I played Desdemona, my baby boy was just five months old. That is to say, the prospect of my character’s potential maternity was ever on my mind. If even for a few brief moments I could have forgotten that so recently I had given birth myself, a physiological cue would have promptly reminded me – I was still nursing my son at the time. This is relevant, in part, because a character’s story is a conflation of the character that is written and the actor embodying her. I simply could not have at that time embodied a Desdemona detached from the possibility of motherhood

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even if I had wanted to. Moreover, I discovered a new strength in giving birth – bringing a baby into the world and somehow keeping him alive with my own body fostered in me a sort of confidence and conviction that I have rarely found easy to come by. Ironically, birthing a newborn (both times I did it) also made me painfully aware of my physical and emotional vulnerability – even with all the support one hopes for in such a situation, in the end, a woman who has a baby must do so alone. A privilege? Of course. A trauma? Absolutely. My own specific experience of maternity thus made me quite a different Desdemona than I would have otherwise been. Add to this set of circumstances the fact that the site of the murder, as well as the important and intimate Willow scene, is also the potential site of childbirth – her bed – and a Desdemona alert to her particular vulnerability to violence, a Desdemona aware of (even resentful of) the watchful eyes of impotent onlookers, a Desdemona whose instinct for self-preservation is compromised by a capacity for love beyond her control, seems plausible. Further, there is something in the feeling of turning one’s own body inside out – both in its complete exposure and in its utter bizarreness – that resonated with my take on Desdemona. With any role, the pursuit of specificity can be the actor’s greatest challenge. As Martha Ronk asserts, though scholarship surrounding Desdemona has traditionally identified her ‘as either passive victim or transcendent icon … she is rather both’.57 Ronk’s conclusion is not only more palatable to, but more performable by, the modern actor, who does not play ‘the abstractions of “femininity,”’ as Penny Gay notes, but rather embodies ‘a particular woman enclosed in a narrative that pretends to be universal’.58 Andrew James Hartley’s description of Irish actor Sinead Cusack’s approach to any role resonates with my own: the ‘unique character’ springs forth from ‘the details of the script as mediated by the actor’s sense of self and personal history’, what Hartley calls ‘the deliberate fusion’ of the actor’s ‘own personality with that of the character’.59 For me, this means that a strong ethical centre, a palpable sense of vulnerability, and an intense maternal instinct find some manifestation in character formation (along with other intimate fears and wishes). That Desdemona marries Othello without her father’s permission, for example, can be the result of a strong ethical centre – a bold belief that she should defy social codes not only if they disallow the pursuit of her desires but if they contradict her conception of what is right – along with the confident (subversive) assertion that she can be ‘divided’ in her ‘duty’ and not be wrong (1.3.181). Her father’s incredulity that his daughter could be capable of such assertiveness – ‘a maiden never bold, / Of spirit so still and quiet that her motion / Blushed at herself’ (1.3.95–7) – suggests not that she has deceptively played the role of dutiful daughter but that her discovery of love has been a dynamic one, giving her occasion to behave differently than perhaps she has before. She is unflinching in her first scene because she has faith in her new marriage; it is this same assuredness of her security with Othello that causes her later to misread his cues.

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The tension born of Desdemona’s legitimate desires and doubts under the pressure of extreme circumstances can make for compelling work. The position in which Desdemona finds herself – newlywed, disowned, far away from the familiar, isolated in a hyper-masculine military space, confronting her hitherto adoring husband’s inexplicably violent behaviour and defending herself against far-fetched accusations of infidelity with a trusted friend – is outrageous. No ‘abstractions of femininity’ facilitate this unreasonable situation nor do they provide adequate means of response. One quandary for the actor playing Desdemona, then, is to determine how to play within the text’s linguistic parameters without allowing them to paralyse, prescribe or generalize her performance. Like any actor, she must also remain flexible enough to respond in real time to her partner’s behaviour, regardless of her predetermined analyses. And, she must subordinate some of her own interests to the greater goals of the production (i.e. Desdemona’s potential motherhood was useful only to me). In my performance situation, approaching the murder as an act of submission would have been incongruous with the modernized setting of our production – and, in truth, complete compliance with one’s own torture seems a bit much to ask even in an early modern context. Desdemona’s murder is not accomplished without her pain and her panic. But why does Desdemona not do more to escape this fate? Why does she take the slap in front of Lodovico? Why does she send Emilia away when her sense of foreboding is so clearly profound? Such questions, and many more like them, persist because whatever the time, place or context of any given production of Othello, those creating it must reckon with the text that Shakespeare wrote. Since Desdemona’s voice is, as Peter Stallybrass notes, ‘constituted fictionally, by a male author’, asking ‘how it is constructed’ is a critical part of crafting the character in performance. Stallybrass goes on to conclude that Shakespeare actually wrote ‘two different Desdemonas: the first, a woman capable of “downright violence” (1.3.250); the second, “A maiden never bold” (1.3.95)’.60 Ultimately, Stallybrass determines that ‘Desdemona’s subservience, enforced by her death, has already been enforced by the play’s structure’.61 In his assertion of Desdemona’s ‘subservience’ to the ‘play’s structure’, Stallybrass offers an analysis that resonates with the main argument of this book: that ‘playing dead’ is a defining condition of portraying female characters in Shakespeare’s works. And because he designed Desdemona (along with all of those other female characters), perhaps Shakespeare cannot entirely be let off the hook here. Production particularities aside, Shakespeare’s construction of Desdemona has for ages frustrated actors and critics alike in their desire to discover the character’s coherence and continuity throughout the play. Early Desdemona has vivacity and verve, giving the play’s start an electric charge of feminine energy. By contrast, late Desdemona is … well, late Desdemona, a character whose cold, still corpse is manhandled for the last several minutes of the play’s end. So puzzling are the differences between the two that scholars like Stallybrass are driven to divide her into

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completely separate characters. If Desdemona’s ‘O, these men, these men!’ is an indictment of ‘these men’ whose narratives shape her life and death, every time the actor’s voice cries out the character’s words, there hangs in the air the suggestion of the man who started it all: Shakespeare himself.

Desdemona ‘undone’ If Othello represents ‘a kind of drama that collapses the poles of the word “death” and brings to full representation the orgasmic undertones always present in the Elizabethan use of this term’,62 as Boose asserts, the actor portraying Desdemona has a lot to think about while she is dead. And if the Desdemona crafted by the play’s men turns out to be a fiction of their ‘erotic fantasies’, the audience has a lot to think about as well. The longer I lay dead during the rehearsal period, the more interested I became in the conception of victimization as a trope in the discourse of love, largely because it allows the victim some agency. Specifically, the imaginative functions of anatomization offer a promising parallel not only to one of the period’s more macabre poetic images but also to the vulnerability required by the role. Metaphorically, it supports the openness I saw as vital to my Desdemona – it is both her generosity and her genuineness that allow Iago to turn ‘her virtue into pitch’ (2.3.355). Further, it helped me reconcile my resistance to forecasting my own demise with the play’s escalating tone of doom. Ultimately, the practice of anatomization positions the corpse as an object of scrutiny in a way that resonates with the play’s final scene – and, significantly, in its poetic uses, the corpse holds the power. Othello’s investment in the condition of Desdemona’s corpse is clear when he imagines mutilating it: ‘I’ll tear her all to pieces’ (3.3.434); ‘I will chop her into messes’ (4.1.197). I was alerted to the notion of dissection, in part, because I was so stunned by the brutality of these lines as I heard them time and time again. Othello’s vivid fantasies of mutilation participate in the early modern cultural fascination with the controversial practice of anatomization. An allusion in John Webster’s The White Devil (1612) directly associates anatomization with female sexuality. The powerful Monticelso taunts the accused Vittoria by asking, ‘what are whores?’ He concludes that, among other things, They are worse, Worse than dead bodies which are begged at gallows And wrought upon by surgeons to teach man Wherein he is imperfect.63 Ironically, the punitive function of anatomy to which Monticelso refers – the bodies of criminals were often ‘transported from the scaffold to the anatomy theatre’ as a form of extended punishment (in the name of science) – seems

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to have stimulated eroticism in some of the period’s poetry, what Jonathan Sawday calls ‘vivid dreams of punishment and partition’.64 In such poems, ‘the subject actively seeks his or her own dissection’ for the purpose of exposing and displaying truth.65 In John Donne’s ‘Loves Exchange’, for instance, the speaker has undergone torture prior to the prospect of anatomization: Kill, and dissect me, Love; for this Torture against thine own end is, Rack’t carcasses make ill Anatomies.66 The lover, Sawday argues, invites both murder and anatomization with the warning that his body – ‘rack’t’ by his love as one who had been tortured prior to death – will not yield a tidy study.67 The corpse will, ironically, ‘torture’ its killer. Desdemona’s objection to Othello’s threats – ‘that death’s unnatural that kills for loving’ – resonates with poetic images of murder and dissection like Donne’s, where the expected dissonance of ‘kill’, ‘dissect’ and ‘Love’ is uncomfortably absent (5.2.42). Significant as well is Desdemona’s reluctance even at this point to figure Othello as her killer – it is, redundantly, ‘death’ that ‘kills’, and the ‘unnatural’ motive is ‘loving’. Though she does not project her own dissection as Othello does, and certainly fights for her life when attacked, in Desdemona’s final pleas is an echo of the poetic invitation to murder: ‘kill me not’; ‘kill me tomorrow’ (5.2.77, 79). Emblematizing both exposure and empowerment – in the way that birthing a newborn might, for example – the metaphorical implications of anatomization make available to Desdemona the authorship of her own story. This is a Desdemona ‘undone’, one who confronts the inevitability of being turned inside out under the watchful eye of lookers on, one whose last breath is at once an act of erasure and an act of creation: ‘Nobody. I myself’ (5.2.122). Zimmerman argues that the obvious aliveness of a ‘disembodied body’ onstage stresses ‘the limits of theatrical representation’68 – hence the intoxicated playgoer’s compulsion to call out Laertes for breathing. In the case of Othello, the sentience of the body further eroticizes an already explicit connection between death and desire. That Othello’s fantasy of dissection dissolves into desire just before the murder attests to the power of Desdemona’s material body: ‘Be thus when thou art dead and I will kill thee / And love thee after’ (5.2.18–19). For a live actor playing a dead character, the eroticism of the scene is, of course, more sensory than symbolic. Staging my death in Othello far more resembled rehearsing rape than murder. Indeed, in performance I felt most vulnerable in the scene not due to the fictional threat of death but because of the real experience of physical exploitation. I cannot claim that this is always the felt experience of actors portraying Desdemona. Sarah Fallon, for example, reports after having played the role twice at the American Shakespeare Center that her Othello (both times René Thornton, Jr) ‘was such a kind and conscientious scene partner. He always made sure

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I felt safe and always tried to position me in the most comfortable way for my death.’ She goes on to reiterate that Thornton ‘was always aware of my body position … which was very kind and helpful’.69 While some Desdemonas may be blessed with more ‘conscientious’ Othellos than others, the script does, in fact, suggest the repeated (mis) handling of her corpse. After the initial smothering, for instance, Othello immediately assaults Desdemona’s body again when he thinks she is still alive and suffering: ‘I would not have thee linger in thy pain. / So, so’ (5.2.87–8). Though many choices are possible to punctuate the ‘so, so’ – stabbing, suffocating, strangling – certainly the line reads as a cue for some kind of physical action. Tales of violent Othellos throughout the play’s production history reveal a compulsion on the part of some male actors to follow through on the invitation of such lines – to badger the body of the Desdemona actor. During his final attempt to kill Desdemona, Othello responds with panicked indecision to the shouts of Emilia outside the door, still clearly in contact with (touching, holding, pinioning, straddling?) the dead body: Ha, no more moving? Still as the grave. Shall she come in? were’t good? I think she stirs again. No – what’s best to do? If she come in, she’ll sure speak to my wife. My wife, my wife! what wife? I have no wife. (5.2.92–6) In the midst of Emilia’s developing discovery of her own husband’s culpability in her mistress’ murder, Othello falls on the bed (near the body, with the body, on the body?) with an anguished ‘O! O! O!’, to which Emilia responds, ‘Nay, lay thee down and roar’ (5.2.195–6). And, finally, Othello’s frantic speech upon Gratiano’s entrance affords him ample opportunity (and direction) to caress, cradle or cling to the corpse. His comments on the condition of her skin – ‘O ill-starred wench, / Pale as thy smock’; ‘Cold, cold, my girl, / Even like thy chastity’ – invite his physical contact with the body, of course, and are followed by a series of desperate curses (5.2.270–1; 273–4): Whip me, ye devils, From the possession of this heavenly sight! Blow me about in winds, roast me in sulphur, Wash me in steep-down gulfs of liquid fire! O Desdemon! dead, Desdemon. Dead! O, O! (5.2.275–9) While playing Desdemona, the alterity of being simultaneously living and dead, passive and active, subject and object was never more awkward for me than during this particular speech (more so than even during the murder

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itself). Othello’s desire, distress and despair all merge in this moment, and the prop onto which he projects his complicated emotions is Desdemona’s body. Not to mention the sweat. When he addresses the corpse after he has learned of Desdemona’s innocence, Othello is concerned with how it appears: ‘Now: how dost thou look now?’ (5.2.270). Farah Karim-Cooper identifies Desdemona’s corpse as ‘an artistic construction of her former self’, claiming that ‘Othello’s love increases, as does his victim’s aesthetic value’, upon her death.70 Even before the murder, Othello acknowledges the body’s inevitable, impending decay: ‘it needs must wither’ (5.2.15). As significant as Othello’s urge to ‘chop’ and ‘tear’ his wife’s body is his deliberate decision to ‘not shed her blood / Nor scar that whiter skin of hers than snow’ (5.2.3–4). If, as Zimmerman notes, ‘anatomy purported to … harness the horror associated with the corpse, or even deny its existence’,71 then Othello’s decision to preserve Desdemona’s flesh reflects the resistance of her body to be ‘undone’. In fact, so tenacious is she that Othello cannot seem to kill her adequately, and once she does (finally) die, her body remains central to the concluding action of the play, culminating in Othello’s outburst: ‘O Desdemon! dead, Desdemon. Dead! O, O!’ (5.2.279). The corpse of Desdemona, like the body of the actor, proves a powerful mediator of the space between passive and active, dead and alive, object and subject. In this way, despite (and even due to) her body’s refusal to be ‘undone’, Desdemona is ‘undone’ through her death. That is, Iago’s Desdemona, Cassio’s Desdemona, Othello’s Desdemona, Shakespeare’s Desdemona – all are upset not only by the innocence of the character and the injustice of her murder but by the undeniable subjectivity of the performer embodying her corpse. Even so, the stories critics, spectators and practitioners tell about Desdemona frequently echo the stories the play’s male characters have crafted. The dramaturgy of the play demands that while Desdemona’s corpse may be defiant, it also is defenceless and ever ‘divine’, providing for the audience, as it does for Othello, the pornographic promise of necrophilia. And although the alterity of the Desdemona actor, dead yet alive, clarifies her subjectivity, it also allows the male voyeur the opportunity to indulge in Othello’s necrophiliac fantasy free of guilt. Thus before and beneath Henry Jackson’s emotional response to the dead Desdemona ‘lying on her bed’, like the reviewer’s conclusion that ‘if one looked as pretty after one was smothered’ as Minna Gale did, ‘it might prove that, if marriage was a failure, death certainly was a success’, is the provocative truth of Othello’s fears and fantasies when he asks, ‘Not dead? not yet quite dead?’ (5.2.85). Just as when he reveals that he would have ‘been happy’ if all of his soldiers ‘had tasted her sweet body’, when Othello says, ‘I will kill thee / And love thee after’, he offers the audience taboo without transgression (3.3.348– 9; 5.2.18–19). Critics, reviewers, actors and onlookers have been killing Desdemona and loving her after ever since.

2 Playing Parts in King Lear

The funeral for my maternal grandmother in 2009 was, as I suspect many funerals are, underscored by a somewhat confused composition of feelings. As families do, we came together from far and wide, fondly sharing stories about a woman who had profoundly touched our lives. So there was an atmosphere of reunion and a mood of reminiscence to the gathering that gave the heaviness of our grief some buoyancy. We were less apprehensive than we had been three years earlier at my paternal grandmother’s funeral. She had been the first grandparent my five siblings and I had lost and the first ageing parent to whom my parents said goodbye, so we had all been in new emotional territory. The ambiance at her service had also been distinctly different – sombre, stark, silent. The minister, a man my grandparents had known for decades, intensified the awkwardness and anxiety by starting with a statement so staggering that focusing on anything else was almost impossible: ‘Alma Martin was meek [pause] and quiet [pause] … just like God likes his women.’ I find it difficult even now to muster a response. Though it is possible this minister had read King Lear (and may have a thing or two in common with the title character), I scarcely think he was trying to quote Shakespeare. The resonance of his statement with Lear’s line about Cordelia, when he enters the closing scene with her corpse in his arms, is thus remarkable: ‘Her voice was ever soft, / Gentle and low, an excellent thing in woman.’1 The presence of a dead female body, both in the anecdote and in the play, amplifies the attitude that ideal femininity is silent. The perfect woman is a dead woman, both examples seem to suggest. And when it comes to being a dead woman, I have a good deal of experience. It is the argument of this book that ‘playing dead’ is, in fact, a defining condition of portraying female characters in Shakespeare. Though I had performed death by murder and by suicide, both onstage and off, playing Regan in King Lear marked the first time I had begun dying onstage, had finished dying offstage and had been brought back onstage for inspection.2 As with most female corpses in the period’s drama, the scrutiny of a dead Regan mirrors the appraisal of a living one. In the case of Regan, who has

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often been, with her elder sister Goneril, ‘streamlined into a composite of comparability’ that contrasts the younger sister Cordelia, the heritage of hyperbolic malice is tricky for the performer to navigate.3 Indeed, trafficking in words like ‘wicked’, ‘sadistic’, ‘evil’, ‘wanton’, ‘incestuous’ and ‘cruel’, the long-established critical consensus on Regan warns the actor of her disadvantage with its uncanny resemblance to Lear’s assessment of her and her sister: ‘unnatural hags’ (2.2.467). When Lear exclaims, ‘then let them anatomize Regan; see what breeds about her heart’ (3.6.73–4), he thus articulates a destructive investigative impulse that is often shared by the critic and the audience. Like Othello, Lear’s projections of dissection participate in a contemporary cultural interest in the controversial practice of cutting up corpses in theatres of anatomy.4 Lear revises the poetic trope in which anatomization authenticates devotion, as when Lyly’s Endymion says to the divine Cynthia, ‘Thus mayst thou see every vein, sinew, muscle, and artery of my love, in which there is no flattery nor deceit, error nor art.’5 Instead, Lear imagines subjecting Regan’s body to punitive partition and exposure. Like the authorities who sentenced criminals to anatomization following execution, as both extended punishment and scientific inquiry, Lear invokes what Jonathan Sawday calls ‘the moral dimension of … dissection’, in which ‘the scalpel can reveal the contours of an individual psyche’, specifically one already deemed corrupt.6 The artistic and scientific functions of anatomization offer a valuable set of images against which to explore the performative possibilities of Regan in this ‘story of humankind tearing itself apart’.7 Whether used medically or metaphorically, as Sawday notes, early modern visions of anatomization register as violent and violating since ‘dissection is an insistence on the partition of something (or someone) which (or who) hitherto possessed their own unique organic integrity’.8 Even before he wants to see Regan cut up, Lear cuts her off. By situating my own performance of the role in 2013 within a larger history of the play’s performance and its criticism, I wish to consider the implications of Regan’s imagined (impending?) anatomization for both the character and the actor. As a result of the play’s initial crisis, Regan shares in common with most of the characters in King Lear her new status as a ‘part’ separated from the ‘whole’. In this way, the condition of the play’s characters resonates with what David Hillman and Carla Mazzio call in their study of anatomization ‘the emergence in early modern culture of … a new aesthetic of the part … that did not demand or rely upon the reintegration of the part into a predetermined whole’.9 The conflict here, as Hillman and Mazzio clarify, is that ‘the isolated part can never be fully autonomous’ because ‘its status as “part” implies by definition a relation’.10 In the world of King Lear, Regan is one of many performing ‘parts’, fragments of a whole who strive to achieve independence despite (or through) the dysfunction caused by their own dissection.11 The same may be true for the actor playing her role, who must face the inevitable prospect of critical anatomization while

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also competing for artistic autonomy in a play whose history persistently pushes her up against its many other ‘parts’.

Lear As so often happens, the correlation of King Lear’s production history to the plot of the play itself is striking. Partially responsible, perhaps, for the steadfast commitment of critics to Lear’s cause is the play’s well-known status as a vehicle for many a mature leading man to test a lifetime of training and experience against the monumental role (and for reviewers to decide how well he has done so). For Oliver Ford Davies, playing Lear in 2002 was so significant that he wrote a book about it (entitled, of course, Playing Lear). Charles Spencer of The Telegraph praises Davies as ‘one of the most moving and intelligent Lears’ he has ever seen, affirming that his performance ‘triumphantly’ revealed Davies as ‘one of our finest actors’.12 Reflecting upon his decision to play the part, Davies declares in the introduction that ‘actors don’t say “no” to Lear or Hamlet. The parts appear some sort of ultimate … but ultimate what? Test, accolade, exploration of the human condition?’13 He further asserts that ‘no actor can claim Lear lies within his range, it doesn’t lie within anyone’s range’.14 Following in the footsteps of his predecessors, Davies eloquently articulates the angst that seems to commonly accompany one’s casting as Lear, setting up his exploration of the role as an ‘ultimate’ opportunity to which he could not ‘say “no”’, even if he wanted to. By reiterating and revising Charles Lamb’s often cited pronouncement that ‘Lear is essentially impossible to be represented on a stage’,15 Davies automatically elevates the ability and artistry of an actor who does so, since ‘it doesn’t lie within anyone’s range’. Playing Lear is the ‘ultimate’ theatrical challenge, and yet somehow, it is beyond the bounds of theatrical training. Similarly, Morris Carnovsky described his preparation to play the role in 1965 as ‘a supreme test of everything I represented to myself, my life work, and my maturity’.16 Ian McKellan told John Lahr of the New Yorker that taking on King Lear in 2007 was not simply the most difficult role he had ever played, but ‘the most difficult thing’ he had ever done.17 While many actors’ comments focus on the intellectual and emotional strains of the role, others highlight its purely physical demands. For example, Jonathan Pryce, who played Lear in 2012 at the Almeida Theatre, says: Tradition dictates that you should play Lear while you’re young enough to lift Cordelia up and carry her. I was 65, and I put my back out doing it – I couldn’t carry her for the entire second half of the production’s run. I was having a lot of trouble with my knees, too. Having to kneel all the time was very painful. But at least when you’re a king, there’s always someone there to help you up.

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Such descriptions emphasize playing Lear not only an artistic accomplishment but an athletic one as well. Pryce poignantly conflates the experience of actor and character – ‘when you’re a king’. He further explains that he ‘had been thinking about doing Lear for a while’ and when he ‘decided to finally take the plunge’, he ‘chose Michael Attenborough’ out of the many directors who had asked him to do it.18 There is a majesty even in Pryce’s approach to the casting process – he ‘decided’, he ‘chose’. While it is true that the role of Lear is immense, intense and certainly central to the play – as one of my former professors would have here indignantly asserted, it is called King Lear, after all – from rehearsal to publicity to criticism, the gap between the actor portraying Lear and the rest of the cast can be vast. As with Hamlet, what the role represents to (and about) a seasoned actor is so precious – ‘a supreme test of everything I represented to myself, my life work, and my maturity’, to repeat Carnovsky’s words – as to overwhelmingly dominate both critical and popular discourse about the play. A cursory glance at the table of contents in Alexander Leggatt’s Shakespeare in Performance: King Lear proves a pointed summary of this pattern – chapter titles are the names of directors (all male) and their Lears (also all male) from the various productions he explores.19 Jonathan Croall’s impressive Performing King Lear: Gielgud to Russell Beale is, as the title reveals, similarly focused on actors in the title role (and their directors).20 In the rehearsal room, the parallel between the sovereignty of Lear and of the actor playing him can make itself known – frequently the actor’s performative choices are primary, and his fellow players must respond to whatever he decides to do, whether it aligns with initial visions of their own characters or not. Pete Postlethwaite, who was reportedly dissatisfied when playing Lear in 2008 under the direction of Rupert Goold, blamed the production’s flaws, in fact, on the company’s decentralization of his position: ‘we found ourselves divided over the way we were approaching the production. There were continual disagreements … You can’t have someone playing [Lear] who doesn’t endorse every bit of the production.’21 Postlethwaite further protested that the ‘duty’ of ‘actors’ is ‘tell the story Shakespeare intended’ rather than ‘impose our theory as to what the story is about’.22 If a production determines that Lear’s perspective is the only ‘story Shakespeare intended’, Lear’s daughters, as well as the female actors portraying them, are at a disadvantage from the start. ‘Every inch a king’, to be sure. Though met with critical acclaim, Glenda Jackson’s Lear in the 2016 Old Vic production, directed by Deborah Warner, seems to have elicited its fair share of suspicion at the dethroning of the typically male leading actor. Dominic Cavendish, for example, calls Jackson’s Lear ‘tremendous’, but also implies a kind of presumption inherent in her acceptance of the role: ‘the fear was that Jackson’s ambition would outstrip achievable reality. Was there not a hint of hubris about the enterprise, too, even a touch of feminist one-up-manship? Anything the old boys can do … this girl can do better?’23

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Cavendish highlights the ‘ambition’ and ‘hubris’ not of any actor taking on the magnitude of Lear, but of a woman usurping the traditionally male role. Although he determines that Jackson holds her own, he situates her as a ‘girl’ trying to ‘do better’ at Lear than the ‘old boys’ who have preceded her. Indeed, even in insinuating gendered competition as a motivation, Cavendish finds irresistible the rhetorical centrality of the masculine challenged by the feminine: ‘feminist one-up-manship’. Praising the same production, Matt Trueman of Variety makes Jackson’s gender crucial to her success: Jackson’s performance gives gender the slip. She is herself as Lear, still a father and a king, still a man, just played by a woman. It’s as if she stands in for him: her tiny frame in his too-big clothes; her cracked pepper voice in place of his. In a sense, she is ‘not-Lear’ – his opposite – but then so is Lear himself … Age has changed him almost out of recognition: a pale reflection of his former self.24 Though Trueman starts by suggesting that her performance ‘gives gender the slip’ – hinting that Jackson has gotten away with something here – he goes on, in fact, to assert her femininity as vital to her theatrical triumph as Lear. Rather than embodying Lear, Jackson ‘stands in for him’, Trueman proposes, ‘his too-big clothes’ swallowing ‘her tiny frame’ in a demonstration of diminishment: this female Lear is ‘a pale reflection’ of the male ‘Lear himself’, not in spite of her gender but because of it. This is, conspicuously, a reiteration of common early modern medical theories and political philosophies predicated on the notion that a woman is an incomplete man, a set of ideas that might resonate differently had the production itself not been modernized. ‘Age’ may have ‘changed’ King Lear ‘almost out of recognition’, but has apparently been less effective with ideologies and images that seem relentlessly attractive despite their destructive implications. Even an empathetic interest in the domestic drama of King Lear does not guarantee any of Lear’s daughters a level playing field. Philippa Kelly claims that in order for current audience members to connect with King Lear, they must ‘care about Lear as a character not because he represents a certain political system or theology, nor even because he depicts the image of a king who has lost everything,’ but rather ‘because he is a father who has lost everything’.25 As evidence that the play ‘can live at the heart of any family’, Kelly goes on to cite Laurence Olivier, who calls Lear ‘a selfish, irascible old bastard’, admitting: so am I […] My family would agree with that: no wonder he’s all right, they would say, he’s just himself, he’s got just that sort of ridiculous temper, those sulks. Absolutely mad as a hatter sometimes […] When you’re younger, Lear doesn’t feel real. When you get to my age, you are Lear in every nerve of your body.26

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Such a reading implies a sense of universality that is tenuous first by assuming that ‘any family’ can relate to the paternity of a man like Lear, and then by citing Olivier, whose perspective is entirely subjective (despite its folksy charm). Kelly generalizes Olivier’s personal experience as a father figure whose family sees him as ‘a selfish, irascible old bastard’, but is not threatened by his ‘ridiculous temper’: ‘he’s just himself.’ Olivier does some generalizing himself, of course. The critical compulsion to identify with Lear is so strong that many writers take for granted that it is desirable to do so. Stanley Kaufmann, for example, says that ‘if Lear isn’t about me, it’s not about anything’; similarly, Jay Carr in his response to a 1979 production declares, ‘I felt this “Lear” was only about the Lear on stage and not about me, and I can’t think of it as having enough reach.’27 Despite what appears self-evident to some actors who play Lear or to critics who write about them, and even despite the triumph of Glenda Jackson and other women in the role, many of us may never be the Lear that Olivier describes ‘in every nerve’ of our bodies. And perhaps we need not wish to be.

Goneril Both in the play and in the criticism, Regan cannot quite get away from Goneril. Categorizing the play’s elder sisters either as a double dose of female malignity or as a dichotomy of sharply distinct forms of malice is a compulsion that seems almost irresistible. In 1962, Peter Brook directed an innovative production of King Lear that made its mark on the play’s rich production history. Brook includes in his book, The Shifting Point (1987), an interview with Peter Roberts conducted at Stratford-upon-Avon while the play was in rehearsal. Brook identifies one problem with previously cut versions of the play: ‘cutting prevents the actors of smaller parts having the material to build three-dimensional figures and so the net result is the destruction of the real texture of the play’. Specifically, he points to the elder sisters: ‘one finds that most times one sees the play done in the cut version, one lumps together Goneril and Regan as two identical women.’ Rather, Brook insists on differentiation between the female characters, and in his production, ‘Goneril is consistently dominant … where Regan is soft and weak. Goneril wears the boots and Regan wears the skirt. Goneril’s masculinity continually fires Regan, whose squelchy softness of core is very opposed to the steely hardness of her sister.’28 This Regan was not ‘made of that self mettle as [her] sister’ after all (1.1.69). In his frequently referenced review for The Observer, Kenneth Tynan calls Brook’s production ‘revolutionary’, acknowledging that ‘instead of assuming that Lear is right, and therefore pitiable, we are forced to make judgments – to decide between his claims and those of his kin. And the balance, in this uniquely magnanimous production, is almost even’. Tynan goes so far as to say that Lear ‘deserves much of what he gets’ and that ‘his

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daughters are not fiends’.29 In his assessment of the same production almost thirty years later, Leggatt similarly asserts that ‘as part of the attempt to make the audience see the text afresh, Goneril, Regan and Edmund were shown not as arbitrary monsters but as characters with their own point of view’.30 Perhaps the most surprising ‘point of view’ in this comment, however, lies in the implication that in performance, a character could possibly not have his or her own perspective. Even when deemed ‘arbitrary monsters’ by critical response, these characters – if embodied by actors – almost certainly always have ‘their own point of view’. What Leggatt is getting at has more to do with the perspective of the viewer than of the character, it seems, as becomes clearer is his conclusion about the production’s departure from precedence: All this re-thinking did not reverse the moral poles of the play: the good were still good and the evil were still evil. Lear was still shut out in the storm and Gloucester had his eyes put out. But Brook was at some pains to block the easy emotional response that comes from a clear conflict of good and evil, the easy sympathy that comes to victims who do not deserve their suffering … In the long run we could still react in the old way, but the reactions could not be triggered automatically; they had to be earned.31 While Tynan, writing in 1962, indicates a shift in his perception of the play’s characters because of Brook’s vision, Leggatt, looking back on the production in 1991, holds fast to ‘the moral poles of the play’ as previously defined by critical legacy. He celebrates the ability to ‘still react in the old way’, even as he alludes to a past in which the ‘old way’ was ‘triggered automatically’ rather than having ‘to be earned’. His references to specific portions of the plot affirm his commitment to that ‘clear conflict of good and evil’ Brook had complicated, as he rhetorically privileges the play’s male ‘victims’: ‘Lear was still shut out in the storm and Gloucester had his eyes put out.’ Ultimately, Leggatt allows that ‘the production must decide’ whether the sisters have a ‘recognizable grievance’ or are merely ‘monstrous’, but he labels them ‘evil’ in either case, claiming that ‘to challenge the play’s moral divisions by getting sympathy for Goneril and Regan requires … a special effort of interpretation’.32 His focus on ‘getting sympathy’ for the elder sisters as an active strategy on the part of the production as opposed to ‘feeling sympathy’, an affective reaction on the part of the viewer, invalidates a sympathetic audience response by attributing it to effective directorial manipulation (that ‘special effort of interpretation’). The ‘old way’ of reacting to which Leggatt refers includes analyses like William Hazlitt’s from 1817: The true character of the two eldest daughters, Regan and Gonerill (they are so thoroughly hateful that we do not even like to repeat their names) breaks out in their answer to Cordelia who desires them to treat their

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father well – ‘Prescribe not us our duties’ – their hatred of advice being in proportion to their determination to do wrong, and to their hypocritical pretensions to do right.33 Perhaps because the line he quotes is Regan’s in some versions and Goneril’s in others, Hazlitt treats the sisters as one, using the plural pronoun eight times in this short excerpt, rather than presenting each as a distinct character. He is more troubled by the sisters’ ‘hatred of advice’ than Cordelia’s (whose defiance of authority causes some problems in this play, it seems fair to say), and also makes the common critical assumption that Goneril and Regan are ‘hypocritical’ from the play’s start. In doing so, analyses like Hazlitt’s confirm Carol Rutter’s point that in Shakespeare’s plays, ‘women’s speech … is defective, not just mechanically but essentially’.34 Cordelia’s ‘nothing’ serves to guard her from the charge of hypocrisy, and despite his initial rage, Lear himself praises it when he identifies as ‘an excellent thing in woman’ Cordelia’s ‘voice’ – ‘ever soft, / Gentle and low’ (5.3.270–1). In 1875, Edward Dowden shares Hazlitt’s contempt for the sisters, though in contrast he claims that ‘the two terrible creatures are … distinguishable’. He characterizes Goneril as ‘the calmer wielder of a pitiless force, the resolute initiator of cruelty’, calling Regan ‘a smaller, shriller, fiercer, more eager piece of malice’.35 When Dowden mentions the relationship each woman has with Edmund, however, he resorts to the plural pronoun as well: ‘to complete the horror they produce in us, these monsters are amorous. Their love is even more hideous than their hate’.36 The ‘self mettle’ shared by the sisters, in Dowden’s view, is their ‘amorous’ pursuit of Edmund. Here he fails to support his earlier claim that the sisters are ‘distinguishable’, instead figuring ‘their love’ as a sort of joint enterprise and attributing ‘the horror they produce’ in the audience to the ‘hideous’ sexuality of ‘these monsters’. Samuel Taylor Coleridge takes pains to differentiate between the sisters when he writes of Regan’s ‘unfeminine violence’, clarifying that she ‘is not, in fact, a greater monster than Goneril, but she has the power of casting more venom’.37 Harley Granville-Barker asserts that the elder sisters make manifest ‘evil triumphant’, calling Goneril ‘stupid’ and Regan ‘weaker’, yet ‘more violent’.38 To Maynard Mack both women are, collectively, ‘paradigms of evil’.39 A. C. Bradley in his famous lectures on the tragedies concludes that Regan in particular is the ‘most hideous human being (if she is one) that Shakespeare ever drew’, and Stanley Cavell asserts that Regan ‘has no ideas of her own’, identifying as her ‘special vileness’ the capacity ‘always to increase the measure of pain others are prepared to inflict’.40 When critics delineate between the elder sisters, then, they frequently do so by deciding which one is more fiendish, which one is more fragile and which one is more foolish. As such examples demonstrate, Regan has been identified as all of the above. For some critics, the unmitigated (and indefensible) cruelty of the sisters packs a punch the play cannot do without. In his review of the 1993–4 RSC

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production directed by Adrian Noble, Benedict Nightingale notes that ‘Janet Dale’s Goneril was a harassed housewife … and Jenny Quayle’s Regan was a sadist who self-evidently relished her new power over a father she despised’. Nightingale observes that ‘directors have frequently drawn on hints in the opening scene (for instance, Goneril’s robust reply to Regan’s temporizing, “we must do something, and in the heat”) to suggest that the elder sister is the more mature and assured and the younger the more unformed, insecure, erratic’.41 He recalls the RSC’s 1976 production (directed by Trevor Nunn, John Barton and Barry Kyle) in which ‘Barbara Leigh-Hunt’s Goneril was a nice-mannered, long-suffering housewife’ while Judi Dench’s Regan was ‘a nervous, stuttering girl’, as well as Deborah Warner’s 1990 production at the National Theatre, in which Sarah Engel’s Goneril was ‘a chillingly wellbred English lady deeply and in some ways rightly outraged by disorder’ in contrast to Clare Higgins’s ‘weak, tearful, and dependent’ Regan.42 Nightingale concludes that in their efforts to make sense of their actions ‘and to invite us to recognize the commonness of their predicament’, many ‘directors have risked sentimentalizing’ the elder sisters ‘and, worse, reducing their impact’. He blames this tendency for keeping Lear from ‘being what it surely must be, a devastating picture of monstrous cruelties’.43 Ultimately, Nightingale’s survey of such productions leads him to lament the lack of ‘frighteningly destructive Gonerils and Regans’ and to fantasize about the ‘elusive’ King Lear he thinks ‘we all yearn to see’: It involves a loving but oversensitive father and a majestic if rash king who unwisely divides his kingdom and impulsively banishes his good daughter, is cruelly treated by evil, ungrateful ones, suffers with an intensity that temporarily pushes him over the boundary between sanity and madness, undergoes an emotional and spiritual rebirth as a result, is reconciled with the daughter he rejected, and spends his last day on Earth experiencing extremes beyond compare of both joy and grief.44 Like Pete Postlethwaite, Nightingale is pining after ‘the story Shakespeare intended’. What he really seems to want, however, is not simply an ideal production of the play, but a more partial perspective than either the genre of drama or the practice of theatre affords. He may want a novel, narrated by Lear (or at least by someone on Team Lear). Or perhaps he wants the version Geoffrey of Monmouth wrote in Historia Regum Britanniae. In addition to the vacillation between sisters who are different and sisters who are the same, the tendency towards the sort of disappointment critics like Nightingale demonstrate reveals a nostalgia for the simplified and subjective story of the play’s source materials, in which both female characters can be clearly villainized. Further, Nightingale proclaims the self-generating myth of universal longing – ‘we all yearn’ – for a version of the play that insists on the reductive representation of all the women as ‘good’ or ‘evil’. As is true culturally, normalizing the nostalgia for a past (or the dream for a future)

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that reproduces destructive stereotypes is dangerous territory. And it’s hard to play truthfully – and ethically – on a stage. Some productions invest in portrayals of transgressive female sexuality, and some critics seem to find these portrayals particularly resonant. In his review of Deborah Warner’s 2016 Old Vic production (the one featuring Glenda Jackson in the title role), Matt Wolf of the New York Times calls Jane Horrocks’s Regan a ‘vampy sex kitten’ that ‘complements’ Goneril, played by Celia Imrie, who is ‘forever appearing drink in hand, clearly guzzling her way to an early grave’.45 Reviewing the same production, Matt Trueman notes that Jane Horrocks as Regan is ‘highly, highly sexed; a harlot who goes straight for the crotch’.46 Similarly, Charles Spencer of The Telegraph calls Anna Maxwell Martin, Regan in the National Theatre’s 2014 production, ‘a sex kitten turned on by torture’, concluding that ‘the wicked sisters are terrific’.47 Ben Brantley of the New York Times reviewed two 2007 King Lears: the Public Theatre’s production (directed by James Lapine, starring Kevin Kline as Lear) and the RSC’s production at the Brooklyn Academy of Music (directed by Trevor Nunn, with Ian McKellan in the title role). Of the former, Brantley says that ‘Lear’s elder daughters, Goneril and Regan (Angela Pierce and Laura Odeh), are, perhaps inevitably, straight out of “Desperate Housewives,” oversexed neurotics with serious Daddy problems’, going so far as to call them ‘heavy-breathing harridans’.48 In their commentary on the sisters’ sexuality, Wolf, Trueman, Brantley and Spencer reflect what Kevin Quarmby identifies as ‘the dramatic currency of the characters as fetishized commodities for twenty-first century stage consumption’.49 Reiterations of Edward Dowden’s description of female desire as ‘hideous’, such reviews render the sisters’ sexuality subversive, in the form of ‘a harlot who goes straight for the crotch’, ‘a vampy sex kitten’, ‘a sex kitten turned on by torture’ or ‘oversexed neurotics’. In his review of the RSC production, Brantley says that Frances Barber’s Goneril and Monica Dolan’s Regan are ‘black-hearted, sneering villains’ whom one might find in ‘a heightened costume melodrama’.50 Brantley finds Kevin Kline’s Lear woefully inadequate, describing him as ‘a temperate, witty and reflective fellow at the far end of middle age, who at worst can be accused of occasional crankiness’. Conversely, the critic is thoroughly enchanted by Ian McKellan in the role: By tortured degrees, with labyrinthine twists between piercing acuity and anesthetizing vagueness, this Lear arrives with a clarity that I’ve never seen before into a state of cosmic empathy and humility, a pained resignation that comes with facing the nothingness into which all men descend. Brantley’s effusive praise of McKellan not only contrasts the critique of Kline but more painfully (to anyone but Kline, perhaps) accentuates

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the unapologetic misogyny of his descriptions of the daughters in both productions. His concluding generalization punctuates even more emphatically the discrepancy between his assessment of men and women while also rehearsing the common critical urge to connect the downfall of the play’s title character to a universal experience: ‘the nothingness into which all men descend’. Universality that is gendered is not universal.

Cordelia Unlike her sisters, Cordelia dodges some of the dangers associated with female speech, particularly in public. Her ‘nothing’ is, of course, a gamble of its own kind that does not immediately pay off. Before her forced departure to France at the end of the first scene, Cordelia says to Regan and Goneril, ‘I know you what you are’ (1.1.271). Critics have often used her statement, along with Kent’s ‘And your large speeches may your deeds approve, / That good effects may spring from words of love’ (1.1.185–6), to contrast Cordelia’s honesty with the elder sisters’ hypocrisy. Cordelia says she knows, and onlookers believe her. Both Regan and Goneril are at a dramaturgical disadvantage when it comes to Cordelia’s reliability: throughout the preceding scene, she has asides, addressed directly to the audience. Her openness creates a connection with the audience for the character and the actor. Her sisters, however, do not have the same textual opportunity for audience access – when they speak in the first scene, everyone onstage is listening, so they cannot afford complete exposure. Regan actively resists exposure throughout the play, in contrast to (or even as defence against) Lear’s later fantasy of her anatomization. She ‘understands the dynamics of the political family in which she was raised’,51 as Lesley Kordecki and Karla Koskinen note, as well as the degree to which power requires poise in her situation. In fact, the physicality I utilized most in my portrayal of the character was based on my own core body work. The antithesis of Brook’s previously mentioned reading of Regan’s ‘squelchy softness of core’, I discovered in my Regan a remarkably strong core, the manifestation of her learned capacity for constriction and contraction in an environment that demanded such control for survival. This protective instinct – a firmness of core that resists exposure – is evident as early as the first scene. As he divides the kingdom and divests himself of ‘rule, / Interest of territory, cares of state’ (1.1.49–50), King Lear removes himself as head of the body politic, performing a sort of political decapitation.52 When asked to articulate their love for Lear in exchange for land, the daughters are thus responding publicly not only to the directive of a demanding father but also to this initial act of disintegration. Forced to follow her elder sister’s proclamation, Regan must find a way to articulate her own value against and above Goneril’s while maintaining diplomacy and dignity in the vast web of relationships represented here (subject/king, daughter/father, sister/ sisters, wife/husband, princess/courtiers):

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Sir I am made of the self mettle as my sister, And prize me at her worth. In my true heart I find she names my very deed of love: Only she comes too short, that I profess Myself an enemy to all other joys Which the most precious square of sense possesses, And find I am alone felicitate In your dear highness’ love. (1.1.69–76) Responding with political and social acumen rather than emotion or impulse, Regan does not make the mistake of thinking that the love test demands that she ‘expose her inwardness’, as Cordelia does.53 She manages artfully even her competitive quip at Goneril – ‘only she comes too short’ (1.1.72) – situating it after affirming and aligning herself with her sister’s declaration of love – ‘In my true heart, I find she names my very deed of love.’ Political sophistication rather than personal insincerity may motivate Regan’s first speech, along with her subsequent actions, as she reacts to increasingly perilous conditions. Indeed, the circumstances surrounding this initial speech emblematize Regan’s extremely complicated position in the world of the play. Even her retort to Cordelia towards the end of the first scene – ‘Prescribe not us our duty’ (1.1.278) – need not be a sarcastic dismissal of her own sense of duty. To the contrary, Regan’s rhetoric and actions consistently demonstrate that she values duty, allegiance and order. Instead, she may point here to Cordelia’s irresponsible political behaviour, particularly in light of the kingdom’s newly vulnerable state. A shrewd spectator, Regan is also a sophisticated reader of her own circumstances. When the topic of legitimacy in King Lear comes up, it most often concerns Edmund, but Regan witnesses the cutting off of Cordelia first, then Goneril, before she is faced with the prospect of her own bastardizing. Upon Lear’s arrival in 2.2, she greets him with ‘I am glad to see your highness’ and he responds by threatening, ‘If thou shouldst not be glad, / I would divorce me from thy mother’s tomb, / Sepulch’ring an adultress’ (2.2.317; 319–21). Such a reply gives Regan cause to reflect upon both of her parents: her dead mother, how her father figures his relationship to her mother and how her father voices the play’s only reference to her mother as a threat to her own legitimacy. Even if Regan recognizes her unmistakably perilous position with Lear long before this moment – as a woman, as a daughter and as a ruler – she now must act cautiously as she reconciles the unreliability of her father’s affection with the dangers and demands of her political context. Hearing Lear call down curses on her elder sister, Regan’s prophetic response is one of reasonable anxiety: ‘so will you wish on me when the rash mood is on’ (2.2.358). Upon seeing Goneril, Lear calls her ‘a disease’ in his ‘flesh’: ‘a boil, / A plague-sore or embossed carbuncle in [his] corrupted blood’ (2.2.411–14). And then he turns to Regan with the expectation that she will accept him with his ‘hundred knights’ (2.2.419). Her preoccupation with order is evident as

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Regan insists that ‘many people, under two commands’ cannot ‘hold amity’ in the same household (2.2.430–1). Equally overt (and equally reasonable) is her fear of her father’s diseased discernment, as she urges him to ‘be ruled and led’ by those whose ‘discretion’ is more functional that his (2.2.337–9). Regan’s concern for the stability of the kingdom is not an implausible explanation for her scepticism about her father’s state of mind. This scene alone makes so explicit such practical motivations that any wholesale attribution of Regan’s behaviour to ‘wickedness’ seems a willful dismissal of the dialogue. Carole Healey, who played Goneril in the Utah Shakespeare Festival’s 2007 production, voices her frustration with the discrepancy between the text and the stereotypical responses to it: Almost everyone I meet after the show in the courtyard says to me, ‘You were so evil’, and I just want to hit them [laughter] because I realize I didn’t do my job very well if that’s what they think. If they can’t see what it was like, if they can’t use their imagination and listen to what Lear says to his daughters, then they’re not paying enough attention.54 The Regan in the same interview was Anne Newhall, the understudy for the role, whose responses were restricted by her limited rehearsal time, in comparison with her colleagues. And though I do not wish to conflate the experiences of the elder sisters, Healey’s report of and reaction to audience reception of Goneril is resonant with familiar feedback to Regan, as will be further examined below. Moreover, Healey’s reply reveals a conflict worth noting. While her impulse in response to viewers’ comments about her character’s ‘evil’ nature is to ‘hit them’, after the indication that there is ‘laughter’ from the audience in front of whom she is interviewing, she seems to suddenly shift to self-blame: ‘because I realize I didn’t do my job very well if that’s what they think’. Not satisfied to bear this burden of responsibility, however, she immediately turns it back on the viewers: ‘if they can’t use their imagination and listen to what Lear says to his daughters, then they’re not paying enough attention’. Healey not doing her ‘job very well’ is quite a different problem from performing for an audience who lacks ‘imagination’, can’t ‘listen’, doesn’t pay ‘enough attention’ and whose assessment of the performance makes her want to ‘hit them’. There is in Healey’s strategic shifts here a hint at the hazards of female speech, both as a character and as an actor in King Lear. Cordelia’s ‘nothing’ – coupled with her asides to the audience, ironically – insulates her from such perils (to a degree).

