Shakespeare/Adaptation/Modern Drama: Essays in Honour of Jill Levenson 9781442689916

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SHAKESPEARE / ADAPTATION / MODERN DRAMA ESSAYS IN HONOUR OF JILL L. LEVENSON

A quiet moment in the office, December 2010. Photo by Sean Robertson.

EDITED BY RANDALL MARTIN AND KATHERINE SCHEIL

Shakespeare / Adaptation / Modern Drama Essays in Honour of Jill L. Levenson

UNIV E R S I T Y O F TO RO N TO P RE SS Toronto Buffalo London

© University of Toronto Press 2011 Toronto Buffalo London www.utppublishing.com Printed in Canada ISBN 978-1-4426-4174-7 (cloth)

Printed on acid-free, 100% post-consumer recycled paper with vegetable-based inks.

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication Shakespeare/adaptation/modern drama : essays in honour of Jill L. Levenson / edited by Randall Martin and Katherine Scheil. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-4426-4174-7 1. Shakespeare, William, 1564–1616 – Adaptations – History and criticism. 2. Drama – 20th century – History and criticism. I. Martin, Randall, 1958– II. Scheil, Katherine West, 1966– PR2880.A1S53 2011

822.3′3

C2011-902769-0

This book has been published with the help of a grant from the Canadian Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences, through the Aid to Scholarly Publications Program, using funds provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial assistance to its publishing program of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council.

University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund for its publishing activities.

Contents

Acknowledgments vii Notes on Contributors ix Introduction 3 randall martin and katherine scheil PART I. Shakespeare and Modern Drama 1 Unwinding Coriolanus: Osborne, Grass, and Brecht peter holland

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2 Three Men in a Boat: Stoppard, Beckett, and the Ghost of Arnold Geulincx 48 hersh zeifman 3 West Side Story and the Vestiges of Theatrical Liberalism andrea most

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4 Staging Shakespeare for ‘Live’ Performance in The Eyre Affair and Stage Beauty 76 margaret jane kidnie 5 Macbeth and Modern Politics john h. astington

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Contents

6 Shakespeare as Memoir katherine scheil

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7 ‘Bold, but Seemingly Marketable’: The 2007 Stratford Ontario Merchant 125 robert ormsby PART II. Shakespeare 8 ‘To gain the language, ’tis needful that the most immodest word be looked upon and learnt’: Editing the Bawdy in Henry IV, Part Two 145 james c. bulman 9 Extremes of Passion stanley wells

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10 Shakespeare and the Indifference of Nature alexander leggatt

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11 Pauline Cartography, Missionary Nationalism, and The Tempest randall martin 12 Lear’s Conversation with the Philosopher hanna scolnicov

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PART III. Modern Drama 13 An Experiment in Teaching: Pygmalion, My Fair Lady, and the Pursuit of Happiness 235 alan ackerman 14 ‘The Going to Pieces of T. Lawrence Shannon’: Notes on Tennessee Williams’s Drafts of The Night of the Iguana (1961) 257 brian parker 15 ‘How do you play this game?’: Nonsensical Language Games in Shaw, Coward, and Pinter 276 rebecca s. cameron

Contents

Afterword: A Tapestry of Thanks: Reflections on the Work of Jill L. Levenson 000 jane freeman Jill L. Levenson’s Publications Index

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Acknowledgments

It is our privilege to assemble a collection of essays that pays homage to Jill Levenson’s lifetime of exceptional scholarship, mentoring, and academic leadership. Our personal gratitude to her runs deep. Katherine worked with Jill as a graduate student at the University of Toronto, and Randall was an undergraduate of hers there. Since then Jill has been an unstinting supporter and friend to each of us, and we know our experience is shared by many other former students. Editing Shakespeare / Adaptation / Modern Drama has therefore been a labour of love, but it has also been a genuine pleasure thanks to our superb contributors from around the world. We are very grateful for their innovative research and timely diligence, which testifies to their own respect and affection for Jill. In addition to their essays, contributions to this volume include appreciations and reminiscences from a wider body of colleagues and students, whose personal admiration for Jill and her achievements is captured in the volume’s Afterword. We would like to thank Richard Ratzlaff, our commissioning editor at University of Toronto Press, for his enthusiastic encouragement, support, and expert guidance at all stages of the production of this book. And we are grateful to UTP’s two anonymous readers for suggesting valuable improvements to the introduction and individual essays. For very generous financial support, we would like to thank the following: Derek Allen, dean of Arts, Trinity College, University of Toronto; Brian Corman, professor and dean, School of Graduate Studies and vice-provost for Graduate Education, University of Toronto; Alan Bewell, professor and chair, Department of English, University of Toronto; and the Faculty of Arts, University of New Brunswick, for underwriting part of the cost of reproduction and permission fees.