Gloucester The role Regan plays in the torture of Gloucester contributes to one of the most negative stereotypes associated with her. Admittedly, mercilessly mutilating an old man makes Regan’s image tough to rehabilitate. Calling

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the blinding of Gloucester ‘the most appalling image of violence’ in the play, Leggatt cites a report from Granville-Barker’s production in 1940 (soon after the frequently abbreviated or omitted scene had been restored) to show the revulsion of the audience: ‘the effect was sufficient to cause some (and especially men!) to grope towards the exits with unbecoming haste’.55 The writer of the report makes a special effort to emphasize a gendered response to the scene – ‘especially men!’ – suggesting that perhaps the ‘image of violence’ alone is not the only reason for repulsion. In the way anecdotes about female spectators passing out during productions of Othello highlight the vulnerability of women, this anecdote positions the prospect of female violence as especially dangerous for male audience members. Though Regan is unyielding in her argument for and participation in the punishment of Gloucester, her rhetoric throughout the scene makes clear a motive that is overshadowed by the often articulated fear of female violence: ‘Ingrateful fox!’; ‘O filthy traitor!’; ‘and such a traitor?’; ‘Out, treacherous villain!’; ‘the overture of thy treasons’ (3.7.28, 32, 37, 86, 88). As Kordecki and Koskinen point out, ‘the repetition of the word “traitor” explains, if not justifies, the violence of the scene’.56 However harshly, Regan is responding to political treason by a trusted follower and beloved friend. The blinding of Gloucester is thus neither a random act of cruelty nor a representative episode of sadistic torture. The servant who stands up to Cornwall in an admirable moment of moral outrage after the removal of Gloucester’s first eye indicates that the couple’s behaviour is anything but ordinary. He orders Cornwall to stop, insisting that such a demand is the best ‘service’ he has ever done his lifelong master (3.7.73–4). Presumably, if Cornwall and Regan engaged in this sort of behaviour on a regular basis, the servant who has been in their service since he was ‘a child’ would have spoken up – and consequently have been run through – long before (3.7.72). Regan’s aggressive response to the servant’s objection may be more about decorum than depravity. She becomes acutely aware of the violation of order that now seems inevitable, first as the trusted Gloucester betrays her, and then as a servant presumes to command his master. The scene shows the dysfunction caused by dissection – the literal removal of Gloucester’s eyes mirrors the mutilation of both family and state that has been the catalyst for this catastrophe. Throughout the play to this point, Regan has had to mediate between the body natural and the body politic, responding with political awareness to the play’s fundamental condition of collapse. While this division is gendered – her body natural is female, her body politic is male – the real rub for Regan is that her body natural is whole and her body politic is in parts. Or, rather, she is merely one part of a larger political body that has undergone a violent dissection. Like her father, Regan is boldest when suppressing specific threats to her sovereignty: stocking the impudent Caius, reducing the rowdy train of Lear, punishing the traitorous Gloucester, killing the insubordinate servant. Her self-identification as sovereign – linguistically

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manifested by her frequent use of the royal ‘we’ – dramatizes her discomfort with divided power rather than revealing a character flaw.

Edmund As the play progresses, Regan finds herself competing with her sister not only for sovereignty but for love (or at least for sex). The common object of their desire is Edmund. In the tradition of classifying the elder sisters as villains from the play’s first scene, William Hazlitt contrasts the ‘deliberate hypocrisy’ of Regan and Goneril with their mutual love interest: It is the absence of this detestable quality that is the only relief in the character of Edmund the Bastard, and that at times reconciles us to him. We are not tempted to exaggerate the guilt of his conduct, when he himself gives it up as a bad business, and writes himself down ‘plain villain’. Nothing more can be said about it. His religious honesty in this respect is admirable. One speech of his is worth a million.57 Hazlitt identifies a substantial advantage for the actor playing Edmund that is unavailable to Regan (or Goneril): he gets soliloquys. And, as Hazlitt points out, they’re pretty good – ‘one speech of his is worth a million.’ In addition to impressing critics with his ‘religious honesty’, these speeches give the character (and the actor) a kind of intimate access to the audience that the female characters simply do not get (with the exception of Cordelia’s brief asides, as mentioned earlier). Edmund, like the actor portraying him, has direct opportunities to charm the audience and gain their sympathy. That he ‘writes himself down “plain villain”’, according to Hazlitt, makes Edmund’s ‘bad business’ more tolerable and saves him from any critical temptation ‘to exaggerate the guilt of his conduct’. One irony here is, of course, that Edmund actually is hypocritical – to Edgar, to his father and to both Regan and Goneril. That he reveals his deception serves to make transparent to the audience what the characters who are duped by him cannot see, but it does not nullify his duplicity. That neither Regan nor Goneril profess villainy, conversely, does not reveal their lack of Edmund’s ‘religious honesty’, but rather undermines the notion of ‘their deliberate hypocrisy’. Like the accusations of female infidelity so common in the period’s literature (accusations that Shakespeare takes pains to unsettle in a number of plays), Hazlitt’s charge of the women’s hypocrisy is impossible to defend against since, after all, most hypocrites pretend not to be hypocrites (unless they have compelling soliloquys). Another irony in Hazlitt’s analysis is what reads like an accidental confession on his part – that when characters do not disclose their ‘bad business’, as Regan and Goneril have not done, viewers tend ‘to exaggerate the guilt’ of their behaviour.

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Not surprisingly, interpretations of Edmund’s sexuality vary from those of his female love interests, as evidenced by Leggatt’s assertion that ‘Edmund also has a chance to bring out the sexuality of Goneril and Regan … though whether this adds to their humanity or makes them more grotesque involves another set of choices’.58 In one of those speeches ‘worth a million’, Edmund boasts: ‘To both these sisters have I sworn my love … Which of them shall I take? / Both? One? Or neither? Neither can be enjoyed / If both remain alive’ (5.1.56–60). Despite Edmund’s delight in his deception of both women, his pursuit of two sisters at the same time is figured as an opportunity – he ‘has a chance to bring out the sexuality’ of both – while the eroticism of the women has the potential to make them ‘grotesque’.

Cornwall When once asked what it meant to be married, my kindergartner replied, ‘Someone hugging you and kissing you.’ What a straightforward and stressfree formula for a stage couple this would be, for married characters as well as the actors portraying them – no commitment or resentment, no backstory or baggage, no competition or compromise – just ‘hugging’ and ‘kissing’. Though the simplicity of my son’s perception of matrimony has its charm (or so thinks his mother), the truth is that even crafting a fictional marriage is more complicated than a little consensual canoodling. The Duke of Cornwall was not my first husband nor will he be my last – being another someone’s wife often comes with the territory of performing Shakespeare’s women. As the other chapters in this book also demonstrate, tying the imaginary knot can produce (in addition to the occasional imaginary offspring) a unique set of potential entanglements – for characters and actors alike. Though the performance of marriage cannot come close to the intricacies and intimacies of the real thing, it does share in common with actual marriage a truth that governs all human relationships: ultimately, one cannot control the thoughts, feelings, desires or fears of someone else, even a committed partner. And this is as true in a rehearsal room as anywhere else. I played Regan opposite an actor who has long been a friend of mine, a colleague whose work I admire and with whom I have performed many times. Even so, we came to the rehearsal process for King Lear with notions of our marriage that required some negotiation (and this is not unusual, in my experience). Each of us had been thinking creatively and critically about our relationship with the other, but had reached rather different conclusions. I could respect that his assertion of Cornwall’s routine physical abuse of Regan fit well with his perception of his character (and, indeed, could even allow that this might work in another production of the play). I could not, however, reconcile that version of the marriage with my vision of my character at that time – a woman whom I thought would simply not endure such treatment. Moreover, I was coming from the opposite angle, it

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seemed, having imagined the couple’s shared ambition and close, Macbethlike partnership of ‘greatness’.59 I thought she deeply loved him; he thought he brutally beat her. Let the premarital counselling begin. Working with a director who values the organic, actor-driven development of characters and their relationships can be quite a lovely thing, and in this case, gave us the freedom to let go of our preconceptions of the marriage to see what happened as we worked. I cannot speak to the effect of this on my acting partner, and that is, in part, ‘what happened’ – I recognized that while certain aspects of the couple’s marriage (is it abusive?) were necessarily subject to discussion and mutual decision, other aspects of the relationship (what does he feel when he looks at me?) might benefit from a little mystery. That is, I valued the vulnerability of not always being able to read my Cornwall’s mind, and moreover, discovered the delights of not always needing to. Of course, the text does its work here as well. From the start, Regan is connected to Cornwall in the language of the play. Lear first addresses her as ‘Our dearest Regan, wife of Cornwall’ (1.1.68). Her dialogue with Cornwall throughout demonstrates their intimacy while still insisting upon their individuality. Shared lines can show this simultaneous sameness and difference, as when Regan’s vow to avoid her father’s ‘riotous knights’ (2.1.94) – ‘if they come to sojourn at my house / I’ll not be there’ – elicits immediately Cornwall’s reinforcing response, ‘Nor I, assure thee, Regan’ (2.1.103–4). The characters often verbally support or strengthen one another, as when Cornwall orders the punishment of Kent: ‘Fetch forth the stocks! / As I have life and honour, there shall he sit till noon’, and Regan fast fortifies the threat with, ‘Till noon? Till night, my lord, and all night too’ (2.2.130–32). Cornwall bolsters Regan’s claims as well, such as when she advises Gloucester to ‘shut up’ his ‘doors’ as the storm approaches, and he replies, ‘My Regan counsels well’ (2.2.494, 499). During the interrogation of Gloucester, they even repeat one another: ‘Wherefore to Dover?’ (Regan, 3.7.51); ‘Wherefore to Dover?’ (Cornwall, 3.7.52); ‘Wherefore to Dover?’ (Regan, 3.7.54). And when later in the scene Cornwall is mortally wounded, Regan kills his attacker, finishes the business with Gloucester and then turns directly to him: ‘How is’t, my lord? How look you?’ (3.7.93). And though some productions make the choice to stage Regan ignoring Cornwall as he dies or in some way relishing his demise, the final words Cornwall says in the play are addressed to his wife, and they communicate connectedness: ‘Give me your arm’ (3.7.97). Perhaps because they eventually become romantic rivals in their common pursuit of Edmund, some discussions of the sisters’ marriages often figure them as antithetical. Sarah Fallon, who long played on average 3–5 wives any given season at the American Shakespeare Center, saw her marriage with Cornwall in the 2008 production as a direct contrast to Goneril’s relationship with Albany: ‘Regan and Cornwall are a hot, fiery, well-matched pair’ while ‘Goneril and Albany are not at all well-matched’,

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which, she asserts, is ‘probably why Goneril goes for Edmund’. Fallon goes on to explain that ‘Goneril needs someone’ like Edmund who can ‘carry out all of her plans and ideas’, unlike Regan, who ‘seems perfectly content and able to carry out her plans herself’. So, although Albany’s failure as ‘a partner that is unafraid to act’ creates irresolvable tension in his relationship with Goneril, she concludes that ‘no such conflict exists in Regan and Cornwall’s marriage’.60 Zoe Waites, who played Goneril in the Almeida Theatre’s 2012 production, similarly claims that the sisters’ marriages represent ‘another fundamental difference between them’. She further explains, ‘Regan and Cornwall are in a passionate relationship and Goneril is in an unfulfilling sexual relationship with Albany.’61 In an interview for the National Theatre’s 2014 production, Anna Maxwell Martin notes that her Regan is ‘empowered by one of the men in this play, which is her husband’, while Goneril has ‘never had the same affirmation’ in her marriage. In the same interview, Kate Fleetwood (Goneril) agrees and goes on to explain that her character eventually ‘becomes desperate because of the infatuation with Edmund’.62 More generally, Michael Billington’s review of the production in The Guardian frames one sister’s flaws as the inverse of the other’s: ‘Kate Fleetwood’s quietly venomous Goneril is also perfectly contrasted with Anna Maxwell Martin’s extrovert and hysterically cruel Regan.’63 Such examples reinforce the irresistibility of two narratives about the elder sisters: the one that replaces the notion of duplication with dichotomy (they are not identical, so they must be antithetical) and the one that renders the pursuit of Edmund a ‘grotesque’ manifestation of female sexual desire.

Albany In Act 4, Scene 6, Edgar reads aloud the following letter after discovering it on the body of Oswald, whom he has just killed: Let our reciprocal vows be remembered. You have many opportunities to cut him off. If your will want not, time and place will be fruitfully offered. There is nothing done if he return the conqueror; then I am the prisoner, and his bed my gaol, from the loathed warmth whereof, deliver me, and supply the place for your labour. Your (wife, so I would say) affectionate servant and for you her own for venture. Goneril. (4.6.256–65) The letter, proof of Goneril’s plan to replace Albany with Edmund, provokes an immediate reaction from Edgar that typifies the tendency of male characters in this play to gender and generalize the female characters’ behaviours: ‘O indistinguished space of woman’s will!’ (4.6.266). He covertly passes the letter on to Albany, who uses it to confront his wife a few scenes later. It is with this incriminating document in hand that Albany intercepts Goneril’s grief over Edgar’s defeat of Edmund in battle, saying, ‘Shut your

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mouth, dame, / Or with this paper shall I stop it’ (5.3.152–3). Sarah Werner describes this moment in the Globe Theatre’s 2008 production: After Edgar’s defeat of Edmund, Goneril laments, ‘Thou are not vanquished, / But cozened and beguiled’ (5.3.143–4). At this line, Albany turns to her with his response, ‘Shut your mouth, dame’ … and the audience laughs – not a chuckle, or a murmur, but a full-throated laugh, accompanied by cheers and applause.64 Werner notes that the production on the whole ‘flattened out any nuances of female behavior; in this King Lear, Regan and Goneril are especially evil, and Cordelia is especially good’, one of many possible factors contributing to this collective reaction to Albany’s line.65 Rutter describes a similar phenomenon in the RSC’s 1993 production, which ‘nostalgically flattered male supremacist fantasies by writing an ending where uppity women got what they deserved’.66 Werner is also interested in the influence of this specific space, the Globe, upon audience reception, insightfully suggesting that ‘a theatrical space that looks early modern’ and ‘sells itself as being connected to original practices’ can function as ‘a safe haven for at least some audience members to give voice to anti-feminist sentiments’.67 In the production of King Lear Rutter discusses, however, Albany’s line often evoked a similar audience response that was therefore not site-specific. While I do not presume that every production shares this theatrical moment, I do wonder if Werner’s point might be expanded beyond the physical location of the play’s performance to the historical, intellectual and ethical space of Shakespeare’s plays more broadly. In this case, the source material for, the production history of and the critical conversation about King Lear can create a climate that craves Albany’s ‘Shut your mouth, dame’ well before his function in the plot leads him to it. Additionally, Albany is an especially dangerous character when it comes to the play’s perception of women. If, as Tom Clayton asserts, ‘from his coming to the fore in 4.2 virtually to the end of the play Albany is the authority figure’,68 the narrative he offers about Lear and his daughters may seem to represent an unbiased truth: ‘Tigers, not daughters, what have you performed? / A father, a gracious aged man / Whose reverence even the head-lugged bear would lick, / Most barbarous, most degenerate, have you madded’ (4.2.41–4). Even an audience member who has witnessed firsthand a Lear who is far from ‘gracious’ and two daughters whose humanity is recognizable (and even relatable) – an audience member who has been ‘paying enough attention’, to echo Carole Healey – may somehow absorb Albany’s claims without interrogating them. Albany asserts that ‘proper deformity shows not in the fiend / So horrid as in woman’ (4.2.61–2), an association echoed by Lear in his later description of female sexuality: ‘But to the girdle do the gods inherit, beneath is all the fiend’s: there’s hell, there’s darkness, there is the sulphurous pit, burning, scalding, stench,

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consumption!’ (4.6.122–5). When Albany calls Goneril a ‘devil’, it seems all too easy for even a modern audience to concur (4.2.60). And when he tells her to ‘shut’ her ‘mouth’, sometimes they cheer. It is Albany who asserts control over the corpses of the elder sisters. Upon hearing that Goneril has stabbed herself after poisoning Regan, Albany orders their bodies to be produced ‘be they alive or dead’ (5.3.229). If, as Rob Conkie asserts, ‘when someone comes on to the stage, they change it’, considering what changes when the dead bodies of Lear’s daughters reappear onstage in the play’s concluding moments may be revealing.69 Once the bodies (actually both ‘alive’ and ‘dead’) are present, Albany says to ‘cover their faces’ (5.3.240). When notified of Edmund’s death, rather than demanding that his body be brought forth, Albany simply retorts ‘that’s but a trifle here’ (5.3.294). Unlike the women, Edmund is inexplicably spared the scrutiny of the audience’s gaze (on top of getting those soliloquys!). While the corpses of all three daughters are present, only Cordelia’s is identifiable by the spectators, hers the only female face still visible. Yet, even she often functions in the final scene as Lear’s prop – ‘both a troubled and a troubling signifier’, to use Rutter’s words – a material object on which he can focus his grief, remorse and rage.70 In a play whose most memorable actions include division and dismemberment, the final mutilation is defacement, and its victims are Goneril and Regan. The covering of the sisters’ faces functions not only as defacement but also effacement. Albany’s order makes identical the most individualizing physical characteristics – the facial features – of the two characters, as well as the two actors portraying them. Covering their faces effects the erasure of the differences between the two women, rendering them representations of the feminine as faceless bodies. The actors playing Goneril and Regan (and, indeed, the actor playing Cordelia) are required to materialize, through their own bodies, the play’s manifold generalizations about women – generalizations most modern actors will likely have been fighting against throughout their entire performance. Whether connoting cruelty or compassion towards the deceased daughters, such an act makes manifest the misogyny with which both characters have been confronted throughout the play as they become indistinguishable female bodies laid out for the scrutiny of spectators – ready to be anatomized. For me, being a dead Regan thus departed rather dramatically from portraying other female corpses. The visceral effect of this twofold violation – defacement and effacement – was painfully resonant with my personal experience at times as a female actor of Shakespeare’s plays (and, if I’m honest, as a female raised in a southern American context in which a minister may confidently profess God’s pleasure at the silence of a dead woman). The connection is less a metaphor than a manifestation – a public, physical extension of a private, psychological phenomenon. Regan’s corpse materialized and magnified, in my case, the bizarre experience of simultaneous objectification and erasure, subject to inspection yet somehow invisible.

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My body, like the body of the actor playing Goneril, was transported back onstage on a gurney, carried by two men. I have never played Cordelia, so I cannot speak to the vulnerability required to become dead weight in the arms of the typically older actor playing Lear (and though much has been made of the male actor’s choice to carry or not to carry, the perspective of the woman playing Cordelia seems not to have been sought after on this point). I can say that the ride on the gurney had its bumpy moments, and when one is dead (and trying not to be distracting), bracing for a potential fall is difficult. Once I made it safely onto the stage as Regan’s corpse, I remained there, face covered, for what seemed like a substantial amount of time. As an actor playing dead, the fabric over my face meant, of course, that I did not have to fret over every minute facial movement; simultaneously, however, the covering created a sense of claustrophobia and, sometimes, of suffocation. I was no less blinded than Gloucester had been, but without the benefit of speech or action. Dying as Regan meant being reduced to all body and no face, portraying ‘parts’ rather than a whole, being gazed at but unable to gaze back. In other words, it felt like a continuation of embodying Regan alive, both as character and as actor, pushing against the play’s fantasy of the ideal female as alive but dead, visible but veiled, sentient but silent – ‘just like God likes his women’.

Regan In the same way that Regan’s situation in 1.1 mirrors her predicament throughout the play, the alterity of being both dead (as character) and alive (as actor) throughout the crucial concluding moments of the play emblematizes the difficulties of playing this strong female character. The expectations of critics and practitioners can corpse Regan – and consequently the actor playing her – from the moment casting is complete. For example, David Hare, who directed King Lear in 1986 at the National Theatre, concludes that Regan is ‘simply irredeemable’ and ‘incapable of being reached’.71 Hare deems Goneril ‘a more rewarding part’ because the actor can reveal how her ‘father’s behaviour both distresses and shocks’ her, making her ‘behave the way’ she does.72 By contrast, Hare insists, ‘Regan is a truly bad person, and there is no other way of playing it’.73 Why Hare allows Goneril the benefit of human experience and emotion – reacting to the ‘distressing’ and ‘shocking’ behaviour of her father – while dismissing Regan as ‘a truly bad person’ is unclear. She has the same father as Goneril, after all. But Hare is not alone in his assessment. Similarly, Donald Sinden, who played Lear at the RSC in 1976, determined that ‘Regan is one of the most evil characters in the whole of Shakespeare’.74 In fact, he blames Regan’s malevolence for Judi Dench’s supposed lack of success in the role, adding that ‘Judi didn’t like to be evil’.75 Speaking about the experience herself, Dench says, ‘I had this theory that Regan couldn’t be all bad. I thought maybe it was all to do

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with her relationship with Lear, so whenever she was with him I gave her a stammer’.76 Her insight into Regan’s potential motivations was, however, effective for some critics. Gareth Evans, for example, determines that ‘the hint of childhood mental disturbance in the stammer Regan (Judi Dench) occasionally tried to swallow’ showed that her ‘hungry but apprehensive grasp for power was an emblem’ of her father’s influence on her, ‘rather than (as is customary in interpretation) an illustration of an inherent “evil” within’ her.77 Still, Dench herself was convinced, according to Jonathan Croall, that ‘she simply couldn’t get Regan right’.78 As if anticipating Postelthwaite’s assertion that Lear must ‘endorse every bit’ of any given production, Laurence Olivier both directed and played the leading role in 1946. Jonathan Croall reports that Margaret Leighton (Regan) was alert to Olivier’s monarchical management of the production: ‘He astonished me by having everything worked out in great detail. He explained his plan for the play, and in particular for my part’, adding that ‘he had planned every single move for Regan.’79 Croall further notes that for the scene in which Gloucester is blinded, Olivier ‘suggested that Regan should appear to have an orgasm when Cornwall trampled on Gloucester’s eyes’.80 Aligning with readings of the sisters’ sexuality as subversive and perverse, Olivier’s suggestion also potentially creates a disturbing double vision: a male director’s disempowerment of a female character by reducing her aggression to pornographic display, as well as a father’s erotic fantasy of his misbehaving daughter. In Leighton’s case, the parallel between the actor’s vulnerability and the character’s is painfully clear. Olivier demands of Leighton, in other words, what Lear demands of Regan; and when Regan fails to comply (as will always happen in the play, of course), she is demonized and penalized. Regan’s beliefs and behaviours are a result of the fragmentation of the world in which she must live (and die). That she does not submit to Lear’s every demand proves not that Regan is ‘degenerate’ but that she is dynamic – as circumstances shift, so must she. The natural evolution of a character in response to rapidly changing conditions seems a given in discussions of Lear, whose variability serves to show off the impressive range of the actor playing him since, as Davies reminds us, ‘it doesn’t lie within anyone’s range’. Regan, like Lear, evolves. The impetus for the character’s new behaviours is not the plots of a wicked woman but the decisions of her father. Even the violence of her participation in the blinding of Gloucester is a response to her progressing predicament, her desperation increasing as the play moves along rather than originating from any innate quality.81 Certainly in the beginning of the play she is far less frantic than Goneril, to whose anxieties about Lear she calmly replies, ‘we shall further think of it’ (1.1.308). Regan’s actions are influenced, informed and even incited by the increasingly unstable situation in which she finds herself. Though Lear is devastated by ‘filial ingratitude’, his daughters experience the same painful realization that loyalty and love have limits, yet are often

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met with little compassion.82 Leggatt’s conclusion that ‘getting sympathy for Goneril and Regan requires … a special effort of interpretation’ reflects the resistance of readers or audience members to identify with the daughters rather than with Lear.83 Zoe Waites (Goneril in 2012 at the Almeida Theatre) acknowledges this kind of resistance: ‘what Goneril and Regan do can be perceived as so barbaric and savage and extreme that it’s easy to write them off as an evil duo. But Lear puts them in an impossibly damaging and difficult situation’.84 Yet even those who are more sympathetic to the sisters have a hard time rejecting completely their critical legacy. For example, though Billington says of Waites and Jenny Jules (Regan in the same production) that they ‘lend Goneril and Regan a palpable sense of inherited wrong and resentment’, he hastens to add that such motivations fail to ‘justify their subsequent monstrosity’.85 Even when some critics perceive the sisters in human terms, they still deny them human responses. Though audience support for Lear and opposition to the sisters may be assumed, both are actually counterintuitive in several ways. Those who would condemn Regan’s reference to her father as ‘the lunatic King’ (3.7.46) may find it difficult to deny that his actions and rhetoric are erratic. Even so, respondents to the play often acknowledge Lear’s mental instability even as they affirm his position as the morally right one.86 Placing the blame for Lear’s decline on his daughters is similarly irrational. As Kordecki and Koskinen point out, ‘“Bad” children do not have such power, or else most parents would be driven insane by their belligerent children’.87 More intimately, though we cannot all know what it is like to be someone’s father (or former king), we do all know what it is like to be someone’s child – whether we have been loved well or whether we have not. The critical tendency to disallow the daughters any empathy is thus quite astounding. More violent than his detachment from his other daughters, Lear’s fantasy of Regan’s anatomization serves as a reminder of the play’s initial act of disintegration, for which he alone is responsible.88 Critics, audience members and actors alike must begin, in the words of Carol Rutter, ‘to question the clear patriarchal need to shift onto women what begins in this play as male transgression’.89 Ian Brown, director of the 2011 production at the West Yorkshire Playhouse in Leeds, admits that ‘there’s definitely something unhealthy in Lear’s attitude to women, something very twisted’, yet also asserts that ‘the play is an exploration of what happens if women are evil’.90 Brown minimizes Lear’s ‘transgression’, to quote Rutter, by labelling ‘evil’ the women who are his victims. Brown goes on to claim that ‘even in our culture, there is something particularly repellent about women doing evil, because we look to women to save us flawed men’, adding, ‘when they behave like men we are very shocked by it’.91 Men are thus empowered not only by the privileges associated with patriarchy (in the world and on the stage), but, unlike women, they are also entitled to be ‘flawed’. This is why an actor playing Regan (even if she is Judi Dench) finds herself justifying behaviour traditionally dismissed as ‘monstrous’ in

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ways not always required of the actor playing Lear. And, perhaps Brown unwittingly identifies one of the reasons gender-blind casting is still so controversial: when women ‘behave like men’, onlookers are ‘very shocked by it’. If Lear’s violent paternity – his banishment of Cordelia, his curse of Goneril’s womb, his desire to see Regan’s body cut open – does not alarm us, perhaps the critical tendency to side with him should.92 As its final act of mutilation shows, through defacement and effacement, the play ensures that all its women are ‘meek’ and ‘quiet’ by the end. Just like God, Lear and a long line of critics seem to like them.

3 Being the Female Body in Macbeth

Towards the end of our first discussion about the 2015 production of Macbeth for which I was the assistant director and dramaturg, the director said with a sigh, ‘and, of course, we have to decide what to do about this curse’.1 He expressed with conviction (and contempt) that he could not tolerate the substitution of the word ‘Mackers’ for the play’s title, but conceded that the cast should be consulted in the matter of how to handle the prospect of misfortune the production brings with it. As it turned out, the costume designer had seen a bit of ‘the future in the instant’ (1.5.58) herself, having already contracted an artisan of the Lakota Sioux tribe in Colorado to design, craft and formally bless the moccasins all of the actors would wear in the show.2 Not ‘one foot’ seeking ‘a foe’ in this production.3 Disaster averted. When it comes to Shakespeare’s Scottish play, the legendary curse consistently finds its way into dialogue – among academics, artists and audiences – bringing with it abundant anecdotes to support its eerie performance mythology, tales of near misses with stage weights, mishaps on stairs and misadventures with swords. The curse, presumably provoked by Shakespeare’s use of ‘an actual black magic incantation’4 in the Weird Sisters’ dialogue or linked to the frequent excision of the Hecate scenes, has been blamed for everything from close calls to collapses to car crashes, along with broken bones, sudden sickness and even the deaths of those beloved by actors who defy it.5 For practitioners who believe that the play causes catastrophe, activated when some daring soul quotes from Macbeth (or even unwittingly utters its title) in a theatre, tradition has provided synonyms for the M word – ‘Mackers’, for example, or even worse, ‘the unmentionable’ – and ritualistic remedies for inevitable slips of the tongue.6 Although, as Paul Menzer points out, ‘the tradition of Macbeth’s supposed curse is surprisingly recent and surprisingly thin’, it seems to be the theatre’s favourite folk tale, echoed, embraced and perhaps even embellished with each recitation.7

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This curse, like the play’s title character (who speaks about 30 per cent of the play’s lines), gets a lot of stage time. The actor playing Lady Macbeth, however, confronts a different curse, one that spends as much time waiting in the wings as she does, lurking on the periphery of the action: like the other female characters in this book, Lady Macbeth has a critical heritage that haunts the play. For many scholars, students and spectators, Macbeth’s crime is mitigated by the doubts he develops early in the play, while his wife’s decisiveness and determination place her into categories easy to define and dismiss. If the supernatural curse on the play is the work of witches’ spells in the text, perhaps Malcolm deserves credit for triggering Lady Macbeth’s curse. Reiterations of his description of the dead lady as Macbeth’s ‘fiendlike queen’ (5.9.35) appear in claims that she has the ‘heart and actions … of a monster’,8 and that she is guilty of ‘sexual terrorism’ as well as ‘demonic possession’.9 A more damaging consequence of this curse can manifest itself as a devaluation of the character (and the role), as in 1932 when George R. Foss attributed the failure of Macbeth in performance to ‘the overemphasis on the “fascinating and comparatively easy part of Lady Macbeth”’. He claimed that a production might have hope of success ‘if Lady Macbeth were subordinated so as not to “distract us from the very human tragedy of Macbeth”’.10 Foss mirrors the common interpretation of Lady Macbeth as the cause of her husband’s downfall – as the would-be king succumbs to evil because of his wife’s overbearing ambition, so the actor pales and fails in the radiance of a dominant leading lady. At times the effort to ‘subordinate’ Lady Macbeth goes so far as to effect her erasure, such as in the Times review of Edmund Kean’s 1814 Macbeth, in which the writer does not even mention Mrs Bartley.11 While some insist that Lady Macbeth bear the blame for her husband’s bad behaviour, others imply that the actor portraying her may be held accountable for her Macbeth’s uninspired performance. And her punishment in criticism has ranged from making her a villain to making her invisible. More than any other role addressed in this book, Lady Macbeth is ‘ghosted’, to use Marvin Carlson’s term, by famous predecessors in the role.12 The actor’s antecedents have been not only famous but famously lauded or lambasted by critics. In approaching and responding to Lady Macbeth in performance, what once divided actors and critics along dichotomous lines – a portrayal that was either excessively forceful or exceptionally fragile  – seems now to be an assumption of both extremes. That is, the reading of Lady Macbeth as the embodiment of eroticism and evil – both ‘fair’ and ‘foul’, to echo the Weird Sisters’ phrase (1.1.9) – is often an expectation in modern performance. That she should serve simultaneously as the play’s passive object of sexual desire and its active force of moral depravity puts today’s female actor in a dangerous position, its pornographic potential embedded in the oscillation of the audience’s gaze between titillation and accusation. Lady Macbeth’s body, the site of physical and moral seduction, is meant to inspire both lust and loathing, culminating in the character’s

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corpsing before she is even dead. The multiple dualities facing the female actor in the role – strong and weak, active and passive, alive and dead, fair and foul – can be difficult to negotiate in performance, as I discovered in my portrayal of the role in 2009. ‘Double, double, toil and trouble’ indeed (4.1.10).

Fiend-like woman or feminine wife? The tradition of playing the character as either villainous monster or vulnerable wife had already been established by the time Mary Anderson remarked in 1896 that ‘Lady Macbeth is not only the most difficult of all Shakespeare’s women to impersonate naturally, but the most unsympathetic to the public’.13 As Carol Jones Carlisle points out, ‘in Garrick’s age, the traditional “good” Macbeth was usually accompanied by a “fiend-like queen”’.14 David Garrick, whose 1744 Macbeth was the first to restore most of Shakespeare’s text, substantially cut a century earlier by Sir William Davenant, had his fair share of Lady Macbeths through more than twenty years of playing the title role. Most notably (and most frequently), he played opposite Hannah Pritchard, ‘a large, imposing woman’ whom Thomas Davies described as having a ‘natural ease of deportment and grandeur of person’.15 Davies thought of Lady Macbeth as ‘a woman of unbounded ambition, divested of all human feelings’.16 He found Pritchard’s performance, along with Garrick’s, to be ‘transcendent’.17 Score one for the ‘fiend-like queen’ fans. Production history’s most famous Lady Macbeth, Sarah Siddons, inspired William Hazlitt to write: Who shall in our time (or can ever to the eye of fancy) fill the stage, like her, with the dignity of their persons, and the emanations of their minds? Or who shall sit majestic on the throne of tragedy – a Goddess, a prophetess and a Muse – from which the lightning of her eye flashed o’er the mind, startling its inmost thoughts – and the thunder of her voice circled through the labouring breast, rousing deep and scarce-known feelings from their slumber? Who shall stalk over the stage of horrors, its presiding genius, or ‘play the hostess’, at the banqueting scene of murder? Who shall walk in sleepless ecstasy of soul, and haunt the mind’s eye ever after with the dread pageantry of suffering and of guilt?18 The first time Sarah Siddons took the stage as Lady Macbeth, at the age of twenty, she did not consider the performance a successful one. A few years later, with ‘utmost difficulty, nay terror’, she says, she undertook the role again, at first playing to William Gentleman Smith’s unimpressive Macbeth, but shortly thereafter, opposite her brother, John Philip Kemble.19 Siddons acknowledged ‘the difficulty of assuming a personage’ like Lady Macbeth:

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‘one’s own heart could prompt one to express with some degree of truth the sentiments of a mother, a daughter, a wife, a lover, a sister, &c.’, she claimed, ‘but, to adopt this character must be an effort of the judgment alone’.20 She found the character difficult to access precisely because she deemed Lady Macbeth an inadequate representation of feminine virtue; yet, Siddons claims that she saw the character as ‘captivating in feminine loveliness’, and ‘perhaps, even fragile’. While Siddons articulates a vision of the character that deliberately (if fretfully) departs from Pritchard’s – ‘that idea of the person of her representative which you have been so long accustomed to contemplate’21 – her reviewers applaud the splendour of her strength, not her ‘feminine loveliness’ and certainly not her fragility. James Boaden, for example, praises her performance as ‘the true and perfect image of the greatest of all natural and moral depravations – a fiend-like woman’.22 Perhaps even more tellingly, when Siddons retired from the stage, one critic lamented: But Lady Macbeth, that dark and dreadful sublimity of evil, has perished for ever from the stage with Mrs. Siddons: without one dissentient voice, it was admitted to be the grandest effort of histrionic genius … Before the towering grandeur of her natural talents in this stupendous character, even the classic magnificence of her brother’s art, in that of Macbeth, shrunk into secondary dimensions.23 Anticipating Foss’s complaint about Lady Macbeths who ‘distract us from the very human tragedy of Macbeth’, in the shadow of Siddons’s ‘towering grandeur’, Kemble’s Macbeth had indeed ‘shrunk’. Wilders suggests that because ‘Kemble regarded Macbeth as initially a good man, the purity of whose heart had hitherto been uncontaminated’, Lady Macbeth therefore ‘became largely responsible for her husband’s corruption, a role which Siddons amply fulfilled’, even though the cause and effect seems out of order in this construction.24 That is, at least according to critics like the one cited above, Kemble played a good and gentle Macbeth because his leading lady was the formidable Sarah Siddons; he ‘fulfilled’ the role opposite her, not the other way around. Despite Siddons’s later writings on what she perceived as a more sympathetic approach to the role, critical consensus aligned with G. J. Bell’s reaction to her performance: ‘She turns Macbeth to her purpose, makes him her mere instrument, guides, directs, and inspires the whole plot. Like Macbeth’s evil genius she hurries him on in the mad career of ambition and cruelty … .’25 As McDonald concludes, ‘she described Lady Macbeth as fragile and womanly but perforce played her as grand and tragic’.26 The disjunction between Siddons’s idealized and realized versions of the character could be the result of relentless stereotypes, production trends, contemporary attitudes towards women and marriage or her specific set of strengths onstage (or all of the above). In any case, the discrepancy makes clear

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one of the fundamental challenges of acting: a lack of control over audience reception and critical perception (alas!). I argue that with Shakespeare’s female characters, this lack of control is particularly pronounced. This is partially because the male characters’ perspectives have long shaped the cultural narratives surrounding Shakespeare’s plays – when Malcolm calls Lady Macbeth a ‘fiend-like queen’, just as when Lear calls his daughters ‘unnatural hags’ (2.2.467), audiences tend to believe him. Indeed, perhaps one of the reasons reception proves especially tricky terrain for Lady Macbeth is that she overtly challenges the masculinity of the title character (many times). Whatever preconceptions an actor brings to her role – and whatever she uses in rehearsal to construct her character – she will consistently confront the deeply embedded assumptions of her audience (and, in fact, of her fellow practitioners) in performance. In some instances, she will play the character as she wants to, but find that it is received otherwise. In other cases, as with Siddons, she may feel compelled to give a performance that conforms to the production concept and critical expectations, in spite of her own instincts and beliefs. Helen Faucit might be the luckiest (and pluckiest) understudy in history. When Amelia Huddart Warner became sick in 1842, Faucit went on as Lady Macbeth opposite Charles Macready, and she made audience members ‘look to the lady’ (2.3.120). Departing entirely from the Siddons tradition, Faucit was the first performer in the play’s surviving production history to play ‘Lady Macbeth as a gentle, affectionate character who, far from being driven by personal ambition, is motivated essentially by devotion to her husband’.27 Following Faucit’s unprecedented portrayal, ‘the idea that Lady Macbeth’s ambition was a wifely one became the basis for all the sympathetic interpretations of the character’.28 Macready worked next with American actress Charlotte Cushman (1846), who was deemed a weaker version of Siddons in the role. She was followed two years later by Fanny Kemble, who claimed that Lady Macbeth ‘possessed the qualities which generally characterise men, and not women – energy, decision, daring, unscrupulousness’.29 Kemble’s Lady Macbeth ‘was of far too powerful an organisation to be liable to the frenzy of mingled emotions by which her wretched husband is assailed’. Ultimately, Kemble thought, the character ‘has no qualms of conscience’ and dies because of her ‘wickedness’.30 Though Ellen Terry enchanted audiences in 1888 with her beauty and signature charm, her ‘passionate, sensuous, and finely strung Lady Macbeth’, according to one reviewer, lacked the ‘insatiable thirst for power’ viewers wanted to see.31 Terry had portrayed a Lady Macbeth, in her own words, ‘full of womanliness’ and ‘capable of affection – she loves her husband’.32 Though Terry described the character as ‘A Mistaken Woman–& Weak’, she did not think of her as ‘gentle’.33 Carlisle wonders if ‘the famous Terry charm caused critics to see sweetness and gentleness where these qualities were not intended’.34 Perhaps Terry was too beloved for her own good (or, rather, for her own bad). Historically, Lady Macbeths considered ‘too soft,

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gentle, and feminine for the part’,35 like Ellen Tree in the nineteenth century, have registered as falling short of the role. Similarly, Martita Hunt (1930, Old Vic) was ‘too likeable’,36 according to James Agate, and Margaret Leighton (1952, Stratford-upon-Avon) was ‘thought to be too slight and feminine: “Frown as she will, her Lady Macbeth never chills our blood.”’37 In the project of rehabilitating masculinity – or penalizing those who would challenge it – it seems a blood-chilling Lady Macbeth can be helpful.

Fair is foul, and foul is fair George Foss’s fantasy of a fading Lady Macbeth has lost some of its lustre. The world of classical acting is a competitive one, especially for women, for whom there are never enough roles to go around. And Lady Macbeth is a character female actors fight to portray. The production of Macbeth I mentioned at this chapter’s start – with the blessed footwear – opened in September 2015 at the Arkansas Repertory Theatre, then a member of the League of Residential Theatres (LORT) and at that time the most established professional theatre in the state.38 For a play with a run of just five weeks, following a modest rehearsal period of three weeks, at a regional theatre in Arkansas, over 550 women submitted (or were submitted by their agents) to audition for the role of Lady Macbeth. The sheer volume of submissions for Lady Macbeth makes the competition for the role of Macbeth in the same production seem almost slim: just under 100 men. So, why do so many women want to play Lady Macbeth? Numbering among them, I feel I can safely surmise that most might express being drawn to the character because she is a complex challenge, not because she is entirely evil or wholly good – and decidedly not with the hope that she will be ‘subordinated’ in order to make Macbeth shine. Wilders agrees, but goes so far as to suggest that the play’s lack of success may be partially due to ‘the complexity of Lady Macbeth, who is both unfeelingly ambitious … and yet genuinely affectionate towards her husband’, adding that ‘few actresses have managed to express both sides of her personality’.39 Though this understanding of performance is flawed – the notion that actors attempt to manifest an ideal version of the character clearly prescribed in the written play – it does reveal the demand for a Lady Macbeth who is at once both ‘fair’ and ‘foul’. The ‘fair’ part of the character is for Wilders, as it was for Helen Faucit and Ellen Terry, her love for her husband. In modern performance, Lady Macbeth’s love often finds expression in an erotic energy focused in and on her body, which also serves as the site of moral temptation. The ‘fair’ becomes itself a sort of ‘foul’. Sinead Cusack, one of the ‘clamorous voices’ interviewed by Carol Rutter for her 1988 collection, portrayed ‘a golden, child-like Lady Macbeth’ opposite Jonathan Pryce at Stratford in 1986.40 Cusack explains that she wanted ‘her to be young, very beautiful, and to have a sort of amorality,

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a complete ignorance of right and wrong’.41 The actor’s interest in her character’s ‘fair’ appearance is not uncommon, but her insistence on her youth is somewhat of a moot point. Sinead Cusack’s age when she played the role was the age of her Lady Macbeth, give or take a few years. While it is certainly possible for an actor to play outside her actual age, this is more the result of casting decisions based on the actor’s appearance or demeanour than it is an actor’s decision that the character should ‘be young’. Throughout the interview, Cusack explains her choices, justifying them with conviction while simultaneously revealing the vulnerability required to make and defend such choices. She says of having her understudy present during rehearsal, ‘it’s scary enough anyway, the feeling of nakedness that you have in rehearsals; and I kept thinking that she might have made different choices, might have wanted to explore different avenues’.42 Cusack eventually asked the understudy not to attend rehearsals. For a character with the divided history of reception that Lady Macbeth has, the fear of being judged for not making ‘different choices’ or exploring ‘different avenues’ may be even more intense than usual. Particularly when the judge is one of those hundreds of other women waiting with bated breath to take over the role at a moment’s notice. Cusack’s view of Lady Macbeth as having ‘a complete ignorance of right and wrong’ is significant. She explains further, ‘I didn’t see her as a very clever woman – she is a grasper of opportunity. She knows she has Macbeth in thrall and she can make him do anything.’43 If her Lady Macbeth was ‘foul’, it wasn’t because she was morally corrupt. It was rather because she was sexually manipulative. Cusack talks about a rehearsal in which Macbeth’s ‘sexual obsession’ was the topic of exploration: ‘Sexually he was totally dependent on her. He needed that sex in order to reassure himself of his own values, his own strength. And she knows, she knows she can play on that. She knows she can get him to do things because of that. And she uses it.’44 As I will argue, the ‘sexual obsession’ with Lady Macbeth to which Cusack refers is not limited to an actor preparing to play her husband. Because she recently had given birth, Cusack says ‘every time I came to that line “I have given suck, and know / How tender ’tis …” – I can’t say it even now – I thought, “I’m never going to be able to speak that line. Not while I’m nursing my own baby”’.45 By distancing herself from the parts of the character she finds difficult to access, much like Sarah Siddons did, Cusack seems emphatic in clarifying the extent to which she is not like this character, an effort she takes one step further in her description of the moments before the sleepwalking scene. After the banquet scene, she explains, ‘I would go to my dressing room and have a great time – a strong cup of tea, a fag – and then I messed myself up. People hated the way I looked in the sleepwalking scene and I don’t give a tuppenny! I loved it.’46 By emphasizing the artifice of the theatrical enterprise, Cusack reminds readers that she is working when onstage (and taking a smoke break when off). Though she personalizes the role, as in the example above

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about breastfeeding her own newborn, she simultaneously takes pains to professionalize it. By acknowledging a negative reaction to one of those choices she made – ‘People hated the way I looked’ – and then claiming not to care – ‘I don’t give a tuppenny!’ – Cusack at once shields herself from judgement and shows her alertness to it. This kind of slippage happens, intentionally or not, in Cusack’s demystification of other theatrical moments. When discussing Macbeth’s entrance after her ‘unsex me here’ speech, for example, she says: ‘What we wanted was for him to be completely silent but for her to know that he’s there by a kind of kinetic energy they both react to. (How did I know he was there? That isn’t mysterious – Jonathan pants onstage).’47 And just like that, the supernatural ‘kinetic energy’ that connects Lady Macbeth to her husband in their first appearance onstage together becomes nothing more ‘mysterious’ than her leading man’s lack of breath control. Cusack describes – while she both defends and demystifies – her choice to be slapped by Pryce during their argument in Act 1, Scene 7. Jonathan did hit me every night, and made the unfortunate mistake of saying so in the press, and someone wrote in saying, ‘Why is she such a wimp to take it?’ But the scene was such that I believe if we’d done a fake slap, we would have destroyed that electric current of violence between us. I shouldn’t admit these things because actors should be able to fake slaps very easily and still be able to keep the mood, but I was convinced we wouldn’t be able to sustain that extraordinary power if we were doing a fake number. I much preferred a stinging slap every night. Technically Jonathan is very clever and I think only on three occasions did he get me on the jawbone, but mostly it was absolutely flat on and it would sting for a minute and then it was gone.48 Although she just revealed that the ‘electric current’ between the two actors was sometimes nothing but hot air (or, at least, heavy breathing), Cusack now insists that to keep it up, even though she ‘shouldn’t admit’ it, she wanted the authenticity of a real, physical slap rather than a ‘fake number’ for the momentum of the scene. Her body is the site of Macbeth’s erotic desire, and, it would seem, she wants her body to be impacted by the physicalization of his frustration. And while she makes it clear that it was her choice – ‘I much preferred a stinging slap every night’ – she implicates Pryce for his deficient delivery (those times he hit her ‘on the jawbone’) and does so with surprising specificity that manages to still sound speculative (‘I think only on three occasions’). It seems Cusack wants to have it both ways. And this is, I suspect, related not only to the character she is playing but also to her professional experience as a woman in this production. Cusack’s experience throughout the rehearsal and production process reflects, predictably, some aspects of the character’s experience in the play, as well as female actors’ experiences in the press. Earlier in the interview,

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Cusack discusses her lack of involvement in pre-production discussions: ‘But Adrian [the director] and I didn’t really talk about the play until the eve of the first rehearsal. That wasn’t a good idea. I kept asking to be involved in discussions; Jonathan Pryce was allowed to participate but not me.’49 There is something both active and passive about her description. Like the character she portrays, Cusack desires agency in a male-dominated environment – ‘I kept asking to be involved’ – but is not ‘allowed’ to. Importantly, her absence from these early discussions, a common fate for Lady Macbeths, puts the actor in a defensive position from the minute rehearsals begin: she must work with or push against presuppositions already made about the production and her character without her contribution or consent. In this way, the actor can feel like she is ‘playing dead’ before she has the chance to bring the character to life. Sian Thomas played Lady Macbeth in the RSC’s 2004 production, and her essay about her experience was published two years later in Michael Dobson’s edited collection, Performing Shakespeare’s Tragedies Today: The Actor’s Perspective. Perhaps the most notable aspect of Thomas’s essay is her insistent effort to establish her own originality alongside her persistent invocation of her most famous predecessor, Sarah Siddons. She recalls ‘a wonderful description of her Lady Macbeth, by Hazlitt’, which she says she ‘read quite late on in the rehearsal process, when it was time to settle various decisions’.50 Ultimately, she marvels that it is ‘extraordinary to find how many of the choices we had made were the same as she had in her own interpretation two centuries earlier’.51 Though Thomas is proud of her alignment with Siddons, she emphasizes the ‘extraordinary’ coincidence of their similar approaches to the role – ‘the choices’ both women ‘had made were the same’, as if they happened concurrently rather than chronologically. Thomas, like Cusack and like most of the critics who have ever written about Lady Macbeth, imagines having it both ways – her interpretation matches that of the most acclaimed Lady Macbeth in history, but still, it is her own. Thomas’s claim of Siddons’s parentage – with a simultaneous assertion of self-generation – is most striking in her description of an interview she did ‘at the RSC’s little gallery and museum ... in front of a glass case containing the slippers which Siddons had worn in the sleepwalking scene the last time she ever played it’.52 Noting the discrepancy between the performance for which Siddons became famous and the interpretation of the character she later wrote about, Thomas continues: ‘I rather liked the idea that I was playing this role for her, as a sort of continuation of what she did – as if I was here being the small-boned, fragile, feminine, blonde Lady Macbeth she always wanted to be.’53 When she emphasizes the character Siddons ‘always wanted to be’, Thomas draws attention to the celebrated actor’s desire (and failure) to embody both ‘fair’ and ‘foul’. Sian Thomas asserts that she will do it ‘for her’. The image of following in her predecessor’s footsteps is materialized by the presence of Siddons’s sleepwalking slippers. The slippers not only stand in for Siddons, a valuable and visible artefact serving as the background for

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Thomas in this instance, but their preservation and display also show how the sleepwalking scene itself often stands in for the entire performance of Lady Macbeth. The irony of the scene’s iconic status is, of course, that it shows Lady Macbeth at her least active, with the least amount of agency. It is Lady Macbeth’s ‘playing dead’ scene. Thomas is concerned about her character’s lack of agency not only in the sleepwalking scene but throughout the play: ‘this poor woman Lady Macbeth has no means of making anything happen; when we first meet her she is utterly frustrated, for she has no direct power but can act only through her husband’.54 Since her character is ‘more practical than Macbeth’, she says, ‘she is not going to stop and have a soliloquy about it, she has to get on with doing things’.55 Lady Macbeth’s forced dependence on her husband seems to produce some resentment in Thomas, useful fuel for performing such a role. She reads a kind of self-indulgence into all this soliloquizing on Macbeth’s part. At the same time, she brilliantly turns a textual deficiency for the performer (the actor is denied the privilege of long soliloquys) into an active choice for the character (Lady Macbeth is too ‘practical’ to waste time explaining herself to the audience). This kind of revision also highlights a truth about the characters’ relationship – Lady Macbeth wants to ‘get on with things’, while her husband must constantly ‘stop’ to talk it out. Like Cusack, Thomas also reveals how the performer’s experience can mirror the character’s circumstances, as when she writes about the following encounter with her leading man, Greg Hicks: I think he assumed I would just play her as an awful bad creature, so that he could get on with being a fascinating, vulnerable, flawed human being. So there was a slight contretemps when he discovered that I was not going to play her just as an evil queen, with him saying we could not both be sensitive and complicated and me assuring him we could and, moreover, that the text demanded it.56 Either Hicks was taking a page out of George Foss’s playbook or Thomas wants us to think he was – and that she would not allow it. This is the familiar narrative of an effort to ‘subordinate’ Lady Macbeth in order to make Macbeth more ‘human’, a desperate attempt to avoid the fate of John Kemble next to his sister Sarah Siddons. And, as already noted, Thomas saw herself filling Siddons’s shoes (or, rather, her sleepwalking slippers). Thomas’s story refutes stories like the one nineteenth-century American actor James Murdoch tells about his Lady Macbeth, the controversial Adah Isaacs Menken. Murdoch claims that Menken admitted to him that she knew ‘nothing’ of Lady Macbeth and had a ‘profound dread of it’ but felt she had to show the management that she could play the role. When he cautioned, ‘you don’t even know the words, and have not time to study them’, she replied, ‘I can commit the lines in a few hours if you will run over them and mark the emphasis for me.’ Distressed by her lack of preparation,

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Murdoch says he ‘gave the lady a few general ideas of the action of the part, and finished by begging her at least to learn the words’. By the time of the performance that night, Menken had indeed learned some of the words, and even received ‘lavish applause’ upon her exit from Act 1, Scene 5. Around the middle of 1.7, however, Murdoch reports that: Here, ‘taking the stage’, she rushed back to Macbeth, and laying her head on his shoulder whispered in his ear, ‘I don’t know the rest.’ From that point Macbeth ceased to be the guilty thane, and became a mere prompter in a Scotch kilt and tartans. For the rest of the scene I gave the lady the words. Clinging to my side in a manner very different from her former scornful bearing, she took them line by line before she uttered them, still, however, receiving vociferous applause, and particularly when she spoke of dashing out the brains of her child; until at length poor Macbeth, who was but playing ‘second fiddle’ to his imperious consort, was glad to make his exit from a scene where ‘the honors’ were certainly not ‘even.’57 If, as Menzer argues, ‘anecdotes act out something furtive and submerged in the plays that they accompany’,58 Murdoch’s tale expresses the male frustration of playing ‘second fiddle’ to a woman – whether he is Macbeth when faced with the forces of his wife’s determination, or the male actor frantically trying not to be outdone by his leading lady’s performance. Murdoch’s story is both fantasy and fear. He carries Menken’s performance – ‘I gave the lady the words’ – while only she receives ‘vociferous applause’ for it.

Unsex me here My daughter was just five years old when my husband took her to see me play Lady Macbeth. Not the most kid-friendly of Shakespeare’s plays, to be sure, but it was important to us that she see the kind of work I was doing. He had planned to leave at intermission, or earlier if she got scared, but the child was so enthralled by the story (and the theatre, bless her) that she begged to stay to the end. Wanting to help her process what she had seen, I asked her the next day if anything had frightened her and was taken aback by her answer: the king had scared her, she said, because he was so loud. Not the gory consequences of combat, the incantations of creepy witches, the haunting of an angry ghost or the murder of innocent children – just Macbeth’s booming voice. Huh. He did, I had to admit, have a vocal quality (and volume) that made an impression. It had not occurred to me, however, that it might be so intimidating as to render the play’s other horrors less threatening. My daughter’s aversion to Macbeth’s voice spoke to me (if you will) especially since the director had made a point to discuss my own vocal quality when he offered me the role.

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The venue in which we were to perform was quite large, and he was concerned about my voice filling the space. I thus immediately sought out a vocal coach and started preparing months prior to the start of rehearsal. There would be no doubt of my ability to vocally fill that space, I determined. Imagine my dismay, then, when a reviewer said that my ‘high-pitched voice and tall, thin figure’ made me ‘an appropriately hysterical Lady Macbeth’.59 Huh. Word by word, this sentence could not more fully encapsulate the gendered assumptions I am writing about here even if I had authored it myself. Disappointing, yes, since I surely hoped my ‘high-pitched voice’ would not merit a mention, much less be credited for my ‘appropriately hysterical’ performance; but, on the bright side, I am in good company, as the reviewer reiterates the concerns and conclusions of many critics before her. Just like my ‘tall, thin figure’ signifies here not only femininity but hysteria, my ‘high-pitched voice’ – also ‘tall’ and ‘thin’ – marks me as somehow smaller than my loud leading man. When it comes to the casting of Lady Macbeth, history suggests that size matters, whether vocally or physically. In another iteration of the fear that Macbeth will be shown up by his leading lady, Carlisle lists several ‘actor-critics’ who claimed that ‘a small, delicate Lady Macbeth is a better foil to Macbeth than a large, imposing one and is less likely to detract from his importance as the hero of the tragedy’.60 It is worth recalling here that the first Lady Macbeth was almost assuredly smaller than her husband, not because such casting ensured the prominence of Macbeth but because female roles were played by boys in Shakespeare’s day. And, generally speaking, boys are smaller than grown men. What began as a product of early modern theatrical convention seems to have developed into a defining condition of the character for some directors and critics. Imagining a Lady Macbeth who literally has to ‘look up’ to Macbeth is so deeply embedded in tradition that most practitioners likely do not even consider the origin of such a practice. When the lady looms larger than her man, not only is the force of the female actor’s performance a potential threat to the male lead but the size and shape of her body can be blamed for his inadequacies. Hannah Pritchard and Sarah Siddons, both ‘fiend-like queens’, seem to have been strikingly tall, as does Charlotte Cushman, whom Wilders describes as ‘tall, big boned, and with a raw, husky voice’.61 Carlisle says of Siddons that ‘on the stage, she had used to her advantage her own imposing physique, her flashing dark eyes, her famous classical features’, though in an essay later she ‘confessed that her personification of Lady Macbeth had not entirely accorded with her personal convictions about the character’.62 Her ‘personification’ was predetermined, in some ways by her ‘imposing physique’, a reality that prevented her from embodying the Lady Macbeth of her fancy. But, as Ellen Terry points out much later, ‘it is not always possible for us players to portray characters on the stage exactly as we see them in imagination’. She continues: ‘it is no use an actress wasting her nervous energy on a battle with her physical attributes. She had much better find a way of employing

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them as allies.’63 Terry, of course, knew a little something about that herself, having created a Lady Macbeth whose charm emanated effortlessly from her own, in spite of her interpretation of the character. Though it may come as a disappointment to some for whom this point is non-negotiable in casting, the text of the play offers no specificity about the height of Lady Macbeth (or her husband, for that matter). Carlisle suggests that ‘a Lady Macbeth of stature’ need not register as ‘a threat to the stature of Macbeth – that is, if the latter character is acted as it should be’.64 Having been told by more than one director that my height has made me ineligible to play opposite a shorter man, I can attest to the challenges of being a tall woman in a casting room (and not only if there are short ceilings; turns out, glass ceilings can prove tricky as well). Even the strongest of Shakespeare’s women require, for some directors, a man looking over (and down on) them. While the text is of no help when discerning how far it is from ‘the crown to the toe’ of Lady Macbeth, it does call attention to her female body (1.5.42). The famous ‘unsex me here’ speech in Act 1, Scene 5, is the first exposure of Lady Macbeth in a way that sexualizes her vulnerability even as it villainizes her for it. The construction of the speech undermines its ostensible objective – it sexes rather than ‘unsexes’ her, an effect the actor cannot escape but must choose how to manage. Phyllis Rackin describes the scene as ‘often accompanied by autoerotic display as the actress fondles her own breasts, breathes hard, and writhes in the throes of passion’.65 The repetition of ‘Come’ resonates throughout the speech: ‘Come, you spirits’; ‘Come to my woman’s breasts’; ‘Come, thick night’ (1.5.40, 47, 50). Whether or not the word connoted reaching climax in Shakespeare’s day, its reverberation stresses at the least the invitation to physical intimacy Lady Macbeth extends to the spirits she invokes.66 Her call to ‘murd’ring ministers’ to exchange ‘milk for gall’ in her ‘woman’s breasts’ can be a cue to at least gesture to the breasts, if not ‘fondle’ them (1.5.47–8). The final imagery of the ‘keen knife’ that will make ‘a wound’ in ‘the blanket of dark’ alludes to sexual penetration (1.5.52–3). And, finally, the speech is a build, each line intensifying the last, until the climactic moment of Macbeth’s entrance. What stands out even more than the erotic language and structure of the speech is its dissonance with the character’s goal. Lady Macbeth does not ask to be filled ‘top-full’ of sex appeal; she demands ‘direst cruelty’ to enable her collaboration in a crime for which she would otherwise feel debilitating ‘remorse’ (1.5.42–3). When a woman is performing orgasmically onstage, however, her purpose may not get the attention it deserves. The soliloquy objectifies Lady Macbeth to the degree that the desires and fears she articulates are rendered inaudible. That is, the speech itself does what many critics and spectators emulate, as the following example suggests: I saw a production of Macbeth with Michael Redgrave as the hero, and the marvelously fierce, sexually intense actress Ann Todd playing Lady Macbeth. When she cried out ‘Unsex me here!’ Miss Todd grabbed herself

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in the crucial area and doubled over. Many men in the audience were highly activated.67 The ‘Miss’ preceding ‘Todd’ makes the piece sound more distant than it is; its author is Harold Bloom (in 2013). Identifying one of those ‘autoerotic’ moments to which Rackin refers, Bloom resorts to a euphemism that is as enlightening as it is eccentric, exposing author more than actor: ‘the crucial area’. The genitalia of the ‘sexually intense actress’ playing Lady Macbeth is so ‘crucial’ that it has a palpable effect on ‘many men in the audience’, as it does, presumably, on Macbeth himself. And, like Macbeth, they are ‘highly activated’ by it, Bloom hastens to note. Having played Lady Macbeth at the Globe in 2001, Eve Best says the character ‘feels sexual’, explaining that her ‘hopes, fears, and other emotional energies were all coming from deep within her belly’ and that she ‘seems to be working … from the groin’.68 Referring specifically to the ‘unsex me here’ speech, Best asserts that ‘in some unexpected way’ the character ‘actually becomes an entirely sexual being, insofar as what she is specifically doing with that plea is becoming visceral’.69 In other words, Best says, ‘she is switching off her mind’.70 After this point in the play, Lady Macbeth ‘becomes all about doing’, and simultaneously, Best argues, grows ‘more and more “womanly”: increasingly soft, increasingly humane, increasingly vulnerable – until she unravels completely. She literally “loses her mind”’.71 Troubling here, of course, is the implication that to unravel and lose one’s mind is ‘womanly’. That the character ‘feels sexual’ to Best, however, makes sense, given the way Shakespeare constructed that important speech. Lady Macbeth’s eroticized language registers as a male fantasy of her psychological and spiritual journey, tough terrain for a female actor trying to reconcile misogynistic roots with her understanding of and commitment to integrity, equality and justice. The actor may be aware of her textually prescribed physical exploitation in a soliloquy that should result in her empowerment, even if Lady Macbeth is not. So, ‘switching off her mind’ would be, I think, a problematic solution for the actor. Thus when I performed the role and my director wanted to try a version of the scene’s ending in which Macbeth observed the last third of the speech – and perceived it as a manifestation of mental illness – I tried it once, then contested. The character cannot take such a stand on her own behalf, but the actor can. The feminist actor of Shakespeare’s plays must frequently do so. While I resisted the reading of my Lady Macbeth as deranged from the play’s start – it is Macbeth who hallucinates, hears voices and sees ghosts, after all, not his wife – I, like Eve Best, could not deny her sensuality. In an interview that appears in John Russell Brown’s Focus on Macbeth (1982), director Peter Hall calls Lady Macbeth ‘very, very sexy’ (and repeats the phrase two pages later).72 When Hall talks about ‘a sort of physical pleasure’ Lady Macbeth experiences while the murder is happening at the top of 2.2, he also calls her ‘very, very frightened’; ‘very, very excited’; ‘very, very

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alive’.73 Lady Macbeth seems to be too big for Hall’s words. His attempt to articulate her intensity is to attach his favourite intensifier to the adjective of choice. Twice. When characters in Macbeth speak this way, we start to wonder what they are hiding, as when Lady Macbeth welcomes Duncan to her home, gushing, ‘All our service, / In every point twice done, and then done double, / Were poor and single business’ as a repayment for the ‘honours’ he has bestowed on her and her husband (1.6.14–17). Hall further theorizes, ‘I think that one of the problems always is that actresses either make Lady Macbeth too ordinary without sufficient imagination or search for a kind of imagination that is independent of Macbeth; they compete with him.’74 Since imagination has to do with the images formed in one’s own mind, it is difficult to understand how Lady Macbeth could not have an ‘imagination that is independent’ of her husband. Further, the way in which Hall begins his assertion is telling: ‘one of the problems’ with the play ‘always’ results from the decisions made by ‘actresses’ about how to play Lady Macbeth. Here is yet another version of the Foss narrative: these problematic actresses who ‘compete’ with Macbeth threaten to displace him as the play’s central concern. Always. The actor can infuse her performance with sexuality, certainly, but cannot use ‘be sexy’ as a means of constructing a believable character. It is equally absurd to imagine a characterization of Macbeth built on a directorial dictate to ‘be seduced’ – or even ‘very, very seduced’. This kind of emphasis on Lady Macbeth’s powers of seduction, a revision of the earlier critical enthusiasm for her ‘fiendlike’ physique, pushes the actor to use her body in a way that reinforces stereotypes, invalidating her actions as ‘manipulation’ or ‘sexual terrorism’. The speech thus became for me a springboard to my character’s subsequent performance of masculinity as the only means of being considered more than an object of desire (or even a sorceress–temptress). Though my reading of the character diverges from Best’s belief that she becomes ‘an entirely sexual being’ by ‘switching off her mind’, I concur that Lady Macbeth ‘becomes all about doing’ at this point. The speech does not ‘unsex’ her, so she must try to do it herself. Lady Macbeth is immediately concerned with performance, coaching her husband when he reacts visibly to her implication that Duncan is doomed: Your face, my thane, is as a book, where men May read strange matters; to beguile the time, Look like the time, bear welcome in your eye, Your hand, your tongue; look like the innocent flower, But be the serpent under ’t. (1.5.62–6) Lady Macbeth encourages her husband’s performative duality – she urges him to ‘look like’ one thing, but to ‘be’ another entirely, something at which he apparently does not excel. Moments like this one, in which Lady

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Macbeth assumes the authoritative theatrical role of director, amplify the fear articulated by Foss and others that the female lead may overshadow the male star. After all, at least according to the text, Lady Macbeth actually is a better actor than her husband. Even without all those soliloquies, it would seem. In my experience with the role, the frustration of subordination can prove productive. In a world that insists upon male agency and authority, female ambition must find expression through a suitable masculine channel or a set of acceptable masculine activities. Navigating a context – and a text – that rejects female autonomy to the point that she bears only the name of the man to whom she is married, what else would Lady Macbeth attack but her husband’s masculinity when he seems to falter? Thus, when Macbeth begins to vacillate in his commitment to the crime, she rejects such division of his nature: Art thou afeard To be the same in thine own act and valour, As thou art in desire? (1.7.39–41) To be masculine, Macbeth must make his ‘act’ match his ‘desire’; he cannot ‘be’ unless he is willing to ‘do’. Thus, the words ‘do’ and ‘done’ reverberate throughout the remainder of the play, such as when Macbeth protests, ‘I dare do all that may become a man, / Who dares do more, is none’ (1.7.46–7). In her response, Lady Macbeth calls attention to the relationship between ‘doing’ and ‘being’: When you durst do it, then you were a man; And to be more than what you were, you would Be so much more the man. (1.7.49–51) Lady Macbeth insists that to ‘do’ the murder will make Macbeth ‘be’ a man, not only ‘more’ but ‘so much more’ than previously. It is worth questioning why this challenge to Macbeth’s masculinity seems to bother students, spectators and critics so intensely when it comes to Lady Macbeth. Though most of us cannot relate to the premeditation of murder (let alone regicide), I conjecture that we all have at least considered manipulating a person with whom we have a relationship to get them to do something we want – for our own good, for their own good, for the larger good or whatever the reason. And part of what is so tragic about Lady Macbeth’s end is her willing vulnerability in the play’s beginning – that she so freely exposes her desires and disappointments to her husband discloses her belief that she can do so at least with him. Further, she is the one to craft and dictate the details of the murder plan. In doing so, she not only acts assertively but also reveals her faith in a kind of equity in their relationship that does not exist for her elsewhere in her world. When at

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the end of the scene Lady Macbeth asks, ‘What cannot you and I perform upon / Th’ unguarded Duncan?’ (1.7.70–1), she emphasizes performance as enactment of desire, just as she did earlier, but this time includes herself as one of the actors. She is Macbeth’s ‘dearest partner of greatness’ (1.5.11), to be sure; but he is also hers. Though the boundaries of the script are at least somewhat fixed, humans are dynamic. Further, unrealized hope does not simply go away nor does a denial of agency erase a desire to act. The tension that results from pushing against textual and contextual boundaries can make exciting things happen in a performance (and in a performer). Lady Macbeth is not really permitted an entirely internalized experience of frustrated desire, even in the way the actor portraying her is – the character is essentially turned inside out by the play’s conclusion. The increasing exposure of Lady Macbeth throughout the play became, for me, a sort of hyperbole of (and perhaps punishment for) my voluntary vulnerability early on, which is an indictment not so much of the character as of the context in which she tries to survive.

To faint or not to faint In Garrick’s version of Macbeth, Lady Macbeth did not faint in Act 2, Scene 3, because Lady Macbeth did not appear in Act 2, Scene 3.75 The matter of the faint has been a subject of debate throughout the play’s performance history. When she is not cut from the scene, the actor playing Lady Macbeth must discern the authenticity of the collapse – does Lady Macbeth actually collapse under the duress of the circumstances or is she pretending to do so in order to direct attention away from her husband? Sarah Siddons did not have the opportunity to faint; both Helen Faucit and Ellen Terry did.76 Faucit writes that when Macbeth recounts ‘with fearful minuteness of detail, how he found Duncan lying gashed and gory in his chamber’, the memory of the images she had before confronted ‘without blenching’ becomes ‘too great a strain upon her nerves. No wonder that she faints’.77 In her notes, Terry remarks, ‘Strung up, past pitch, she gives in at the end of his speech when she finds he is safely through his story, and then she faints, really.’78 R. A. Foakes figures the faint as a genuine assertion of the lady’s femininity, claiming that it ‘visually dramatizes her weakness, and confirms that she cannot sustain her attempt to be manly’.79 After asking, ‘does Lady Macbeth really turn faint, or does she pretend?’ A. C. Bradley concludes, ‘I decidedly believe that she is meant really to faint’, adding by way of support that ‘she was no Goneril.’80 Bradley undermines his own claims on the topic, however, by closing with: ‘Shakespeare, of course, knew whether he meant the faint to be real: but I am not aware if an actor of the part could show the audience whether it was real or pretended. If he could, he would doubtless receive instructions from the author.’81 If Shakespeare wanted us to know, he suggests, he would have told us.

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This debate has remarkable persistence. Nicholas Brooks in his 1990 edition of the play asserts that ‘it is ambiguous whether Lady Macbeth is pretending, or does actually faint – and will inevitably be so in performance, despite the many editors who have pronounced one way or the other’.82 One of the problems with the faint – for Lady Macbeth as for the actor portraying her – is its ambiguity. If the audiences of the faint (both the observers onstage and the spectators in the house) can tell if Lady Macbeth is faking it or not, both she and the actor should review her own acting advice to her terrified husband earlier in the play. That is, if the play’s audience can discern that the faint is artificial, surely so could the men that surround the lady onstage. After all, they comprise the only audience the character knows about. And, to further compound the problem, the truth is that the faint is always fake, just as the play is always a play. Referring to Nicholas Rowe’s 1709 editorial note, ‘Seeming to faint’,83 accepted by a line of subsequent editors, Pamela Mason asserts: ‘the combination of “seeming” and “fainting” is powerful in its indictment not only of her but more generally of female duplicity. She has been accused of exploiting an assumed feminine weakness for more sinister motives’.84 Mason concludes that the possible inauthenticity of the faint ‘lies at the heart of the cultural anxiety about the character’.85 If the history of criticism on the subject is to be trusted, it seems also to lie at the heart of a kind of cultural anxiety about female actors in the role (and about women more generally). When Granville-Barker talks of ‘an appropriate beauty in her fainting’,86 he is articulating the aesthetic appeal of the female body in distress or death, what Farah Karim-Cooper calls ‘the penchant for the dead or dying mistress in early modern England’.87 The faint is not only a preview of Lady Macbeth’s death, with all its ‘appropriate beauty’, but is also a reminder of the early modern figuring of orgasm as a ‘little death’. If the ‘unsex me here’ speech puts Lady Macbeth in the position of orgasmic performance, that is, the faint puts the men around her in the position of asking if she is ‘pretending, or does actually faint’, in Brooks’s words. What seems significant here is not that the actor playing the part must choose between fainting or feinting – after all, this is the sort of thing actors are hired to do – but rather that male critics of Macbeth historically have had a fanatical fixation on figuring out whether Lady Macbeth is faking it or not. The fainting scene is the point at which critical analysis and performance heritage coalesce most strikingly. Even so, the sleepwalking scene has provided a nearly hypnotic focus for both actors and critics.

What’s done cannot be undone Often the measure of her performance’s success, the sleepwalking scene (5.1) is a daunting one for the actor. Sian Thomas expresses a common view when she calls it ‘the scene of the role’.88 In his criticism of the 1876 Edinburgh

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production, R. L. Stevenson claims that ‘not to succeed in the sleep-walking scene … is to make a memorable failure’.89 No pressure. Lady Macbeth’s semi-conscious state, her haunting by Duncan’s blood and her nightgown-clad body forecast her own corpsing, a materialization of her status as both active subject and passive object. In the words of Granville-Barker, ‘we should hardly be sure … whether this wraith that sighs and mutters and drifts away is still a living creature or no’.90 Her body parallels the corpses of female characters whose bodies are, according to Dympna Callaghan, ‘constructed as focal points for ocular inspection … in a way that male bodies are not’.91 She is both ‘a living creature’ and ‘no’, a corpse before she is dead. By this point in the play, Macbeth’s internal life is no longer laid bare before the audience – he insists that his desires be ‘acted’ before they are ‘scanned’ (3.4.138) – but his wife’s interiority is so exposed that the play does not even allow her to be in conscious control of it. When Macbeth confesses his private ambitions and anxieties, he does so in full possession of his mental capacities; he can thus garner sympathy from the audience for his moral crisis. Conversely, Lady Macbeth speaks in deconstructed memories, her relationship with the audience in the house complicated by the audience on the stage, the ‘doctor and waiting-gentlewoman’, commenting on her behaviour. Brett Gamboa sees the scene as an erosion of ‘the audience’s confidence, since it learns that it has been kept inexplicably ignorant of Lady Macbeth’s habit of walking in her sleep’, and perceives ‘some injustice in the comparative privilege assigned to these nameless characters’ who know more about her condition than the viewers do. He continues: ‘And her death offstage will continue the trend of denying the audience access to what most anxiously concerns it.’92 Gamboa insinuates a provocative line of questioning when he suggests ‘what most anxiously concerns’ the audience  – Is the audience anxious to see Lady Macbeth’s death? Her dead body? And why? An audience never sees what happens offstage, however, and is frequently informed by nameless characters – it is ‘the bloody captain’, after all, who describes the play’s title character before his first appearance. A sense of collective resentment on the part of the viewers thus seems implausible, though Gamboa’s implication is reminiscent of one critic’s response to poor Sarah Bernhardt’s début as Lady Macbeth at the Gaity Theatre in 1884: ‘the audience was good-humoredly tolerant of her efforts, the result of which, however, were a disappointment’.93 This comment treats Bernhardt’s ‘efforts’ sympathetically, but it has in common with Gamboa’s assessment the assertion of the audience’s shared, homogenous feelings about, and response to, the portrayal of Lady Macbeth. The examination of the doctor and gentlewoman can actually draw spectators close, inviting them to inspect the corpse-like lady, whose ‘eyes are open’ though ‘their sense are shut’ (5.1.24–5). For the actor, ‘their sense’ is not ‘shut’ – like any actor playing a dead character onstage, she can perceive the scrutiny of her body, but can do nothing to prevent it – ‘what’s

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done, cannot be undone’ (5.1.67–8). Inherent in this scrutiny may also be a set of suspicions regarding the female actor who aspires to play Lady Macbeth in the first place. If Lady Macbeth’s mind is ‘infected’, perhaps to blame is not only the ‘unnatural deed’ of regicide but also the diseased version of masculinity in the play that motivates her behaviour even as it constricts and condemns it (5.1.72, 71). Her haunting by Duncan’s blood mirrors the character’s haunting by tradition, which can be invisible to onlookers despite its palpable effect on the actor portraying the role. Perhaps this is Macbeth’s more dangerous curse, the one we might wish to generate greater collective concern, its effects less spectacular than the supernatural curse of theatrical folklore, but far more insidious.

4 Making Love in Hamlet

I have had two broken bones in my life. The first was a fracture in my left ankle from a lanky-legged fall during a seventh-grade track meet, a vision that must have put on full display all the gifts of grace adolescence afforded me. The second big break happened over twenty years later – a fracture in my right foot that seems to have resulted from a mysterious misfortune on a roller coaster at Disney World. In the days following the former, I presented my cast for friends’ autographs with all the pride of youthful heroism, a courageous (if gangly) athlete injured while protecting my school’s honour. ‘You’re welcome’, I must have thought, as peer after peer put pen to bandage to make a mark on my war wound. By contrast, I hobbled through the six weeks after the Disney World incident in shame, sheepishly explaining to each curious acquaintance (and student, alas) that I managed somehow to severely injure myself while buckled into a roller coaster deemed safe enough for my seven-year-old daughter. And a clunky black boot on a grown woman simply lacks the pizzazz of a thirteen-yearold’s cast and crutches. To make matters worse, my broken foot was initially misdiagnosed – or, rather, not diagnosed at all. I survived the remainder of my family’s vacation by loading up on ibuprofen and trying not to whimper as I limped, my tenmonth-old son strapped to my hip in a baby carrier. I was there to make magic memories with my children, damn it, and I was not going to complain. Furthermore, I was a healthy, athletic, some might have even said ‘elegant’ woman, not a frail, bumbling, stumbling someone who seriously hurts herself while goofing off with her children. My sense of self-control, coupled with my indignation at the prospect of injury, was no doubt misleading to my family. Maybe, I was told, my foot was just sore from toting my (rather robust) baby around Disney World for several days. Though this rang hollow to me – I had toted the growing child around inside my own body before birthing him and had toted him everywhere else since – I vacillated between resenting such an affront to my stamina and wondering if I was, in fact, overdramatizing the problem. So I fortified my resistant façade and chose

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to forego interrupting the family fun with an ER visit. Instead, I waited until we returned home to see my doctor, who reported after reviewing the X-ray that he could see nothing wrong as he scribbled out a prescription for a painkiller. When I called back the next day in agony, I held my breath so as not to pant into the phone while trying to pinpoint precisely what the nurse found so irksome. My pain? My expectations? My voice? She sighed, scolded me for my impatience and ordered me to ‘give it a few days’. Too desperate to wait, I sought out a specialist on my own, who took one look at an X-ray of my foot and said, ‘Oh, yeah. There’s a break in here. That’s why it hurts so much.’ The inevitable imperfections of medical science and the hidden hazards of family-friendly roller coasters notwithstanding, this story reveals a learned behaviour with which I am all-too familiar as a woman: restraint. Throughout the entire excruciating and exasperating ordeal, restraint was my response to my fear of the judgement any show of vulnerability seemed to invite – of my physical weakness if something really was wrong, of my psychological weakness if it really wasn’t. And, as counsellors the world over are well aware, the presence of pain does not dictate the verbalization of pain. In the case of the Disney fiasco, my stoicism worked against me, and perhaps had I moaned a bit more, I would have found relief a bit more quickly. This was a difficult decision, however, since even a little moaning was met with what felt like patronizing reassurance or outright dismissal. Damned if you do, as I’ve many times heard my father say (never bothering to add the inevitable conclusion: damned if you don’t). Admittedly, this mama’s theme-park-induced broken bone is a far cry from the conditions in which Hamlet’s mother finds herself entangled and entrapped. The seemingly inescapable imperative of female restraint, however, is a truth that spans even the space between two such wildly different scenarios. Indeed, the risks associated with female speech are among those interests Shakespeare worries over again and again. Gertrude, like many of his other female characters, finds herself forced into rhetorical restraint. While scholars and spectators have traditionally identified Hamlet’s verbosity as veracity, neither the pain nor the love in Shakespeare’s play need be (or can be, truly) limited to the title character. More than one spectre spooks Hamlet – the prince of Denmark is not the only one haunted throughout the play that bears his name. For the female actor portraying her, Gertrude’s critical legacy both haunts and daunts. It skulks in the shadows of the rehearsal room, sometimes challenging traditional narratives with new possibilities, yet at other times charming her colleagues into a Hamlet-authored conspiracy that can doom the character right from the start. Having played the part in 2014, I am still struck by the ways in which Gertrude gets ghosted. Unlike the role of Hamlet, famed for all those fabulous speeches, Gertrude’s role yields the actor no opportunity to articulate her private thoughts to an audience of sympathetic listeners – and, to be honest, she would be compromised if she did since her audience’s

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sympathies are pre-empted by her son quite early on. In this way, the actor portraying the part may feel somewhat ghostly herself. Although Gertrude is not granted the gift of soliloquy, performance requires interiority of the actor and provides occasions for expression that do not rely on speech alone. That she does not say it does not mean she does not feel it, whatever ‘it’ may be. That the play does not permit her to luxuriate in the language of contemplation does not mean she is not contemplating. And, that she does not have a dramatic heart-to-heart with a ghost does not mean she is not haunted – by her late husband, her past, her limitations, her secrets and her son’s words (‘ … words, words’).1 Like the other characters explored in this book, Gertrude’s haunting parallels the haunting of the actor who embodies her. Reductive readings of Gertrude as either wanton and wicked or submissive and silly, as historically popular as they are, prove inadequate in performance. That the play devotes a good deal of imaginative energy to Gertrude ‘making love’ shows that even within the parameters of the early modern piece, the queen is active rather than passive (3.4.91). It is her activity, after all, that has Hamlet feeling so flustered. Yet Gertrude’s lovemaking extends beyond the sexual act so stressed by (and stressful to) her son – both the character and the actor must find ways to ‘make love’ in a text and context that continually scandalize and stigmatize female sexuality. Rhetorical restraint, though dictated by the play’s dramaturgy and often cited as evidence of Gertrude’s gullibility or guilt (or both), can also be a response to a world in which a woman’s sexuality is not rendered as a manifestation of her love but represents instead her corruption. When a woman in Hamlet wishes to act upon, speak about or even feel desire, she does so always in the aftermath of Hamlet’s damning declaration: ‘Frailty, thy name is Woman’ (1.2.146). If love is to be a part of the Gertrude actor’s approach to the role (as in modern performance it likely will be), she must reckon with it, along with her pain, despite her rhetorical restraint. She must cultivate it beneath, behind and beyond what she is empowered to say. And, she must foster it in the face of Hamlet’s haunting words about her physical, psychological and sexual ‘frailty’ – and the eagerness with which his audiences affirm him.

‘Words, words, words’ When it comes to quantity and quality, Hamlet’s words excel. Further, as with King Lear, both the reputation of the role as a measure of professional maturity and the notion of the character’s ‘universal’ appeal are compelling aspects of Hamlet’s words for actors, critics and audience members alike. Marvin Carlson points to the persistent and pervasive cultural presence of Hamlet: ‘our critical and theoretical memories are haunted by Hamlet’, he claims, adding as well that ‘our theatrical memories are haunted by Hamlet’, which he calls ‘the dream and ultimate test of every aspiring young serious

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actor in the English-speaking theatre’.2 Jude Law, who played the part in 2009, reportedly echoed the common conviction that the role is ‘the greatest part written for an actor between 19 and 40’.3 Stanley Wells recalls Max Beerbohm’s description of Hamlet as one of the ‘hoops “through which every very eminent actor must, sooner or later, jump”’.4 Robert Hapgood similarly stresses the ‘opportunities for virtuoso acting’ the role provides, calling it ‘the role of roles’ for ‘leading actors’.5 The myth of the role’s universality for performers – that ‘every aspiring young serious actor’ must give it a go – is transparent enough in any production of the play. There is always only one Hamlet, after all. So even among actors (let alone audience members), playing Hamlet puts one in a privileged position, not a universal one. Hapgood cites David Warner, whose description of playing Hamlet as a sort of spiritual epiphany illustrates this point: ‘A lot of actors say there are moments, maybe just once in a split second in your career, you get next to God. There is this ONENESS – one moment where every single member of the audience is THERE, together with yourself, where you feel everybody is in tune, one split second … ’6 Playing Hamlet is thus, according to Warner, a divine experience, one that positions not only the character but, notably, the actor ‘next to God’. He emphasizes the unity (‘ONENESS’) and the presence (‘THERE’) of the audience, which create a sense of harmony (‘everybody is in tune’), making him the catalyst of something quite miraculous indeed, since audiences are made up of individuals, each of whom may or may not be mentally or emotionally invested at any given theatrical moment. A key word in Warner’s description is thus ‘feel’ – and since Hamlet saturates the stage time of the play and shares so much intimately with the audience, it seems reasonable that the actor playing him would ‘feel’ such things. Warner does make the error of generalizing the experience – ‘your career’, ‘you get next to God’, ‘together with yourself’, ‘where you feel’ – in a way that will likely not bear out for most of his readers. At least, not for those who do not get to play Hamlet. No doubt playing Hamlet can indeed be sublime. It is a difficult role, both physically and psychologically, not only because of the demands of the material but because of the magnitude (and maybe even the magnification) of its history – the way the play haunts, in Carlson’s words, ‘our critical and theoretical memories’ as well as ‘our theatrical memories’.7 Carlson further suggests that ‘every new major revival of Hamlet is doubly haunted’: first, ‘by the memories of the famous Hamlets of the past’, and second, ‘by the memories of the new interpreter, who comes with his own particular style and technique … ’8 Thus when actors find a measure of success in it, no wonder they may feel as if they are ‘next to God’ – the literary and performative space in which Hamlets are brought to life over and over again has long been believed sacred. In discourse surrounding the play, however, respect for the role seems easily to slip into reverence for the character. People are entitled to personal favourites, certainly, and Hamlet’s words are worth the worship. In question is not whether Hamlet’s words are profound, both

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poetically and philosophically. The well-established consensus is that they are. Neither is the argument whether they are an accurate articulation of the character’s own experience (as authored by Shakespeare). It makes sense to assume that they are. The point is, rather, that automatically accepting Hamlet’s words as an accurate articulation of all things Elsinore proves problematic. Precisely because, as Richard Levin points out, ‘Hamlet clearly is supposed to possess such a complex, multileveled interiority’ – the kind that makes an actor like Warner feel a sort of sanctity in the performance of it – the question of whether he is ‘a reliable narrator in his statements about Gertrude’ is a valid one.9 Hamlet is drama, after all, a genre that works because of its multiple (conflicting, one hopes) perspectives. Hamlet’s perspective is a prominent and compelling one – but it is just one. And Shakespeare wrote the others as well. My experience presenting a preliminary version of this chapter’s work at a conference resonates with my Gertrude in a way that is as uncanny as it is uncomfortable. As one audience member wrapped up her response to another presenter on the panel, she made sure to note with disdain the ‘nonsense’ of thinking about characters as people (with feelings, motivations and the like). Her delivery lacked subtlety, and my paper was clearly the target. Some scholars of Shakespeare resist performance-oriented approaches to his performance-oriented works. Understood. But still, the statement so unsettled me that I immediately replayed the presentation in my mind, instinctively searching for signs of ‘nonsense’. That I fretted over this invalidation of the work I do may be evidence of my professional insecurities or my personal sensitivities (or, likely, some combination of both). My response to the episode also reveals, however, a few of the impulses I found in common with my Gertrude. The respondent’s remark was not gendered nor was it a comparison of Gertrude’s perspective versus Hamlet’s (or any other character’s) perspective. The comment did not even, in fact, directly engage my paper. Yet, the respondent’s dismissal was so nonchalant, so condescending and so certain – an authoritative, sweeping indictment that undermined any opportunity for a dialogue in which I could actively participate. My contributions would simply be ‘nonsense’, after all. In other words, like Hermione of The Winter’s Tale, I could sense that it would ‘scarce boot me / To say “Not guilty”’.10 It brought to memory with surprising intensity a moment during my first year of graduate school, in a class on Hamlet no less, when one of my professors called Gertrude ‘flakey’. I challenged his reading, thinking that graduate school was the perfect place to try my hand at a little academic assertiveness. The professor did not argue with my objection because the professor did not acknowledge my objection. He instead repeated his verdict more emphatically and forged ahead. So much for academic assertiveness. I wonder now if he had mentally labelled me as ‘flakey’, too, and if so, when? As I entered the room? As I opened my mouth? As I questioned his statement? Like declaring an argument ‘nonsense’ – or naming an entire gender ‘frailty’, for that matter –

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deeming a character ‘flakey’ closes the door to discourse and does so with a harsh, heavy, reverberating slam that communicates a clear message: learn restraint, or you will be shut out (and shut up, and shut down). I saw in my Gertrude someone who had heard similar messages most of her life and had consequently mastered the art of restraint. And, perhaps like the specialist who possesses enough insider knowledge to identify an injury others may underestimate or overlook, a woman like myself might see a character like Gertrude and respond, ‘Oh, yeah. There’s a break in here. That’s why it hurts so much.’