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Acknowledgments

Unless otherwise noted, references are to William Shakespeare: The Complete Works, ed. Stanley Wells, Gary Taylor, John Jowett, and William Montgomery (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986). RM and KS 30 September 2010

Notes on Contributors

Alan Ackerman is author of Just Words: Lillian Hellman, Mary McCarthy, and the Failure of Public Conversation in America (Yale University Press, forthcoming), The Portable Theater: American Literature and the Nineteenth Century Stage ( Johns Hopkins University Press), and editor of the journal Modern Drama. He teaches in the English Department of the University of Toronto. John H. Astington is professor of English and drama at the University of Toronto, and is a specialist in Shakespeare, his contemporaries, and the early modern stage. His chief publications include English Court Theatre 1558–1642 (1999) and Actors and Acting in Shakespeare’s Time (2010). He succeeded Jill Levenson as editor of the journal Modern Drama in 1986, a position that she had made dauntingly eminent. James C. Bulman is professor of English at Allegheny College. General editor of the Shakespeare in Performance series for Manchester University Press, he has published several books including Shakespeare, Theory, and Performance and, most recently, Shakespeare Re-Dressed. He currently is editing Henry IV, Part Two for the Arden Shakespeare. Rebecca S. Cameron is an associate professor at DePaul University, where she teaches modern British literature. She has published several articles on modern drama and has collaborated on the development of an extensive digital resource in women’s literary history, Orlando: Women’s Writing in the British Isles from the Beginnings to the Present. Jane Freeman is a faculty member in the University of Toronto’s School

xii Notes on Contributors

of Graduate Studies and a member of the Stratford Shakespeare Festival’s Board of Governors. She completed her PhD thesis on Shakespeare’s use of classical rhetoric under the supervision of Jill Levenson. Peter Holland is associate dean for the Arts and McMeel Family Professor in Shakespeare Studies at the University of Notre Dame. He is editor of Shakespeare Survey and co-editor (with Stanley Wells) of Oxford Shakespeare Topics and (with Adrian Poole) of Great Shakespeareans. He is completing the Arden 3rd series edition of Coriolanus. Margaret Jane Kidnie is professor of English at the University of Western Ontario, and author of Shakespeare and the Problem of Adaptation (2009). She has edited early modern drama and prose, co-edited a collection of essays called Textual Performances: The Modern Reproduction of Shakespeare’s Drama (2004), and published various articles on Shakespearean performance. She is currently editing A Woman Killed with Kindness for Arden Early Modern Drama. Alexander Leggatt is professor emeritus of English at the University of Toronto. He has published extensively on English drama, mostly on the work of Shakespeare and his contemporaries. His books include Shakespeare’s Comedy of Love (1974) and Shakespeare’s Tragedies: Violation and Identity (2005). Randall Martin is professor of English at the University of New Brunswick. He has edited Henry VI, Part Three for the Oxford Shakespeare (2001) and The Merchant of Venice with Peter Lichtenfels for Applause Theatre Books (2001), and his monograph Women, Murder, and Equity in Early Modern England was published by Routledge in 2007. He is currently writing a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada– supported book on Shakespeare and Paul. Andrea Most is an associate professor of American literature and Jewish studies in the Department of English at the University of Toronto. Her book Making Americans: Jews and the Broadway Musical (Harvard University Press, 2004) won the 2005 Kurt Weill Prize for distinguished scholarship on musical theatre. She is currently at work on Theatrical Liberalism, a book-length study on Jews and popular entertainment in America. Robert Ormsby teaches Shakespeare and early modern drama in the

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English Department at Memorial University of Newfoundland. He writes on the performance of early modern drama and is currently completing a performance history of Coriolanus for Manchester University Press. Brian Parker is professor emeritus at the University of Toronto where he served as founding director of the Graduate Drama Centre, director of graduate English studies, and dean of Arts and vice-provost of Trinity College. Since retirement he has researched the manuscripts of Tennessee Williams with fellowships from the Fulbright and Mellon Foundations, B.S.A., and SSHRC. Katherine Scheil is associate professor of English at the University of Minnesota and author of The Taste of the Town: Shakespearian Comedy and the Early Eighteenth-Century Theater. Her book on women readers of Shakespeare in America will come out in 2012 and she is beginning a new project on the afterlife of Anne Hathaway. Hanna Scolnicov is associate professor in theatre studies at Tel-Aviv University. She is the author of Experiments in Stage Satire and Woman’s Theatrical Space, and has co-edited The Play Out of Context and Reading Plays. Currently, she is preparing an edition of Chagall’s Tempest and a study of Harold Pinter’s experimental plays. Stanley Wells is chairman of the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust, professor emeritus of the University of Birmingham, and general editor of the Oxford and Penguin editions of Shakespeare. His recent books include Shakespeare: For All Time, Shakespeare & Co., and Shakespeare, Sex, and Love. Hersh Zeifman, professor emeritus of English and theatre at York University, Toronto, has published widely on Beckett and on contemporary British and American drama. Formerly president of the International Samuel Beckett Society, co-editor of the journal Modern Drama, and script reader for London’s Royal National Theatre, he is the editor of Contemporary British Drama, 1970–90 (Macmillan) and David Hare: A Casebook (Routledge).

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SHAKESPEARE / ADAPTATION / MODERN DRAMA

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Introduction randall martin and katherine scheil

Separated by more than three centuries, Shakespeare and modern drama may seem odd bedfellows – an early modern English dramatist who wrote popular entertainment for an all-male company and mixed London audiences, and post-romantic playwrights from various national performance traditions experimenting with modernism, existentialism, and other varieties of self-consciously intellectual Western theatre. Jill Levenson is among a small group of scholars whose work has contributed substantially to our understanding of both fields, and in a forthcoming study she brings their encounters into new critical dialogue. For while artistic and cultural relationships between Shakespeare and modern drama have been intense and fruitful from the latter’s beginnings in the mid-nineteenth century, their connections have yet to be extensively recognized or investigated.1 Levenson maps their intersections from two coordinates. Modern drama’s range is defined by chronology and genre, beginning with foundational European playwrights such as Ibsen, Strindberg, Chekhov, and Shaw and continuing to the present day in stage works from around the world. Roughly, this sphere of activity corresponds to nationalist, modernist, postmodernist, and other forms of avant-garde and political theatre written by male and female Western and non-Western playwrights. The range covered by ‘Shakespeare’ is larger, reaching back to the early modern period and now stretching far beyond the traditional stage. In addition to dramatic forms it includes an expanding array of innovative genres and performance media, as well as audience interactions in high and popular cultural modes, all propelled by globalized agents of production and reception. These asymmetrical but overlapping spheres have created a mega-field of intertextual relations, materially localized on the one hand and interculturally hyperperformative on the other.2

4 Randall Martin and Katherine Scheil

Implicit in the creative dynamic of Shakespeare and modern drama as both individually coordinating and mutually intersecting fields, as Levenson further observes, is the process of adaptation. First examined by Ruby Cohn in her ground-breaking study, Modern Shakespeare Offshoots (1976), this critical idiom has attracted increasing interest in Shakespeare studies as well as broader literary criticism. It provides an appropriately flexible model for mapping the complex epiphenomenal and multi-temporal relationships between Shakespeare and modern drama examined by many essays in this volume, which aims overall to honour Jill Levenson’s scholarly achievements across both fields. As recently defined by literary and cultural theorists, adaptation seeks to situate any re-creative work in relation to changing social contexts and disciplinary boundaries. Yet as a concept it remains reflexively open to testing and re-evaluation in the light of past, present, and future adaptations and their scholarly interpreters. The collaborative status of any playwright’s work also allows adaptation to establish common ground for the essays presented here that are oriented separately to the spheres of either Shakespeare or modern drama. The Shakespeare of our title therefore represents neither a fixed nor an exclusive starting point for appraising relationships with modern dramatic and other art forms discussed in this volume. Rather, it is an adaptive subject-in-process, continually reshaped by new discourses of creative and academic (re)discovery such as those exemplified and inspired by Jill Levenson’s ongoing research. Theorizing the Adaptative Text: To Be Continued The fifteen essays by international scholars in this collection contribute to the historical and contemporary discursive relationships that partially constitute both Shakespeare and modern drama as adaptive fields, as Cohn and Levenson have recognized. Our contributors’ arguments may gain greater purchase in this respect by being situated within the wider taxonomy of adaptation, recently explored by theorists such as Julie Sanders and Linda Hutcheon. In Adaptation and Appropriation (2006) and A Theory of Adaptation (2006), respectively, Sanders and Hutcheon substantially revalue adaptation as a condition and product of dialogic intertextuality.3 This postmodern hermeneutic proposes that source works, or what Gérard Genette calls hypotexts (literally ‘under-texts’), interweave in openly negotiated, anti-linear, and authorially dissipating ways with adaptive texts, or what Genette calls hypertexts (literally ‘overtexts’ or ‘excessive texts’). Sanders and Hutcheon accordingly define