‘Most pernicious woman’ Much can be made of what Gertrude does not say. Playing the role in 2016, Tanya Moodie claims she ‘had to be told’ of Gertrude’s lack of lines because she did not ‘even notice’: ‘I was like, really? There’s an entire inner monologue going on, I never shut up – it didn’t even occur to me that I didn’t say very much.’11 Even so, Marvin Rosenberg notes that ‘critics have generally judged her’ based on ‘her silences’, as well as ‘what others say of her’.12 Although such textual evidence is foundational to building or understanding a character, relying only on what a character does not say or on ‘what others say’ about that character (or even what that character says about herself) may result in conclusions that are contextually flawed. By way of example, applying a similar standard of character construction to Hamlet would yield a critic (or an actor) a character who, for one thing, clearly cannot be trusted. After all, Laertes says as much when he tells Ophelia that Hamlet’s love for her is ‘a fashion and a toy in blood’, and that she must not think it ‘permanent’ or ‘lasting’ (1.3.6, 8). Polonius seconds this opinion, saying that Hamlet’s ‘vows’ are ‘mere implorators of unholy suits / Breathing like sanctified and pious bonds / The better to beguile’ (1.3.126; 128–30). Hamlet even says of himself to Ophelia that he is ‘very proud, revengeful, ambitious, with more offences at my beck than I have thoughts to put them in’ and warns her to ‘believe none of us’ (3.1.123–5, 128). And, of course, he demonstrates this duplicity when, after she is dead, he proudly proclaims, ‘I loved Ophelia’ (5.1.258), having told her to her face, ‘I loved you not’ (3.1.118). In between his denial of love and his confession of love, he manages some sexual harassment, telling Ophelia it is ‘a fair thought to lie between maids’ legs’ (3.2.112), and adding that ‘it would cost’ her ‘a groaning to take off’ his ‘edge’ (3.2.242–3). And this is just one topic. If Hamlet were nothing more than a composite of the things other characters say about him, the things he says about himself, and the things he does not say, with no regard for the bigger contextual picture, the character might not elicit the same sort of praise he historically has enjoyed. When Hamlet calls himself ‘a rogue’ and ‘peasant slave’ (2.2.485), ‘a dull and muddy-mettled rascal’ (2.2.502), ‘pigeon-livered’ (2.2.512) or ‘an ass’ (2.2.517), it does not

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necessarily mean he is all these things. Similarly, when he calls Gertrude a ‘most pernicious woman,’ that he speaks it does not make it inevitably so (1.5.105). To clarify, I am not attempting to decode what Shakespeare ‘intended’ – perhaps it was obvious to him, and to his audience, that Gertrude was nothing more than a ‘most pernicious woman’, or that she was ‘flakey’, or that even considering her point of view would be ‘nonsense’ – I lack access to that information. But the play is performed today, and it means something that the world is different today, even if the production in question is committed to historicity. What now happens in Hamlet on stages throughout the world matters, and how Gertrude is ghosted by critical legacy matters, if for no other reason (though other reasons abound) than because she is typically now embodied by a real woman. If the Hamlet actor may feel as if he is ‘next to God’, it seems by comparison a small thing to allow that the Gertrude actor may feel something real too. If he may enjoy a little divinity, surely she may be entitled to a little humanity. And if his subjectivity requires no apology, neither should hers.

‘At your age’ I was an under-forty Gertrude, and the possibilities of such casting intrigued me: adolescent bride, teenage queen, young mother, youthful widow. I recognized that my Hamlet, an immensely talented performer, brought to the role the depth of experience, range of emotion, sophistication of humour and mastery of language of an actor seasoned enough for our age difference to be not entirely realistic. I did not know, however, until much later that he was actually just three years my junior. I escaped the panic-driven spiral that would have reached its inevitable end in an emergency phone call to an aesthetician (did I really look old enough to be his mother, gasp?) not only because I had so passionately wanted to play the role but also because I had discovered how often such Hamlet casting practices have happened. Some high-profile productions have featured Hamlet/Gertrude pairings with a biologically or culturally feasible age difference, such as the RSC’s 2008 production with David Tennant as Hamlet, seventeen years younger than Penny Downie as Gertrude. Similarly, the 2009 Donmar Warehouse production starred Jude Law as Hamlet and first Penelope Wilton, then Geraldine James, as Gertrude (both twenty-plus years older than Law). The RSC’s 2016 production featured as Gertrude a 43-year-old Tanya Moodie, ‘young to play Hamlet’s mum’, according to David Jays, though her Hamlet (Paapa Essieduis) was just twenty-five.13 The Barbican’s 2015 production, however, starred the fanatic-inspiring Benedict Cumberbatch as a Hamlet only eleven years younger than his mother, played by Anastasia Hille. In the 1999 film, Glenn Close played a Gertrude who would have been nine years old when she gave birth to Mel Gibson’s Hamlet. Aljean Harmetz

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wrote a New York Times review of San Diego Shakespeare Festival’s 1977 production provocatively entitled, ‘Hamlet Is Young, but Gertrude Is Younger’.14 Hamlet was played by Mark Lamos (thirty-one) and his mother was played by Maureen Anderman (thirty), who just one year earlier had played Ophelia at Lincoln Center. Because such casting practices have become normative, they may seem harmless enough – until held up against the conventional casting of, say, fathers and daughters in Shakespeare’s plays. Envisioning a Miranda close to the same age as Prospero – or a Hermia older than Egeus, a Hero older than Leonato, a Rosalind older than Duke Senior, a Goneril, Regan or Cordelia older than Lear – makes clear the extremity of this discrepancy between male and female performers. And, even though to a female actor maturing by the moment these father–daughter performance possibilities sound glorious, I do not expect to see the trend catch on. Famously, for the 1948 film, Eileen Herlie was cast as Gertrude although she was eleven years younger than Laurence Olivier as Hamlet. Samuel Crowl cites a letter Olivier wrote to Marcia Swinburne, whom he auditioned for the role. His explanation of the Gertrude he seeks is worth quoting: a perfectly respectable Queen … who has been seduced for the first time in her life into having one hell of an absolutely gorgeous time. For the first time in her life she has been sexually awakened: for the first time; for the first time she has a highly agreeable companion over a jolly nice whiskey and soda … There is between many a mother and son, an overdeveloped affection that is commonly known as the Oedipus complex. She must, in other words, be the most wonderfully glamourous mummy to Hamlet. Glamourous and Mummy. Very difficult; very, very hard to find, and almost impossible to cast in a film in view of the difficult situation wrought by either being too old for the part or too young for me.15 Apparently eleven years younger was not ‘too young’. The brazen swagger of Olivier’s description is so audacious that it almost reads as satire. But satire it is not. Specifying that his Gertrude will ‘for the first time in her life’ have been ‘sexually awakened’, and even mentioning the ‘Oedipus complex’ as the ‘overdeveloped affection’ between ‘many a mother and son’, Olivier makes clear the eroticism he wants his Gertrude to embody. His repetition of ‘for the first time’ makes the role sound more ingénue than leading lady, the character more virginal than maternal. That he imagines this ‘perfectly respectable Queen’ as ‘the most wonderfully glamourous mummy to Hamlet’ positions his pursuit of the perfect Gertrude as an uneasy inversion of procreation – he will produce his ‘mummy’ rather than the other way around (a notion that comes to full fruition, if I may, when he casts the much younger Eileen Herlie). Ultimately, he warns that what he is after – both ‘Glamourous and Mummy’, framed as exclusive categories he will inventively combine – is ‘very, very hard to find’.

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Though such misogyny may be considered by some a product of the time and culture in which it was formed, women in the business of acting (alongside many other professions) are still confronted with such characterizations routinely. Expecting to encounter injustice, however, does not dull its sting, in my experience. A year or two after my portrayal of Gertrude, for example, my agent called me in to audition for a role in a feature film. The character was the mother of the teenaged female lead and was described in the script only as a woman who ‘was hot ten years ago’ – because evidently ‘Glamourous and Mummy’ remains ‘very, very hard to find’. Imogen Stubbs writes of her shock when offered the role in the 2004 Old Vic production at only forty-three; of course, her Hamlet, Ben Whishaw, was then only twenty-four, which would have made her Gertrude still quite young (though long since out of preschool) when she bore him. Stubbs registers her initial surprise, but then describes the potential she saw in a youthful Gertrude: Socially speaking, Gertrude could become a Yummy Mummy, by which I mean an exquisitely maintained young mother almost in Princess Diana’s social niche: a parent who plays as a friend and almost as a sister to her son but who, because the court provides such unlimited childcare, has only ever done the fun stuff with him, the treats.16 Stubbs goes on to explain that, in her interpretation, Gertrude ‘has been pretending you can be sexy and a mother at once’,17 reiterating the exclusivity of Olivier’s distinct categories, ‘Glamourous and Mummy’. Stubbs suggests that Gertrude cannot be both ‘sexy’ and ‘a mother’, while Olivier insists she must be (though such a woman is ‘very, very hard to find’). Stubbs further classifies Gertrude as ‘one of those high-maintenance women who want everyone to fall in love with them, including their sons’.18 Whether intentionally or not, Stubbs recreates a version of Olivier’s Hamlet fantasy, but from a Gertrude perspective. Though the ideas are remarkably resonant, Stubbs’s reading allows Gertrude the benefits of agency and desire where Olivier’s does not. Both Olivier and Stubbs imply in their conceptions of Gertrude the likelihood of erotic energy between mother and son – the ‘overdeveloped affection’ of the ‘Oedipus complex’ for Olivier, the longing of a woman to have her son ‘fall in love with’ her for Stubbs. Both interpretations (and countless others like them) also rely on Gertrude’s youth to justify such erotic energy – or, perhaps more accurately, conclude that Gertrude’s youth will inevitably result in such erotic energy. Carlisle cites Wilson Barrett’s quite specific vision for Gertrude, whom he says must be a ‘handsome, sensual, attractive woman of forty’, in fact, as one of the justifications for casting Hamlet young.19 Rosenberg communicates the same dilemma in portraying the perfect Gertrude, explaining:

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The ideal physical image has become a seemingly desirable woman attracting descriptives like voluptuous, vivacious, ravishing, charming, voracious for life, in her second youth, siren-like, of lusty vitality, lush, over-ripe, subtly wanton, abandoned; and at the same time with enough maturity and dignity and maternity to have been old Hamlet’s wife and Hamlet’s mother. Not easy.20 Following a staggering catalogue of objectifying qualifications for the position, Rosenberg’s ‘not easy’ registers like Olivier’s ‘very, very hard to find’. His description of a woman who is a sexual fantasy incarnate ‘and at the same time’ possesses the ‘maturity and dignity and maternity’ to be ‘wife’ to the former king and ‘mother’ to the prince proves an insightful contrast to Stubbs’s criticism of Gertrude as a woman ‘pretending you can be sexy and a mother at once’. That is, what Rosenberg recognizes as imperatives imposed by the play or its producers (or both), Stubbs internalizes as a flaw of the character. One reason the possibility of sexual chemistry between Hamlet and Gertrude has such traction is more about what happens on the stage than what happens on the page. That is, unless the actors cast are related in real life, the squeamishness that might accompany such an attraction is simply not present for the performers. They can certainly manufacture the emotions that any erotic urges might enflame, but whatever chemistry occurs between the two actors at key moments in the play is not itself burdened by the taboo of incest. And though this may sound like a statement of the obvious when it comes to conditions of performance, the actors may create for (or impose upon) the audience an experience they are not actually having themselves. In the case of Hamlet and Gertrude, it may be that the ‘Glamourous and Mummy’ ideal is a response not only to the dictates of the text but also to the desires of those who shape it for performance. So expected is the standard of pairing Hamlet with a Gertrude too young to have birthed him that a more realistic age difference can produce anecdotes like the one Rosenberg recounts about the 1936 Imperial Theatre production: Leslie Howard, Houseman remembers, had once to play his Hamlet opposite a Gertrude who was Forbes-Robertson’s Ophelia 37 years before. She was now in her sixties, and ‘the closet scene, in which Hamlet pursued his frail sexagenarian with accusations of criminal lust, was such an embarrassment that, after we staged it, Leslie refused to go near it again for days’.21 Leslie’s ‘embarrassment’, according to this narrative, is not because Hamlet levels ‘accusations of criminal lust’ against his mother, but rather because his mother was a ‘frail sexagenarian’ in this instance. The reference to this Gertrude’s former portrayal of Ophelia specifies just how much the female

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performer had aged: ‘37 years’. Though it is reasonable that Gertrude might be significantly older than Ophelia, the story seems to suggest that if Hamlet’s mother was not so much older than Hamlet’s lover, his ‘accusations of criminal lust’ might not send him into hiding ‘for days’. As is evident in the case of Maureen Anderman’s Ophelia just one year later becoming Gertrude (to a Hamlet older than she, no less), the ease with which Hamlet’s lover can become his mother is somewhat stunning. I had auditioned for a different production of Hamlet four years prior to the one in which I was cast. At that time, the director explained that I might be up for Ophelia and I might be up for Gertrude – depending, he clarified, upon which Hamlet he chose. Had the finalists for the title role been a good decade or two apart (and perhaps they were), the openness of these two casting possibilities might make some sense. Otherwise, that an Ophelia could so quickly become a Gertrude is a bit dizzying. The 2011 production for Berlin’s Schaubühne Theatre pushed this point, as Kate Kellaway observes: ‘Gertrude and Ophelia are played by the same actress, Judith Rosmair – an idea of frantic coherence that confirms Hamlet’s confused, incestuous idea of every woman as similarly contaminated.’22 By having the same performer play both roles, director Thomas Ostermeier emphasized Hamlet’s – and Hamlet’s – conflation of the women to whom he is closest (and onto whom he projects his anger). This historical precedent for casting a Gertrude possibly young enough to pass for Ophelia, however, lacks the self-awareness of Ostermeier’s statement-making vision. Granville-Barker suggests that Gertrude ‘must still be young, only as much older than Ophelia as dress and conduct’23 signify. He further asserts that Shakespeare could not have ‘envisaged Gertrude upon his stage’ as ‘the realistic mother of a man of thirty’ and goes on to explain that an ‘old’ Gertrude would ‘make her relations with Claudius – and their likelihood is vital to the play – quite incredible’.24 Specifically because the role would have been played originally by a boy actor, GranvilleBarker claims, Shakespeare created Gertrude as ‘the woman who does not mature, who clings to her youth and all that belongs to it, whose charm will not change but at last fade and wither’. Since the ‘presenting of ripe womanhood’ would have been out of the boy actor’s range, Gertrude is, he explains ‘a pretty creature … desperately refusing to grow old’.25 Though his contextualization of both female roles as having been originated by boy actors is useful as a description of casting practices of the past, it presents some problems as a prescription for casting practices indefinitely. It is one thing to recreate the conditions of Shakespeare’s theatre for historical insight or, indeed, to make transparent its outrageous disparities of power (much like the AMC series Mad Men did for professional and domestic convention in 1960s America, for example), but another thing to argue for such conditions in a theatre that simultaneously claims to be current, relevant or in any way ‘universal’. If consideration of modern ethics and commitment to gender equality outweigh the purest commitments

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to original practice – as hopefully they frequently do – the ‘boy actor’ explanation does not quite do the trick. Despite the role’s origin, if a woman is portraying Gertrude, she cannot pretend she is embodying an early modern boy actor’s character. The audience will certainly not do so. When Hamlet speaks of his mother’s age, he does so in the context of their confrontation in 3.4, the intensity of which is strong enough to eventually summon Old Hamlet’s ghost to intervene. After showing her ‘the counterfeit presentment of two brothers’ (3.4.52), demanding that she compare (or, rather, listen while he compares) a picture of his father and a picture of his uncle, Hamlet marvels that his mother could transfer her affection from her first to her second husband: Have you eyes? Could you on this fair mountain leave to feed And batten on this moor? Ha, have you eyes? You cannot call it love, for at your age The heyday in the blood is tame, it’s humble And waits upon the judgement, and what judgement Would step from this to this? (3.4.63–9) Ann Thompson and Neil Taylor note that when he specifies ‘at your age’, Hamlet reveals his ‘assumption … that his mother is too old to experience sexual desire’, an idea that ‘has been regularly endorsed by (male) editors, who also feel that she must be too old to excite it’.26 Hamlet does not, however, seem to assume a lack of sexual desire (or the ability to ‘excite it’) on his mother’s part. Indeed, he appears to assume the opposite – after all, ‘to feed’ or not ‘to feed’ is not the question here. That Gertrude will ‘feed’ is a given in this speech; what Hamlet demands to know is how she can do so on a ‘moor’ after having done so on a ‘fair mountain’. The ‘heyday’ in her ‘blood’ is not as ‘tame’ as he deems it should be, but it certainly seems to be present. Hamlet asserts not that Gertrude has no appetite – indeed, he declares his mother’s sexual ‘appetite’ for his father early in the play, an appetite made only more voracious ‘by what it fed on’ (1.2.144–5) – but that her appetite for Claudius ‘cannot’ be ‘love’. And this assertion is precarious all on its own. Still, the reference to the relationship of her ‘age’ to her sexuality has resonance for those casting, performing, reviewing or simply watching the play. Troublesome enough when the actor playing Gertrude is old enough to actually be the mother of her Hamlet, the notion that Gertrude’s age in any way dictates her desire is particularly puzzling when the woman to whom he says it is either barely older or, in some cases, even younger than he is. The subversive effect of this discrepancy in either case – one that outs Hamlet’s point of view as skewed – is a potentially powerful one in performance. Whether this power is ever fully realized when such casting dynamics are

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present, however, depends upon the willingness of the actors, audience and critics to interrogate Hamlet’s words. That is, when what spectators hear from Hamlet does not match what spectators see before them, if they do not at least entertain the possibility that Hamlet’s perspective is subjective, they empower his language at the cost of the female actor’s performance – while also endorsing the regulation of female sexuality by men. No matter what Gertrude does or does not do in such cases, Hamlet’s words win the day. Damned if you do …

‘Frailty, thy name is Woman’ So permeating and powerful is Hamlet’s point of view that it often surfaces in criticism almost involuntarily. Even as Granville-Barker admits that ‘Hamlet so dominates the play that we are too apt to see things through his eyes’, for example, he still asserts of Gertrude: ‘Yet, watching her, we know that this shallow, amiable, lymphatic creature was an adulteress, cunning enough to deceive her husband. Hamlet says that “she would hang on him, / As if increase of appetite had grown / By what it fed on …” 27’ Granville-Barker is himself ‘too apt to see’ Gertrude through her son’s ‘eyes’, going so far as to cite Hamlet’s words as evidence of her ‘cunning’ and ability to ‘deceive’. Worth considering here is the context of the speech from which this description of Hamlet’s mother comes – Granville-Barker would appear to have already admitted as much when he acknowledges how Hamlet ‘so dominates the play’ as to bias the audience’s perspective. When Hamlet says his mother would ‘hang on’ his father, ‘As if increase of appetite had grown / By what it fed on’, he is in the middle of his first soliloquy – his first extended moment alone on stage, his first articulation of the convoluted emotional terrain he finds himself navigating, his first opportunity to cultivate the sympathies of spectators. The speech swiftly scuttles from a contemplation of ‘self-slaughter’ to an indictment of Gertrude’s new marriage to his ‘father’s brother’ (1.2.132, 152): ‘O most wicked speed! To post / With such dexterity to incestuous sheets, / It is not, nor it cannot come to good’ (1.2.156–8). The accuracy of Hamlet’s initial musings may be called into question in a couple of ways. First, his isolation and grief, well established in the previous scene, might affect his perception of others’ behaviours. Second, when Hamlet speaks about anything, he does so from a position of privilege not shared by all – royal, educated, male, title character – which means, if nothing else, that the view of Hamlet as a stand-in for humanity is dubious at best (and destructive at worst). And third, perhaps least apparent is what may be most universal about Hamlet’s experience: the reality that by its nature, memory is always subjective. Some readings of Hamlet (and Hamlet) make synonymous recollection and exposition. Hamlet must believe in the accuracy of his own memories, certainly, but onlookers need not automatically do so. As with any other

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character whose soliloquys invite intimacy with the audience – Iago, Richard III, Edmund, Macbeth – spectators may engage and even empathize with the character’s perspective while realizing it is … well, a perspective (as opposed to a kind of absolute truth). And the portions of Hamlet’s perspective that are so artfully written as his ‘remembrance of things past’28 seem reasonably subject to a little scrutiny. Exploring the malleability of memory for The Atlantic in 2013, Erika Hayasaki quotes experts in neurobiology, cognitive psychology and journalism. Clearly, this is not material Shakespeare would have consulted as he composed Hamlet. But it is material that articulates insights that may have been familiar in Shakespeare’s day, though without the psychology, neurology and vocabulary to explain them. And, importantly, it is material a modern actor might consult when constructing a character (or when writing a book about doing so, apparently). Hayasaki cites memory researcher Elizabeth Loftus, who discusses how ‘powerful’ it is ‘when somebody tells you something and they have a lot of detail’, particularly ‘when they express emotion’.29 Loftus goes on to say, however, that ‘those characteristics are also true of false memories’, especially ‘the heavily rehearsed ones that you ruminate over. They can be very detailed. You can be confident. You can be emotional’.30 James McGaugh, whose work on the neurobiology of emotion and memory is considered groundbreaking, argues that ‘we all have narratives’31 that enable us to explain who we are, and Barry Siegel, director of the literary journalism programme at UC Irvine, adds: ‘narrative … shapes meaning and order out of an existence that is otherwise just angst and chaos’.32 Hamlet discloses early in the play his existential ‘angst’: ‘O God, God, / How weary, stale, flat and unprofitable / Seem to me all the uses of this world!’ (1.2.132–4). At the same time, he reveals his perception of a world in ‘chaos’, one that is ‘an unweeded garden  / That grows to seed, things rank and gross in nature / Possess it merely’ (1.2.135–7). And possibly Hamlet’s memory ‘shapes meaning and order’ through the narratives Shakespeare gave him to rehearse. That the speech reveals the fallibility – and adaptability – of Hamlet’s memory through his uncertainty about how much time has actually passed since his father’s death is nothing new: ‘But two months dead’ quickly dwindles to ‘nay not so much, not two’, which then further diminishes to ‘within a month’ and ‘a little month’ (1.2.138, 145, 147). As most people who have undergone any kind of trauma likely know, the precision of time is easily clouded by the fog of more visceral markers of the ordeal – the surreal phone call, the weepy voice delivering bad news, the horrific ride to the hospital, the sleepless nights in an ICU room that start to bleed together. Or, in Hamlet’s case, perhaps the transferal of affection from dead to living, the transferal of power from elder to younger, the transferal of expectation from hope to despair, with all the disappointment and distress about the ‘weary, stale, flat and unprofitable’ state of ‘this world’ such awareness provokes. Incidentally, Gertrude may well have had her own experience of trauma where King Hamlet and his death are concerned. She is simply not

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permitted to talk about it (in gorgeous iambic pentameter all alone on the stage, or otherwise). Another way in which Hamlet’s memory may expose its own subjectivity in this speech is through his descriptions of both of his parents. Memories about parents are perhaps particularly unreliable since they are often riper recollections of a less mature perception of people or events. That is, a child of eleven or twelve may interpret an event quite differently than he or she would interpret the same event at the age of twenty or thirty or forty, and so on. But, if it happens at the age of eleven or twelve, even the more nuanced perspective of adulthood may not be able to dislodge the memory from its adolescent point of view, at least emotionally (one need only conjure a handful of early teenage memories to test out this theory). Hamlet remembers his father as ‘so excellent a king’ that he merits comparison with ‘Hyperion’, one ‘so loving to my mother / That he might not beteem the winds of heaven / Visit her face too roughly’ (1.2.139–42), a meditation he interrupts with an interjection that, ironically, stresses the subjectivity of the memories he is in the middle of rehearsing: ‘Must I remember?’ (1.2.143). This specificity demarcates the speech as more than straightforward exposition, which means it need not – indeed, cannot – be accepted only at face value. That is not to say that Hamlet’s father was not ‘so loving’ to his mother but that this speech is no proof that he was (or when he was, if he was). Similarly, Hamlet’s reminiscence that his mother ‘would hang on’ his father, ‘As if increase of appetite had grown / By what it fed on’, may or may not be recent, just as it may or may not be accurate. Despite its flaws and failings, memory is something of an obsession for Hamlet – his memory of his father, his memory of his mother with his father, Gertrude’s memory, the collective memory of old King Hamlet. His father’s ghost commands Hamlet to do precisely that with which he is already consumed: ‘remember me’ (1.5.91). Hamlet’s first charge against his mother seems to be what he perceives as her forgetfulness. His famous ‘Frailty, thy name is Woman’ is followed by his comparison of his mourning mother to ‘Niobe’ as ‘she followed’ his ‘poor father’s body’: A little month, or e’er those shoes were old With which she followed my poor father’s body, Like Niobe, all tears. Why she – O God, a beast that wants discourse of reason Would have mourned longer – (1.2.147–51) He believes that Gertrude was heartbroken at his father’s death – ‘she followed my poor father’s body, / Like Niobe, all tears’ – but that her mourning was cut short, having ended within ‘a little month’. The allusion to the mythological character Niobe is noteworthy. Niobe was so overwhelmed with grief upon the loss of her fourteen children, who had been killed by

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Apollo and Artemis as a punishment, that she could not stop weeping even after she had been turned to stone. The image of Niobe as a figure of stone that is ‘all tears’ functions as a monument, much like a headstone or statue, an object that stands in for the memory of the dead. Hamlet’s father, he here laments, now has no ‘Niobe’, no female monument. Gertrude’s rejection of her role as monument registers to Hamlet as a failure of sexual propriety – ‘O God, a beast that wants discourse of reason / Would have mourned longer.’ As Janet Adelman puts it, Gertrude’s ‘failure of memory’ is ‘registered in her undiscriminating sexuality’.33 Though Hamlet claims to have ‘that within which passes show’, he denies his mother the privilege of a private interiority, assuming instead that her behaviours externalize her emotions, unfettered and unfiltered (1.2.85). Some spectators find it easy to follow his lead. The circumstances of the play support the claim that the marriage of Gertrude and Claudius happens on the heels of King Hamlet’s death. It is, however, Prince Hamlet’s ‘most wicked speed’ that races towards ‘incestuous sheets’ in this particular speech. And, since his words carry such weight throughout the play, as he predicts, ‘it cannot come to good’ – at least not where Gertrude is concerned.

‘Your husband’s brother’s wife’ and ‘my mother’ Challenging the ‘traditional depiction of Gertrude’ as ‘a sensual, deceitful woman’ some thirty years ago, Rebecca Smith attempted to recuperate the reputation of the queen by reading her as ‘a soft, obedient, dependent, unimaginative’ figure who ‘loves both Claudius and Hamlet’ and is ‘bewildered and unhappy’ that the two men are in ‘conflict’.34 Smith claims that Gertrude is ‘easily led, and she makes no decisions for herself’.35 Though Smith’s reading portrays a less guilty Gertrude than some, it does no favours for the actor interested in pursuing objectives – and it crafts a character entirely fashioned by her feelings about and reactions to ‘Claudius and Hamlet’. Rosenberg recognizes the need for a corrective to common assumptions about Gertrude, insisting that ‘speaking or silent’ Gertrude ‘must affect the action’.36 Rosenberg’s insightful reading of Gertrude, however, relies on rationale that at times stops just short of satisfactory when it comes to embodying the role. Though he asserts the queen’s ability to ‘affect the action’, for example, he explains that because ‘Hamlet and Claudius will frequently look to’ her, ‘clothing her in importance’, she ‘must become it’.37 Again, a problem with this claim is its construction and validation of Gertrude’s identity through the male characters, as an object to whom (or at whom) they ‘look’. Further, Rosenberg’s language manages to evoke an erotic image. The suggestion that both son and husband are ‘clothing’ Gertrude implies her exposure if they do not.

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The tendency to read this leading lady through her male scene partners derives from Hamlet, who seems to have a hard time conceptualizing his mother independent of the men with whom she is in relationship. When confronted in the closet scene with Gertrude’s indignant, ‘Have you forgot me?’ (3.4.13), Hamlet replies that he has not, and goes on to identify Gertrude first as ‘the Queen’, then as her ‘husband’s brother’s wife’ as well as his ‘mother’ – though he wishes ‘it were not so’ (3.4.14–15). By ‘husband’s brother’s wife’, Hamlet may mean Old Hamlet’s brother’s wife; but, he could just as well mean Claudius’s brother’s wife. Either way, rhetorically a ‘brother’ stands between ‘husband’ and ‘wife’. And, either way, Gertrude is defined by them both. Besides drawing attention to the inevitable entanglements inherent in Gertrude’s former and current marital status, Hamlet’s wording also forecasts a kind of ambiguity realized by productions of the play, like the one I was in, that feature the same actor playing both Old Hamlet and Claudius. Hamlet’s ensuing comparison between the brothers is a strained one if based on looks alone, particularly when both roles are played by the same person. But, in forcing Gertrude to ‘look here upon this picture, and on this’ (3.4.51), Hamlet emphasizes the physicality of the brothers. Adelman says of Claudius and Old Hamlet that ‘what they have in common is an appetite for Gertrude’s appetite; and her appetite can’t tell the difference between them’.38 And though this idea is pushed by the production choice to have the same actor embody both brothers, the truth is, Gertrude would still be able to ‘tell the difference between them’ – and perhaps that is the point. It may be that Hamlet’s assessment of the ‘grace’ that was ‘seated on’ his father’s ‘brow’ as well as his perception of his uncle as a ‘mildewed ear’ are not shared by Gertrude, even when she breaks down in the face of his terrorizing treatment of her (3.4.53, 62).

‘Honeying and making love’ As it turns out, Hamlet is not the only one obsessed with his mother’s sex life. Like the debate over whether Lady Macbeth’s faint is real or fake, the question of whether or not Gertrude was having an affair with Claudius before the murder of King Hamlet has aroused the curiosity of many a critic. Nicholas Rowe, as early as 1709, determined that the Queen was ‘a murderer and an adulteress’, though soon thereafter other critics argued for her fidelity to her first husband and her innocence in his death.39 This debate is ongoing. Writing in 1926, Lena Ashwell describes Gertrude as a type that could be recognized by the modern reader ‘in sensational divorce cases, or as an instigator in an affair of murder, very amply reported by the press. She is extremely attractive, especially to the opposite sex, good-natured and charming, entirely and absolutely selfish, sensual, with the wit to camouflage

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her vice’.40 Robert Speaight says of Diana Wynyard’s Gertrude that she is ‘morally indolent and physically beautiful, suggesting, as she should, a woman who has been satisfied by her second husband but not by her first’.41 As the mummy of Olivier’s dreams, who ‘for the first time in her life’ had ‘been sexually awakened’, this Gertrude has ‘been satisfied’ by Claudius as never before. Moreover, Speaight rhetorically links her corruption to her attractiveness – ‘morally indolent and physically beautiful’ – claiming that this combination of attributes not only accompanies the notion of Gertrude’s sexual satisfaction but is actually ‘suggesting’ it. Such associations may originate in Hamlet’s pornographic descriptions of his mother’s sexual activity, which can be startling indeed. The circumstances of the confrontation in Gertrude’s closet are alarming enough – an episode that begins with a bang, just after the insult and injury of The Mousetrap, when Hamlet launches a verbal attack on Gertrude that leads to his murder of Polonius. After his comparison of the two brothers, Hamlet pictures Gertrude in (and, in many stagings, pushes her onto) ‘an enseamed bed’ (3.4.90), which is, as Catherine Loomis notes, ‘always carefully glossed as “greasy” but soaking up “semen” as well’.42 He imagines his mother’s ‘rank sweat’ (3.4.90) as she has sex with Claudius in a bed – possibly the same bed the actors are often working on during this scene – ‘stewed in corruption’ (3.4.91). When Hamlet vividly envisions his mother and his uncle ‘honeying and making love’ (3.4.91), they are doing so ‘over the nasty sty’ (3.4.92) their previous lovemaking has created. Hamlet’s disgust is as specific as it is graphic, like when he urges Gertrude at the end of the scene to not: Let the bloat King tempt you again to bed, Pinch wanton on your cheek, call you his mouse And let him for a pair of reechy kisses, Or paddling in your neck with his damned fingers, Make you to ravel all this matter out … (3.4.180–4) Similar to Iago’s visions of Desdemona and Cassio together ‘as prime as goats, as hot as monkeys’,43 Hamlet’s imaginings of his ‘mother stained’ (4.4.56) by specific sexual activities with his uncle occupy the intersection of disgust and desire, and invite the audience to indulge in both as they gaze on Gertrude.

‘You are the Queen’ Gertrude’s narrative of Ophelia’s death is most famed not for the insight into the speaker it may supply but rather for the images of the subject it has sparked. The speech, as Ann Thompson and Neil Taylor explain, ‘provides the material for what became one of the most frequently illustrated moments

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in the play even before the famous 1851 painting by John Everett Millais’.44 In this image and others like it that have become so iconic, no trace exists of Gertrude, even though she is its author (though Shakespeare wrote the words, of course). But, while Hamlet is the character credited with, for example, the ‘Alas, poor Yorick’ speech – inspiring its own impressive number of iconic images, a quick online search of which reveals countless renderings of the skull, with Hamlet prominently present – Gertrude’s artful construction of Ophelia’s death has been entirely severed from its speaker. And, in some ways, perhaps this is what it means to be ‘the Queen’ in Hamlet – that is, to be shut out (and shut up, and shut down). Given Gertrude’s rhetorical restraint throughout most of the play, this exquisite speech that comes along late in Act 4 – and carries in its elegant poetry the devastating news of Ophelia’s death, delivered directly to her already outraged brother – creates for the actor some significant questions. Imogen Stubbs describes the speech as ‘a completely impossible one’, playfully conjecturing: ‘it is as though Shakespeare had had a row with someone in his acting company who said they would not play Gertrude unless they got a big speech, and so for a joke’, he composed what is sometimes referred to as the Willow speech.45 Stubbs goes on to say that ‘the speech still baffles’ her, admitting she struggles ‘to find a reason why’ Gertrude ‘feels the need to go on and on at such length, in such circumstantial detail’.46 Delivering some ‘circumstantial detail’ of her own, Stubbs then steps out of the life of the character and leans in to the labour of the actor: ‘I tried it fast, tried it slow, tried killing the tone, tried not doing any downward inflections, and just once or twice I did feel that it was really doing something.’47 Demystifying the speech in such a way serves several purposes. First, Stubbs reminds readers that acting is work – it involves technical expertise and artistic awareness, and sometimes it makes for tough and tricky business. Further, by suggesting that success with this particular speech is rare, despite an actor’s attempt at a wide variety of approaches, her feeling ‘that it was really doing something’ implies a notable triumph (at least ‘once or twice’). As enduring as the debate over whether Gertrude was having a fling with Claudius before King Hamlet’s ‘murder most foul’ (1.5.27) is the question of the queen’s culpability in the drowning of Ophelia. Harmonie Loberg, for example, confidently concludes that ‘Queen Gertrude is involved in Ophelia’s’ drowning based on the ‘many unanswered questions’ lingering after ‘the report’ delivered by the queen: ‘How does the Queen know of such details? Who tells her? Who is the eyewitness? Why does the eyewitness not try to save Ophelia? Why does the eyewitness not come forward to defend Ophelia’s soul from later accusations of suicide that result in an improper burial?’48 Richard Levin suggests that such ambiguity ‘contributes to the impression that she is functioning here as an impersonal nuntius’,49 whose sole purpose, he explains, is ‘to inform the other characters and hence the audience about events that took place off stage’. Levin thus claims the nuntius – Gertrude in this case – must be ‘a reliable narrator’ who ‘cannot have some personal

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motive’.50 I doubt this is exactly the sort of answer Imogen Stubbs was seeking. Levin’s point is important, however, in that it grants Gertrude the same benefit as any other nuntius – credibility – eliminating at least some of those troublesome questions. What would not work for most modern actors is the notion of having ‘no personal motive’, particularly since, as Hamlet emphatically reminds Gertrude, she is ‘the Queen’ (rather than a messenger). Without question, she has a personal stake in the affairs of the play. Focusing on the Willow speech in film versions of Hamlet, Hanna Scolnicov initially claims that ‘the speech does not serve to define or characterize the speaker in any way’.51 She proceeds, however, to assert that the speech exemplifies the ‘compassion of one woman for another’.52 And since the ‘one woman’ feeling ‘compassion’ for the other is Gertrude, it would seem that the speech does ‘characterize the speaker’, even in Scolnicov’s own reading. Moreover, despite critical declarations of detachment like Scolnicov’s or Levin’s, when the speech is coming from the mouth of a real woman, it will unavoidably ‘define or characterize’ her in some way. Immy Wallenfels proposes that the speech possibly indicates Gertrude’s fantasy of ‘her own death if that were possible’.53 Amanda Hadingue, who played the part in the Shakespeare’s Globe 2011 touring production, agrees, attributing the style and content of the speech to Gertrude’s psychological state: ‘there’s a kind of rapture in the way Gertrude’s describing that death that’s almost as if it’s something she envies, or desires, or just seems like a wonderful way out at that point, which is both very tender to Ophelia, but also tells you something about her’.54 And, since actors must think of themselves as the authors of the words they speak, this makes good sense. The speech could function both as Gertrude’s description of Ophelia’s death and a fantasy of her own. It could also, however, serve to express in poetry what the speaker is denied in prose: a moment of interiority externalized and self-recognition realized. It could be, that is, the closest Gertrude gets to a moment like those in Hamlet’s soliloquys – but, because of her rhetorical restraint (demanded by both the circumstances of the character and the dramaturgy of the play), Gertrude must find the means to expression in her careful composition of the tragic scene of Ophelia’s drowning. It may be fair to suggest that Gertrude has been metaphorically drowning before the audience’s eyes for some time. And it may be possible that her increasing awareness of her slow but sure demise – along with her son’s successful ruin of her credibility – is tangible for the actor portraying her. Ophelia’s ‘crownet’ made of worthless ‘weeds’ (4.7.170) emblematizes the inefficacy of Gertrude’s royal position. Like Ophelia’s ‘clothes spread wide’ that ‘awhile’ managed to hold ‘her up’, Gertrude’s identity as ‘the Queen’ – or, even the ‘importance’ with which her son and husband have been ‘clothing her’, as Rosenberg suggests – has kept Gertrude’s head held high above the watermark for some time, ‘mermaid-like’. In Ophelia’s ‘snatches of old lauds’ Gertrude may hear a former version of herself, if not entirely

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‘incapable of her own distress’, then certainly ‘native and endued’ to her confining circumstances. Such conditions are not sustainable, however, and like Ophelia’s ‘garments, heavy with their drink’, Gertrude’s restraint has ‘pulled the poor wretch’ down towards ‘muddy death’ (4.7.173–81). That the speech seems to serve not just as a message about the tragedy of Ophelia’s death but also as an epiphany about the injustice of Gertrude’s life is supported by the scene’s end. Claudius has to work to get Gertrude to go with him: ‘Let’s follow, Gertrude’ (4.7.189), he says immediately upon Laertes’s exit, but then has to reiterate, ‘therefore let’s follow’ (4.7.192), implying Gertrude’s reluctance (or outright refusal?) to do so. That some Ophelias grow up to play Gertrudes – or, could play either, ‘depending on which Hamlet’ is chosen – makes Gertrude’s blazon of Ophelia’s corpse even more a blazon of herself. Since Hamlet determines the age of each woman and polices the sexuality of both, the question implicit in Hamlet’s misogyny is made explicit by traditional casting practices: What is the real difference between Ophelia and Gertrude? Similar to the covering of the faces of Regan and Goneril at the end of King Lear, Gertrude’s description of Ophelia’s drowning, particularly as a metaphor for her own life or a foretelling of her own death, emblematizes the effacement Hamlet has been effecting throughout the play – the erasure of any difference between the two female characters. When, during his contemplation of Yorick’s skull, Hamlet says, ‘Now get you to my lady’s table and tell her, let her paint an inch thick, to this favour she must come’ (5.1.182–4), he anticipates the point driven home by Gertrude’s self-identification in the Willow speech: all dead women look the same. And spectators want to see them. Gertrude’s speech thus reveals another man who, like Othello and critics such as Henry Jackson who follow his lead, describes a female corpse: Shakespeare. And, as in Jackson’s rendering of Desdemona as more moving ‘after she was dead, when, lying on her bed’, as ‘she entreated the pity of the spectators by her very countenance’,55 the aesthetic of this woman’s dead body is so appealing that it has been frequently turned into a beautiful painting. Even when a play withholds the material presence of a female corpse, as Hamlet withholds Ophelia’s, someone else will provide it. That is, if the ‘very countenance’ of the dead woman is hidden from ‘the spectators’ who might delight in gazing on it – if there is no invitation to the necrophiliac fantasy Desdemona’s corpse offers the audience at the end of Othello – it seems culture will, to recall Albany’s charge in King Lear, ‘produce the bodies’.56

Beneath, behind and beyond Like Regan, Gertrude must navigate the complex political system of which she is a part. Like Lady Macbeth, she must realize her limitations as a woman in her world, and like Desdemona she must perceive her powerlessness to defend herself against the male-authored narratives of the

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play. I saw my Gertrude as a woman for whom both romantic and maternal love had been – and was continuing to be – transformative and dynamic, often surprising her with its impulses. My performance of the role mirrored, I hope, Gertrude’s performance as a public royal female figure, marked by physical and rhetorical restraint, though not void of intention, specificity and action. Grounded firmly in Shakespeare’s text, I also found inspiration for Gertrude’s lovemaking in the play beneath, behind and beyond it – in my own life experiences (as any actor knows is inevitable) and in a couple of other texts in particular. John Updike’s Gertrude and Claudius (2000) ends where Hamlet begins. As is evident in the novel’s title, Gertrude occupies the central position young Hamlet will claim in the continuing narrative of Shakespeare’s play. Indeed, as the novel closes, Updike imagines a Gertrude as perceptive and vulnerable to the haunting of old King Hamlet as her son will be: King Hamlet in Gertrude’s sense of him became almost palpable, quickening all of her senses save that of sight, her ears imagining a rustle, a footstep, a stifled groan … he seemed, this less than apparition but more than absence, to be calling her name, out of an agony … What did dead Hamlet want of her? All-seeing from beyond the grave, he knew her sins now, every rapturous indecency and love-cry … The blessed dead do not haunt the living; only the damned do, tied to the living fallen, and her late husband had been a model of virtue and a very pattern of kingship. He wants me still to be his was her intuition; the King loved her, had always loved her, and her infidelity … now tormented him so that she could smell his burning flesh and almost hear his strangled voice.57 In Gertrude and Claudius, Updike overtly links his adaptation to the narrative’s other texts, explaining in the ‘Foreword’ that ‘the names in Part I are taken from the account of the ancient Hamlet legend in the Historia Danica of Saxo Grammaticus’ from the twelfth century and ‘the spellings in Part II come from … Francois de Belleforest’s Histoires tragiques, a free adaptation of Saxo … translated into English in 1608, probably because of Shakespeare’s play’s popularity’.58 In Part III, Updike uses the names used in the play, suggesting that the characters ‘that inhabit the world of Shakespeare’s tragedy’ are somehow products of evolution and not just artistic creation.59 The dynamics of adaptation that Updike’s novel exposes connect it to the responsibilities and ramifications of performance. As Laura Elena Savu points out, the novel opens up new possibilities implicit in the text of the play, for it confronts crucial, yet unanswered questions, such as: Why and how did Gertrude come to remarry? How does she regard both her first and second husbands and her son? Is she culpable for King Hamlet’s unnatural death? How

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well does she know Claudius? What lies behind her public words? What is she doing or thinking when she is silent or offstage?60 All of these questions are, of course, crucial to the actor approaching the role. Such questions must be answered in production in a way not demanded of literary analysis, where multiple possibilities remain visible in the periphery of each specific argument. Updike’s Gertrude identifies publicity as the chief obstacle in her relationship with Old Hamlet (Horwendil), setting up the privacy of her affair with Claudius as a means to real intimacy: when complaining of her marriage match, the sixteen-year-old Gerutha tells her father, ‘The very qualities that make for public love … may impede love in private’ (4). In the same conversation with her father, she notes that it is ‘hard … to consider one man when another is present’, a conflict she rehearses throughout the novel in her interactions with her husband, his brother and her son (9). This Gertrude feels more than lust for her brother-in-law and, indeed, sex is the last rather than the first element of ‘love-making’ in their long relationship. She feels compassion and a sense of communion, reflecting that ‘younger brothers … are like daughters in that no one takes them quite as seriously as they desire’ (14). Her initial curiosity about Claudius is driven by rather than disconnected from his attachment to her husband, as she reasons, ‘the brother of one’s husband is a figure of interest, providing another version of him – him recast, as it were, by another throw of the dice’ (48). Notably, Claudius is ‘one or two inches shorter’ than King Hamlet – a difference she perceives as ‘nearer her own height’ (49). This physical compatibility is mirrored in the companionship and reciprocity missing in her interactions with the other men in her life: ‘She was unused to a man she could talk to, and who was willing to listen to her’ (52). In Updike’s rendering, Gertrude and Claudius consummate their relationship after knowing one another for over thirty years, and Gertrude’s desire is as forceful as Claudius’s: ‘protest had been lurking in her, and recklessness, and treachery, and these emerged in the sweat and contention of adulterous coupling’ (129). This is the story of a girl who had rationalized that ‘a good woman lay in the bed others had made for her and walked in the shoes others had cobbled’ (27), but had come, with maturity, to question her own acquiescence. She confides as much to Polonius: ‘I was my father’s daughter, and became the wife of a distracted husband and the mother of a distant son. When, tell, do I serve the person I carry within … ?’ (94). In this line, Updike manages to unsettle the male-centred theatrical and critical objectification of Gertrude – she goes from being a ‘father’s daughter’, ‘the wife of a distracted husband’ and ‘the mother of a distant son’ to being someone who carries a ‘person … within’. In other words, she rhetorically realizes her own transformation from object to subject. This is good. Even so, throughout the novel, Gertrude frets over both her ‘distracted husband’ and her ‘distant son’. As young Hamlet grows, so too does the

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intellectual and emotional space between them. At one point, she confides to Polonius that she keenly feels the ‘mocks’ of her increasingly confident son ‘even when he apes respect’, concluding that though he is ‘not yet six’, he already ‘knows that women needn’t be listened to’ (37). So distressing is Hamlet’s detachment and derision that she persistently questions her maternal capacity, as in the following passage: Something held back her love for this fragile, high-strung, quick-tongued child. She had become a mother too soon, perhaps; a stage in her life’s journey had been skipped, without which she could not move from loving a parent to loving a child … She wondered if her own motherlessness was discovered by the gaps of motherly feeling within her. (34–5) Further, Gertrude wonders if the inability to produce another child is ‘God’s rebuke for her failings of maternal feeling, which she could not hide from Him’ (36). Certainly the king blames Gertrude for their infertility, reminding her at one point that ‘the womb is the appointed venue … the male principle a mere tangency’. He goes on to conjecture that ‘resentment of our early betrothal, it may be, curdled your fructifying juices. They lacked no supply of seed’ (54). Updike’s Claudius murders Old Hamlet after the king has confronted him about his affair with the queen, threatening them both. Though Gertrude never knows that her husband has discovered her infidelity, she feels the weight of her guilt upon his death – ‘she felt her fall had somehow caused the adder in the orchard to sting the sleeping cuckold’ (169) – so a quick marriage to Claudius seems a path towards sanctification and perhaps towards greater peace. She notes the shame both her late husband and her son have the ability to evoke in her: ‘Even dead, Hamlet has a way of making me feel guilty … Now little Hamlet has it, that same gift. Of making me feel dirty and ashamed and unworthy’; she knows when her son is around he will try to make her ‘feel shallow, and stupid, and wicked’ (165). And, significantly, she is all too aware of his disappointment that she is not the Niobe about which he will speak in the play: ‘he wanted me to die, to be the perfect stone statue of a widow, guarding the shrine of his father for him forever’ (166). This Gertrude destabilizes the notion that young Hamlet’s moral indignation towards her is without its own flaws, claiming that ‘adoring his father is for him a kind of self-adoration’ (166). Similarly, any Gertrude portrayed by a real person in performance will push against easy Hamlet-centric interpretations by virtue of her own subjectivity. I found that my Gertrude also resonated with a later early modern female character, John Webster’s Duchess of Malfi. At the beginning of Webster’s play, the Duchess is a female ruler and, more importantly to the men around her, she is a widow. The widow represented a threat to patriarchal structures precisely because of her ambiguity – she was neither maid nor wife and was thus under the control of neither father nor husband. A discourse of

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widowhood therefore emerged in early modern culture that focused not on widows’ economic and political freedoms, but portrayed them as ‘imperious in their chambers crowded with suitors, and lusty and demanding in their sexuality’, as Vivien Brodsky describes.61 In his contribution to Thomas Overbury’s The Overburian Characters (1614), Webster himself distinguishes a vertuous widdow, one who ‘thinkes shee hath traveld all the world in one man’ from an ordinarie widdow, one for whom ‘the end of her husband beginnes in teares; and the end of her teares beginnes in a husband’. Like Hamlet’s indictment of his mother, this description privileges female grief over female desire, equating the end of ‘teares’ for the dead with the beginning of a new marriage. Further, Webster describes the vertuous widdow in terms that resonate with Hamlet’s reference to Niobe, calling her ‘a Relique, that without any superstition in the world, though she will not be kist, yet may be reverenc’t’,62 a view shared by the Duchess’s suspicious and territorial brother Ferdinand, who warns her that ‘they are most luxurious / Will wed twice’.63 The Duchess herself alludes to the same imagery when she proposes to her steward Antonio, assuring him that ‘This is flesh and blood, sir; / ’Tis not a figure cut in alabaster / Kneels at my husband’s tomb’ (1.1.454–6). When Ferdinand reacts violently to his discovery of the secret marriage, she responds by asking why she must ‘of all the other princes of the world, / Be cased up, like a holy relic’ and not allowed to marry again. ‘I have youth’, she says, ‘and a little beauty’ (3.2.140–3). Gertrude shares in common with the Duchess her aversion to being ‘cased up like a holy relic’, a perpetual living ‘Niobe, all tears’, as her son would have her be. Like the Duchess, Gertrude maintains a public position of power that she must continually balance with her private thoughts and desires. And both female characters are surrounded by men who are obsessed with their sexuality. Since I was on the younger end of the Gertrude age spectrum, I adapted the Duchess’s sense of her ‘youth’, ‘little beauty’ and refusal to ‘be cased up, like a holy relic’. And since I am a mother myself, I found it natural to use the maternal anxiety, fears of failure and pain of rejection Updike’s Gertrude expresses in her relationship with her son. That the influence of Webster’s Duchess and Updike’s novel on my characterization of Gertrude may not have been apparent to anyone but myself makes them no less impactful in the creative work of performance than the personal anecdotes scattered throughout this book. Claudius’s warning to Laertes that ‘the general gender’ have a ‘great love’ for Hamlet (4.7.19) rings true in modern productions – Hamlet seems to have the people on his side from the start. In this way, the actor portraying Gertrude might feel as if she is ‘playing dead’ well before the script cues her to drink from the poisoned cup. If Hamlet does represent anything universal, perhaps it lies in Claudius’s acknowledgment of the prince’s privilege – those who enjoy the ‘great love’ of ‘the general gender’ can magnify the deficits of those in positions of less power. Unlike Hamlet, female characters are frequently most beloved when least active (or least alive). Thomas Campbell makes mention of the

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eighteenth-century tragic actress Mary Ann Yates as Hermione in The Winter’s Tale, saying she ‘had a sculpturesque beauty that suited the statue, I have been told, as long as it stood still; but, when she had to speak, the charm was broken, and the spectators wished her back to her pedestal’.64 Like that appalling 1888 review of Minna Gale as Desdemona in which the writer asserts that ‘if one looked as pretty after one was smothered as did this special Desdemona, it might prove that, if marriage was a failure, death certainly was a success’,65 Campbell’s anecdote reiterates the male fantasy of the complete female objectification (‘sculpturesque beauty’) and silence (‘when she had to speak, the charm was broken’) that comes in the form of a corpse – or in this case, a statue. Othello similarly wishes to see Desdemona as ‘smooth as monumental alabaster’,66 Montague promises Capulet (over his daughter’s dead body) that he will create a ‘statue in pure gold’67 of Juliet, and Hamlet imagines a Gertrude ‘like Niobe’, who was, of course, turned to stone (1.2.149). Shakespeare has a thing, it would seem, for ‘statuesque’ women. Or, at least, his male characters do. Though some ‘spectators’ may enjoy gazing on a beauty on a ‘pedestal’ – one whose ‘charm’ is lost if she should ‘speak’ – a woman who puts her body on the stage may have to insist that she is still ‘flesh and blood’, as the Duchess of Malfi does, rather than ‘a figure cut in alabaster’ (1.2.454–5). To be a female body made of ‘flesh and blood’ and not ‘alabaster’ is to be ‘Woman’, the name Hamlet assigns to ‘Frailty’ (1.2.146). The tension between Shakespeare’s investment in monumental women (alive or dead) and the various fractures they suffer is enough to sharply remind the female actor of her own restraint. In this way, some theatrical ‘big breaks’ can be far more precarious than a foot fractured in the name of fun.

5 Falling and Rising in Richard III

I spent the steamy Texas summer of 2005 playing Lady Anne in an outdoor production of Richard III and fielding two recurring questions: (1) Are you drinking hot coffee out here? (yes, I was), and (2) Why does Anne fall for Richard? (it’s … complicated). To the former, my hasty reply – possibly hurled at the asker with the reckless defensiveness of an addict – must have frequently betrayed my frazzled state. But, I was an out-of-town actor with a one-year-old baby in tow, running lines while changing diapers and squeezing in some writing on a dissertation-in-progress during my downtime. Also, to be fair, I had not yet discovered the delights of iced coffee. Outweighing my perpetual exhaustion, however, was my equally pervasive exhilaration – as a first-time mother and a first-time professional Shakespeare performer – especially as I savoured the surreal intersection of the two. And the closest coffee shop. Even in the scorching southern heat. The second question I had invested much of my intellectual and emotional energy into exploring well before the rehearsal process began. Once the show was in production, a relentless reminder of this question manifested in the form of a faithful festival patron who made a habit of intercepting me many evenings as I was on my way to the dressing room. He saw our production numerous times, and he informed me that he and his wife even read the play aloud at home together on occasion (true story). His familiarity with the text, as well as his viewing of the second scene in our production over and over, had failed to yield an acceptable answer to his question: Why does Anne fall for Richard? It is one thing to confront this question in a rehearsal room – as a part of the discovery process, in pursuit of playable action and truth – but another thing to attempt repeatedly (thus, it would appear, unsuccessfully) to answer the same question for the same person after playing the scene many times in his presence. Even more distressing than my inability to respond adequately to the playgoer’s anxiety was, well, the playgoer’s anxiety, which found its focus in the falling (and failing) of Lady Anne. Unmistakably, he blamed me – how could I have ‘forgot already that brave prince, / Edward … ’ and

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so quickly have surrendered to the seduction of the man I had deemed worthy of my curses only moments before?1 The episode occurred to me then as a disheartening instance of playing something onstage that simply was not reading as I had hoped – if someone was by the end aggressively, obsessively investigating why Anne had fallen, then I feared I had somehow fallen short. And while I still think this plausible, it also strikes me now as another example of a play’s dominant male voice both predicting and producing the audience’s perspective. It is Richard who first tells the audience that Anne has fallen for him: ‘Upon my life, she fi nds, although I cannot, / Myself to be a marvellous proper man’ (1.2.256–7). Spectators may chuckle at his sardonic humour, reacting with equal parts ‘tsk, tsk’ and barely restrained glee, unable to reject his charisma and charm. Shakespeare’s Richard makes it easy to get lost in the flurry and flourish of his ‘honey words’ (4.1.79), to quote Anne from later in the play. Spectators can further lose themselves in an often fanatical fixation on Richard’s physicality. So it seems it may be the audience who falls for Richard. Perhaps I should have asked the exasperated patron about that.

A world to bustle in Dramaturgically speaking, Richard III is not only a male-dominated play; it is a Richard-dominated play. As James Siemon points out, the character is onstage for all but ten scenes, and ‘a third of the play’s lines are his’.2 Shakespeare crafted a Richard who wields power by virtue of his inescapable presence and his dominant speech. He takes up more space – physical, rhetorical, theatrical – than any other figure in his world. In this way, William Hazlitt’s description of Edmund Kean’s Richard III in 1814 reaches beyond one actor’s extraordinary performance: ‘he filled every part of the stage.’3 No wonder, then, an actor like Antony Sher could fill every page of a book entitled Year of the King: An Actor’s Diary and Sketchbook, in which he chronicles the experience of preparing for and playing the role of Richard III at the RSC in 1984. An anxiety Sher reiterates throughout the book, however, is what makes the book possible – the magnitude of the role, both theatrically and critically. Some irony about this anxiety is hard to miss in Sher’s engaging recollection of the final days before the show’s opening. The closer he gets to opening night, the more panicked Sher is about the sheer number of lines he must remember. He reveals that on the morning of the first preview, for instance, his immediate instinct is: ‘Get up and practice the lines. This is still my greatest worry, a fear so private that I hesitate to write it even here.’4 He hesitates – but then he goes on to ‘write it’ several more times in the next few pages. He does so again as he describes the moments just before his call to the stage that evening: ‘Will I remember the lines? In the profession it is considered a joke that outsiders always ask the question, “How do you learn all those lines?” This is a joke that I will never again find

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remotely funny.’5 And, once again as the show ends, ‘At least I remembered the lines’.6 Sher does not fare quite as well at the second preview, confessing that ‘the lines are less secure and at one point I dry completely’.7 Also of great concern throughout the previews is the condition of Sher’s voice (because he has to use it to speak all those lines). Both the director and the vocal coach urge Sher to proceed with caution, particularly when his ‘failing voice cracks badly’ during the first preview, giving him ‘a terrible fright’.8 If masculine heroism requires physical hazards to bravely defy and overcome, there can be no ‘weak piping time of peace’ for Richard III or for the actors who play him (1.1.24). Actors thus bear the burden of the character’s longing for the good old days of ‘bruised arms’, ‘stern alarums’ and ‘dreadful marches’ (1.1.6–8). After stressing his fear that his memory and his voice are both vulnerable to failure due to the role’s demands, Sher concludes that before the show opens, director Bill Alexander must make more cuts, a subject that Sher and some of his colleagues have broached throughout the rehearsal period. Given the nervousness the size of the role and volume of speech have produced in Sher during the previews, it might seem reasonable to conjecture that if Alexander chooses to make last-minute cuts, he could do so strategically to lighten Sher’s load. But, it is Richard III, so this is not what happens. As Paul Menzer notes, when it comes to this play, ‘actors will ... go out of their way to advertise a fear of injury’, publicizing the unique risks that are ‘reserved for history’s Richards’.9 This is not to say that the risks are not real. The physical stresses of such a role, and of live performance more generally, can be gruelling indeed. Sher’s close calls in previews – his cracking voice, his forgotten line, his sheer exhaustion by the end of Scene 2, his need for a daily massage to prevent injury, his reliance on sleeping pills that cannot quite quell his qualms, his overindulgence in iced Coca-Cola and its alarming consequences (‘later when I pee it’s the colour of coke’) – serve to legitimate the weight of the work he is undertaking and simultaneously secure his position in a revered lineage of top-notch actors who have put their bodies on the line for the part.10 Besides, the moment the show opens, Sher nonchalantly notes, ‘the lines ceased to be any problem at all’.11 And he was instructed to lay off the cold Coke. Despite (or due to) the risks associated with playing Richard, this panicinducing, voice-ravaging role still looms rather large even when the play is cut. Alexander thus fulfills Sher’s desperate desire to trim a little time off the show before opening night by cutting two of the few scenes not involving Richard at all: ‘the Clarence children scene and the one in which Elizabeth flees to sanctuary’.12 Both scenes do involve the Duchess of York, played by Yvonne Coulette in this production, who consequently lost ‘about a third of her part’13 – after the second preview. Sher breathes a sigh of relief when he perceives that Coulette took the news ‘very well’ and that, in fact, Alexander ‘was more upset than she was’.14 Sher warmly relates his colleague’s maternal charm in a way that makes her seem to feel fortunate for not having been cut completely: ‘she was more worried for the kids playing the Clarence

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children (who’ve lost all their lines)’.15 And just like that, Coulette’s already smaller role is reduced even further, leaving Sher’s massive role that much more room to expand (despite the mental and physical perils he has fearfully delineated). Moreover, Sher may enjoy the extra room to stretch free of guilt – Coulette is exceedingly gracious, and even made to sound practically grateful, her feminine impulse to protect the kids playing her grandchildren apparently outweighing her own professional appetite. Less space devoted to the Duchess leaves more space for Richard. With his mother sufficiently subdued, he has more of the stage ‘to bustle in’ (1.1.152). The dispensability of lines (or scenes, or roles, or actors, for that matter) is a liability that comes with the territory of performance, to be fair. I recently landed a day player role in a feature film (I was hired for a day to play a small speaking role – a great gig for a local actor in a small market when big movies come to town). I had no idea until I attended a premiere of the film that the sole scene I had shot was cut from the final product. I was also once cast in what would have been a recurring role introduced in the second season of a television series that was, excruciatingly, not renewed after the first season. Such disappointments are difficult to digest, but not at all unusual, particularly when it comes to film and television – even celebrity actors are susceptible to ruthless cuts. But, for someone playing a smaller role like I was in the film, the rehearsal time was minimal and even the time spent on set was quite limited. And, naturally, I invested no time in rehearsing or working on the television series since my character never made it in. I lost a little heart, to be sure, but not much else. I have not ever experienced a cut like Coulette’s when working in the theatre (and, to be clear, have not ever worked at a theatre like the RSC), so I can only conjecture my hypothetical response to it based on the experiences I have had. And those are not really adequate points of comparison, since by the time Alexander cut the Duchess’s role by a third, Coulette had been in rehearsal proper for weeks and, I would guess, preparing on her own for some time before that. Perhaps professionally this did not trouble her; being paid the same while required to do less has its benefits, as I discovered the day I received the first residual check for the film even though my scene had been cut. Suffice it to say, my sense of loss significantly decreased. But the frequency with which women are, in a broader sense, ‘cut’ – that is, coached, shamed or forced into occupying less space than the men around them – is a communal concern rather than only a personal one. Whether or not one woman takes it ‘very well’, the implications are not just individual but institutional. In the words of Lady Anne, after all, ‘to take is not to give’ (1.2.205). As anyone who has been forced into the fetal position on an airplane or subway because of a manspreading neighbour knows, being able to make oneself smaller is not the same as wanting to do so. The implications of such manspreading are themselves horrifyingly early modern, another iteration of the notion that women are incomplete men. That is, man has a ‘thing’ where woman has ‘no thing’ and is thus allowed to fill up not only his space but hers as well (regardless of the disadvantage or detriment this causes her).

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The case of Richard III is so useful in this conversation because its gender imbalance is a given from the beginning, which makes directors’ decisions to further cut the female roles – sometimes altogether – astonishing. Trudi Darby writes about director Patsy Rodenburg, who chose to give ‘the women’s scenes their original scope’ by not cutting them in her 2011 production.16 Darby contrasts Rodenburg’s decisions with Laurence Olivier’s 1955 film, in which ample cuts were made (including the elimination of Margaret entirely). Still, Darby notes towards the end of the essay that Rodenburg was ‘quick to say that she could only direct the play in this way because she had an exceptionally generous actor playing Richard’.17 I have to say that again. She, as the director, could only retain the female roles as Shakespeare wrote them because the Richard actor was ‘exceptionally generous’. If there is anything more discouraging than cuts like Olivier’s, this might just be it – the perceived need to applaud the leading male actor for allowing a female director to do her job, at least when it means allowing the play’s women to take up the space Shakespeare allotted them (which is comparatively modest to begin with). One of the methods for shaming women who might complain about the confining space – physical or verbal – assigned to them is to normalize their oppression by insisting that it is not oppression, dismissing such complaints as absurd. A friend of mine once attempted an argument about gender in a theological discussion with an acquaintance who promptly halted all productive discourse by retorting, ‘Oh, don’t try to make this about women’s rights!’ It has since become one of my favourite phrases to fling at my husband in mock exasperation, whether we are discussing gender or theology or where to go for dinner. To be honest, however, such a statement is as painful as being left on the cutting room floor. I do not know how to be a woman and not ‘make’ things ‘about women’s rights’ – and I cannot fathom why I would be expected to do so. Because even if someone emphatically explains that by saying ‘mankind’ they mean everyone, that gendering divinity as male benefits everyone, that texts rooted in misogyny can apply to everyone, that theoretical equality somehow outweighs practical inclusivity of everyone – or that early modern acting companies were all male – I am still a woman. Similarly, some might insist that Richard III is Richard’s story – he is the title character, and it is his story, undoubtedly – so it is not only natural but necessary that he should take up so much space in it (and that, consequently, others should take up so little). Yes. But when the discussion ends there – ‘oh, don’t make this about women’s rights!’ – it stops short of addressing the ways in which the rehearsal and performance of this play (and many others) can inadvertently replicate the value and viability assigned to female perspectives in Shakespeare’s day. Without awareness, the process of telling Shakespeare’s story, that is, can lead to internalizing – and, perhaps, institutionalizing – some of its more harmful messages. When this happens, the female characters are not the only women getting ‘cut’.

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Wooed and won? Whether or not she suffers a drastic loss of lines just before the opening of the production (and whether or not that upsets her), a woman playing Lady Anne in Richard III faces from the start the inevitability of her own diminishment. She is smaller than the men around her, and Richard spreads out further than the rest since, in the words of Menzer, ‘the role of Richard is a curtain call that lasts the whole play long’.18 Not so for Lady Anne, who features in one potentially electric scene near the play’s start, shows up again at the top of Act 4 and then makes a ghostly appearance towards the end. The space in which Lady Anne lives (and in which the actor playing her must work), already limited from the beginning, closes in on her further as the play goes on. Like the bed to which Desdemona is finally confined as Othello brutally suffocates her, the covering Albany demands be placed over the faces of Regan and Goneril, the waters in which Ophelia ceases to breathe or the poison on which Gertrude chokes, Lady Anne’s progression from restriction to constriction is a stifling prospect. And this seems to be, in some way, fundamental to what it means for a woman to put her body on the stage in Shakespeare. Whatever amount of space she occupies at the top – whether as big as a proclamation before male senators that ends in her forthright expression of desire (Desdemona) or as small as a conversation with male family members that ends in her reluctant pledge of obedience (Ophelia) – is sure to contract by the time the curtain falls. An actor whose job it is to seek truth, life and love even in the claustrophobic conditions of an increasingly limited scope may find her task at least as sacrificial, as complex and perhaps even as hazardous as the actor who fills ‘every part of the stage’. The dangers are different, to be sure – her risks may not be mitigated by a massage therapist waiting in the dressing room or a vocal coach attentively watching from the wings – but they are real. As scenes from Shakespeare’s plays go, Anne’s first one is famous: the second scene of the play, sometimes called the ‘wooing’ or ‘seduction’ scene, the one Tzachi Zamir calls ‘undoubtedly the strangest scene in the play’.19 This is the scene that so perplexed the playgoer in Texas, the one in which he saw Lady Anne fall for Richard. Because it happens so early, it is the scene that forces the performer, in Sher’s description of Penny Downie’s viewpoint, ‘to deliver the goods right at the start of the play, no warm-up, no second chances’.20 And it is the scene, according to Phoebe Fox, the Lady Anne of the BBC’s Hollow Crown series, most ‘trotted out at drama school’, amplifying its iconic status for aspiring female actors (only a small number of whom will ever actually get to perform it in a production of the play).21 Because the scene fosters a sense of scarcity – one among so few roles available to female performers of Shakespeare and one that allows ‘no second chances’ to those who do get the privilege – when Lady Anne enters for the first time, she may be bearing her own heavy burden, though one less visible than the ‘honourable load’ she instructs her followers to ‘set down, set down’ (1.2.1).

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My first experience rehearsing the scene was not what I expected. The director did not wish to do a traditional read-through around a table, as is common for the first few days of a rehearsal period. Especially when it comes to beginning work on one of Shakespeare’s plays, this period (the ‘tablework’) is not only the first time the cast reads the play aloud but also an opportunity for the actors to study the work together, talking through their initial questions, ideas or concerns about characters and text. When I hear theatre practitioners pronounce some version of ‘Shakespeare’s plays were meant to be performed on a stage, not studied in a classroom’, I want to remind them gently of their own tablework – countless concordances and footnote-laden editions piled high, a pencil in every hand, intellectual discourse and dialogue and discussion in abundance. So even practitioners study the play before putting it onstage (of course). And the Richard III director did return to this more studious part of the process later, but first he instructed the cast to begin rehearsal off book so we could spend the first week in private coaching sessions. The week then culminated in a runthrough of the entire play. Since we had not even done a read-through of the play beforehand, each character’s initial encounter of the others was authentic, original and unpredictable in this way. The director hoped that such an experiment would infuse the rest of the rehearsal process with equally thrilling and provocative possibilities. I entered this series of unrehearsed encounters with my own ideas about Richard’s attitude towards and pursuit of me, and was disoriented when our interaction did not play out as I had anticipated. The result was dismal. Despite the strength of my own desires, goals and feelings – both as actor and character – I could not help but to produce reaction to Richard’s action. His entrance, in fact, interrupts and obstructs the action in which Anne is engaged (which she consequently never sees through to completion) – the journey ‘towards Chertsey’ for the king’s interment (1.2.29). From that point forward, the actor portraying Lady Anne is largely compelled to make her decisions based on how the actor portraying Richard chooses to play the scene. If he is irresistible, she may find him impossible to resist. If he is persuasive, she may find herself persuaded. If he is seductive, she may end up seduced. If he is not those things – if it seems instead as if he has already won (which he has, of course, since the script says so) – she must determine how to ‘fall’ just the same, and she must know why she does. Some critics charge Richard (rather than Lady Anne) with the responsibility of convincing the audience that he has ‘won’ her (1.2.231). William Winter, for example, identifies Edwin Booth as ‘the only actor I ever saw who made absolutely credible the winning of Lady Anne; and, as nearly as I can ascertain, from careful study and inquiry, he was the only actor of Richard who ever accomplished that effect’.22 Winter’s sentiment, though subjective, reveals the potential difficulty of this job for the woman playing Anne – if most actors playing Richard fail to make the wooing ‘absolutely credible’, this means all of their Annes must then either make the wooing

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work anyway or take the blame for falling victim to the villain’s suspect seduction. For many actors and critics, the sexual chemistry between Richard and Anne is the crucial element that makes the scene work well. Catherine Thorncombe, for instance, who played Lady Anne with Lazarus Theatre Co. in 2014, insists that ‘there is undeniable chemistry there’, noting that ‘they are equal in their intelligence and wit’ and ‘both use each other as political pawns’.23 In the same interview, Thorncombe talks about one of her artistic inspirations for the character: During our exploratory workshops we were asked to bring in a picture that made us think of our character, interestingly the first image that entered my head in connection to Lady Anne was the painting Ophelia by John Everett Millais. The eerie image of the ethereal woman in the water made me think of Anne’s plight, she loses everything because of Richard and similar to Ophelia in Hamlet, is driven to despair from love and loss.24 That Thorncombe sees ‘Anne’s plight’ in Millais’s famous painting of Ophelia is predictable. Both characters move from positions of restriction to constriction, as mentioned earlier, both dependent on and deprived of masculine protection in their male-dominated worlds. But, Thorncombe has just said that Anne uses Richard as much as he uses her, implying a kind of equality between them in addition to that ‘undeniable’ erotic attraction. She thus describes a woman who sounds not as ‘similar to’ the ‘Ophelia’ of Millais’s imagination as her inspiration might suggest. In this way, Thorncombe communicates a common conflict for modern female actors who play Shakespeare’s women: the tension between the impulse to be active and the imperative to be passive, between being quite alive and having to ‘play dead’. Exciting things happen ‘when angels are so angry’ (1.2.74), Richard says, suggesting that such chemistry is stimulating (both to perform and to watch) precisely because it is so volatile. Portraying Anne in the BBC’s The Hollow Crown series, Phoebe Fox says, reminded her of ‘people that have Stockholm syndrome. People who become obsessive over someone and hate them but love them at the same time’, suggesting that ‘there’s a fine line between wanting to kill someone and wanting to have sex with them’.25 This was, she reveals, her ‘starting point’ for the character.26 I think what Fox is getting at here is the ‘undeniable chemistry’ Thorncombe identifies, but the claim that ‘wanting to kill’ a person can easily slip into ‘wanting to have sex with them’ is a dubious one since, taken at its word, it sounds a lot like sexual assault. Making such a connection between violence and sex normative and tantalizing, however, draws attention to one tale the wooing scene tells that might seem more dangerous if removed from the sanctity and safety of its Shakespearean origin: a man who has power over a woman can activate her sexual desire even through her hatred of him. How potent.

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The problematic interplay of loathing and lust is a tricky issue to tackle when it comes to the text of the scene. After all, the dialogue between Richard and Anne signals their suitability as a match, in spite of all the odds – as Thorncombe says,‘they are equal in their intelligence and wit’. Fox’s assessment resonates remarkably with Thorncombe’s when she asserts that ‘Anne is fierce and she matches Richard intellectually’, but also claims that she is ‘fragile’. She goes on to say that Shakespeare’s ‘women are by no means perfect’, explaining in more generalizing terms that ‘women can have a male kind of strength in them, but that at the same time women are more emotional than men’.27 By calling Anne both ‘fierce’ (‘a male kind of strength’) and ‘fragile’ (‘more emotional than men’), Fox finds a way to answer the million-dollar question: Anne falls for Richard because she is weak (like a woman); but still, she’s strong (like a man). Such a resolution feels unsatisfying, reinforcing gender stereotypes that have long outlived Shakespeare. Some justifications of Anne’s fall for Richard would be worrisome even with a female character portrayed by a boy impersonating a woman, as in Shakespeare’s day; they become more perilous when the body of a real woman is on the stage (and is at stake). From a scholarly perspective, Donald Shupe works hard ‘to explain Anne’s attraction toward Richard’, and does so based on the assumption ‘that repulsion is no longer a viable emotion toward a person who responds with flattery and vows of love, as Richard does’.28 He goes on to cite Anne’s line, ‘I would I knew thy heart’ (1.2.195), as evidence that Anne’s confusion at this point in the scene ‘may lead to arousal’, adding that ‘from this moment on her arousal may be attributed to attraction toward Richard’.29 According to Shupe, Richard’s ‘flattery and vows of love’ dictate what response from Anne is ‘viable’ – he kills her husband and father-in-law, but he calls her pretty and says he loves her, so she is obligated to respond without ‘repulsion’. Even creepier is Shupe’s conclusion that Anne’s confusion ‘may lead to arousal’ – he kills her husband and father-in-law, but he calls her pretty and says he loves her, so she is turned on. In an attempt to make the trajectory of the scene logical, like the link between violence and sex, such an assessment recycles some dangerous and destructive ideas: a woman owes herself to a man who says he loves her, and furthermore, she will find his ‘flattery and vows of love’ titillating, despite (or specifically because of) her confusion. When respondents to the play rely only on the chemistry between Richard and Anne to excuse and eroticize violating behaviour, the question of whom this account helps – and whom it harms – is a serious one. Richard is forthcoming about his plans, after all – ‘I’ll have her, but I will not keep her long’ (1.2.232). Sher tells a story from the first preview of the production he was in that pushes this point: The Lady Anne scene goes well. Just before her spit, on the spur of the moment, I slide one of the crutches under her skirt and between her legs. Normally, I would never dare try something like this at a first

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performance but Penny and I have always had a special rapport in this scene. Nevertheless it shocks both of us as well as the audience, creating a rather wonderful moment.30 Is this chemistry? Sher clarifies that he and his scene partner ‘have always had a special rapport’ – ‘special’ enough that he is willing to ‘dare try something’ he would otherwise ‘never’ do: shove his crutch up Lady Anne’s skirt. By specifying that he makes this decision ‘on the spur of the moment’, Sher signals the dynamic, organic nature of the scene and of this performance. And by rendering the shock of all involved – himself, his partner and the audience – a ‘rather wonderful moment’, he signals his success. While this may register as chemistry, it could also read as sexual assault – not Sher’s assault of Penny Downie, but rather Richard’s assault of Anne – and whether this is indeed ‘a rather wonderful moment’ for the audience to behold is a weightier matter than the anecdote acknowledges. Attempts to explain what happens between Richard and Anne are often clumsy, perhaps because chemistry can be as strange and mysterious a thing onstage as it is in real life. And boundaries seem notoriously blurry when it comes to sexy performances. Sometimes characters who should have chemistry (Anne and Richard, Beatrice and Benedick, Juliet and Romeo, the Macbeths) are played by actors who simply may not be able to generate a spark between them. And, conversely, sometimes mutual chemistry crops up where it is least expected. Because actors are people, and that can happen. Chemistry can be manufactured to a degree – in fact, the words of the scene create chemistry all on their own. Still, what audiences want to watch and what critics often evaluate is not the heat between Richard and Anne, demonstrated by the sizzle of their dialogue, but the heat between the actors playing Richard and Anne. It is worth interrogating why there is so much pressure to have that kind of chemistry in this particular scene onstage and what it means when it is missing.

To take is not to give What Richard tries to do in Act 1, Scene 2, is not simply conquer Lady Anne, but inspire her to believe that she has chosen him (whether she actually has other options or not). He is so masterful at doing so that compulsion may begin to look like consent on Anne’s part, though she denies complete complicity when Richard offers her his ring: ‘to take is not to give’ (1.2.205). Even before Richard’s entrance, Anne defines herself in terms of the men to whom she is connected: ‘poor Anne / Wife to thy Edward, to thy slaughtered son’, she says to ‘virtuous Lancaster’ as she weeps over his corpse and curses his murderer (1.2.9–10, 4). As Marguerite Waller points out, ‘Anne does not assume for herself quite the same kind of unproblematic position that she assumes for the royal men’, but rather announces in her opening speech her

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vulnerability as a woman whose ‘position and identity are thought of as derivative, and therefore in some sense representative, of a male position’.31 Richard has already articulated the same perspective on Anne’s position: ‘the readiest way to make the wench amends’ for killing ‘her husband and her father’, he proposes, ‘is to become her husband and her father’ (1.1.154– 6). That is to say, both Anne and Richard actually reveal why she ‘falls’ for him before it even happens: each is aware that Anne, as Waller notes, ‘has no habitual or socially available alternative’.32 The rhetorical skill of both Richard and Anne can thus be as distracting as it is delightful, resonating with the dynamic dialogue of Katharina and Petruchio, another complicated Shakespearean couple-to-be. The wit and wordplay of their first meeting can make it easy to lose sight of what is actually happening between Katharina and Petruchio – a woman is desperately trying to reject a man who simply will not take no for an answer (in a play entitled, without irony, The Taming of the Shrew). The ‘keen encounter of … wits’ between Richard and Anne can be similarly enchanting (1.2.118). They were made for each other, it may seem (and they were, in fact, since Shakespeare wrote them that way). The beginning of Anne’s ‘fall’ for Richard is his appropriation and adaptation of her language, when to her charge that he is a ‘dreadful minister of hell’ he replies: ‘Sweet saint, for charity, be not so curst’ (1.2.46, 49). Richard is ‘adopting Anne’s language concerning charitable deeds’ from moments before, as Siemon points out,33 when she asks, ‘What black magician conjures up this fiend / To stop devoted charitable deeds?’ (1.2.34–5). He does so again after her extended curse of him: ‘Lady, you know no rules of charity, / Which renders good for bad, blessings for curses’ (1.2.68–9). He projects the part Anne needs to play – a ‘sweet saint’, one whose value of Christian ‘charity’ requires that she ‘be not so curst’. She will eventually take on this role, performing ‘sweet saint’ later in the scene when she refuses to be his ‘executioner’ (1.2.188), offering him ‘hope’ (1.2.202) and affirming his contrition – ‘and much it joys me too / To see you are become so penitent’ (1.2.222–3). Between Richard’s casting of Anne as a ‘sweet saint’ and her acceptance of the role, she puts up a fight, doing so rhetorically through antithesis: his ‘sweet saint’ becomes her ‘foul devil’ (1.2.49–50), his ‘Lady’ becomes her ‘Villain’ (1.2.68, 70), his ‘divine perfection of a woman’ becomes her ‘diffused infection of a man’ (1.2.75, 78), his ‘fairer than tongue can name thee’ becomes her ‘fouler than heart can think thee’ (1.2.81, 83). And she spits on him. Anne’s resistance to performing ‘sweet saint’ exposes the artificiality of the tropes by which Richard aims to ‘win’ her. Rather than being duped by Richard’s language of love, then, Anne defies it, even as she concedes the limitations of her circumstances. As Waller explains, Lady Anne’s acceptance of his use of her terms, as well as his appropriation of her terms … sets up a paradoxical dependency. In order for Anne to remain the author, the creator, of the terms she is using and to retain her sense

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that hers is the definitive description of the situation – in order to be a speaker at all, really – she will have to remain in conversation with Richard, as in fact she does.34 Richard’s invitation to Lady Anne to kill him provides a perfect example of the ways in which, as Siemon notes, ‘systemic female vulnerability surely contributes to Richard’s power’:35 Teach not thy lip such scorn, for it was made For kissing, lady, not for such contempt. If thy revengeful heart cannot forgive, Lo, here I lend thee this sharp-pointed sword, Which if thou please to hide in this true breast And let the soul forth that adoreth thee, I lay it naked to the deadly stroke And humbly beg the death upon my knee. (1.2.174–81) Richard prefaces his proposition here by sexualizing Anne’s ‘contempt’, as he insists her ‘lip’ was made for ‘kissing’ instead of ‘scorn’. He then suggests she has two options, to ‘forgive’ him or to kill him – ‘Take up the sword again, or take up me’, as he reiterates a few lines later (1.2.186). Siemon asserts that when Richard ‘lays open his breast’ for her to stab, ‘whatever his (unspoken) sense of Anne’s (unacknowledged) vulnerability as unprotected female or as disempowered family member, Richard counts on her having limits’. Furthermore, he counts on her ‘being ignorant of exactly where those limits lie’.36 If, as a ‘sweet saint’ should, Anne ‘renders good for bad’, the opposite of revenge, she cannot kill him. Similarly, Hamlet’s ‘limits’ cause him to delay for the majority of the play that bears his name before committing murder in the name of revenge. It is reasonable that Anne would hesitate. Moreover, by showing mercy (even if it is no more than show), Anne may feel as though she retains some measure of agency. At least, Richard seems to rely on that. He continues: Nay, do not pause, for I did kill King Henry, But ’twas thy beauty that provoked me. Nay, now dispatch; ’twas I that stabbed young Edward, But ’twas thy heavenly face that set me on. (1.2.182–5) Here, the conflict between the vocabulary for female virtue and the horrific crimes that have left Anne so vulnerable is most pronounced. Richard has behaved deplorably, he admits, but manages now to blame Anne by praising her beauty. And another dangerous cultural attitude comes to light: beautiful women make men do bad things.

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Almost as if she anticipates the boast Richard will make to the audience on her exit, Anne’s last words of the scene clarify that she knows exactly what has happened here. When Richard asks for a proper ‘farewell’, she responds: ‘But since you teach me how to flatter you, / Imagine I have said farewell already’ (1.2.226–7). Like Petruchio’s taming of Kate, Richard’s wooing of Anne is much more palatable (more fun to watch and more fun to play) when passion provides the subtext. And this is, crucially, the point – in cases where the chemistry is lacklustre, some troubling truths may become more conspicuous. Even when Richard is resistible, Lady Anne will never be permitted to resist him. Though such a dynamic makes the compulsory nature of the scene clear to the woman playing Anne (as it did in my case), it does not necessarily do so for the audience (as it did not in the puzzled patron’s case). Countless iterations of the scene are possible, but worth considering in any of them is which narratives about gender, power and sex are normalized and which are challenged – chemistry or no chemistry.

Victim or vamp One of my younger brothers was just twelve when I was offered the role of Lady Anne. In fact, he was visiting my out-of-state home, holding my baby girl, when the phone call came. He had watched me go through an audition process that included, over the span of several weeks, a general audition followed by three separate callbacks (all with the same director and with the same Richard actor, who had been cast quite early). If I had not already keenly felt the rarity of female roles like this, the carefulness with which the director handled this bit of casting would certainly have done the trick. When I finished the phone call and shared the good news with my brother – who is himself a working actor in New York now – we both let out shrieks of joy punctuated by laughter and tears (ours and the baby’s, sadly, since our sudden screams must have terrified the poor child). Celebratory phone calls and congratulations ensued. I would be paid to perform Shakespeare, in a role coveted by countless young female actors. It was a milestone. And yet … I doubt I could get away with devoting an entire book to my personal and professional experience of being cast and performing in Richard III. I was not working at the RSC, for starters, and (to state the obvious) I am no Antony Sher. I was playing a role a fraction of the size of the title character’s part. No national identity, institutional prestige or even burgeoning classical acting career relied on my portrayal of Lady Anne in a summer Shakespeare festival production in Texas. Also, I had been cast only a few months prior to the start of an extremely brief rehearsal period, followed by an equally short run of the show. Rather than conceptualizing, colluding and collaborating with the director for months in advance, I was submitted to four rounds of scrutiny (by the same men) before I was offered the part, which was well after the parameters of the production had been

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established. Not to mention that Four-ish Months of the Lady does not pack the same punch as Year of the King. The reasons my story is marginal in comparison to Antony Sher’s are many. I have navigated male-dominated environments – offices, rehearsal rooms, film sets, academic meetings and, certainly, Shakespeare’s plays – since the start of my professional life. So, working in the margins (and working out the reasons I am doing so) is familiar ground. Both in academia and acting, I have done my share of rationalizing rejection and restraint, dismissal and disregard – all easy to explain since both fields are competitive, continually and increasingly so. But, rationalizing individual failures does not resolve institutional flaws. That is, precisely because it makes perfect sense that a character like Lady Anne must function in a marginal space since she is scripted to do so, the magnification of the title character and the actor portraying him (it is his story, right?) may hardly seem problematic. Yet, there is something circular about privilege, and traditional casting in Shakespeare has a knack for bringing that to surface. Sher is central, so he is cast early. He is cast early, ensuring his centrality. Sher is central, so he collaborates with the director. He collaborates with the director, ensuring his centrality. Sher is central, so he helps shape the structure of the play. Sher helps shape the structure of the play, ensuring his centrality. Sher is central, so he writes the narrative. Sher writes the narrative, ensuring his centrality. And Sher sees the play, quite naturally, from Richard’s point of view. This means, among other things, he may describe thrusting a crutch between Lady Anne’s legs as ‘a rather wonderful moment’. I would argue that what such a perspective communicates – that a man who has power over a woman is at liberty to touch her genitalia – is a message against which women are still fighting today. Any scepticism about this can be alleviated by a quick online search for the ‘pussyhat project’, a movement that started in 2016 ‘in anticipation and commemoration of the Women’s March on Washington’.37 According to LA Times reporter Seema Mehta, the ‘handmade pink caps with cat ears’ were a response ‘to Trump’s vulgar statements about grabbing women’s genitals’ prior to the presidential election.38 This is not to credit Donald Trump with directly channelling Richard III, but rather to challenge the admittedly comforting notion that the misogyny of early modern England is safely distant and detached from current cultural attitudes. In the words of Roxane Gay, we live in ‘a culture where we are inundated, in different ways, by the idea that male aggression and violence toward women is acceptable and often inevitable’.39 Gay goes on to assert that ‘womanhood feels more strange and terrible now because progress has not served women as well as it has served men’.40 And justifications for this discrepancy abound at every turn. When it comes to working with Shakespeare, sustained bias can be grounded in a culture governed by patriarchal principles and precepts, alongside blatantly misogynistic perceptions of female thought, emotion, physicality and behaviour – because it’s Shakespeare. The inevitable result is a kind of reaffirmation of sexist assumptions and actions – the most slippery

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kind, since it seems on the surface so reasonable. ‘Oh, don’t try to make this about women’s rights!’ The vulnerability evoked by my own gendered experiences in various male-dominated environments is enough to keep me from using specific narratives of them here. And I suspect the effect might be staggering if those of us who know a little bit about Shakespeare were all to honestly examine the ways in which our personal, practical experiences collide with his scripted, theatrical hierarchies when it comes to the stories we tell (and those we do not) about gender, sexuality and authority. Perhaps this is one of the more sobering ways in which Shakespeare’s works reveal his extraordinary insight into humanity. Or, perhaps this is one of the ways in which humanity reveals the extent to which its most damaging and destructive biases are deeply embedded. Following an agonizing history of women either remaining silent or taking the blame for their own exploitation, degradation, intimidation or assault, the current cultural moment provides plenty of opportunities for dialogue on gender and power dynamics. In 2017, sexual harassment charges of high-profile politicians and celebrities in America made clearer than ever the need for reform. Figures such as film producer Harvey Weinstein in the entertainment industry were called to account for their predatory behaviour – like Richard, such men preyed on women who could not refuse without risking their careers, security or safety. In the words of Alexandra Schwartz, the ‘shared catharsis’ brought about by ‘the exposure and disgrace of Harvey Weinstein’ serves as ‘the silver lining to the awful revelations’ of sexual harassment and assault that date back for decades. The famous movie mogul’s downfall also prompted victims of other high-profile sexual predators to speak out. Among the men accused of exploiting their power and celebrity to coerce other professionals into sexual relationships was Kevin Spacey, for example, an actor and director whose portrayal of Richard III in 2012 received significant critical attention. Nina Burleigh reports that, in the wake of numerous allegations against Weinstein, ‘powerful men in a multitude of fields are being smacked off their perches because of their rapacity’, as ‘victims’ make their voices heard.41 Even so, ‘the vast majority of incidents – 75 percent – are never reported because of fear of retaliation’.42 That is, according to Burleigh, most of those who experience some form of sexual harassment or assault determine that the risks of reporting their victimization outweigh the potential benefits. And, for those who do speak out, the damaging effects of their experiences are not suddenly eradicated by its exposure. Jia Tolentino writes about how predators like Weinstein ‘implicate their victims in their acts’, observing that ‘most of the women who have spoken up about Weinstein … have spoken with a tone that many women find familiar: a muted sadness, a long-kept knowledge of diminishment, a sense of undeserved yet inescapable remorse’.43 In the New York Times article that broke the story on Weinstein, journalists Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey recount their interviews with such women,

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‘typically in their early or middle 20s and hoping to get a toehold in the film industry’, who ‘described varying behaviour by Mr. Weinstein’, including ‘appearing nearly or fully naked in front of them, requiring them to be present while he bathed or repeatedly asking for a massage or initiating one himself’.44 One of those interviewed, Laura Madden, talked about how Weinstein suppressed objections to his behaviour: ‘it was so manipulative … you constantly question yourself – am I the one who is the problem?’45 In her 2015 memo to executives working with Weinstein, Lauren O’Connor called the company a ‘toxic environment for women’: ‘I am a professional and have tried to be professional. I am not treated that way however. I am sexualized and diminished.’46 Madden registers the ‘sense of undeserved yet inescapable remorse’ Tolentino describes (‘am I the one who is the problem?’), while O’Connor exemplifies the ‘long-kept knowledge of diminishment’ (‘I am sexualized and diminished’). And diminishment, it seems, is the objective. Burleigh cites James Gilligan, a psychiatrist whose work focuses on male violence, who asserts that ‘sexual harassment is related to men’s shame and humiliation over their perceived lack of sexual or worldly power’.47 Gilligan further explains that ‘what underlies this compulsive male sexual aggression is the fear that one is not sufficiently potent’.48 By subjecting his victim to ‘unwanted sexual activity’, Gilligan claims, the man is trying ‘to undo his own feelings of inadequacy by transferring that onto the woman by humiliating her’.49 He adds that ‘one of the ways you can most deeply shame somebody is by attacking their genitals or exposing your genitals to them’, a methodology Weinstein and others like him are accused of having mastered.50 Perhaps it is simpler, tidier and less stressful to do almost anything but ‘descant’ on our culture’s ‘own deformity’ (1.1.27), and instead to normalize, naturalize and rationalize the ways in which we support systems of power that are enabling to some by disabling others (it’s … complicated). Julie Berebitsky, whose work surveys a history of ‘unwelcome sexual behaviors in the office’ from the late 1800s to the present, expands beyond her book’s more narrow scope to affirm that ‘women have been at risk of … sexual exploitation and hostility whenever and wherever their economic needs or social positions placed them under men’s authority’ (see any chronicle of history ever).51 Berebitsky also addresses ‘sexual enticement’, the term sometimes given to ‘the issue of women’s sexual power over men in the workplace’ and how it ‘has on occasion been presented as a corollary to “sexual harassment” that also needs to be stopped’.52 When it comes to distinguishing between ‘harassment’ and ‘enticement’, women have traditionally been categorized according to ‘the classic narrative regarding workingwomen and sexuality’, what Berebitsky calls the ‘victim-vamp stereotype’.53 That is, a woman involved in some kind of sexual scandal is frequently either perceived as the victim of a male predator or deemed predatory herself. Ultimately, Berebitsky says questions about power and sex in professional contexts have not changed much:

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The primary question Americans asked in the late nineteenth century is the one they still debate today: Who really needs protection from the predatory intentions of the opposite sex – women or men? Put differently, who really has the power: the woman who arouses desire or the man who wields authority?54 Such questions predate the advent of women in the workplace, and, insofar as they inform and were informed by the culture in which they were created, Shakespeare’s plays provide plenty of case studies. Even as Richard (‘the man who wields authority’) takes advantage of Lady Anne’s powerless position – as Sher’s Richard illustrated by forcing a crutch between her legs – he places the blame squarely on her for arousing his desire: ‘But ’twas thy beauty that provoked me’; ‘But ‘twas thy heavenly face that set me on.’ This tactic is effective enough that later, in 4.1, Anne echoes Richard’s take on what happened: O when, I say, I looked on Richard’s face, This was my wish: ‘Be thou’, quoth I, ‘accursed For making me, so young, so old a widow; And when thou wed’st, let sorrow haunt thy bed; And be thy wife, if any be so mad, More miserable by the life of thee Than thou hast made me by my dear lord’s death.’ Lo, ere I can repeat this curse again, Within so small a time, my woman’s heart Grossly grew captive to his honey words And proved the subject of mine own soul’s curse … (4.1.70–80) Resonating remarkably with Tolentino’s description of Weinstein’s victims, Anne embodies that tortured ‘tone’ of ‘muted sadness, a long-kept knowledge of diminishment, a sense of undeserved yet inescapable remorse’. And like those women, Anne has been implicated in her own abuse. Richard frames Anne’s ‘fall’ as an astounding victory on his part when he works the audience after her departure in the earlier scene: ‘And yet to win her? All the world to nothing! / Ha!’ (1.2.240–1). By later in the play, however, Anne has internalized it instead as a shameful failure on her part: ‘my woman’s heart / Grossly grew captive to his honey words’ (4.1.78–9). Her perception of the wooing from a distance reflects at least a little of Richard’s influence. She even misquotes herself when she recalls her own curse. While she says she cursed herself unknowingly by wishing that his future ‘wife’ be made ‘more miserable by the life of’ Richard than she was made by her ‘dear lord’s death’, what the audience actually heard her wish was that this hypothetical wife ‘be made / More miserable by the death’ (1.2.26–8) of Richard than she had been made by the deaths of her husband and father-in-law.55 She curses

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the wife to widowhood. And while Anne has undoubtedly been made ‘more miserable’ by Richard’s life, she has not been made ‘more miserable’ by his death, which means this is one of the play’s curses that does not come to fruition. Anne is taking on blame that does not belong to her. Richard has indeed taught her ‘how to flatter’ him (1.2.226). In this instance, the male narrative has managed to rewrite the female experience so successfully that it goes uncontested – by Anne, by spectators, by everyone. To borrow Berebitsky’s terms, Richard blames Anne for a form of ‘enticement’ which seems not only to explain but to justify both his bad behaviour and his ‘harassment’ of her. While Anne is not deemed ‘predatory’, she is rendered responsible. If the ‘victim-vamp stereotype’ is at all applicable here, Anne has gone from being one to the other, right before the audience’s eyes. And maybe that is why the zealous playgoer demanded relentlessly and repeatedly that I adequately explain my ‘fall’.