Introduction

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adaptation as a contextually oriented process of (re)creative interpretation that encompasses formal transformation from genre to genre and intercultural reinterpretation by locally situated but globally networked writers and readers. These kinds of relationships contrast with more traditional deferential practices of citation, allusion, or echoing, in which the adaptive text is implicitly judged – above all in the case of works related to Shakespeare – to be of lesser cultural value compared to the original source. A transcultural model of adaptation raises fascinating questions about authorial indebtedness and fidelity, intellectual property rights, and resistance to the conventional reflex of depreciating adaptive texts as derivative hybrids. Sanders partially departs from Hutcheon in positioning the related term ‘appropriation,’ often used interchangeably with ‘adaptation,’ as a subset of the latter. Her leading criterion is again formal distance from the source text, with appropriation representing a ‘more decisive journey away from the informing source into a wholly new cultural product and domain.’4 But she also distinguishes appropriations by their encoding of writers’ more self-consciously ethical or political motives. These move the adaptive work closer to what feminist poet and theorist Adrienne Rich calls ‘re-visioning,’ or the deliberate ‘writing back’ against the source text to break with and challenge its ideological assumptions.5 Essays in the present volume by Alan Ackerman on Lerner and Loewe’s My Fair Lady; John H. Astington on House of Cards by Michael Dobbs and Andrew Davies; Peter Holland on Brecht’s, Grass’s, and Osborne’s versions of Coriolanus; Margaret Jane Kidnie on Richard Eyre’s Stage Beauty; and Andrea Most on Bernstein and Sondheim’s West Side Story illustrate the varying levels of oppositional commitment that characterize appropriation, as well as the agents of reception that valorize it. They also measure the paradoxically high degree of subjective agency implied by Sanders’s (but not necessarily other theorists’) idea of appropriation, which is compatible with the robustly decentring models of adaptation put forward by Martha Tuck Rozett’s Talking Back to Shakespeare (1994) and Christy Desmet and Robert Sawyer’s essay collection, Shakespeare and Appropriation (1999). Hutcheon takes a somewhat different approach by proposing that morally bounded fidelity to an author’s work should give way to an ethically neutral process of individually focused appraisal. She suggests that new respect for adaptations may be found by judging them according to their particular ‘mode of engagement,’ or textually and aesthetically varied means of bodying forth the ‘multilaminated’ adaptive text.

6 Randall Martin and Katherine Scheil

This approach prioritizes personal creativity and imagination as well as technological ingenuity in order to circumvent pejorative associations embedded in terms such as ‘borrowing,’ ‘offshoot,’ or ‘spin-off.’ Mediumspecific performativity as the ontological condition of adaptation also underpins Hutcheon’s related argument that any adaptation is not merely the transmission of an earlier text in a different form or genre but rather a cultural intervention that heightens the visibility of the interpretive and/or contested dynamic between the source text, the re-created text, and audience responses. In addition to the essays mentioned above, Katherine Scheil’s study of Herman Gollob’s Me & Shakespeare (2002) and Dominic Dromgoole’s Will & Me (2006) and Rebecca S. Cameron’s analysis of linguistic conventions and language games in George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion, Noel Coward’s Hay Fever, and Harold Pinter’s The Birthday Party implicitly examine the degrees of critical reflexivity generated by adaptation across different genres and media. Scheil’s piece also raises acutely searching questions about the degree of ethical neutrality readers may be willing to concede to this aspect of adaptation in the case of Dromgoole’s and Gollob’s self-promoting appropriations of Shakespeare or other writers’ lives. While both Sanders and Hutcheon construct their model of adaptation broadly and open-endedly in relation to virtually any re-creating form of communication, Hutcheon takes a more liberal view of the adapting subject’s ability to fashion both the process and the object of cultural production. On this point her approach may be compared with the groundbreaking collection of Shakespearean adaptations edited by Daniel Fischlin and Mark Fortier, whose introduction to the subject Hutcheon acknowledges. Seeking to dethrone Shakespeare’s status as the pre-eminent artist against which any adaptation of his life or work is valued, Fischlin and Fortier propose a radically levelling alternative. For them adaptation is creative ‘recontextualization’ in a very capacious sense: the reworking of already adapted material in continuously changing historical frameworks (social, institutional, political, canonical, etc.).6 Although the intertextual basis of their definition anticipates Sanders, Hutcheon, and other recent commentators, Fischlin and Fortier also suggest that this ‘historical’ process of reception is temporally compressable as well as diachronically reversible. The dialogic forces of ‘recontextualization’ may play out at the level of daily creative labour, such as writing and performance, and therefore apply to both Shakespeare’s personal acts of writing and any theatrical production of his work.