Maternity, mourning and memory Even with a title like Richard III, the way the women function in the play is crucial not only to the plot but also to the cultural narratives surrounding the play both then and now. Of all the losses the play catalogues, the denunciation of Richard by his own mother has always hit me especially hard. Perhaps it is particularly gut wrenching since I had just become a mother myself when I first experienced the play from the inside. When my daughter was a baby – so innocent, so dependent on me for survival (and such a breathtaking beauty) – I could not have imagined many things more painful than rejecting her. Now that she is growing up – so smart, so selfsufficient (and still such a breathtaking beauty) – I cannot quite imagine many things more painful than being rejected by her. When the Duchess says to Richard, ‘Thou cam’st on earth to make the earth my hell’ (4.4.167), I hear, for one thing, an acknowledgement of the vulnerability children start visiting on their mothers as soon as they are created. It would be a great line to use on my own children at choice moments, in fact, were I not so terrified of being rejected by them (see above). The physical and psychological trauma of pregnancy and childbirth – and the Duchess says this was ‘a grievous burden’ with Richard (4.4.168) – is a mother’s introduction to a capacity for love that exponentially increases her susceptibility to loss. Richard III is invested in the maternal – indeed, ‘the words “mother” and “children” (and cognates) are more numerous than in any other Shakespeare play’, according to Siemon.56 All of its female characters are mothers who have been deprived of their children, except for Anne, who figures herself as a maternal presence to the young princes, claiming she is ‘in love their mother’ (and she is also a potential mother of future royalty) (4.1.23). If there is a form of feminine expansion that is not as susceptible to interruption or shame as others, it is maternity. A woman may occupy extra

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space freely when she is pregnant with another human – indeed she has no other choice – and this is an experience the Lady Anne of Shakespeare’s play will not have. But the women of this play demonstrate another way in which they leverage some latitude: mourning. Grief in Richard III cannot be separated from the desire for retribution, a desire that has as much to do with the identity of the victim as that of the perpetrator. In his introduction to the play, however, Stephen Greenblatt focuses on the offender to the detriment of the offended. He claims that the ‘chorus of grief-crazed women’ exemplifies the play’s underlying ‘ritual process – the inexorable working out of retributive justice or nemesis through the agency of Richard’.57 Greenblatt refers in part to Act 4, Scene 4, during which Margaret, Queen Elizabeth and the Duchess of York ‘tease out the strict eye-for-an-eye logic of the action’ through a series of laments and curses aimed at Richard. Ultimately, Greenblatt seems to privilege the curses over the laments, concluding that ‘the ritual that lingers over the play is an exorcism’58 – the obliteration of the traditional Vice character. While ritual exorcism may hang heavily over the play, female mourning has as powerful a presence. The laments, in other words, give the curses their rhetorical and emotional force – and perhaps even their efficacy. Scenes of female lament and cursing permeate the play, establishing a presence that is consistent and widespread, particularly when the women’s roles remain intact. So powerful is their rhetoric that the play, like Richard himself, cannot easily be rid of ‘these tell-tale women’ (4.4.150) – even when a director makes considerable cuts. Melissa Maxwell, who portrayed Margaret at Great River Shakespeare Festival in 2017, asserts that since ‘each of Margaret’s curses and everything she prophesies comes true’, she ‘takes up a great deal of space, regardless of the number of lines she has or amount of time she is on stage’.59 Katherine Goodland agrees, arguing that ‘it is the women … who articulate the communal consciousness and catalyze the healing of the kingdom’.60 The women’s curses are retributive, to be sure, but they also ‘constitute “affairs of state”’, as Siemon notes.61 The women’s concerns are not only personal but communal. The play’s women, in fact, insist that the violations against them are not individual but institutional. That the audience actually sees the image of a female mourner crying and cursing over the corpse of a loved one early in the play is important, for example, since dead bodies are hard to come by in Richard III. Though the staging of Queen Elizabeth weeping over the bodies of her ‘tender babes’ (4.1.98), for example, is absent, 1.2 establishes a visual point of reference that the remainder of the play recalls repeatedly as it pushes this point: the deprivation of women in this world is widespread, and their mourning is powerful. After this scene, the dead bodies so bitterly mourned are conspicuously absent throughout the rest of the play. The audience sees the corpses of neither Edward nor Clarence, for example, whose deaths are the subject of an entire scene’s worth of laments. Perhaps more striking is the ambiguity of the location of the children’s dead bodies. When Richard

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asks Tyrrell if he saw the children ‘dead’ and ‘buried’, he replies: ‘The chaplain of the Tower hath buried them, / But where, to say the truth, I do not know’ (4.3.29–30). That the play insists on the absence of bodies after 1.2 heightens the importance of the women’s lamentations, which reflect ‘the insistence and intrusion of memory upon human action’.62 Though the bodies of the dead are nowhere to be found, the female characters refuse to let them be forgotten. And though Richard does his best to silence their voices, threatening to ‘drown’ their ‘exclamations’ (4.4.154), nevertheless they continue to cry out.

Rising David Garrick’s 1776 production of Richard III stirred one London Magazine critic to complain that ‘most’ of the characters ‘were wretchedly performed’, noting ‘particularly the female ones’: ‘Mrs. Hopkins was an ungracious Queen, Mrs. Johnston a frightful Duchess, and Mrs. Siddons a lamentable Lady Anne.’63 In his Life of Mrs. Siddons, Thomas Campbell cites this particular critique as he works out the reasons behind ‘the first failure of the greatest of actresses’.64 He proposes explanations for Siddons’s performance, offering that ‘by her own confession’, she ‘was infirm in her health, and fearfully nervous’. Campbell then turns his (and his readers’) attention to what followed the ‘lamentable Lady Anne’ in Siddons’s career: ‘the day of her fame, when it rose, well repaid her for the lateness of its rising and its splendour more than atoned for its morning shade’.65 The failure of Siddons neatly collapses with the failure of Lady Anne in the reviewers’ descriptor, ‘lamentable’, its resonance with the character’s scripted lamentation too loud to ignore. Campbell uses the reviewer’s appraisal of one of Siddons’s early performances to further amplify her later magnitude – when measured against her initial falling (this ‘first failure’), the ‘splendour’ of Siddons’s ‘rising’ is all the more magnificent. Despite popular perceptions of or indignant questions about her falling in her first interaction with Richard, Lady Anne shows some remarkable resilience by rising again, even after her death. That Anne shows up onstage as a female ghost, a rarity in Shakespeare’s plays, is a significant marker of the tenacity she emblematizes. By haunting him on the eve of the battle in which he will die, Anne defies Richard’s plans to ‘have her’ but ‘not keep her long’ (1.2.232): Richard, thy wife, that wretched Anne, thy wife, That never slept a quiet hour with thee, Now fills thy sleep with perturbations. Tomorrow in the battle think on me, And fall thy edgeless sword. Despair and die. (5.3.159–63)

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As she does earlier in the play, Anne identifies herself through her connection to the man she addresses – ‘thy wife’ – but this time instead of crying over a corpse, she is tormenting her tormentor. Shifting from harassed to harasser, Anne reminds Richard of the encounter that resulted in their inevitable marriage. Anne has risen and it is Richard’s turn to ‘fall’, the ‘sword’ with which she once refused to kill him finally causing his defeat. That Anne is not isolated in her desire for Richard to ‘despair and die’ reiterates the communal ramifications of personal violation. And, as Goodland notes, ‘the ghosts and Richard’s troubled dreams are poetically and dramatically linked to the ritual laments of the widowed queens’,66 ensuring that the memorializations of all the play’s women are materialized in the end. Anne’s ghost is singular, however, in that she speaks for herself. That is, unlike the male ghosts who are manifested through the words of the play’s women, Anne’s rising is not contingent on the curses or lamentations of other characters. Zamir, who calls Anne’s ‘response to Richard’s’ seduction early in the play ‘outrageously unmotivated’,67 holds Anne responsible for her own demise: Richard’s ‘casual dispatching of her, after she has served her purpose when he moves to wooing Elizabeth’s daughter’, Zamir claims, ‘suggests that Anne has never worked herself out of being merely a pawn in Richard’s instrumental calculations’.68 Faulting Anne for having ‘never worked herself out of’ her own disempowerment, Zamir insinuates her culpability in Richard’s ‘casual dispatching of her’. Zamir’s assertion further implies that the option not to be ‘merely a pawn’ in Richard’s plan would have been available to Anne if she had ‘worked’ harder for it. Like other versions of holding a woman responsible for her own victimization, the centrality of privilege creates a biased perspective that may seem objective. But it is not. Though certainly not the only feasible production choice, one potential corrective for this oppressive view of victimized women lies in fully exposing the reprehensibility of Richard’s violent misogyny – without mitigating it by capitalizing on ‘chemistry’ between predator and prey. If productions refuse to normalize the sexual violence of Richard’s advances on Anne (about which he makes his motives clear both before and after), perhaps audiences will hold accountable the offender rather than the offended. After all, if ‘the fear that one is not sufficiently potent’ is what motivates ‘compulsive male sexual aggression’, as Gillian asserts, Richard gives himself away in that famous first soliloquy: since he ‘cannot prove a lover’ he is ‘determined to prove a villain’ (1.1.28, 30). And though Anne will always face the injustice of diminishment, as the play insists, practitioners can find ways to not blame her for her own victimization. Even so, some spectators will likely continue to worry so much over Anne’s apparent falling that they will miss the ‘splendour’ of her ‘rising’, or, more dangerously, rationalize the brutality of Richard’s initial subjugation and eventual elimination of her. When it comes to playing Shakespeare today, rather than asking why Anne falls for Richard, perhaps we should ask why male narratives so often rewrite female experiences in dismissive and destructive ways. And why it is easy to believe them.

6 Dying in Romeo and Juliet

A defining moment demarcated the first half of my undergraduate career from the second and forever influenced the way I see women in the world, literary or otherwise. In early November of my junior year, my husband and I (yes, ‘husband’ – my youthful marriage itself is almost Shakespearean) made the rounds to visit my professors. Navigating our way through the social excitement, intellectual discovery, academic stress and holiday anticipation often found on a college campus in the middle of a fall semester, our distress created a deafening dissonance against the energetic buzz of such surroundings. One by one, each of my professors listened as my husband explained that I would be leaving school for the rest of the semester. He asked on my behalf for mercy in the form of ‘incompletes’ so I wouldn’t lose all my work, while I sat beside him, a quiet, demoralized, humiliated shell of myself. I had quite conspicuously collapsed on campus a few days before and was rushed to my physician, who, after caring for me through several months of excessive weight loss, expressed alarm at my condition. Firmly fixing his eyes on mine, the doctor said, ‘That’s it. You will not die in my care. You have two days to find an in-patient treatment facility or I will have you courtordered to one.’ Court-ordered? The criminal connotations of such a phrase still take my breath away. I have never felt so disgraced. Or so diminished. So there we were, having painfully resolved on a treatment facility where I would spend the next six weeks trying to learn how not to be anorexic. Sitting in silent surrender while my husband explained to a series of mostly older male professors that I must leave the semester abruptly for eating disorder treatment produced, as one might imagine, varying results. One kind professor conveyed sincere concern and insisted on recording the remainder of the semester’s lectures himself to make it easier for me to finish the class. Another professor expressed sympathy, but with his characteristically eccentric flair. He wanted me to be able to finish the class, but urged me to wait until after the treatment was finished to move forward in my work, as he feared that reading the literature for his course while I was in the ‘asylum’ – his word – might lead me to absolute ‘despair’ – also

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his word. Further, he commiserated (in a more confessional tone) that his wife sometimes thought he was anorexic because he liked to run a lot. So there was that. When something like a serious eating disorder suddenly becomes public (which was nothing short of catastrophic for me since I was so private), how many misunderstandings people have about such conditions becomes immediately obvious. Upon hearing of the urgency of my situation – that I was headed to an in-patient facility right away because my health was severely at risk – one of my grandmothers begged my parents to let her send a pecan pie (my childhood favourite) in hopes that I would devour it. My other grandmother made the even more bewildering suggestion that I become pregnant as soon as possible so that I would have to eat and gain weight. Well-meaning individuals coached me in the art of navigating pop culture, and while they made valid points (photo-shopped images are not real, there is more to life than being skinny, beauty standards are culturally prescribed and never stay the same), I resented the perception that my eating disorder was mere vanity. From my much healthier outlook now, I see that there are so many different perspectives on what eating disorders are and what they mean about those who have them because, like most life experiences, they are not fully accessible from the outside. Indeed, this is part of the power of anorexia – it becomes so normative for the sufferer that even as it progressively grows more dangerous, standers-by begin to … well, simply stand by, not knowing what else to do. And this can make behaviour that is aberrant seem sensible to the sufferer (and to all those watching). That is, what is exceptional becomes expected. Sometimes people respond in ways that make an already vanishing person even less visible. Other responses may work to villainize the sufferer. Tzachi Zamir, for example, writes about ‘the anorectic performance’, asserting that the misery of a person with anorexia is theatrical, an effort ‘to incorporate such agonies into one’s self-dramatization due to the perception that such pain forms part of what is being consumed by one’s audience’.1 Zamir finds possible cultural motives for such pain ‘unpersuasive’, contrasting the ‘self-conscious motivations and choices of politically-minded performers’ with the ‘indifferent, highly self-centered anorectic experiences’.2 In Zamir’s rendering of it, anorexic behaviour is aggressive, ‘a prolonged suicidal gesture’ in which the anorectic is ‘compelling’ loved ones to watch her kill herself.3 To Zamir’s question, ‘why, then, do anorectics eat rather than simply starve themselves to death?’, his own answer credits the theatricality of the endeavour: the performance requires the anorectic to ‘ingest the bare minimum’ in order to stay ‘on the verge of death for as long as possible’.4 I offer instead the modest suggestion that anorectics eat because they still get hungry. Even in self-starvation, nourishment is a human need that remains resilient for a remarkably long time. Though manipulation may be a commonplace of anorexic conduct – I witnessed astounding examples of it myself through the recovery process – Zamir is so engaged with his theatrical metaphor

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that his descriptions analyse the anorectic at the cost of empathy, erasing her humanity. And this is one way in which the limits of observation become clear – witnessing and experiencing are quite different things. The day we talked to all of my professors about my impending departure from school, I did not sit in silence and shame while my husband did the talking because I am unintelligent, incapable of speaking for myself or hold any beliefs about wifely submissiveness. Neither did I do so because I was enjoying my own ‘anorectic performance’, though I cannot generalize about all anorexic experiences. Despite Zamir’s scepticism about such things, my anorexia had a way of literalizing and materializing many of the messages I grew up hearing about the ‘role’ of women, messages that clashed with my own sense of myself, creating its own kind of deafening (and silencing) dissonance. A cruel hyperbole of certain cultural mandates to women – particularly those about appetite, ambition, restraint and perfectionism – anorexia made me a kind of walking corpse. And at that time, I let my husband’s voice stand in for my own. Silence may mean many things not immediately obvious to observers. Though the complexities and contradictions of such disorders are beyond the scope of this book, my experience with anorexia aligns, if uncomfortably, with my experience embodying some of the female characters Shakespeare created. I have played women, in other words, for whom the exceptional becomes expected, for both character and actor (and for all those watching). A variation on the ‘miraculous maidens’ and ‘hunger artists’ of centuries past – the former religious, the latter secular, both famed for their ability to endure extreme deprivation – female actors of Shakespeare seem often set up for an impossible task.5 Trying to self-author by producing a body that already has been written by men, they can become something close to walking corpses. Sometimes onlookers even villainize them for it. Again, witnessing and experiencing are quite different things. Lady Capulet is the role that has reminded me most profoundly of my personal history of anorexia. I have played her twice, some eight years apart, and particularly the last time I did so, the process clarified itself as a kind of exercise in desperation and disappearance. To be clear, I do not mean that my Lady Capulet had anorectic behaviours, but rather that I found in her a resonance with my own formerly anorectic attitudes, with the misunderstandings they prompted in onlookers and with the pressures and pains of invisibility. Whether influenced most by my ordeal with an eating disorder, my struggles as a daughter, my fears as a mother, my negotiations as a spouse or my challenges as a professional woman, I identify in Lady Capulet a yearning for visibility that yields, inevitably, increased invisibility. The trappings of her society are so unforgiving, the expectations of her behaviour so suffocating and the depreciation of her post-adolescent (and post-maternal) function so palpable. Such things I understand. Unlike Lady Anne, Lady Capulet occupies space throughout the play, though she still shrinks steadily before the audience’s eyes. A kind of

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restriction governs her behaviour, rendering her ineffective and registering as hazardous, especially when held up next to her husband’s indisputable sovereignty, her daughter’s burgeoning autonomy and the Nurse’s rhetorical licence. Crucially, when a performer embodies her onstage, Lady Capulet’s constriction is not devoid of consciousness – she may herself feel disgraced and diminished by her circumstances. Emaciated textually, critically and, as it turns out, emotionally, Lady Capulet has an experience not fully accessible from the outside, whatever others may say are her motives (even when they are committed to metaphorical analyses of her conduct). Lady Capulet is the only female character of focus in this book who does not die by the time her play ends; rather, she is dying from the time it begins.

Nurse, where’s my daughter? Criticism frequently deems Lady Capulet’s distance from her daughter a moral failure. Helen Faucit, who first appeared as Juliet in 1836, found ‘no sympathy between Lady Capulet and her daughter, although Juliet, her “loving child,” as she calls her when she has lost her, would not question that she owed her mother all obedience’.6 Examining productions of the play at Stratford-upon-Avon between 1947 and 2000, Russell Jackson notes what he terms ‘chilly’ readings of the role.7 He cites some critical responses to Lady Capulet in performance that call her someone ‘from whom the last sparks of humanity ha[d] been extracted’, ‘icily unmaternal’ and ‘as remote from her daughter’s predicament as a statue in a square from the people hurrying through’.8 Worth noting here are the corpsing effects of such descriptions: ‘humanity’ that has been ‘extracted’; ‘icily’; ‘a statue’. Such readings of Lady Capulet often play out in performance, according to critics. Reviewing the 2008 production at the Abbey Theatre in Dublin (Jason Byrne, director), Helen Meany describes a completely disconnected mother in Ali White’s Lady Capulet, who ‘embodies the sense of bored detachment – overdressed, cocktail in hand, she is too consumed by resentment of her husband to notice what is happening to her daughter’.9 Jeffrey Walker’s review of the 2016 Shakespeare Theatre Company production (Alan Paul, director) similarly reports that Judith Lightfoot Clarke’s Lady Capulet is ‘played with haughty arrogance and a wine-fueled haze’.10 Further, Walker notes that this Lady Capulet’s ‘treatment of her daughter as a commodity to trade to a wealthy suitor’ sharply contrasts with ‘the deep relationship between nanny and child’ created by Inga Ballard’s Nurse, who ‘has a heart of gold for her little Juliet’.11 Both reviewers describe Lady Capulets that are pretentious (‘overdressed’; ‘haughty’) and self-medicating (‘cocktail in hand’; ‘wine-fueled haze’), and both emphasize her decidedly unmotherly coldness to Juliet. Expectations of and condemnation for Lady Capulet’s maternal failure are activated in many respondents’ earliest encounters of the play. High

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school students who read or watch the play for the first time (as many do) and turn to online sources to help them through (as many will) may come across any of the following character descriptions of Lady Capulet: ‘an ineffectual mother’;12 ‘it’s obvious that Juliet’s closest bond is with the Nurse. … As a result, Lady Capulet doesn’t come across as a particularly great mom’;13 ‘a flighty woman and an ineffectual mother who left most of the raising of her daughter to the Nurse. … believes more in the material happiness a “good match” can bring than in love’;14 ‘quite a timid, unknowing and selfish character, as she appears to be frightened of her husband and does not love her daughter like a mother should’;15 ‘Lady Capulet is vengeful. … In her relationship with Juliet, she is cold and distant.’16 Such descriptions are not only unapologetically judgemental but also make it sound as if the performer playing the role has no choice in the matter. When I began preparing to play Lady Capulet the second time, I could not reconcile my own experience of maternity with simplified and stereotyped readings of this character. I recalled a familiar biblical story about King Solomon’s judgement of two fighting mothers. In the religious household in which I was raised, my family attended church nearly every time the doors were open. As a child, I eagerly anticipated Sunday school, with its Bibleoriented crafts, tiny paper cups full of animal crackers and silly songs. My love for the dramatic declaring itself early, my favourite part was the flannelboard story – the story of the day that the teacher acted out by sticking feltbacked paper cut-outs of Bible figures onto a big board covered in flannel. It has occurred to me since that some of those stories I enjoyed as a small child are filled with brutality far beyond my comprehension at the time. One such tale involves Solomon, the Israelite king renowned for his wisdom, who settles a dispute between two mothers arguing over a baby. The women live in the same house (in some translations they are specified as prostitutes or harlots), and they give birth to sons three days apart. Tragically, one of the babies has died. Each woman claims the living baby as her own, both are sticking to their stories about what happened and they come to King Solomon for resolution: Then the king said, ‘The one says, “This is my son that is alive, and your son is dead”; and the other says, “No; but your son is dead, and my son is the living one.”’ And the king said, ‘Bring me a sword.’ So a sword was brought before the king. And the king said, ‘Divide the living child in two, and give half to the one and half to the other.’ Then the woman whose son was alive said to the king, because her heart yearned for her son, ‘Oh, my lord, give her the living child, and by no means put him to death.’ But the other said, ‘He shall be neither mine nor yours; divide him.’ Then the king answered and said, ‘Give the living child to the first woman, and by no means put him to death; she is his mother.’17

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One baby dies, the other baby is on the verge of being dissected – unlikely fodder for a children’s flannel-board story, but evidently it made quite the impression on me. When I was young, the story’s application was about regulating competitive or covetous behaviour – I was not to argue with my siblings over a specific toy, lest it be cut in half (and of no use to any of us). That this could be a bluff never crossed my mind. The wisdom of Solomon is the story’s punchline, I think, but the plight of the mothers now stands out to me most. There is only one baby between them; the other child has died. The parallel is by no means perfect, but I found useful in the narrative that one mother has to give up her biological claim in order to allow the child to thrive. In the biblical story, the woman who is willing to let a surrogate raise her child rather than see the baby torn in two is rewarded for her sacrificial love, which is read as the sign of her true maternity. Though the circumstances of Romeo and Juliet differ drastically, the possibility of Lady Capulet recognizing her detachment from Juliet as a dictated loss rather than a deliberate rejection captivated me. Each Lady Capulet is unique, of course; attributing her distance from Juliet to her own narcissism or to social structure alone never felt right for mine. Both narcissism and social structure could still be involved (as they are for us all), but I felt that Lady Capulet would have her own perception of and beliefs about these things. And because of who I am and what I have been through, I imagined her sense of herself might clash with the messages of her culture enough to create a deafening (and silencing) dissonance. Further, as a mother myself now, I know all too well how easily mothers are blamed for many outcomes over which they have little or no control. I wanted my Lady Capulet to know better, regardless of the opposition she faces in this regard. Implicit in the Nurse’s ownership of Juliet’s childhood is Lady Capulet’s sacrifice of it. The Nurse’s daughter is dead – ‘God rest all Christian souls’ (1.3.18) – and was ‘of an age’ with Lady Capulet’s daughter (1.3.19). The remaining child cannot be cut in half, of course, so perhaps the childrearing responsibilities must be, given the standards of contemporary social structure or the constraints of the Capulet household or, at the very least, the parameters of this play. It could be that Lady Capulet fulfills what she understands as her duty when it comes to mothering, and may also register that it means giving up the gratifying parts of parenting the Nurse gladly assumes (and gleefully recounts … right in front of her). The Nurse makes it impossible to forget – and difficult to even reconcile – the imbalance of intimacy that is the result. Indeed, the Nurse is one of the play’s characters who, dramaturgically speaking, effects Lady Capulet’s erasure. Jackson observes that ‘Lady Capulet’s nervousness in raising the topic of marriage, and her initial uncertainty about including the Nurse in the conversation, have sometimes reflected a lack of warmth in the mother-daughter relationship’, and, by way of comparison, notes that ‘the Nurse’s behavior has usually made up abundantly for this by including a good deal of easy physical intimacy’.18 Stanley Wells says of the Nurse that she is ‘perhaps the

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most complete character in the play as written’, adding that the role is ‘of Shakespeare’s few (if unknowing) gifts to actresses who are no longer able to play young women’.19 This assertion is flawed since, by ‘actresses who are no longer able to play young women’, I think he means performers who are no longer young themselves; and these performers could, in fact, play many more roles than are frequently made available to them. But, the point Wells is making – that the Nurse is a fantastic role – is inarguable (both Nurses with whom I have gotten to work were outstanding). Notably, however, Wells says nothing similar of Lady Capulet. Additionally, in his discussion of roles ‘that can be played by what are known as character actors’,20 he mentions Lady Capulet only as someone with whom Tybalt ‘was having an intralineal affair’ in the Stratford production directed by Michael Bogdanov in 1986.21 Wells claims that if the supporting roles ‘constitute challenges to their performers, it is in remaining content with being cast as lay figures: “don’t do something, just stand there.”’22 And this challenge is perhaps at the heart of Lady Capulet’s inner life. Act 1, Scene 3, begins with a question that encapsulates the complexity of Lady Capulet’s relationships with her child and with the household’s other mother: ‘Nurse, where’s my daughter?’ (1.3.1) Even as she claims parental possession (‘my daughter’), Lady Capulet concedes the Nurse’s practical custody of Juliet – she’s the one who would know where she is. When Juliet enters, she asks ‘who calls?’ (1.3.5), and the Nurse’s reply, ‘your mother’ (1.3.5), further suggests the women’s shared stake in the child. After all, the audience well knows it is the Nurse who has just called – ‘What, lamb. What, ladybird. / God forbid. Where’s this girl? What, Juliet!’ (1.3.3–4) – because they hear it. So does Lady Capulet. Whether played as innocent or intentional, the Nurse’s response alludes to the ambiguities this parenting arrangement might produce. Neither ‘mother’ seems entirely sure of their relationship’s boundaries. Lady Capulet dismisses the Nurse before she talks with Juliet, for instance, but immediately calls her back: This is the matter. Nurse, give leave awhile, We must talk in secret. Nurse, come back again, I have remember’d me, thou’s hear our counsel. (1.3.7–9) James L. Loehlin describes ‘the recalling of the Nurse’ as ‘always a comic moment’, noting that ‘the standard business goes back at least to the nineteenth century’.23 What makes this moment funny is also what reinforces the rules of the women’s relationship as sources of conflict and confusion for Lady Capulet – she is uncertain who the ‘matter’ of Juliet’s sexuality, matrimony and maternity should involve. Though Lady Capulet may reasonably react to the Nurse’s ensuing loquaciousness in a variety of ways (and has in production), ranging from

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affectionate to amused to annoyed, the rhetorical architecture of the scene reveals a clear message: the stories of Juliet’s past belong to the Nurse, but the trajectory of Juliet’s future falls under Lady Capulet’s jurisdiction. The Nurse famously steals the scene, articulating her closeness to Juliet in ways with which Lady Capulet cannot compete. The Nurse highlights motherhood as burdened by scarcity, having lost her own daughter: ‘Susan is with God’ (1.3.19). Further, when she moralizes the loss as a kind of maternal deficiency – ‘she was too good for me’ (1.3.20) – she, knowingly or not, indicts Lady Capulet not only for her future loss of Juliet but for the grief she may already be experiencing. A reminder of her necessary role in the nurturing of Juliet, the Nurse tells a meandering story about when ‘she was wean’d’ (1.3.24): When it did taste the wormwood on the nipple Of my dug and felt it bitter, pretty fool, To see it tetchy and fall out with the dug. (1.3.30–2) The repetition of ‘dug’, here and elsewhere in the speech, is significant. Modern debates over the bottle versus the breast aside, I decided to nurse my babies and recall the awe of my body’s ability to sustain someone else’s life – I cannot speak to the experiences of other breastfeeding mothers (real or fictional), but what had been a bizarre prospect before the birth of my children became for me a source of daily astonishment. The ‘dug’ is something the Nurse has given Juliet that Lady Capulet did not (or could not). The Nurse drives home the point by noting that she ‘never shall forget’ Juliet’s weaning, for which Lady Capulet was absent (1.3.24) – ‘My lord and you were then at Mantua’ (1.3.28). It is possible that Lady Capulet hears the message, loud and clear. And it is possible that she feels the loss, whether or not she thought she had control over such a decision. Once again drawing attention to her singular role as the child’s wet nurse, the Nurse calls Juliet ‘the prettiest babe that e’re I nurs’d’ (1.3.60), then adds: ‘And I might live to see thee married once, / I have my wish’ (1.3.61–2). That the comment on breastfeeding Juliet as a ‘babe’ leads directly to the Nurse’s assumption of her own investment in seeing her ‘married’ reveals that the boundaries of mothering are as uncertain for her as they are for Lady Capulet. In fact, Lady Capulet reasserts her control over the conversation at precisely this point: ‘Marry, that marry is the very theme / I came to talk of’ (1.3.63–4). When Lady Capulet momentarily assumes the more dominant role in the discussion, she authors a description of Paris so passionate and poetic that some practitioners have read it as a sign that she is actually in love with him herself. Others think Lady Capulet’s figuring of Paris as a ‘precious book of love’ and ‘unbound lover’ (1.3.87) that Juliet could ‘beautify’ by becoming his ‘cover’ (1.3.88) seems so out of place that it needs specific motivation of another kind. They may frame Juliet as a voracious reader, for

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example, much like my own adolescent daughter, from whom a well-timed Hunger Games or Harry Potter reference elicits far more enthusiasm than my straightforward lecturing can. Loehlin cites Declan Donellan’s 1986 production, in which Juliet (Sarah Woodward) ‘was reading and ignoring her mother’s praise of County Paris’, provoking Lady Capulet (Philippa Gail) to grab the book to get the girl’s attention, which then inspired the literary conceit.24 The possible explanations for what prompts this tactic on Lady Capulet’s part are many, and crafting plausible stage business to support a specific reading is part of the artistry and fun of performance. Regardless of the preferred and most playable stage business, this speech and the shift in tone it creates register to me as out of place on purpose. That is, the contrast to the Nurse’s speech that Lady Capulet creates communicates the division of their labour. Dympna Callaghan notes that ‘the Nurse comically deflates’ what she calls ‘Lady Capulet’s high-flown conceit about Paris’ by making ‘jokes about sex and pregnancy – in other words, the reality of adult sexual life’.25 Also conceivable, however, is that Lady Capulet is communicating ‘the reality of adult sexual life’ as well (albeit a different ‘reality’ than the Nurse’s). After all, the relationship the Nurse had with the ‘merry man’ (1.3.40) to whom she was married – ‘God be with his soul’ (1.3.39) – may not be the most accurate model of the relationship Juliet should anticipate in her own hypothetically traditional marriage, given the differences in their social status. Contrary to interpretations of this passage as her inability to comprehend love, ‘rendering passion as something akin to bookbinding’,26 in Thomas Moisan’s terms, or as the mother’s ‘attempt at saddling Juliet with her own destiny’,27 the speech might then be Lady Capulet’s coded way of preparing her daughter for what lies ahead by offering her a degree of agency in an arrangement that leaves her otherwise powerless. While Capulet encourages Paris to objectify his daughter, counting her among the ‘fresh female buds’ he should ‘view’ at the forthcoming feast (1.2.29, 32), Lady Capulet makes it instead Juliet who will objectify Paris: This night you shall behold him at our feast; Read o’er the volume of young Paris’ face And find delight writ there with beauty’s pen. Examine every married lineament And see how one another lends content; And what obscur’d in this fair volume lies, Find written in the margent of his eyes. (1.3.80–6) Lady Capulet frames her advice to Juliet in active terms: ‘behold’, ‘read’, ‘find’, ‘examine’, ‘see’. In this way, she instructs Juliet to do with Paris what she will actually end up doing with Romeo. Lady Capulet tries to help her daughter craft love and equity in a potentially loveless and presumably inequitable affair; perhaps she has tried the same thing. The line to which

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the entire speech builds signifies Lady Capulet’s pressing concern: ‘So shall you share all that he doth possess, / By having him, making yourself no less’ (1.4.93–4). If in early modern marriage, a man absorbs his wife – person, possessions and all – Lady Capulet knows the diminishment her daughter is facing. She attempts to revise the narrative she likely has lived by envisioning her daughter as a woman who is made ‘no less’ by her marriage to a man. Further, Lady Capulet’s idea that Juliet will become at least ‘no less’ by marrying and axiomatically giving birth, an association the Nurse makes apparent in her reminder that ‘women grow by men’ (1.3.95), resonates (if grotesquely) with my grandmother’s notion that an anorectic could become ‘no less’ by getting pregnant. It seems the suggestion of maternity as a compensation for, or protection against, a woman’s reduction transcends contextual boundaries. As mentioned in the context of Richard III, maternity ensures at least the temporary taking up of space. While Lady Capulet might feel somewhat invisible during portions of the scene, as she silently observes the Nurse’s maternal memories (‘don’t do something, just stand there’), she may also be sharply reminded of her invisibility in significant snapshots of Juliet’s upbringing. And this might be a peculiar and painful thing for a woman who has risked and survived the dangers of pregnancy and childbirth to bring a baby safely from her womb into the world. As she cries out later, Lady Capulet has ‘but one, poor one, one poor and loving child’ (4.5.46). And she never completely has even her.

Here in Verona The ‘fair Verona’ (Prologue, 2) Romeo and Juliet defy, and in which they consequently die, is the same one in which Lady Capulet is captive: ‘claustrophobic, stultifyingly formal, hard and predictable’, according to Brian Gibbons.28 It is the same Verona whose streets are unsafe because of the irrepressible eruption of spontaneous ‘civil brawls’ (1.1.87). And it is the same Verona to which the audience’s first exposure is an animated conversation between two agitated servants of the Capulet household, Sampson and Gregory. As he envisions how he will ‘show’ himself a ‘tyrant’ (1.1.20) and triumph over any ‘dog of the house of Montague’ (1.1.7), Sampson declares that he will ‘push Montague’s men from the wall, and thrust his maids to the wall’ (1.1.16–17) since ‘women, being the weaker vessels, are ever thrust to the wall’ (1.1.14–15). He continues, expounding on his plans to ‘be civil with the maids’ by taking their ‘maidenheads’ (1.1.21–2, 24). Sampson punctuates the threat with a penis joke: ‘Me they shall feel while I am able to stand, and ’tis known I am a pretty piece of flesh’ (1.1.27–8). Sampson’s meaning is sometimes tempered by baffling editorial explanations like Gibbons’s ‘amorous assault’29 or, even more ambiguous, David Bevington’s ‘with bawdy suggestion’.30 What Sampson means when he says he will ‘thrust’ Montague’s ‘maids to the wall’ is that he will rape

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them. He fantasizes about his violent domination over ‘the weaker vessels’ and about how they will ‘feel’ his erect ‘piece of flesh’ as long as it can ‘stand’. This is neither ‘amorous’ nor a ‘suggestion’. Verona is dangerous for men and women alike – and its women are particularly vulnerable to sexual violence, the first scene makes clear. To play the scene for its comic potential – portraying a Sampson that is not likely to ‘strike quickly being moved’ (1.1.5), for example, or is anything but a ‘pretty piece of flesh’, his threats seemingly innocuous – makes for an easier introduction to a play frequently billed as an iconic love story, but does so at a cost. As Roxane Gay asserts, ‘humor about sexual violence suggests permissiveness’.31 When it comes to modern performance, how the play treats rhetoric about rape is important to grapple with, even if Sampson and Gregory are joking; as Gay points out, ‘rape humor is designed to remind women that they are still not quite equal’.32 And this seems to be the point at the top of the play. Sampson and Gregory are servants, at the bottom of the power structure in Verona – but as men, they boast, they still have power over women. Moisan claims the dialogue ‘unfolds less as dialogue than as a verbal joust’, an example of how in Verona ‘men talk about women and sex a fair amount’ by using puns.33 He further argues that ‘the abuse of women in this patter lies not in any emotional vehemence Sampson and Gregory display but in their detachment’.34 But Sampson and Gregory are not just talking about ‘women and sex’. And while terming their talk mere ‘patter’ makes it seem less vile, the images themselves are powerful enough to do some damage to women. So is the denial of their ‘vehemence’. Moisan makes an excellent point about the ‘rhetorical rape’ the play’s men ‘perpetrate in seizing on women as tropes’, but the point stops a bit short – ‘sexually violent verbiage’35 about attacking women is an attack on women, all on its own. In a world where the male regulation of female sexuality is a matter of life and death, Sampson’s threats represent more than early modern ‘locker room talk’. Or, perhaps that is precisely what they represent. And that is precisely why acknowledging them as vicious and violent is important, particularly for practitioners producing the play in the current cultural and political climate. Progress eludes Shakespeare’s Verona, as evidenced by a play that begins where it ends – ‘a pair of star-crossed lovers take their life’ (Prologue, 6) – and ends where it begins – ‘For never was a story of more woe / Than this of Juliet and her Romeo’ (5.3.308–9). In many ways, this Verona disallows the resources required to mature to even its more seasoned citizens, let alone its youth. Old men are stuck waging the wars of their past, women who have been mothers since their own adolescence suffer one tragic loss after another, a caretaker responsible for the well-being of her charge facilitates a forbidden marriage and a spiritual leader devises a deception that ends in multiple suicides. And servants threaten to rape women in the streets. Though the world of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet is tumultuous for all its inhabitants, it is particularly perilous for women.