Introduction

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Fischlin and Fortier’s problematizing of individual creative authorship is captured metaphorically by the emblem of the boat journey that Hersh Zeifman discusses in his essay on Tom Stoppard’s The Invention of Love (1997), the unpublished ‘Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Meet King Lear’ (written in 1964), and Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead (1967) (see below, pp 48–55). The boat image takes the form of a passenger walking eastward along the deck, feeling himself in control of his movements in time and space, while the boat travels westward. Zeifman traces this image to the occasionalist philosopher Arnold Geulincx (1624–69), arguing that Stoppard discovered him through reading Beckett. All three were attracted to the idea of the circumscribed if not delusory nature of the autonomous human will, which, rather than being free to effect action, is really just ‘occasional,’ or merely an apparent effect of synchronically linked events acted out in a sphere of obscure determination by larger material and social forces. Philosophically this concept of intersubjective agency is reminiscent of the way historicizing textual critics have reconceived Shakespearean dramatic authorship. The creation of an early modern play, Stephen Orgel declared in his seminal essay, ‘What Is a Text?’ (1981), was a collaborative process, with the author by no means at the center of the collaboration. The company commissioned the play, usually stipulated the subject, often provided the plot, often parceled it out, scene by scene, to several playwrights. The text thus produced was a working model, which the company then revised [for performance] as appropriate … [T]he text belonged to the company.7

The original theatrical conditions under which Shakespeare worked thus anticipate the model of interrelational agency that fascinated Geulincx, Beckett, and Stoppard. As a resident playwright for the Chamberlain’s and then the King’s Men, Shakespeare served the commercial interests of his company and worked as a habitual interpreter and recreator of derived historical or contemporary material (e.g., Holinshed, Ovid, Plutarch, Montaigne, the Bible; Shakespeare’s method is exemplified in essays by Hanna Scolnicov on King Lear and by Randall Martin on The Tempest, see below, pp 218–31, and 198–217). The ‘original’ Shakespearean texts were also neither fixed nor stable. They consisted of detachable prologues, epilogues, and songs, single actor’s parts, manuscript drafts by one or more writers, fair copies by authors or scribes, and printed texts. The latter underwent further changes by the playwright’s

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theatrical colleagues and publishers in anticipation of being presented before changing public and private audiences in London or the provinces, or of being fashioned into more literary texts.8 ‘A play,’ as Margaret Jane Kidnie observes in Shakespeare and the Problem of Adaptation (2009), and similarly argues in her essay in this volume on The Eyre Affair and Stage Beauty (see below, pp 76–92), ‘for all that it carries the rhetorical and ideological force of an enduring stability, is not an object at all, but rather a dynamic process that evolves over time in response to the needs and sensibilities of its users.’9 As Fischlin and Fortier likewise note, the historical reality of a precopyright period governed by classical theories of re-creative imitation as the measure of artistic and cultural value, rather than an ethos of artistic novelty and private legal ownership, also validates a concept of Shakespeare as an inherently adaptive writer–subject. James C. Bulman, Stanley Wells, and Alexander Leggatt explore three fascinating instances of this self-consciously reflexive process of ‘internal’ adaptation in their respective essays on Shakespeare’s heightening of topical and social allusiveness in the bawdy language of his sequel play, Henry IV, Part Two; Shakespeare’s language of emotional affect in King Lear ; and the playwright’s reworking of the classical archetype of shipwreck as an emblem of the ambiguous relationship between human agency and nature (see below, pp 145–65, 166–82, and 183–97). With the help of modern personal and public records that are lacking for the historical Shakespeare, Brian Parker also documents a fascinating modern example of playwriting as self-adaptation in Tennessee Williams’s The Night of the Iguana (see below, pp 257–75). Parker’s essay positions the prevailing but mediated image of Williams’s play as a redemptive tragicomedy against the historically retrievable idea Williams had of it as an existential tragedy. The latter, arguably ‘re-visionist,’ interpretation is chronologically prior but critically subsequent to the popular one. Parker’s essay thus enacts a scholarly performance upon the received yet semantically dynamic script, explicitly demonstrating its adaptive and relational susceptibility. In Shakespeare’s case, another factor contributing to his negotiability of reception was the fact that his plays were written for and presented to different audiences: in the public theatres, private houses, and the royal court. The adaptive profile of Shakespeare’s author function thus includes diverse original and later productions of his works. Hutcheon notes that ‘in a very real sense, every live staging of a printed play could theoretically be considered an adaptation in its performance.’10 All theatrical productions of the playwright’s work were (and continue to be)

Introduction

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uniquely situated adaptations of his dramatic scripts. Robert Ormsby’s essay on the 2007 Stratford Festival production of The Merchant of Venice (see below, pp 125–42) vividly illustrates this inescapable process of theatrical transformation (which, in the case of The Merchant, includes the notoriously contested reception of past productions) into visual, aural, and physically mediated signs of (re)interpretation.11 The remarkably volatile conditions and opinions that shaped Williams’s textual versioning of what eventually became The Night of the Iguana, or that characterize public debates over modern productions of The Merchant of Venice, also attest to the power of non-specialist readers and audiences as stakeholders in adaptation and patrollers of its semantic and ideological boundaries. Both Hutcheon and Kidnie observe that a theoretically extended definition of adaptation to encompass either the ‘general process of cultural recreation’12 or any individual production raises questions about the term’s pragmatic definition in general culture. Placing greater emphasis on the reciprocal foundation of adaptation, Kidnie argues that, while all Shakespeare productions may be strictly considered performative adaptations in the historical and theoretical senses outlined above, actors and audiences do not commonly understand them as such. As users whose creative endeavours turn the dramatic text into a performance event, they carry into the task a provisionally stable image of its form and meaning shaped by past interpretation and productions. On the basis of this evolving imaginary construction – reminiscent of Benedict Anderson’s idea of national identity as an imagined community13 – audiences judge from production to production whether a performance text’s collective markers have journeyed into a recognizably new cultural product and domain. Modern audiences routinely register productions that retain an acceptable degree of fidelity to the Shakespearean work as the play in performance, a perception that occludes the performance text’s actual signs of adaptation. The often divergent reactions of non-academic and scholarly spectators indicate that efforts to arrive at an inclusive yet analytically stable or precise concept of adaptation remain subject to ongoing redefinition in the light of new theoretical tendencies and fresh research such as that presented by the fifteen contributors to this collection. Despite recent challenges to Shakespearean authority raised by revisionist studies in text, performance, and attribution, Shakespeare remains, paradoxically, an important ‘cultural barometer for the historically contingent process of adaptation’ in other modern art forms and disciplines.14 Juxtaposing the terms ‘Shakespeare,’ ‘adaptation,’ and

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‘modern drama,’ this volume offers numerous pathways into reconsideration of their adaptive relationships across and within each domain. In our tripartite grouping of contributions and our summaries of individual essays in the remainder of this introduction, we have followed Sanders’s and Hutcheon’s model of categorizing adaptations according to medium-specific criteria. Our first group of essays (by Peter Holland, Hersh Zeifman, Andrea Most, Margaret Jane Kidnie, John H. Astington, Katherine Scheil, and Robert Ormsby) primarily concerns modern adaptations of Shakespeare in dramatic form. This is the genre with the longest history of creative intervention for the purposes of tribute, resistance, and/or profit. Our second grouping consists of Shakespeare essays by James C. Bulman, Stanley Wells, Alexander Leggatt, Randall Martin, and Hanna Scolnicov, and the third of modern drama essays by Alan Ackerman, Brian Parker, and Rebecca Cameron. Both these sections illustrate dramatic writing as a practice of manifold reinterpretation and re-creation, while also probing prevailing intertextual paradigms of authorship and production. Modern Shakespeare Adaptations Peter Holland’s essay ‘Unwinding Coriolanus: Osborne, Grass, and Brecht’ underlines a major theme linking all the essays in this section: that the hermeneutic relationship between Shakespeare and modern dramatic adaptations is imaginatively and temporally multidirectional. Holland’s subjects represent the most commonly recognized form of Shakespearean adaptation across dramatic scripts and performances, yet in non-deferential and consciously political works that also qualify as appropriations. In examining the complex relationships of interpretation and rewriting among Brecht’s Coriolan (begun 1950), the dramatic responses of Günter Grass, including The Plebeians Rehearse the Uprising (1966), and John Osborne’s A Place Calling Itself Rome (1973), Holland reveals the dangers of using a conventional account of derivation and variation to isolate the authorial and artistic value of each adaptation in relation to a supposedly stable Shakespearean original. By proceeding in reverse chronological order he argues that each version of Coriolanus is a ‘modality’ or construction of dynamically networked agencies and historical interests. Ontologically, one might say, each modality occupies a space somewhere in between the author’s version and past, present, and future responses of artistic colleagues, performers, and – crucially for Holland – commentators.15 The last group’s personal choice of a