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While boys in Verona seem to have a lot of time on their hands, girls seem to have no time at all. That is, as Coppélia Kahn observes, ‘unlike its sons, Verona’s daughters have, in effect, no adolescence’.36 William Winter writes of Mary Anderson’s highly acclaimed Juliet: ‘The felicity of her artistic method was particularly exhibited in the discriminative skill with which she marked the change from girl to woman.’37 The truth is, in Shakespeare’s Verona, the potential ‘change from girl to woman’ is a bleak prospect. Echoing Paris’s ‘younger than she are happy mothers made’ from the previous scene (1.2.12), ‘here in Verona’, Lady Capulet asserts, ‘ladies of esteem’ are married and bearing babies ‘younger’ than Juliet, who is ‘not fourteen’ (1.3.69–70, 12). Lady Capulet claims that she was as young a mother herself (1.3.72–3). Juliet’s transition from girl to woman as ‘awkward and premature’ is the focus of some productions, as Loehlin notes: In Karin Beier’s 1994 Düsseldorf production, Lady Capulet gave Juliet a pair of high-heeled shoes, which she tried on eagerly but couldn’t walk in; nonetheless, her mother refused to give her old shoes back (Times, 1 November 1994). During Lady Capulet’s speech in the 1995 RSC production, the Nurse removed Juliet’s childish pinafore and dressed her in a more womanly party frock.38 Such images suggest that a Juliet who grows up in Verona will in some way become like her mother. If the prospect of becoming a mother offers a woman some hope of becoming ‘no less’, the potential of becoming a version of one’s own mother – at least in Verona – seems to promise the opposite. Some extratextual versions of Juliet’s potential transformation into her mother show up in the play’s production history. Thomas Davies writes about such an instance at Drury Lane in 1756 in which Juliet was played by the daughter of the celebrated Hannah Pritchard, who found herself, in the words of William Winter, ‘cooperating as Lady Capulet’:39 A remarkable instance of public regard was shewn to this comedian when she first brought her daughter on the stage. Mrs. Pritchard stooped to play Lady Capulet in Romeo and Juliet, in order to introduce Miss Pritchard, in her attempt to act Juliet; the daughter’s timidity was contrasted by the mother’s apprehensions, which were strongly painted in their looks, and these were incessantly interchanged by stolen glances at each other. This scene of mutual sensibility was so affecting, that many of the audience burst into involuntary tears. This young actress was extremely agreeable, and, in many parts suited to her youth and beauty, was a favourite of the audience. But she did not continue long an actress: a daughter of Mrs. Pritchard might be excused for quitting the stage, when she recollected, that, however indulgent the people were to her performance, she put them in mind of her mother’s great superiority.40

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Like Winter, who says Pritchard is ‘cooperating as Lady Capulet’, Davies is sure to specify that she ‘stooped’ to play the role, ‘in order to introduce Miss Pritchard’ – the implication is that the presence of her mother onstage will help the daughter. Although the ‘extremely agreeable’ Miss Pritchard is ‘a favourite of the audience’, she does ‘not continue long an actress’, resisting expectations that she follow in the footsteps of her mother. Like Juliet, who does ‘not continue long’, while Lady Capulet does, the anecdote provides another instance of a mother who outlives her daughter onstage. In 1829, Fanny Kemble played Juliet, her reluctance to do so resonating with her character’s resistance to grow up to be like her mother. Charles Kemble, Fanny’s father, decided to stage Romeo and Juliet at Covent Garden, an attempt to ‘avoid bankruptcy’ since the theatre was in financial trouble, as Faye E. Dudden notes.41 The production was ‘the ultimate family affair’, according to Catherine Burroughs.42 Charles played Mercutio, and Fanny’s mother, Marie Therese De Camp, came out of retirement to play Lady Capulet. By all accounts, Fanny had been hesitant to perform, and on opening night, ‘at her cue, she was almost literally pushed on, and promptly ran to the shelter of her mother’s arms’.43 Though she started meekly, Fanny Kemble ended up being a smash, even if against her better judgement – ‘she later declared, “My going on the stage was absolutely an act of duty and conformity to the will of my parents”’.44 Again, the mother’s appearance as Lady Capulet is meant to comfort the daughter in her debut as Juliet – and does so, if the anecdote is to be believed, providing a ‘shelter’ to which Kemble ‘promptly’ runs upon her entrance. Kemble echoes Juliet in another way, of course, claiming later that she only began acting as ‘an act of duty and conformity’ to her parents’ ‘will’. She does not say so in gratitude, explaining that it was not ‘the acting itself that is so disagreeable to me, but the public personal exhibition, the violence done (as it seems to me) to womanly dignity and decorum in thus becoming the gaze of every eye and theme of every tongue’.45 Despite her success onstage, Fanny Kemble seems to resent having been ‘pushed on’ in the first place.

’Tis gone, ’tis gone, ’tis gone In the second scene of the play, Paris talks to Capulet about a potential match with Juliet. Capulet insists, however, that his ‘child is yet a stranger in the world’ and not yet ‘ripe to be a bride’ (1.2.8, 11). When the eager suitor retorts, ‘younger than she are happy mothers made’ (1.2.12), Capulet replies, ‘And too soon marr’d are those so early made’ (1.2.13). One implication of Capulet’s response is that he sees his own wife as ruined, damaged by way of her young marriage and maternity. Loehlin observes that in Franco Zeffirelli’s 1969 film, the camera makes such a connection explicit: ‘a quick zoom to a frowning Lady Capulet across the courtyard makes it evident that Capulet is speaking from bitter experience about the bad effects of early

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marriage on young women’.46 Capulet continues, emphasizing to Paris the value of his only daughter: ‘Earth hath swallow’d all my hopes but she; / She is the hopeful lady of my earth’ (1.2.14–15). Missing from the avowal that all of Capulet’s ‘hopes’ are gone except Juliet is his wife (‘marr’d’ as she is). Capulet further reveals his disappointment with and disregard for his wife at the feast when he publicly boasts about his past ‘amorous assaults’, to repurpose Gibbons’s phrase – ‘the day’ when he ‘could tell / A whispering tale in a fair lady’s ear’ that would ‘please’ her. He then wistfully laments, ‘’tis gone, ’tis gone, ’tis gone’ (1.5.21–4). Perhaps something is ‘gone’ for Lady Capulet as well. Indeed, the play’s production history suggests as much – Lady Capulet has been portrayed as attracted to (or sleeping with) Paris sometimes, with Tybalt at others, and frequently as an alcoholic or drug addict. Following the murder of Tybalt, and her vehement reaction to it, Lady Capulet becomes even less visible to her husband as the play moves forward. When in 3.4 Capulet suddenly determines to pledge their daughter to marry Paris in just a few days, Lady Capulet is present, but not consulted. Similarly, when in 4.2 Juliet returns from Friar Laurence and pretends to be penitent, Lady Capulet is silent until her husband impulsively decides to move the wedding to the following morning. She remains speechless through Capulet’s wedding planning frenzy, his harsh name-calling of their daughter and his reconciliation with Juliet upon her repentance. When Juliet appears to go along with the updated schedule, however, Lady Capulet objects, ‘No, not till Thursday. There is time enough’ (4.2.36) – and even then, everyone else onstage completely ignores her. Though she does not contradict her husband again until the Nurse and Juliet have exited, she tries once more to influence his decision: ‘We shall be short in our provision, / ’Tis now near night’ (4.2.37–8). His response is ‘Tush’, he gives her the order to ‘help to deck up’ Juliet, and then he demands that she ‘let’ him ‘alone’ (4.2.39, 41, 42). Even when she does speak, Lady Capulet is swiftly shut up – silence may mean many things not immediately obvious to observers.

Weeping and wailing I experienced another public collapse some twenty years after the one brought on by self-starvation. I was in the middle of an outdoor technical rehearsal for A Midsummer Night’s Dream – it was early June in Arkansas, so the day was hot, but as tech rehearsals go, all was running smoothly. Suddenly a friend came sprinting towards the stage screaming my name, phone in hand. The call was from my husband, sobbing as he struggled to explain that my son’s preschool teacher had been unable to wake him from his nap. He had been rushed to the children’s hospital by ambulance and was currently ‘unresponsive’. My mind raced through the harrowing implications of such a word, ‘unresponsive’: not conscious? not breathing?

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no heartbeat? no brain function? dying? dead? The next thing I recall is lying on the ground crying and gasping for air. I have no idea how that reaction looked or sounded to those observing it, and I have no idea how long it took for me to go from standing to falling to sitting up again. My memory of the collapse is surreal and sluggish. My son suffered what his physician termed a ‘life-altering event’, but he is doing well – vivacious and healthy and extremely responsive, I delight to report. In the months that followed, however, I woke up weeping in the middle of almost every night, the trauma of that moment – and that word, ‘unresponsive’, newly laden with the imagery and agony of the entire experience – devastating me over and over again. In addition to Midsummer, I was also rehearsing Romeo and Juliet at the time, having my second go at Lady Capulet. Once I felt I could return to rehearsal, I found the discovery of Tybalt’s death to be particularly challenging  – not because I could not separate Lady Capulet’s collapse from my own or Tybalt’s body from my son’s, but, conversely, because such boundaries were as apparent as they were absolute. Similarly, finding Juliet dead in her bed the morning of her wedding felt phony (which it is, in fact, as far as the play is concerned). Acting entails fabrication, certainly, but Lady Capulet’s imagined grief – along with all its shock and rage – had somehow been easier to convey authentically before I had faced the possibility of my own heartrending loss. Entirely exposed, I struggled to move past the feelings of absurdity and artificiality that would wash over me as my breakdown over Tybalt’s corpse approached, and then again before entering to encounter Juliet’s lifeless body. I had never so intimately felt the frustration inherent in the Prologue to Henry V, where the Chorus entreats the audience to pardon ‘The flat unraiséd spirits that have dared / On this unworthy scaffold to bring forth / So great an object’.47 The inadequacy of my ‘weeping and wailing’ (3.2.128) on a stage, over healthy, breathing bodies, to ‘bring forth’ the anguish ‘so great an object’ as the fear of losing my son had produced in me was almost unbearable. ‘Life-altering event’, to be sure. To be honest, I never fully conquered this crisis during the production’s run – and, perhaps that taps into a part of Lady Capulet as well (it did in this instance, at least, since I was playing her). My Lady Capulet’s trajectory seemed a surreal and sluggish collapse of its own kind, involuntary and inevitable. Already corpsed from the start – visible yet invisible, ‘made’ yet ‘marr’d’ – I felt each development in the play’s plot as a new form of deprivation. The dead bodies of Tybalt and Juliet represent a change in the nature of Lady Capulet’s losses from deterioration to desolation. That is, to lose parts of oneself is one kind of devastation; to lose loved ones is entirely another. Melanie Jessop played Lady Capulet at Shakespeare’s Globe in 2004, to high acclaim. Lyn Gardner describes Jessop as ‘a cracking and sharply defined Lady Capulet’.48 Paul Taylor similarly praises her ‘excellently conflicted Lady Capulet’, emphasizing especially her ‘emotional depth’.49 In

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the ‘Rehearsal Notes’ she authored for the Globe’s website, Jessop discusses Lady Capulet’s ‘very violent’ reaction to Tybalt’s death: Within two lines, she moves from the shock of seeing him dead to the desire for revenge (III.1) and it’s important to try and imagine why she reacts like this. She’s not just upset, she quickly demands revenge. I think a good explanation is that Tybalt is the only son of Lady Capulet’s brother. We know Lady Capulet herself only has a daughter, Juliet, so Tybalt is the last of the Capulet line. Perhaps at that moment, Tybalt represents something else to Lady Capulet: he’s not just her nephew – he’s also a symbol of her family line, which has now been lost.50 A week later, Jessop comes back to Lady Capulet’s response to the death of her nephew: I keep coming back to the moment in Act III, scene 1, when Lady Capulet’s desire for revenge is overwhelmingly powerful. It seems to be the key to her character. She is a woman of great strength and stature – a woman who is capable of such a response in that situation is neither shallow nor diffident nor vacillating. I’d love to find some humour in this scene too; I think Lady Capulet is incredibly self-absorbed – she’s a tragic heroine in miniature – and some humour might provide an interesting counterbalance to her tragic side.51 Lady Capulet’s response to each death seems to register differently. Early in the rehearsal process, I assumed this meant that the death of my only child would provoke in me something stronger than the death of my nephew. But, despite my desire to make this true, it never quite worked for several reasons. Lady Capulet’s response to Tybalt’s death is textually privileged in a way her reaction to Juliet’s death is not. When she walks in to find Juliet dead, the Nurse has already preceded her, and other vocal mourners quickly follow. Conversely, she is the sole mourner of Tybalt’s corpse: Tybalt, my cousin, O my brother’s child! O Prince, O husband, O, the blood is spill’d Of my dear kinsman. Prince, as thou art true, For blood of ours shed blood of Montague. O cousin, cousin. (3.1.148–52) Full of emotion-filled ‘Os’, Lady Capulet’s cry is structured in a way that her later clamour over Juliet’s corpse is not. There is a logic to this lament: beginning with a recognition of the body and its value (‘my cousin’, ‘my brother’s child’), it moves to pleas for help from the powerful men present (‘O Prince, O husband’), then quickly converts to a demand for justice (‘For

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blood of ours shed blood of Montague’) before circling back to a focus on the body (‘O cousin, cousin’). Tybalt’s death activates Lady Capulet, while Juliet’s death will incapacitate her instead. The notion of revenge on Tybalt’s behalf gives her at least the illusion of agency, evident in her attempts to comfort the weeping Juliet in 3.5: We will have vengeance for it, fear thou not. Then weep no more. I’ll send to one in Mantua, Where that same banish’d runagate doth live, Shall give him such an unaccustom’d dram That he shall soon keep Tybalt company; And then I hope thou wilt be satisfied. (3.5.87–92) Lady Capulet’s rhetoric over what she believes to be the dead body of her child is, on the other hand, messy and muddled. This response is not based on reason, profoundly evident in the helpless panic of lines like ‘O me, O me!’ and ‘Alack the day! She’s dead, she’s dead, she’s dead!’ (4.5.24). She experiences denial in a way that does not occur with Tybalt, as if there may be some hope for Juliet’s survival: ‘Revive, look up, or I will die with thee. / Help, help! Call help!’ (4.5.20–1). And though, as Jessop notes, ‘Lady Capulet’s desire for revenge is overwhelmingly powerful’ when she realizes that the death of Tybalt means the end of ‘her family line’, no act of revenge can mitigate the loss of her ‘but one, poor one, one poor and loving child’ (4.5.46). Lady Capulet is already depleted by the time she finds her daughter dead – when she says ‘I will die with thee’, the tormenting echo of her wish that Juliet ‘were married to her grave’ ringing in her ears, I believe her (3.5.140).

Weep no more What happens for Lady Capulet between her mourning over Tybalt and her mourning over Juliet is a domestic disaster deferred by a spark of hope. In 3.4, Capulet settles an agreement for Juliet’s hand with Paris, without input from Juliet or her mother. When Lady Capulet subsequently tells Juliet to ‘weep no more’ (3.5.88), she may just as easily be speaking to herself. As when early in the play she frames a courtship with Paris as something in which Juliet has agency, Lady Capulet spins her husband’s marital mandate as ‘a sudden day of joy’, arranged by ‘a careful father’ who wishes to alleviate Juliet’s ‘heaviness’ (3.5.107–9). The news that Paris soon ‘shall happily make’ Juliet ‘a joyful bride’ registers as instructive – that is, the mother is directing rather than predicting her daughter’s reaction (3.5.115). ‘Here in Verona’, this is what is expected. Juliet’s defiant response – ‘He shall not make me there a joyful bride’ (3.5.117) – is thus not only a rejection of her father’s decision but also of her mother’s direction. Lady Capulet articulates what

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perhaps worries her the most about such a reply: ‘Here comes your father, tell him so yourself, / And see how he will take it at your hands’ (3.5.124–5). Capulet’s volatility is, it seems, predictable. If Lady Capulet mirrors, in some way, the kind of hyperbolic feminine ideal of cultural pressures that anorexia can produce, Lord Capulet embodies in this scene a magnification of violent and oppressive masculine rhetoric about women. Among the derogatory and destructive names he hurls at his daughter are ‘Mistress minion’ (3.5.151); ‘green-sickness carrion’ (3.5.156); ‘baggage’ (twice, 3.5.156 and 3.5.160); ‘tallow face’ (3.5.157); ‘disobedient wretch’ (3.5.160); ‘hilding’ (3.5.168); ‘wretched puling fool’ (3.5.183); ‘whining mammet’ (3.5.184). Capulet’s diatribe reads like a catalogue of gendered stereotypes. He reminds Juliet that she is not merely obligated to him but, in fact, captive to his will (‘minion’, ‘mammet’). He both sexualizes her (‘hilding’, ‘baggage’) and infantilizes her (‘puling’, ‘whining’). And, significantly, he corpses her (‘carrion’, ‘tallow face’). Capulet even references ‘green-sickness’, a term for chlorosis, for which the OED offers the following definition: ‘a disorder believed to occur almost exclusively in young, virginal women soon after puberty, characterized by a greenish pallor of the skin, cessation or irregularity of menstruation, and weakness, often accompanied by pica or other disturbance of appetite’.52 Though not the same as anorexia, ‘green-sickness’ shares with it some similar symptoms. What seems important about this is not that Capulet is diagnosing Juliet as chlorotic (much less anorexic) but that he uses as an insult a medical condition often associated with ‘weakness’ in ‘young, virginal women’ even as he demands ‘weakness’ from his ‘young, virginal’ (as far as he knows) daughter. In other words, those qualities for which Capulet ruthlessly reprimands Juliet are the same qualities Verona requires of her – the same qualities he requires of her and of her mother. Lady Capulet departs decisively from her husband in this scene, going so far as to admonish his severe threat to ‘drag’ Juliet ‘on a hurdle’ to ‘Saint Peter’s Church’ to marry Paris (3.5.155, 154), along with his name-calling – ‘Fie, Fie, what are you mad?’ (3.5.157). After the Nurse’s interjections are met with hostility, Lady Capulet tries to moderate her husband’s temper, verbally (and possibly physically as well): ‘You are too hot’ (3.5.175). All three women are unsuccessful in their efforts to negotiate with Capulet, and he concludes before exiting: And you be mine I’ll give you to my friend; And you be not, hang! Beg! Starve! Die in the streets! For by my soul I’ll ne’er acknowledge thee, Nor what is mine shall never do thee good. (3.5.191–4) The ultimatum with which he leaves Juliet is, in a sense, the ultimatum all women in Verona (and elsewhere) may feel that they face: either submit to

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the cultural dictates of society – even if they include a kind of enslavement – or ‘Beg! Starve! Die in the streets!’ After the horrific episode in which Capulet terrorizes all of the household’s women, Lady Capulet says to her daughter, ‘Talk not to me, for I’ll not speak a word. / Do as thou wilt, for I have done with thee’ (3.5.202–3). Though this reads as a refusal to acknowledge Juliet’s cry for help, it may also be Lady Capulet’s admission of her own helplessness, as well as a surrender to the conditions of her own constriction. Perhaps her corpsing throughout the play has taught her to ‘not speak a word’ – it has proven ineffective and maybe even dangerous when she does, after all. Perhaps instead of being ‘done with’ Juliet, she recognizes that she is ‘done with’ Juliet, their oppression a shared circumstance, her optimism about Juliet’s future no longer viable – a prophecy that turns out to be true.

My old age Romeo and Juliet provides the perfect opportunity to think about how women are always somehow too young or too old to perform Shakespeare. That Juliet’s age occupies a great deal of critical energy in the play’s production history suggests as much. As the actor playing Lady Capulet may know too well, for women performers of a certain age, Shakespeare is ‘done with’ them alarmingly early. Then, for the rest of their careers, he is done ‘without them’. As Gardner laments, even ‘the few classical roles there are for older women are not safe’, observing that ‘the current directorial trend is for younger Gertrudes and Lady Macbeths, and it’s not uncommon to see Lady Capulet represented as a gymslip mum turned desperate housewife’.53 To be clear, casting Lady Capulet young is a perfectly legitimate choice. If she was Juliet’s ‘mother much upon these years’ that Juliet is ‘still a maid’ (at thirteen years old), as she says, her youth could be quite shocking (1.3.72–3). As Catherine Loomis reminded me, especially if her husband is cast much older, this version of the play has horrifying potential – that is, thinking of Lady Capulet as too young to have babies, resulting in their deaths, is one truly terrible explanation for all those ‘hopes’ that the ‘earth hath swallow’d’ due to Capulet’s greed for a youthful bride (1.2.14).54 Still, Lady Capulet has been considered a role open to women more seasoned than those playing Juliet, perhaps precisely because such roles do not abound. Dame Harriet Walter addresses the issue of ageing in the epilogue to her book about performing Shakespeare’s women, which takes the form of a letter to William Shakespeare. In it, Walter writes, ‘I am now what you would consider a very old woman, and I have felt somewhat starved of your material for the last ten to fifteen years. We seem only to be allowed into your stories as the daughters, mothers, wives or widows of the Main Man.’55 Like Stanley Wells’s observation about the lack of opportunity for ‘actresses who are no longer able to play young women’, Walter’s reference to herself as ‘a

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very old woman’ reflects what may be the most piercing double standard when it comes to performing Shakespeare. The ageing male actor seems to have endured the necessary preparation for iconic roles that require more maturity and experience, but the ageing female actor seems rather to be running an involuntary race to get in all the ‘good’ parts before it’s too late. The scarcity of substantive work for the more mature female performer of Shakespeare registers to Walter as both deprivation and subjugation: she has ‘felt somewhat starved’ and acknowledges only being ‘allowed’ into the plays in relation to ‘the Main Man’. Even being one of those actors who is still ‘able to play young women’ involves a degree of invisibility that may never be fully accessible from the outside. The disappearance of the female actor as she ages is a doom that echoes hauntingly in Lady Capulet’s final line: ‘O me! This sight of death is as a bell / That warns my old age to a sepulchre’ (5.3.205–6). She is as good as dead, in other words. The allusion to Lady Capulet’s ‘sepulchre’ also predicts, in a way, Montague’s plan to erect Juliet’s ‘statue in pure gold’ (5.3.298). Evoking Othello’s desire to preserve Desdemona as ‘smooth as monumental alabaster’ (5.2.5) and Hamlet’s fantasy of his mother as a perpetually mourning stone monument, ‘like Niobe’ (1.2.149), the references to funeral statuary at the end of Romeo and Juliet reiterate the relentless efforts of Shakespeare’s men to turn women into statues. Similarly, in Antony and Cleopatra, Enobarbus’s description of Octavia as ‘holy, cold, and still’ projects the early modern male fantasy of ideal womanhood, as does Menas’s response: ‘who would not have his wife so?’ (2.6.120–1). Indeed. Here, as elsewhere, male narratives about Shakespeare’s statuesque women show up not only in the plays but also in critical responses to them. Russell Jackson’s telling comparison of Lady Capulet to ‘a statue in a square’, for example, and Stanley Wells’s directive to ‘just stand there’ demonstrate how persistent and pervasive is the male tendency to shape Shakespeare’s women out of – or, rather, into – stone. But, unlike statues, of course, women think and feel. And they need to eat. Like those who thought I could stop starving myself if only I had a big slice of pecan pie (or a baby!), who read my deprivation as vanity or insanity (or both), or who may have misinterpreted my silence as desirable (‘who would not want his wife so?’), an easy dismissal of Lady Capulet as an ‘ineffectual mother’ reinforces gendered stereotypes in which the exceptional becomes expected. That girls who become women in Verona are destined to suffer the pressures and pains of invisibility like Lady Capulet does not make it acceptable. That Shakespeare did not write as many roles for maturing women as he wrote for men does not make it impossible to change parts to accommodate female talent. And that male characters (and male critics, as the history suggests) want to turn women into statues does not mean that women want to starve – or aspire to be ‘holy, cold, and still’. If Lady Capulet is always dying in Romeo and Juliet, perhaps so is the female actor portraying her.

NOTES

Preface 1 2

3 4

Tom Stoppard, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead (1967; New York: Grove Press, 1994), 83. William Shakespeare, Hamlet, ed. Ann Thompson and Neil Taylor (London: Bloomsbury Arden Shakespeare, 2016), 1.2.85. All subsequent references to Hamlet will be from this edition and will be cited parenthetically. Roxane Gay, Bad Feminist (New York: Harper Perennial, 2014), 171. Ibid., 172.

Introduction 1

2

3

4

Walter Vandereycken and Ron van Deth, From Fasting Saints to Anorexic Girls: The History of Self-Starvation (London: The Athlone Press, 1994), 77–81. Joan Jacobs Brumberg, Fasting Girls: The History of Anorexia Nervosa (New York: Vintage Books, 2000), 43; Vandereycken and van Deth, From Fasting Saints to Anorexic Girls, 49; See also Caroline Walker Bynum, Holy Feast and Holy Fast: The Religious Significance of Food to Medieval Women (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987). François Citois, A true and admirable historie, of a mayden of Confolens, in the prouince of Poictiers that for the space of three yeeres and more hath liued, and yet doth, vvithout receiuing either meate or drinke. Of whom, his Maiestie in person hath had the view, and, (by his commaund) his best and chiefest phisitians, haue tryed all meanes, to find, whether this fast & abstinence be by deceit or no. In this historie is also discoursed, whether a man may liue many dayes, moneths or yeeres, without receiuing any sustenance. Published by the Kings especiall priuiledge (London: I. Roberts, 1603). John Reynolds, A discourse upon prodigious abstinence occasioned by the twelve moneths fasting of Martha Taylor, the famed Derbyshire damosell: proving that without any miracle, the texture of humane bodies may be so altered, that life may be long continued without the supplies of meat & drink: with an account of the heart, and how far it is interessed in the business of fermentation / by John Reynolds (London: Printed by R. W. for Nevill Simmons.… and for Dorman Newman, 1669).

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NOTES

5 William Shakespeare, ‘Othello’: Revised Edition, ed. E. A. J. Honigmann (London: Bloomsbury Arden Shakespeare, 2016), 2.3.286–7. All other references to this work have been cited parenthetically. 6 Thornton Shirley Graves, The Comedy of Stage Death (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1922), 109. 7 Ibid., 115. 8 Ibid., 118. 9 Ibid., 115. 10 Susan Zimmerman, ‘Duncan’s Corpse’, in A Feminist Companion to Shakespeare (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers, 2000), 320–38, 334. 11 Carol Chillington Rutter, Enter the Body: Women and Representation on Shakespeare’s Stage (London: Routledge, 2001), 2. 12 Ibid., 26. 13 Kirk McElhearn, ‘Interview with Pippa Nixon and Alex Waldmann of the Royal Shakespeare Company’, Kirkville, 20 September 2013, accessed 21 August 2017, http://www.kirkville.com/interview-with-pippa-nixon-and-alexwaldmann-of-the-royal-shakespeare-company/. 14 ‘Pippa Nixon on Four of Her Shakespearean Roles for the RSC’, Theatre Voice, 14 June 2013, accessed 20 August 2017, http://www.theatrevoice.com/audio/ actress-pippa-nixon-on-her-two-shakespearean-roles-for-the-rsc/. 15 Ibid. 16 Terry Riggs, ‘Ophelia’, Tate, February 1998, accessed 27 July 2018, http:// www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/millais-ophelia-n01506. 17 Jill R. Ehnenn, ‘“Strong Traivelling”: Re-Visions of Women’s Subjectivity and Female Labor in the Ballad-Work of Elizabeth Siddal’, Victorian Poetry 52, no. 2 (2014): 251–76, 251. 18 Ibid., 251. 19 Elisabeth Bronfen, Over Her Dead Body: Death, Femininity and the Aesthetic (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1992), 51. 20 Ibid. 21 Rutter, Enter the Body, 53. 22 Ibid., 54. 23 Dame Harriet Walter, ‘Two Loves, or the Eternal Triangle’, in Living with Shakespeare: Essays by Writers, Actors, and Directors, ed. Susannah Carson (New York: Vintage Books, 2013), 389–406, 395. 24 Ibid. 25 ‘Royal Shakespeare Company – King Lear, Act 5 Scene 3 – Stage Scene – NY’, YouTube video, 3:38, from a performance of the Royal Shakespeare Company’s 2010–11 production of King Lear starring Greg Hicks, posted by ‘Royal Shakespeare Company’, 30 June 2011, accessed 23 August 2018, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_MpGb0nJ3eM. 26 William Shakespeare, King Lear, ed. R. A. Foakes (London: Bloomsbury Arden Shakespeare, 1997), 5.3.263. All subsequent references to King Lear will be from this edition and will be cited parenthetically. 27 Rutter, Enter the Body, 4, 5.

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28 Harley Granville-Barker, Prefaces to Shakespeare, vol. 1 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1946), 15. 29 ‘Looking at Hiring Biases by the Numbers’, Equity News 102, no. 2 (Spring 2017): 11, accessed 29 July 2018, https://www.actorsequity.org/news/ EquityNews/Spring2017/en_02_2017.pdf#page=5. 30 Ibid. 31 Ibid. 32 Charlotte Higgins, ‘Women in Theatre: Why Do So Few Make It to the Top?’, The Guardian, 10 December 2012, accessed 28 November 2017, https://www. theguardian.com/stage/2012/dec/10/women-in-theatre-glass-ceiling. 33 Ibid. 34 Terri Power, Shakespeare and Gender in Practice (London: Palgrave, 2016), 3. 35 Dominic Cavendish, ‘The Thought Police’s Rush for Gender Equality on Stage Risks the Death of the Great Male Actor’, The Telegraph, 23 February 2017, accessed 20 August 2017, http://www.telegraph.co.uk/theatre/what-to-see/ thought-polices-rush-gender-equality-stage-risks-death-great/. 36 Ibid. 37 Ibid. 38 Ibid. 39 Ibid. 40 Lyn Gardner, ‘Theatre: Richard III’, The Guardian, 13 June 2003, accessed 28 November 2017, https://www.theguardian.com/stage/2003/jun/13/theatre. artsfeatures1. 41 Ibid. 42 Paul Taylor, ‘Richard III, The Globe, London: Richard woos with a killer’s smile in an all-woman cast’, The Independent, 12 June 2003, accessed 29 November 2017, https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/theatredance/reviews/richard-iii-the-globe-london-108544.html. 43 Ibid. 44 Melissa D. Aaron, ‘“A Queen in a Beard”: A Study of All-Female Shakespeare Companies’, in Shakespeare Re-dressed: Cross-Gender Casting in Contemporary Performance, ed. James C. Bulman (Madison, WI: Farleigh Dickinson University Press, 2008), 150–65, 158. 45 Ibid. 46 Charles Spencer, ‘Sex-change Villain Lacks Frisson of Fear’, The Telegraph, 12 June 2003, accessed 23 August 2017, http://www.telegraph.co.uk/ culture/3596490/Sex-change-villain-lacks-frisson-of-fear.html. 47 Ibid. 48 Charles Spencer, ‘Old Mrs. Lear Is not Every Inch a King’, The Telegraph, 1 March 1997, accessed 25 August 2017, http://www.telegraph.co.uk/ culture/4707784/Old-Mrs-Lear-is-not-every-inch-a-king.html; ‘Julius Caesar, Donmar Warehouse, Review’, The Telegraph, 5 December 2012, accessed 4 December 2017, http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/theatre/theatrereviews/9722122/Julius-Caesar-Donmar-Warehouse-review.html.

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49 John Knox, The First Blast of the Trumpet Against the Monstrous Regiment of Women, ed. Edward Arber (London: The English Scholars Library, 1878 [1558]), Project Gutenberg, accessed 23 August 2018, http://www.gutenberg. org/ebooks/9660. 50 Elizabeth Klett, ‘Re-dressing the Balance: All-Female Shakespeare at the Globe Theatre’, in Shakespeare Re-dressed: Cross-Gender Casting in Contemporary Performance, ed. James C. Bulman (Madison, WI: Farleigh Dickinson University Press, 2008), 166–88, 167. 51 Ibid. 52 Susan Glaspell, ‘Trifles’, in Norton Anthology of Drama: Shorter Second Edition, ed. J. Ellen Gainor, Stanton B. Garner Jr and Martin Puchner (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 2014), 943. 53 With the exception of Richard III (Shakespeare Dallas, 2005, directed by John Davies), all other productions discussed in the book were by Arkansas Shakespeare Theatre: Othello, 2011, directed by David Alford; King Lear, 2013, directed by Rebekah Scallet (Producing Artistic Director); Macbeth, 2009, directed by Matt Chiorini (Founding Producing Artistic Director); Hamlet, 2014, directed by Robert Quinlan; and Romeo and Juliet, 2016, directed by Rebekah Scallet. Founded in 2006, Arkansas Shakespeare Theatre is the only professional Shakespeare festival (and one of only a few professional theatres) in the region. I am a proud member of the professional company’s Artistic Collective (although I am not currently a member of Actors’ Equity Association). 54 Kathleen McLuskie, ‘The Patriarchal Bard: Feminist Criticism and Shakespeare: King Lear and Measure for Measure’, in Political Shakespeare: Essays in Cultural Materialism, 2nd edn, ed. Jonathan Dollimore and Alan Sinfield (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1994), 88–108, 103. 55 Walter, Brutus and Other Heroines: Playing Shakespeare’s Roles for Women (London: Nick Hern Books, 2016), 204. 56 Klett, ‘Re-dressing the Balance’, 178. 57 Ibid. 58 Mary Z. Maher, Actors Talk About Shakespeare (New York: Limelight Editions, 2009). 59 John Russell Brown, ed., The Routledge Companion to Actors’ Shakespeare (London: Routledge, 2012). 60 Nisi Sturgis, interview with the author, 23 August 2017.

Chapter 1 1 Ayanna Thompson, introduction to Othello: Revised Edition, ed. E. A. J. Honigmann (London: Bloomsbury Arden Shakespeare, 2016), 1–116, 68. 2 Clare McManus, ‘The Vere Street Desdemona: Othello and the Theatrical Englishwoman, 1602–1660’, in Women Making Shakespeare: Text, Reception and Performance, ed. Gordon McMullan, Lena Cowen Orlin and Virginia Mason Vaughan (London: Bloomsbury Arden Shakespeare, 2014), 221–31, 222. 3 Ibid., 224.

NOTES

157

4 Henry Jackson, quoted in Lois Potter, Shakespeare in Performance: Othello (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2002), 5. 5 Dympna Callaghan, Woman and Gender in Renaissance Tragedy: A Study of King Lear, Othello, The Duchess of Malfi and The White Devil (Atlantic Highlands: Humanities Press International, 1989), 90. 6 Rutter, Enter the Body, 152. 7 Ibid., 144, 145. 8 Lynda E. Boose, ‘“Let It Be Hid”: The Pornographic Aesthetic of Shakespeare’s Othello’, in Othello: Contemporary Critical Essays, ed. Lena Cowen Orlin (Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), 22–48, 35. 9 Ibid., 27–8. 10 Ibid., 28. 11 Gāmini Salgādo, Eyewitnesses of Shakespeare: First Hand Accounts of Performances 1590–1890 (New York: Harper & Row, 1975), 267. 12 Ibid., 267. 13 Folger Shakespeare Library Scrapbook B.83.1 ‘Othello’. 14 James Earl Jones, ‘The Sun God’, in Living with Shakespeare: Essays by Writers, Actors, and Directors, ed. Susannah Carson (New York: Vintage Books, 2013), 104–40, 107. 15 Folger Shakespeare Library Scrapbook B.7.3 ‘Edwin Booth’. 16 Folger Shakespeare Library Scrapbook B.30.2 ‘Hanford, Charles’. 17 Folger Shakespeare Library Scrapbook B.30.2 ‘Hanford, Charles’. 18 Folger Shakespeare Library Scrapbook B.30.2 ‘Hanford, Charles’. 19 Tallis’s Dramatic Magazine, April, 1851, quoted in Carol Jones Carlisle, Shakespeare from the Greenroom: Actors’ Criticisms of Four Major Tragedies (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1969), 244. 20 Folger Shakespeare Library Scrapbook B.83.1 ‘Othello’. 21 Folger Shakespeare Library Scrapbook B.83.1 ‘Othello’. 22 A. P. Rossiter, Angel with Horns: Fifteen Lectures on Shakespeare, ed. Graham Storey (London: Longman, 1961), 206. 23 A. C. Bradley, ‘Othello’, in Shakespearean Tragedy: Lectures on Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, and Macbeth (London: Penguin Books, 1991), 170. 24 Ibid., 193. 25 Lauren Katz, ‘Review: “Othello” at Shakespeare Theatre Company’, DC Metro Theatre Arts, 2 March 2016, accessed 11 January 2017, http:// dcmetrotheatrearts.com/2016/03/02/othello-at-shakespeare-theatre-company/. 26 Stephen Reid, ‘Desdemona’s Guilt’, American Imago 27, no. 3 (Fall 1970): 245–62. 27 Julian C. Rice, ‘Desdemona Unpinned: Universal Guilt in “Othello”’, Shakespeare Studies 7 (1974): 209–26, 214. 28 Ibid., 219. 29 Antony Sher, ‘Iago’, in Performing Shakespeare’s Tragedies Today: The Actor’s Perspective, ed. Michael Dobson (Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 57–69, 64.

158

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30 See Paul Menzer, ‘Macbeth: An Embarrassment of Witches’, in Anecdotal Shakespeare: A New Performance History (London: Bloomsbury Arden Shakespeare, 2015), 173–211. 31 Ibid., 180. 32 Edward Pechter, Othello and Interpretive Traditions (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2012), 12. 33 Folger Shakespeare Library Scrapbook B.130.10 ‘Theatrical Clippings’. 34 Charles H. Shattuck, Shakespeare on the American Stage: From the Hallams to Edwin Booth (Washington, DC: Folger Shakespeare Library, 1976), 46. 35 Paul Menzer, Anecdotal Shakespeare, 20. 36 Thompson, introduction to Othello: Revised Edition, 42–3. 37 Samuel Pepys, quoted in Lena Cowen Orlin, introduction to Othello: Contemporary Critical Essays (Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), 1. 38 Quoted in Marvin Rosenberg, The Masks of Othello: The Search for the Identity of Othello, Iago, and Desdemona by Three Centuries of Actors and Critics (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1961), 32. 39 Johann Friedrich Schütze, quoted in Werner Habicht, Shakespeare and the German Imagination (Hertford: Stephen Austin and Sons, 1994), 5. 40 Abraham Wright, Commonplace Book, quoted in Gāmini Salgādo, Eyewitnesses of Shakespeare: First Hand Accounts of Performances 1590–1890 (New York: Harper & Row, 1975), 47. 41 Folger Shakespeare Library Scrapbook B.83.1 ‘Othello’. 42 Ibid. 43 Potter, Shakespeare in Performance: Othello, 55. 44 Ellen Terry, quoted in ibid. 45 Darren Tunstall, ‘Patrice Naiambana’, in The Routledge Companion to Actors’ Shakespeare, ed. John Russell Brown (London: Routledge, 2012), 174–86. 46 Potter, Shakespeare in Performance: Othello, 53. 47 Helena Faucit Martin, On Desdemona (Edinburgh: W. Blackwood & Sons, 1881), 52. 48 Ibid. 49 Ibid. 50 Ibid., 90. 51 Ibid. 52 Perhaps more strikingly, in Q (though omitted by many editors), her final words to Othello are ‘O Lord! Lord! Lord!’ (5.2.83). 53 Potter, Shakespeare in Performance: Othello, 50. 54 Francis Gentleman, quoted in Carlisle, Shakespeare from the Greenroom, 240. 55 Michael Billington, ‘Othello’, The Guardian, 20 September 2011, accessed 10 December 2017, https://www.theguardian.com/stage/2011/sep/21/othellocrucible-sheffield-review. 56 Ibid. 57 Martha Ronk, ‘Desdemona’s Self-Presentation’, English Literary Renaissance 35, no. 1 (2005): 52–72, 69n37.

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159

58 Penny Gay, As She Likes It: Shakespeare’s Unruly Women (London: Routledge, 1994), 4. 59 Andrew James Hartley, ‘Sinead Cusack’, in The Routledge Companion to Actors’ Shakespeare (London: Routledge, 2012), 15–26, 18, 16. 60 Peter Stallybrass, ‘Patriarchal 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), 123–42, 141. 61 Ibid. 62 Boose, ‘Let It Be Hid’, 25. 63 John Webster, The White Devil, in English Renaissance Drama: A Norton Anthology, ed. David Bevington, Lars Engle, Katharine Eisaman Maus and Eric Rasmussen (New York: W. W. Norton, 2002), 3.2.93. 64 Jonathan Sawday, The Body Emblazoned: Dissection and the Human Body in Renaissance Culture (London: Routledge, 1995), 48, 53. 65 Ibid., 51. 66 John Donne, ‘Loves Exchange’, quoted in Sawday, The Body Emblazoned, 50. 67 Sawday, The Body Emblazoned, 50–1. 68 Zimmerman, ‘Duncan’s Corpse’, 334. 69 Sarah Fallon, e-mail message to author, 18 April 2017. 70 Farah Karim-Cooper, Cosmetics in Shakespearean and Renaissance Drama (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2006), 174. 71 Zimmerman, ‘Duncan’s Corpse’, 328.

Chapter 2 1 Shakespeare, King Lear, ed. R.A. Foakes 1997 (London: Bloomsbury Arden Shakespeare, 2009), 5.3.270–1. All subsequent references to King Lear will be from this edition and will be cited parenthetically. 2 Portions of this chapter appeared in an earlier version in Shaping Shakespeare for Performance: The Bear Stage edited by Catherine Loomis and Sid Ray Copyright © 2015. Used by permission of Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group. All rights reserved. 3 Ramona Wray, ‘King Lear: Performative Traditions/Interpretive Positions’, in King Lear: A Critical Guide, ed. Andrew Hiscock and Lisa Hopkins (London: Continuum, 2011), 56–77, 61. 4 See Zimmerman, ‘Duncan’s Corpse’, 321–2. 5 John Lyly, Endymion, ed. David Bevington (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1996), 2.1.48–50. 6 Sawday, The Body Emblazoned, 83. 7 René Weis, ‘Introduction: King Lear 1606–2009’, in King Lear: A Critical Guide, ed. Andrew Hiscock and Lisa Hopkins (London: Continuum, 2011), 1–25, 6. 8 Sawday, The Body Emblazoned, 2.

160

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9 David Hillman and Carla Mazzio, The Body in Parts: Fantasies of Corporality in Early Modern Europe (New York: Routledge, 1997), xiv. 10 Ibid. 11 ‘The negotiation between parts and wholes thus became an especially vexed issue,’ ibid., xiii. 12 Charles Spencer, ‘Moved to Tears by a Modern Lear’, The Telegraph, 14 February 2002, accessed 22 August 2018, http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/ theatre/3573193/Moved-to-tears-by-a-modern-Lear.html. 13 Oliver Ford Davies, Playing Lear: An Insider’s Guide from Text to Performance (London: Nick Hern Books Limited, 2003), 3. 14 Ibid. 15 Charles Lamb, ‘On the Tragedies of Shakespeare’, The Reflector (1810), quoted in King Lear: A Critical Guide, ed. Andrew Hiscock and Lisa Hopkins (London: Continuum, 2011), 13. 16 Morris Carnovsky and Peter Sander, ‘The Eye of the Storm: On Playing King Lear’, Shakespeare Quarterly 28, no. 2 (Spring 1977): 144–50, 144. 17 John Lahr, ‘He That Plays the King: Ian McKellen’s Meticulous Theatricality’, The New Yorker, 27 August 2007, accessed 5 August 2016, http://www. newyorker.com/magazine/2007/08/27/he-that-plays-the-king. 18 Laura Barnett, ‘Out of Their Minds: The Actor’s Guide to Playing King Lear’, The Guardian, 12 January 2014, accessed 5 August 2016, https://www. theguardian.com/culture/2014/jan/12/actors-guide-king-lear-simon-russell-beale. 19 Alexander Leggatt, Shakespeare in Performance: King Lear, 2nd edn (Oxford: Manchester University Press, 2004), v. 20 Jonathan Croall, Performing King Lear: Gielgud to Russell Beale (London: Bloomsbury Arden Shakespeare, 2015). 21 Ibid., 76. 22 Ibid. 23 Dominic Cavendish, ‘King Lear, Old Vic, Review: “Glenda Jackson’s Performance Will Be Talked About for Years”’, The Telegraph, 5 November 2016, accessed 5 August 2017, http://www.telegraph.co.uk/theatre/what-to-see/ king-lear-old-vic-review-glenda-jacksons-performance-will-be-tal/. 24 Matt Trueman, ‘London Theatre Review: Glenda Jackson as “King Lear”’, Variety, 8 November 2016, accessed 5 August 2017, http://variety.com/2016/ legit/reviews/king-lear-review-glenda-jackson-1201912375/. 25 Philippa Kelly, ‘The Current State of Thinking on King Lear’, in King Lear: A Critical Guide, ed. Andrew Hiscock and Lisa Hopkins (London: Continuum, 2011), 78–98, 83. 26 Quoted in ibid., 83. 27 Quoted in Leggatt, Shakespeare in Performance: King Lear, 4–5. 28 Peter Brook, The Shifting Point: Theatre, Film, Opera, 1946–1987 (New York: Theatre Communications Group, Inc., 1987), 87, 88. 29 Kenneth Tynan, ‘Kenneth Tynan at the Observer: Paul Scofield and Peter Brook’s King Lear’, The Observer, 11 November 1962, accessed 25 July 2016, The Guardian https://www.theguardian.com/stage/2014/jan/24/kenneth-tynanpaul-scofield-peter-brook-king-lear.

NOTES

30 31 32 33

34

35

36 37

38 39 40

41

42 43 44 45

46

47

48

49

161

Leggatt, Shakespeare in Performance: King Lear, 50. Ibid., 52. Ibid., 13–14. William Hazlitt, Characters of Shakespeare’s Plays (London: C. H. Reynell, 1817), Project Gutenberg, accessed 22 July 2016, https://www.gutenberg.org/ files/5085/5085.txt. Carol Rutter, ‘Eel Pie and Ugly Sisters in King Lear’, in Lear from Study to Stage: Essays in Criticism, ed. James Ogden and Arthur H. Scouten (Madison: Fairleigh Dickinson Press, 1997), 172–225, 179. Edward Dowden, Shakespere: A Critical Study of His Mind and Art (London: Henry S. King & Co., 1875), 263, Google Books, accessed 25 July 2016, https://play.google.com/store/books/details?id=hwUCAAAAYAAJ&rdid=bookhwUCAAAAYAAJ&rdot=1. Ibid., 264. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Coleridge’s Essays and Lectures on Shakespeare and Some Other Old Poets and Dramatists (London: J.M. Dent & Co., 1907), 133, Google Books, accessed 22 July 2016, https://books.google.com/books/about/ Coleridge_s_Essays_Lectures_on_Shakespea.html?id=5-AvAQAAMAAJ. Granville-Barker, Prefaces to Shakespeare, 303, 287, 302. Quoted in Leggatt, Shakespeare in Performance: King Lear, 3. A. C. Bradley, Shakespearean Tragedy, 277; Stanley Cavell, ‘The Avoidance of Love’, in King Lear: A Norton Critical Edition, ed. Grace Ioppolo (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 2008), 243–54, 244–5. Benedict Nightingale, ‘Some Recent Productions’, in Lear from Study to Stage: Essays in Criticism, ed. James Ogden and Arthur Hawley Scouten (Madison: Farleigh Dickinson University Press, 1997), 226–46, 234. Ibid., 233. Ibid., 244. Ibid., 246. Matt Wolf, ‘Review: Glenda Jackson Rivets as King Lear in Her Return to the Stage’, New York Times, 6 November 2016, accessed 5 August 2017, https:// www.nytimes.com/2016/11/07/theatre/review-glenda-jackson-rivets-as-kinglear-in-her-return-to-the-stage.html?_r=0. Matt Trueman, ‘Glenda Jackson as “King Lear”’, Variety, 8 November 2016, accessed 5 August 2017, http://variety.com/2016/legit/reviews/king-lear-reviewglenda-jackson-1201912375. Charles Spencer, ‘King Lear, National Theatre, Review’, The Telegraph, 23 January 2014, accessed 23 August 2018, http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/ theatre/theatre-reviews/10593210/King-Lear-National-Theatre-review.html. Ben Brantley, ‘Howl? Nay, Express His Lighter Purpose’, New York Times, 8 March 2007, accessed 19 July 2016, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/08/ theatre/reviews/08lear.html. Kevin A. Quarmby, ‘Sexing up Goneril: Feminism and Fetishization in Contemporary King Lear Performance’, in Women Making Shakespeare: Text, Reception, Performance, ed. Gordon McMullan et al. (London: Bloomsbury Arden Shakespeare, 1988), 323–33, 326.