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sequence of events and selection of documentary evidence results in a multiplicity of critical narratives, each one recognizably ‘truthful.’ The charged personal and intertextual relationships among Osborne, Grass, and Brecht also point to another general feature of adaptation touched on by essays in this section. Every ‘re-mediation’ of Shakespeare recesses or foregrounds the semantic and cultural significance of the playwright’s work in critically reflexive patterns. The ‘amendation’ of new meanings back to Shakespeare reminds us of his continuously debated meaning and value – to wit, in the case of Coriolanus, the contested status of heroic authority and traditional political order (which can in turn be traced back to the politically invested narratives of Plutarch, Livy, and other classical historians that Shakespeare reworked). Although selfconsciously oppositional dramatists such as Brecht or Shaw make the point obvious, all modern adaptations throw the ideological priorities of the source text(s) into relief, thus encouraging actors and audiences to rethink the meaning of Shakespeare’s plays over time.16 Awareness of the virtually limitless opportunities for reshaping ‘Shakespeare’ partially explains the unflagging appetite of modern drama and contemporary art forms for the playwright’s work, which, Cleopatra-like, sustains a paradoxical image of apparently ‘universal’ and ‘timeless’ cultural variety and significance. Famous stage adaptations such as Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead exemplify both the appeal and the reinterpretive achievements of this process. In his essay on the play, mentioned above in relation to Geulincx’s image of the boat journey, Hersh Zeifman examines Stoppard’s adaptations of the image in relation to the play’s source text, Hamlet, in order to highlight their contrasting genres of improvisational farce and existential tragedy respectively. Three more essays in this section examine adaptations of Shakespeare through genres and media other than traditional theatre. These more textually or visually extensive mediations raise important questions about what amounts of social capital accrue to either Shakespeare or the adapted text when the playwright’s works are recirculated and recontexualized.17 The Broadway musical, for example, reworks Shakespeare not only generically but also through culturally specific American performance traditions. In ‘West Side Story and the Vestiges of Theatrical Liberalism,’ Andrea Most argues that Leonard Bernstein and others’ 1957 musical adaptation of Romeo and Juliet presents the play’s conventionally defining idea of romantic love ambiguously as a self-authorizing and transcendent social force. Most relates both this outlook and West Side Story’s generic instability as both musical comedy and Shakespearean tragedy

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to growing post–Second World War scepticism about the ideology of theatrical liberalism which had previously dominated American musical theatre. She traces its origins to the hybridizing cultural encounter between immigrant Jews and Protestant American liberalism in the first half of the twentieth century. Drawing on secularized and Americanized versions of certain traditional Jewish attitudes towards public action and communal ethics, theatrical liberalism privileged a performative construction of personal identity above appeals to an authentic or essential self or to individual rights. Most shows how West Side Story juxtaposes these opposing concepts, with its ultimate departure from Shakespeare’s double suicide in Romeo and Juliet ambivalently affirming the idea that theatrical self-fashioning can still be socially transformational. Novels and film adaptations focus additional attention on alternative modes of performativity and affect in non-theatrical media. In ‘Staging Shakespeare for “Live” Performance in The Eyre Affair and Stage Beauty,’ Margaret Jane Kidnie counters recent arguments by Roger Copeland and Philip Auslander critiquing live stage performance as the defining experience of theatre. While acknowledging their claims about the highly mediated nature of much ‘live’ modern performance, Kidnie nonetheless maintains that the spatial and temporal specificity of a performance event creates an ‘idea of presence’ that can be defined as both an effect of and a desire for liveness. Kidnie identifies this kind of theatrical immediacy, paradoxically, in two virtual re-creations of Shakespeare in performance. Jasper’s Fforde’s novel The Eyre Affair describes a single performance of Colley Cibber’s 1699 adaptation of Richard III staged in a provincial English playhouse/movie palace in the mode of weekly midnight screenings of the cult film The Rocky Horror Picture Show, in which spectators perform as both audience and actors. Fforde elides the imaginative and emotional thrill of the first-person narrator with readers who participate imaginatively in Richard III as a live communal event. Similarly, Richard Eyre’s 2004 film, Stage Beauty, imagines the moment in Restoration theatre when a woman first performed Desdemona. Focusing on Othello’s final murder scene, the film interweaves two competing ideas of playing Desdemona ‘authentically’: by a man performing coded theatrical gestures signifying a ‘female death scene,’ and by a woman identifying with the threat of murder through her physical and psychological reactions. This intermingling blurs spectator perceptions both inside and outside the film of whether the murder is being staged or is actually happening. The crossover of audience expectations re-creates the teasingly pleasurable hope that exists during any performance of Othello,