162

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50 Ben Brantley, ‘Lear Stripped Bare’, New York Times, 14 September 2007, accessed 19 July 2016, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/14/theatre/ reviews/14lear.html?_r=0. 51 Lesley Kordecki and Karla Koskinen, Re-Visioning Lear’s Daughters: Testing Feminist Criticism and Theory (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 45. 52 See Carol Chillington Rutter on Titus Andronicus, ‘Talking Heads’, in Shakespeare and the Making of Theatre, ed. Stuart Hampton-Reeves and Bridget Escolme (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 102–27, 114. 53 Muriel Cunin, ‘King Lear: Fabric of the Human Body and Anatomy of the World’, in ‘And That’s True Too’: New Essays on King Lear, ed. Francois Laroque, Pierre Iselin and Sophi Alatorre (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2009), 90–103, 91. 54 Michael Flachmann, ‘Acting Shakespeare: A Roundtable Discussion with Artists from the Utah Shakespearean Festival’s 2007 Production of King Lear’, in Journal of the Wooden O Symposium (Cedar City: Southern Utah University Press, 2008), 97–112, 101. 55 Quoted in Leggatt, Shakespeare in Performance: King Lear, 9. 56 Kordecki and Koskinen, Re-Visioning Lear’s Daughters, 142. 57 Hazlitt, Characters of Shakespeare’s Plays. 58 Leggatt, Shakespeare in Performance: King Lear, 14. 59 William Shakespeare, Macbeth, ed. Sandra Clark and Pamela Mason (London: Bloomsbury Arden Shakespeare, 2015), 1.5.11. All subsequent references to this text will be cited parenthetically. 60 Sarah Fallon, e-mail message to author, 12 April 2017. 61 Jasper Rees, ‘Shakespeare’s Most Dysfunctional Family’, The Telegraph, 31 August 2012, accessed 15 April 2017, http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/ theatre/theatre-features/9490313/Shakespeares-most-dysfunctional-family.html. 62 Anna Maxwell Martin and Kate Fleetwood, ‘King Lear: Goneril and Regan’, Stratford-Upon-Avon Theatre Review, accessed 23 August 2018, http:// stratford-upon-avon-theatre.blogspot.com/2015/07/anna-maxwell-martin-katefleetwood-king.html, posted 27 July 2015 by Guy Thornton. 63 Michael Billington, ‘King Lear – Review’, The Guardian, 23 January 2014, accessed 11 November 2017, https://www.theguardian.com/stage/2014/jan/24/ king-lear-olivier-theatre-review. 64 Sarah Werner, ‘Audiences’, in Shakespeare and the Making of Theatre, ed. Stuart Hampton-Reeves and Bridget Escolme (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 165–79, 171. 65 Ibid., 172. 66 Rutter, Enter the Body, 23. 67 Werner, ‘Audiences’, 174. 68 Tom Clayton, ‘“The Injuries That They Themselves Procure”: Justice Poetic and Pragmatic, and Aspects of the Endplay, in King Lear’, in King Lear: New Critical Essays, ed. Jeffrey Kahan (New York: Routledge, 2008), 184–207, 199. 69 Rob Conkie, ‘Entrances and Exits’, in Shakespeare and the Making of Theatre, ed. Stuart Hampton-Reeves and Bridget Escolme (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 32–49, 32.

NOTES

70 71 72 73 74 75 76 77 78 79 80 81 82 83 84 85

86 87 88 89 90 91 92

163

Rutter, Enter the Body, 5. Croall, Performing King Lear, 219. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid., 54. Ibid. Ibid. Gareth Lloyd Evans, ‘The RSC’s King Lear and Macbeth’, Shakespeare Quarterly 28, no. 2 (Spring 1977): 190–5, 192. Croall, Performing King Lear, 54. Ibid., 17. Ibid. See Tzachi Zamir, Double Vision: Moral Philosophy and Shakespearean Drama (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007), 188–9. Ibid., 189. Leggatt, Shakespeare in Performance: King Lear, 14. Croall, Performing King Lear, 194. Michael Billington, ‘King Lear – Review’, The Guardian, 11 September 2012, accessed 1 December 2017, https://www.theguardian.com/stage/2012/sep/12/ king-lear-almeida-review. See Kordecki and Koskinen, Re-Visioning Lear’s Daughters, 18. Ibid., 130. See Rutter, ‘Eel Pie and Ugly Sisters in King Lear’, 175. Ibid. Croall, Performing King Lear, 81. Ibid. On Lear’s ‘intense hatred of strong women’, see Kordecki and Koskinen, ReVisioning Lear’s Daughters, 8–9.

Chapter 3 1 Arkansas Repertory Theatre, director Bob Hupp, 2015. 2 Marianne Custer was the production’s costume designer. Shakespeare, Macbeth, 1.5.58. 3 William Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet, ed. Brian Gibbons (London: Arden Shakespeare, 2006), 1.1.78. All subsequent references to this work have been cited parenthetically. 4 Richard Huggett, The Curse of Macbeth and Other Theatrical Superstitions (Chippenham: Picton Publishing, 1981), 143. 5 Ibid. Huggett claims that the ‘cursed’ play ‘has for four hundred years carried in its wake a truly terrifying trail of disaster and bad luck’ (133). 6 Ibid., 133.

164

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7 Menzer, Anecdotal Shakespeare, 173. 8 Michael David Fox, ‘Like a Poor Player: Audience Emotional Response, Nonrepresentational Performance, and the Staging of Suffering in Macbeth’, in ‘Macbeth’: New Critical Essays, ed. Nick Moschovakis (New York: Routledge, 2015), 208–23, 221. 9 Stephen Greenblatt, introduction to Macbeth in The Norton Shakespeare, ed. Stephen Greenblatt et al. (New York: W. W. Norton, 1997), 2558, 2560. 10 George Foss, What the Author Meant (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1932), 53, 59, quoted in Carlisle, Shakespeare from the Greenroom, 364. 11 John Wilders, ed., Macbeth, Shakespeare in Production Series (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 28. 12 Marvin Carlson, The Haunted Stage: The Theatre as Memory Machine (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2003), 58. 13 Mary Anderson, A Few Memories (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1896), 82–3, quoted in Carlisle, Shakespeare from the Greenroom, 363. 14 Carlisle, Shakespeare from the Greenroom, 395. 15 Wilders, Macbeth, 14; Thomas Davies, Memoirs of the Life of David Garrick, vol. 2 (1808; reis., New York: Benjamin Blom, 1969), 184. 16 Davies, Memoirs, 188. 17 Thomas Davies, quoted in Wilders, Macbeth, 14. 18 William Hazlitt, Criticisms and Dramatic Essays of the English Stage (London: G. Routledge, 1851), 43, Internet Archive, accessed 27 July 2018, http://www. archive.org/details.criticismsanddr01hazlgoog. 19 Wilders, Macbeth, 21. 20 Sarah Siddons, ‘On Playing Lady Macbeth (1834)’, in Macbeth: Norton Critical Edition, 2nd edn, ed. Robert S. Miola (New York: W. W. Norton, 2014), 91–7, 91. 21 Ibid., 94. 22 Wilders, Macbeth, 6. 23 Quoted in Russ McDonald, Look to the Lady: Sarah Siddons, Ellen Terry, and Judi Dench on the Shakespearean Stage (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2005), 38. 24 Wilders, Macbeth, 22. 25 G. J. Bell, ‘Notes on Siddons’s Lady Macbeth (1809)’, in Miola, Macbeth, 97–8, 97. 26 McDonald, Look to the Lady, 94–5. 27 Wilders, Macbeth, 32–3. 28 Carlisle, Shakespeare from the Greenroom, 404. 29 Fanny Kemble, Notes upon Some of Shakespeare’s Plays (1882; New York: AMS Press, 1972), 57. 30 Ibid., 59, 50. 31 Unsigned review, Pall Mall Gazette, 31 December 1888, quoted in McDonald, Look to the Lady, 99. 32 Ellen Terry, quoted in Wilders, Macbeth, 46.

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33 Ellen Terry, MS letter to William Winter, in the Folger Library (undated), quoted in Carlisle, Shakespeare from the Greenroom, 411. 34 Carlisle, Shakespeare from the Greenroom, 412. 35 Folger Shakespeare Library Scrapbook B.130.10 ‘Theatrical Clippings’. 36 Wilders, Macbeth, 55. 37 Ibid., 57. 38 See www.therep.org. 39 Wilders, Macbeth, 60–1. 40 Carol Rutter, Clamorous Voices: Shakespeare’s Women Today (London: Women’s Press, 1988), xi. 41 Sinead Cusack, interview by Rutter, Clamorous Voices, 55. 42 Ibid., xviii. 43 Ibid., 55. 44 Ibid., 60. 45 Ibid., 54. 46 Ibid., 70. 47 Ibid., 61. 48 Ibid., 64. 49 Ibid., 57. 50 Sian Thomas, ‘Lady Macbeth’, in Performing Shakespeare’s Tragedies Today: The Actor’s Perspective, ed. Michael Dobson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 95–105, 96. 51 Ibid. 52 Ibid., 97. 53 Ibid. 54 Ibid. 55 Ibid., 102. 56 Ibid., 99. 57 James E. Murdoch, The Stage: or Recollections of Actors and Acting from an Experience of Fifty Years, a Series of Dramatic Sketches (Philadelphia, PA: J. M. Stoddart, 1880), quoted in Leigh Woods, On Playing Shakespeare: Advice and Commentary from Actors and Actresses of the Past (New York: Greenwood Press, 1991), 55–7. 58 Menzer, Anecdotal Shakespeare, 22. 59 Helen Austin, ‘Arkansas Shakespeare Theatre: Reynolds Performance Hall, June 11–12’, Arkansas Times, 18 June 2009, accessed 10 December 2015, https:// www.arktimes.com/arkansas/arkansas-shakespeare-theatre/Content?oid=949248. 60 Carlisle, Shakespeare from the Greenroom, 413. 61 Wilders, Macbeth, 14, 19, 33. 62 Carlisle, Shakespeare from the Greenroom, 398. 63 Ellen Terry, Four Lectures on Shakespeare (1932), quoted in Woods, On Playing Shakespeare, 125.

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64 Carlisle, Shakespeare from the Greenroom, 424. 65 Phyllis Rackin, Shakespeare and Women (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 121. 66 See Eric Partridge, Shakespeare’s Bawdy: A Literary & Psychological Essay, and a Comprehensive Glossary (London: Routledge, 1947), ‘come’. OED gives 1604 as the first date in print. See Oxford English Dictionary Online, s.v. ‘come’. 67 Harold Bloom, foreword to Living with Shakespeare: Essays by Writers, Actors, and Directors, ed. Susannah Carson (New York: Vintage Books, 2013), vii–xiii, ix. 68 Eve Best, ‘A Star Danced’, in Living with Shakespeare: Essays by Writers, Actors, and Directors, ed. Susannah Carson (New York: Vintage Books, 2013), 377–88, 381. 69 Ibid. 70 Ibid. 71 Ibid. 72 Peter Hall, interview by John Russell Brown, Focus on Macbeth, ed. John Russell Brown (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 2005), 236, 238. 73 74 75 76 77

78 79 80 81 82

83 84 85 86 87 88 89

Ibid., 239. Ibid., 238. Carlisle, Shakespeare from the Greenroom, 325. Ibid., 326, 328. Helena Faucit, On Some of Shakespeare’s Female Characters (Edinburgh: William Blackwood and Sons, 1904), 234–5, quoted in Carlisle, Shakespeare from the Greenroom, 403. Ellen Terry, quoted in McDonald, Look to the Lady, 97. R. A. Foakes, Shakespeare and Violence (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 156. Bradley, Shakespearean Tragedy, 485. Ibid., 486. Nicholas Brooks, quoted in Michael Cordner, ‘“Wrought with Things Forgotten”: Memory and Performance in Editing Macbeth’, in Shakespeare, Memory, and Performance, ed. Peter Holland (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 87–116, 111. Nicholas Rowe, quoted in Pamela Mason, ‘Sunshine in Macbeth’, in Moschovakis, ‘Macbeth’, 342. Mason, ‘Sunshine in Macbeth’, 342. Ibid. Harley Granville-Barker, quoted in Carlisle, Shakespeare from the Greenroom, 414. Karim-Cooper, Cosmetics in Shakespearean and Renaissance Drama, 83. Thomas, ‘Lady Macbeth’, 104. ‘Salvini’s Macbeth’, The Academy, 15 April 1876, quoted in Wilders, Macbeth, 47.

NOTES

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90 Granville-Barker, quoted in Carlisle, Shakespeare from the Greenroom, 419. 91 Callaghan, Woman and Gender in Renaissance Tragedy, 90. 92 Brett Gamboa, ‘Dwelling “in Doubtful Joy”: Macbeth and the Aesthetics of Disappointment’, in ‘Macbeth’: The State of Play, ed. Ann Thompson (London: Bloomsbury Arden Shakespeare, 2014), 31–57, 46. 93 ‘Bernhardt as Lady Macbeth’, New York Times, 5 July 1884, accessed 10 December 2015, https://search-proquest-com.ucark.idm.oclc.org/hnpnewyorktimes/ docview/94211415/7E1FC2E58E764A71PQ/1?accountid=10017, accessed 10 December 2015, ProQuest Historical Newspapers.

Chapter 4 1 Shakespeare, Hamlet, 2.2.189. 2 Carlson, The Haunted Stage, 79. 3 Jude Law, quoted in Luisa Borges, ‘Jude Law’s Hamlet on Broadway’, HuffPost, 24 November 2009, accessed 5 May 2017, http://www. huffingtonpost.com/luisa-borges/jude-laws-emhamletem-on-b_b_299177.html. 4 Stanley Wells, Great Shakespeare Actors: Burbage to Branagh (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 2. 5 Robert Hapgood, ed., Hamlet, Shakespeare in Production Series (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 1. 6 David Warner, quoted in ibid., 3. 7 Carlson, The Haunted Stage, 79. 8 Ibid. 9 Richard Levin, ‘Gertrude’s Elusive Libido and Shakespeare’s Unreliable Narrators’, SEL Studies in English Literature, 1500–1900 48, no. 2 (Spring 2008): 305–26, 318. 10 William Shakespeare, The Winter’s Tale, ed. John Pitcher (London: Bloomsbury Arden Shakespeare, 2010), 3.2.24–5. 11 Tanya Moodie, quoted in David Jays, ‘“She’s Willing to Go to the Frontier”: The Fearless Tanya Moodie’, The Guardian, 16 March 2016, accessed 8 August, 2017, https://www.theguardian.com/stage/2016/mar/16/rsc-tanyamoodie-hamlet-gertrude-royal-shakespeare-theatre. 12 Marvin Rosenberg, The Masks of Hamlet (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1992), 70. 13 Jays, ‘She’s Willing to Go to the Frontier’. 14 Aljean Harmetz, ‘Hamlet Is Young, but Gertrude Is Younger’, New York Times, 10 August 1977, accessed 28 May, 2017, http://www.nytimes.com/1977/08/10/ archives/hamlet-is-young-but-gertrude-is-younger.html. 15 Laurence Olivier, quoted in Samuel Crowl, Screen Adaptations: Shakespeare’s Hamlet; The Relationship Between Text and Film (London: Bloomsbury Arden Shakespeare, 2014), 51.

168

NOTES

16 Imogen Stubbs, ‘Gertrude’, in Michael Dobson, Performing Shakespeare’s Tragedies Today: The Actor’s Perspective (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 29–39, 32. 17 Ibid., 33. 18 Ibid. 19 Wilson Barrett, quoted in Carlisle, Shakespeare from the Greenroom, 118. 20 Rosenberg, Masks of Hamlet, 75. 21 Ibid. 22 Kate Kellaway, ‘Hamlet: Schaubühne Berlin – Review’, The Guardian, 3 December 2011, accessed 10 December 2017, https://www.theguardian.com/ culture/2011/dec/04/schaubuhne-berlin-hamlet-shakespeare-review. 23 Granville-Barker, Prefaces to Shakespeare, 227. 24 Ibid., 226. 25 Ibid., 226–7. 26 Thompson and Taylor, Hamlet, 371. 27 Granville-Barker, Prefaces to Shakespeare, 230, 228. 28 William Shakespeare, ‘Sonnet 30’, in The Norton Shakespeare, 3rd edn, ed. Stephen Greenblatt et al. (New York: W. W. Norton, 2016), line 2. 29 Elizabeth Loftus, quoted in Erika Hayasaki, ‘How Many of Your Memories Are Fake?’, The Atlantic, 18 November 2013, accessed 24 March 2017, https:// www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2013/11/how-many-of-your-memoriesare-fake/281558/. 30 Ibid. 31 James McGaugh, quoted in Hayasaki, ‘How Many’. 32 Barry Siegel, quoted in Hayasaki, ‘How Many’. 33 Janet Adelman, Suffocating Mothers: Fantasies of Maternal Origin in Shakespeare’s Plays, ‘Hamlet’ to ‘The Tempest’ (New York: Routledge, 1992), 13. 34 Rebecca Smith, ‘A Heart Cleft in Twain: The Dilemma of Shakespeare’s Gertrude’, in The Woman’s Part: Feminist Criticism of Shakespeare, eds. Carolyn Ruth Swift Lenz, Gayle Greene and Carol Thomas Neely (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1983), 194–210, 194. 35 Ibid., 207. 36 Rosenberg, The Masks of Hamlet, 70. 37 Ibid., 71. 38 Adelman, Suffocating Mothers, 21. 39 Bernice W. Kliman, ‘Gertrude: Wife, Mother, Widow, Queen’, Hamlet Works, accessed 27 July 2018, http://hamletworks.net/ABOUT/Gertrude-7-16-09.html. 40 Lena Ashwell, quoted in Carlisle, Shakespeare from the Greenroom, 118. 41 Robert Speaight, quoted in Carlisle Shakespeare from the Greenroom, 122. 42 Catherine Loomis, ‘Closing In On Gertrude’, paper presented at the 44th Annual Meeting of the Shakespeare Association of America, New Orleans, LA, 2016. 43 Shakespeare, Othello, 3.3.406.

NOTES

44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54

55 56 57

58 59

60 61

62

63

169

Thompson and Taylor, Hamlet, 436. Stubbs, ‘Gertrude’, 35. Ibid., 36. Ibid., 37. Harmonie Loberg, ‘Queen Gertrude: Monarch, Mother, Murderer’, Atenea 24, no. 1 (June 2004): 59–76, 59. Levin, ‘Gertrude’s Elusive Libido’, 326n17. Ibid., 314. Hanna Scolnicov, ‘Gertrude’s Willow Speech: Word and Film Image’, Literature Film Quarterly 28, no. 2 (April 2000): 101–11, 102. Ibid., 105. Immy Wallenfels, ‘Gertrude as a Character of Intersection in Hamlet’, Journal of the Wooden O Symposium 6 (January 2006): 90–9, 98. Amanda Hadingue, interview by Hayley Bartley, ‘Introducing Amanda Hadingue as Gertrude’, Shakespeare’s Globe, 10 April 2011, accessed 5 May 2017, http://www.shakespearesglobe.com/discovery-space/adopt-an-actor/ archive/gertrude-played-by-amanda-hadingue/introducing-amanda-hadingueas-gertrude. Henry Jackson, quoted in Potter, Introduction to Shakespeare in Performance: Othello, 5. Shakespeare, King Lear, 5.3.229. John Updike, Gertrude and Claudius (New York: Random House Trade Paperbacks, 2001), 195. All other references to this work will be cited parenthetically. Updike, foreword to Gertrude and Claudius. Laura Elena Savu, ‘In Desire’s Grip: Gender, Politics, and Intertextual Games in Updike’s Gertrude and Claudius’, Papers on Language & Literature: A Journal for Scholars and Critics of Language and Literature 39, no. 1 (January 2003): 24. Ibid., 25. Vivien Brodsky, ‘Widows in Late Elizabethan London: Remarriage, Economic Opportunity and Family Orientations’, in The World We Have Gained: Histories of Population and Social Structure, ed. Lloyd Bonfield, Richard M. Smith and Keith Wrightson (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986), 122–54, 125. See also Arthur F. Kinney, introduction to The Duchess of Malfi in Renaissance Drama: An Anthology of Plays and Entertainments, ed. Arthur F. Kinney (1999; repr. Oxford: Blackwell, 2002), 561. Kinney offers numerous examples of these conflicting ideas: Juan Luis Vives’s Instruction for a Christian Woman, which discourages remarriage among widows, is pitted against Protestant writers such as Thomas Becon, William Perkins, William Gouge and Andrew Kingsmill, who stand in favour of a widow’s right to remarry. John Webster, ‘New Characters’, in Thomas Overbury, The Overburian Characters: To Which Is Added, a Wife, ed. W. J. Paylor (1614; Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1936), 70–1. John Webster, The Duchess of Malfi, in English Renaissance Drama: A Norton Anthology, ed. David Bevington, Lars Engle, Katharine Eisaman Maus and

170

64 65 66 67

NOTES

Eric Rasmussen (New York: W. W. Norton, 2002), 1.1.299–300. All other references to The Duchess of Malfi will be from this source and will be cited parenthetically. Thomas Campbell, Life of Mrs. Siddons, vol. 2 (London: Effingham Wilson, 1834), 265. Folger Shakespeare Library Scrapbook B.7.3 ‘Edwin Booth’. Shakespeare, Othello, 5.2.5. Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet, 5.3.298.

Chapter 5 1 William Shakespeare, Richard III, ed. James R. Siemon (London: Arden Shakespeare, 2009), 1.2.242–3. All subsequent references to Richard III will be from this edition and will be cited parenthetically. 2 Siemon, introduction to Richard III, 81. 3 William Hazlitt, ‘A View of the English Stage’, in The Collected Works of William Hazlitt, ed. A. R. Waller and Arnold Glover (London: J. M. Dent, 1903), 182. 4 Antony Sher, Year of the King: An Actor’s Diary and Sketchbook (Pompton Plains, NJ: Limelight Editions, 1985), 233. 5 Ibid., 236. 6 Ibid., 238. 7 Ibid., 239. 8 Ibid., 237. 9 Menzer, Anecdotal Shakespeare, 154, 159. 10 Sher, Year of the King, 237, 236. 11 Ibid., 249. 12 Ibid., 239. 13 Ibid. 14 Ibid., 240. 15 Ibid. 16 Trudi Darby, ‘Trusting the Words: Patsy Rodenburg, Laurence Olivier and the Women of Richard III’, in Women Making Shakespeare: Text, Reception and Performance, ed. Gordon McMullan, Lena Cowen Orlin and Virginia Mason Vaughan (London: Bloomsbury Arden Shakespeare, 2014), 253–62, 258. 17 Ibid., 260. 18 Menzer, Anecdotal Shakespeare, 158. 19 Zamir, Double Vision, 78. 20 Sher, Year of the King, 240. 21 Phoebe Fox, interview, ‘Great Performances: The Hollow Crown; The Wars of the Roses’, Thirteen, 11 December 2016, accessed 27 July 2017, http://www. thirteen.org/13pressroom/press-release/great-performances-hollow-crownwars-roses/cast-interviews/.

NOTES

171

22 William Winter, Shakespeare on the Stage (New York: Moffat, Yard, 1911), 108. 23 Catherine Thorncombe, interview by Sara Reimers, ‘Women in Richard III – Interview with Lazarus Theatre’, Female Arts, 18 March 2014, accessed 27 July 2018, http://femalearts.com/node/1080. 24 Ibid. 25 Phoebe Fox, ‘Great Performances’. 26 Ibid. 27 Ibid. 28 Donald R. Shupe, ‘The Wooing of Lady Anne: A Psychological Inquiry’, Shakespeare Quarterly 29, no. 1 (Winter 1978): 28–36, 33. 29 Ibid. 30 Sher, Year of the King, 236. 31 Marguerite Waller, ‘Usurpation, Seduction, and the Problematics of the Proper: A “Deconstructive,” “Feminist” Rereading of the Seductions of Richard and Anne in Shakespeare’s Richard III’, 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), 159–74, 171. 32 Ibid., 172. 33 Siemon, introduction to Richard III, 152. 34 Waller, ‘Usurpation’, 172. 35 Siemon, introduction to Richard III, 16. 36 Ibid., 16–17. 37 ‘FAQ: What Is Pussyhat Project?’ Pussyhat Project, accessed 9 December 2017, https://www.pussyhatproject.com/faq/. 38 Seema Mehta, ‘How These Los Angeles-born Pink Hats Became a Worldwide Symbol of the Anti-Trump Women’s March’, Los Angeles Times, 15 January 2017, accessed 9 December 2017, http://www.latimes.com/politics/la-pol-capink-hats-womens-march-20170115-story.html. 39 Roxane Gay, Bad Feminist (New York: Harper Perennial, 2014), 129. 40 Ibid., 132. 41 Nina Burleigh, ‘How Donald Trump Rules America’s Garden of Dicks and Sparked the #MeToo Movement’, Newsweek, 9 November 2017, accessed 9 December 2017, http://www.newsweek.com/2017/11/17/me-too-donald-trumpharvey-weinstein-powerful-predators-facing-accusers-704658.html. 42 Ibid. 43 Jia Tolentino, ‘How Men Like Harvey Weinstein Implicate Their Victims in Their Acts’, The New Yorker, 11 October 2017, accessed 9 December 2017, https://www.newyorker.com/culture/jia-tolentino/how-men-like-harveyweinstein-implicate-their-victims-in-their-acts. 44 Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey, ‘Harvey Weinstein Paid Off Sexual Harassment Accusers for Decades’, New York Times, 5 October 2017, accessed 10 December 2017, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/05/us/harvey-weinsteinharassment-allegations.html.

172

NOTES

45 Ibid. 46 Ibid. 47 Burleigh, ‘How Donald Trump Rules America’s Garden of Dicks and Sparked the #MeToo Movement’. 48 Ibid. 49 Ibid. 50 Ibid. 51 Julie Berebitsky, Sex and the Office: A History of Gender, Power, and Desire (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2012), 5. 52 Ibid., 281. 53 Ibid., 288, 295. 54 Ibid., 287. 55 See Siemon’s note on 4.1.74–6, Richard III, 314. 56 Siemon, introduction to Richard III, 18. 57 Stephen Greenblatt, introduction to Richard III in The Norton Shakespeare, 3rd edn, ed. Stephen Greenblatt et al. (New York: W. W. Norton, 2016), 559. 58 Ibid., 560. 59 Melissa Maxwell, e-mail message to author, 26 July 2017. 60 Katharine Goodland, ‘Obsequious Laments: Mourning and Communal Memory in Shakespeare’s Richard III’, in Shakespeare and the Culture of Christianity in Early Modern England, ed. Dennis Taylor and David N. Beauregard (New York: Fordham University Press, 2003), 44–79, 45. 61 Siemon, introduction to Richard III, 18. 62 Goodland, ‘Obsequious Laments’, 56. 63 Quoted in John Fyvie, Tragedy Queens of the Georgian Era (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1909), 206–7. 64 Thomas Campbell, Life of Mrs. Siddons (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1834), 40. 65 Ibid. 66 Goodland, ‘Obsequious Laments’, 45. 67 Zamir, Double Vision, 79. 68 Ibid., 80.

Chapter 6 1 Tzachi Zamir, Acts: Theatre, Philosophy, and the Performing Self (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2014), 199. 2 Ibid., 200. 3 Ibid., 199, 201. 4 Ibid., 207. 5 See Vandereycken and Van Deth, From Fasting Saints to Anorexic Girls, 76. 6 Helen Faucit, quoted in Woods, On Playing Shakespeare, 105–6.

NOTES

173

7 Russell Jackson, Shakespeare at Stratford: ‘Romeo and Juliet’ (London: Arden Shakespeare, 2003), 58. 8 Quoted in ibid. 9 Helen Meany, ‘Romeo and Juliet’, The Guardian, 14 February 2008, accessed 11 December 2017, https://www.theguardian.com/stage/2008/feb/14/theatre. 10 Jeffrey Walker, ‘A Brilliant Romeo and Juliet from Shakespeare Theatre Company (Review)’, DC Theatre Scene, 22 September 2016, accessed 11 December 2017, https://dctheatrescene.com/2016/09/22/brilliant-romeo-julietstc-review/. 11 Ibid. 12 ‘Lady Capulet’, Sparknotes, B&N, accessed 28 August 2017, http://www. sparknotes.com/shakespeare/romeojuliet/characters.html. 13 ‘Lady Capulet: Character Analysis’, Shmoop, accessed 28 August 2017, https:// www.shmoop.com/romeo-and-juliet/lady-capulet.html. 14 ‘Lady Capulet: Character Analysis’, LitCharts, accessed 28 August 2017, http:// www.litcharts.com/lit/romeo-and-juliet/characters/lady-capulet. 15 ‘Lady Capulet’, BBC, accessed 28 August 2017, http://www.bbc.co.uk/ education/guides/zchsyrd/revision/5. 16 ‘Character List: Lady Capulet’, CliffsNotes, accessed 28 August 2017, https:// www.cliffsnotes.com/literature/r/romeo-and-juliet/character-list. 17 1 Kings 3.23–7 (English Standard Version). 18 Jackson, Romeo and Juliet, 69. 19 Stanley Wells, Shakespeare on Page and Stage: Selected Essays, ed. Paul Edmondson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 101. 20 Ibid. 21 Ibid., 98. 22 Ibid., 98–9. 23 James L. Loehlin, ed., Romeo and Juliet, Shakespeare in Production (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 107. 24 Ibid., 110. 25 Dympna Callaghan, ed., ‘Romeo and Juliet’: Texts and Contexts (Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2003), 343. 26 Thomas Moisan, ‘“Now Art Thou What Thou Art”: Or, Being Sociable in Verona; Teaching Gender and Desire in Romeo and Juliet’, in Approaches to Teaching Shakespeare’s ‘Romeo and Juliet’, ed. Maurice Hunt (New York: Modern Language Association of America, 2000), 47–58, 54. 27 J. Karl Franson, ‘“Too Soon marr’d”: Juliet’s Age as Symbol in Romeo and Juliet’, Papers on Language & Literature 32, no. 3 (Summer 1996): 244–62, 248. 28 29 30 31 32

Brian Gibbons, introduction to Romeo and Juliet, 73. Gibbons, Romeo and Juliet, 83. David Bevington, in Callaghan, ‘Romeo and Juliet’: Texts and Contexts, 41. Gay, Bad Feminist, 182. Ibid., 179–80.

174

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33 34 35 36

Moisan, ‘Now Art Thou What Thou Art’, 51. Ibid. Ibid. Coppélia Kahn, ‘Coming of Age in Verona’, in The Woman’s Part: Feminist Criticism of Shakespeare, ed. Carolyn Ruth Swift Lenz, Gayle Green and Carol Thomas Neely (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1983), 171–93, 180. 37 William Winter, Shakespeare on the Stage, 177–8. 38 39 40 41

42

43 44 45 46 47

Loehlin, Romeo and Juliet, 109. Winter, Shakespeare on the Stage, 143. Davies, Memoirs of the Life of David Garrick, 187. Faye E. Dudden, Women in the American Theatre: Actresses and Audiences, 1790–1870 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1994), 31. Catherine Burroughs, ‘The Erotics of Home: Staging Sexual Fantasy in British Women’s Drama’, in Women’s Romantic Theatre and Drama: History, Agency, and Performativity, ed. Lilla Maria Crisafulli and Keir Elam (Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2010), 103–21, 118. Dudden, Women in the American Theatre, 31. Ibid., 31–2. Burroughs, ‘The Erotics of Home’, 118. Loehlin, Romeo and Juliet, 101. William Shakespeare, Henry V, ed. T. W. Craik (London: Arden Shakespeare, 1995), prologue, lines 9–11.

48 Lyn Gardner, ‘Romeo and Juliet’, The Guardian, 21 May 2004, accessed 8 August 2017, https://www.theguardian.com/stage/2004/may/21/theatre. 49 Paul Taylor, ‘Romeo and Juliet, Shakespeare’s Globe, London: Lovers Led a Merry Dance’, The Independent, 26 May 2004, accessed 29 November 2017, http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/theatre-dance/reviews/ romeo-and-juliet-shakespeares-globe-london-564791.html. 50 Melanie Jessop, ‘Lady Capulet Played by Melanie Jessop: Rehearsal Notes 1’, Shakespeare’s Globe, 2 April 2004, accessed 9 August 2017, http://www. shakespearesglobe.com/discovery-space/adopt-an-actor/archive/lady-capuletplayed-by-melanie-jessop/rehearsal-notes-1. 51 Melanie Jessop, ‘Lady Capulet Played by Melanie Jessop: Rehearsal Notes 2’, Shakespeare’s Globe, 9 April 2004, accessed 9 August 2017, http://www. shakespearesglobe.com/discovery-space/adopt-an-actor/archive/lady-capuletplayed-by-melanie-jessop/rehearsal-notes-2. 52 Oxford English Dictionary Online, s.v. ‘chlorosis’, accessed 15 August 2017, http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/32071#eid9539562. 53 Lyn Gardner, ‘What Happened to Great Stage Roles for Older Women?’, The Guardian, 16 March 2009, accessed 1 December 2017, https://www. theguardian.com/stage/theatreblog/2009/mar/16/stage-roles-older-women. 54 Catherine Loomis, e-mail exchange with the author, 30 April 2018. 55 Harriet Walter, Brutus and Other Heroines, 203.

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INDEX

actors and acting 9, 17, 20, 29–30, 46–7, 56–7, 71–76, 78, 112–3 acting while dead 4–5, 7, 61 boy 8, 10–11, 76, 95–6 female 1–2, 8–12, 16, 19, 26, 30, 33, 44–5, 60, 66–7, 70, 72–3, 76, 78, 82, 84, 86, 92, 97, 110, 116, 118, 123, 135, 152 Actors Equity Association (AEA) 9 Adelman, Janet 100–1 age 26, 45, 71, 91–7, 99, 105, 151–2 Alexander, Bill 113–14 Almeida Theatre 43, 58, 63 American Shakespeare Center 38, 57–8 anatomization 15, 37–8, 42, 51, 60, 63 Anderson, Mary 67, 144 anorexia 133–5, 150 Antony and Cleopatra 152 Barrett, Wilson 93 Berebitsky, Julie 126, 128 Best, Eve 78–9 Billington, Michael 34, 58, 63 Bloom, Harold 78 bodies 2, 4–7, 19–22, 26, 38–40, 54, 61, 72, 77, 82–3, 105, 110, 116, 119, 148–9 Boose, Lynda E. 21–2, 24, 37 Booth, Edwin 32, 117 Booth, Junius Brutus 29–30 Bradley, A. C. 28, 34, 48, 81 Bronfen, Elisabeth 6 Brook, Peter 46–7, 51 Brown, Ian 63–4 Callaghan, Dympna 20, 83, 141 Carlisle, Carol Jones 67, 69, 76–7, 93 Carlson, Marvin 66, 87–8

casting 8–12, 16, 64, 71, 76–7, 95, 96–7, 105, 123–4 age 26, 91–2, 95, 151 all-female 8, 10–12, 16 all-male 8, 10–12 gender 9–10, 44–5 Cavendish, Dominic 10, 44–5 corpses/corpsing viii, ix, x, 1, 2, 3–7, 14, 17, 19–20, 26–7, 34, 36, 37–40, 41–2, 60–1, 67, 83, 105, 110, 120, 129, 135–6, 147, 148, 150–1 Coulette, Yvonne 113–14 Covent Garden 26, 32, 145 Croall, Jonathan 44, 62 Cusack, Sinead 35, 70–3 Darby, Trudi 115 Davies, Oliver Ford 43, 62 Davies, Thomas 67, 144–5 death 2, 4–7, 19–21, 27–8, 33–4, 36–41, 60–1, 82–3, 102–5, 134, 147–9, 152 defacement 60, 64 Dench, Judi 13, 49, 61–3 Donne, John 38 Dowden, Edward 48, 50 Downie, Penny 91, 116, 119–20 Drofnah, Marie 27 The Duchess of Malfi 108–10 effacement 2, 60, 64, 105 embodiment 2–4, 12, 13, 26–7, 34–5, 45, 61, 66, 91, 96, 100, 127, 135–6, 150 Endymion 42 erasure 2, 6, 33, 38, 60, 66, 105, 135, 138 Fallon, Sarah 38, 57–8 Faucit, Helen 33, 69, 70, 81, 136

188

INDEX

femininity 6, 21, 35–6, 41, 45, 48, 76, 81 Foss, George R. 66, 68, 70, 74, 79–80 Fox, Phoebe 116, 118–19 Gale, Minna 27, 40, 110 Gamboa, Brett 83 Gardner, Lyn 10–11, 147, 151 Garrick, David 67, 81, 130 Gay, Roxane x, 124, 143 gender x, 2–4, 9–12, 45, 51, 54, 58, 64, 76, 95, 115, 119, 123–5, 150, 152 Gertrude and Claudius (2000) 106–9 ghosts 87, 96, 99, 130–1 Globe Theatre 10, 59, 78, 104, 147–8 Goodland, Katherine 129, 131 Granville-Barker, Harley 8, 12, 48, 54, 82, 83, 95, 97 Graves, Thornton Shirley 3–5, 7 Greenblatt, Stephen 129 grief 97, 99, 109, 129–30, 140, 147–9 Hall, Peter 78–9 Hamlet 1, 3, 4, 6, 15, 44, 85–110, 118, 122, 152 adaptation 6, 106 Claudius 95–6, 100–3, 105–9 Gertrude 1, 15, 85–110, 116 age 91–7 complicity 103–4 conflation with Ophelia 94–5 critical history vs. performance 87 dissociation 103–5 interiority 86–7, 99–100, 104 male power 106–7 perspective 89 politics 105–6 sexuality 87, 93–6, 101–2 Hamlet ix, 5–6, 26, 43, 44, 86–90, 92, 94–110, 122, 152 Laertes 3, 5, 90, 105, 109 Old Hamlet 96, 99, 101, 106–8 Ophelia 1–2, 4–7, 90, 92, 94–5, 102–5, 116, 118 Hare, David 61 Hayasaki, Erika 98 Hazlitt, William 47–8, 55, 67, 73, 78, 112

Healey, Carole 53, 59 Hicks, Greg 7, 74 Higgins, Charlotte 9 Hunter, Kathryn 10–11 hypocrisy 48, 51, 55 identity 60, 100, 104, 121, 129 Jackson, Glenda 44–6, 50 Jackson, Henry 20, 27, 32, 40, 105 Jackson, Russell 136, 138, 152 Jessop, Melanie 147–9 Johnson, Samuel 11–12, 16 Karim-Cooper, Farah 40, 82 Kean, Edmund 66, 112 Kelly, Philippa 45–6 Kemble, Fanny 69, 145 Kemble, John Philip 67–8, 74 King Lear 7, 11, 15, 41–64, 87, 92, 105 Albany 57–60, 116 Cordelia 7, 41–3, 47–8, 51–3, 55, 59–61, 64, 92 Cornwall 54, 56–8, 62 Edgar 55, 58–9 Edmund 47–8, 52, 55–60 Gloucester 47, 53–4, 57, 62 Goneril 42, 46–53, 55–64, 81, 92, 105, 116 King Lear 7, 42–7, 51–3, 63 Regan 15, 41–2, 46–64, 92, 105, 116 Klett, Elizabeth 12, 16 Knox, John 12 Leggatt, Alexander 44, 47, 54, 56, 63 Levin, Richard 89, 103–4 Loehlin, James L. 139, 141, 144–5 Lyly, John 42 Macbeth 8, 15, 29, 65–84 Duncan 79, 81 Lady Macbeth 3, 15, 66–84, 101, 105 agency 73–4 ambition 66–9, 80 audience reception 69 criticism 66–7, 76 duality 67–70 eroticism 77–8

INDEX

femininity 68, 70, 78, 81 physicality 76–7, 81–2 sexuality 66, 70–2, 77–81 sleepwalking 73–4, 82–4 Macbeth 66, 68, 71–2, 76, 79–80, 83 mental illness 78, 84 superstition 65–6, 84 male power 10, 21, 37, 105, 112, 118–27, 143, 150 marriage 25, 27, 31, 56–8, 68, 97, 107–10, 131, 138, 141–2, 145–6 Martin, Helena Faucit. See Faucit, Helen maternity 31–2, 34–5, 94, 108–9, 128–9, 136–40, 142, 144 memory 81, 83, 87–8, 97–100, 113, 128–31 Menken, Adah Isaacs 74–5 Menzer, Paul 29, 30, 65, 75, 113, 116 Millais, John Everett. See Ophelia (1852 painting) misogyny 6, 12, 16–17, 21, 29, 51, 60, 78, 92–3, 105, 115, 124–5, 131 Moisan, Thomas 141, 143 Murdoch, James 74–5 National Theatre 9, 49, 50, 58, 61 Nightingale, Benedict 49 Niobe 99–100, 108–10, 152 Nixon, Pippa 4–6 Oedipus complex 92–3 Olivier, Laurence 45–6, 62, 92–3, 94, 102, 115 Ophelia (1852 painting) 4, 103–6, 118 Othello 3, 14, 19–40, 54, 105, 110, 116, 152 Brabantio 22, 24, 28 Cassio 3, 22–4, 26, 31, 32, 102 Desdemona 3, 14, 19–40, 102, 105, 110, 116, 152, 158 n.52 actors 32–4 and audiences 29–32 beauty 24, 31 and critics 26–9 erasure 33, 38 innocence 28 maternity 34–5 sexuality 22–4, 26

189

skin color 28 victimization 27, 37 virtue 24, 28–9, 37 as whore 20–1, 25, 28–9 Emilia 20–2, 34, 36, 39 Iago 22–5, 27, 29, 32–3, 37, 40, 98, 102 Othello 20, 22–8, 31–4, 37–40, 42, 105, 110, 116, 152 pornography 21–2, 40, 62, 66, 102 Potter, Lois 32–4 pregnancy 6, 31, 128–9, 134, 141–2 Pritchard, Hannah 67–8, 76, 144–5 Richard III 10, 15, 111–31, 142 Duchess of York 113–14, 128–30 Lady Anne 15, 111–12, 114, 116–24, 127–31, 135 victimization 127–8 language 120–3 Margaret 115, 129 Queen Elizabeth 129–30 Richard III 98, 111–13, 115–25, 127–31 Rodenburg, Patsy 115 Romeo and Juliet 8, 15, 135–52 Capulet 8–9, 110, 141, 145–6, 149–50 Gregory 142–3 Juliet 110, 136–42, 144–52 Lady Capulet 3, 8, 15, 135–42, 144–52 agency 141–2 femininity 150 grief 140, 147–51 maternity 136–42 revenge 148–9 visibility 135–6, 142, 146 Nurse 136–42, 144, 146, 148, 150 maternity 138–42 Paris 140–1, 145–6, 149–50 Sampson 142–3 Tybalt 8, 139, 146–9 Romeo and Juliet (1969 film) 145 Rosenberg, Marvin 90, 93–4, 100, 104 Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC) 4, 7, 29, 48–50, 59, 61, 73, 91, 112, 114, 123, 144

190

INDEX

Rutter, Carol Chillington 4, 6, 7, 20–1, 48, 59, 60, 63, 70 Rylance, Mark 11–12 Sawday, Jonathan 38, 42 sex 21–4, 26, 34, 58, 66, 71, 92, 94, 96, 101–2, 107, 122–3, 141, 150 sexism 14, 16–17, 124–5 sexual harassment 90, 124–6 sexual violence 118–19, 125–6, 131, 142–3 sexuality 15, 21–2, 26, 37, 48, 50, 56, 59, 62, 77–9, 87, 96–7, 100, 105, 109, 117–18, 125, 139, 141, 143 Sher, Antony 13–14, 29, 112–14, 116, 119–20, 123–4, 127 Siddons, Sarah 67–9, 71, 73–4, 76, 81, 130 Spencer, Charles 11–12, 16, 43, 50 Stubbs, Imogen 93–4, 103–4

The Taming of the Shrew 121, 123 Terry, Ellen 32, 69–70, 76–7, 81 Thomas, Sian 73–4, 82 Thorncombe, Catherine 118–19 Updike, John 106–9 violence 6, 27, 29–31, 35–6, 48, 54, 62, 72, 118–19, 124, 126, 131, 143, 145. See also sex, sexual violence voyeurism 5, 19, 21, 40 Walter, Dame Harriet 6, 13–14, 16–17, 151–2 Webster, John 37, 108–9 Weinstein, Harvey 125–6 Wells, Stanley 88, 138–9, 151–2 The White Devil 37 The Winter’s Tale 89, 110