Introduction

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‘that Desdemona, Hermione-like’ might not be killed but ‘brought back to life.’ Stage Beauty satisfies both tragic and comic expectations when the female actor playing Desdemona naturalistically ‘survives’ the character’s death. Kidnie concludes that both Eyre and Fforde generate an overt desire for theatrical presence which operates in more covert and conventionally channelled ways in all live performances. Although Shakespeare rarely writes political history in didactic or allegorical modes, the modern tendency in both mass-media commentary and stage and television drama, as John H. Astington observes, is to treat Shakespearean tragedy as a perpetually authoritative frame of reference for modern abuses of political power. In ‘Macbeth and Modern Politics’ he situates Howard Brenton’s Thirteenth Night (1981) and Michael Dobbs and Andrew Davies’s popular three-part television series, House of Cards (1990–5), in contexts of political transition at the respective beginning and end of Margaret Thatcher’s controversial reign as prime minister (1979–90). In the case of Thatcher’s swift and unsentimental downfall, Astington reminds us of just how closely art and life became intertwined: a House of Commons speech on 13 November 1990 that triggered the final Conservative Party revolt was followed five days later by the first broadcast episode of House of Cards. There Francis Urqhuart, memorably played by the late Royal Shakespeare Company actor Ian Richardson, interwove gestures and attitudes from previous performances as Macbeth and Richard III to portray an ambitious cabinet minister plotting to overthrow Thatcher’s fictional successor. Thatcher herself resigned on 22 November that year, and the series was temporarily suspended because it seemed to resemble too closely a sinister script for the campaign of John Major to replace his former boss. Katherine Scheil examines another popular genre for reshaping Shakespeare which also anticipates the process of self-adaptation that connects essays in our second group. This is the recent literary trend of commemorating Shakespeare through the form of a personal memoir. Scheil notes that this genre constructs a public persona meant to represent and celebrate wider cultural values as much as it fashions personal identities. In the case of Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre director Dominic Dromgoole’s Will & Me (2006), the neo-romantic project of walking from Stratford-upon-Avon to London in order to connect physically and spiritually with the landscape Shakespeare once lived in reveals socially conservative, defensively popular, and characteristically Anglo-Saxon anxieties. In ‘Shakespeare as Memoir,’ Scheil shows how Dromgoole sentimentalizes Shakespeare as fun and accessible precisely because he

14 Randall Martin and Katherine Scheil

can be appropriated in a spirit of laddish anti-intellectual comradery. Physical pain suffered on Dromgoole’s ‘pilgrimage’ becomes a visceral badge of authentic kinship with the playwright. At the same time, his memoir acts as surrogate knowledge for Dromgoole’s lack of theatrical experience when applying for the directorship of Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre. Dromgoole’s double adaptation, of his own life and Shakespeare’s, unconsciously parodies modern practices of personal confession, self-promotion, and credentialism. The guru-Shakespeare whom Herman Gollob constructs in Me & Shakespeare (2002) is equally romantic but more Arnoldesque. For Gollob, the Bard’s writings (here the popular epithet is apt) become a form of sacred writ reminiscent of the family Bible Dromgoole recalls in his memoir. While conventionally affirming Shakespeare’s universalism, Gollob’s memoir also validates his personal change of career and rediscovery of his Jewish faith. The Shakespeare appropriated by both texts is an intersubjectively free-floating entity, shorn of any imaginative obstacles of cultural or historical difference. As we noted earlier, a definition of adaptation based on cultural recreation in varying media and performance contexts carries the possibility that every stage performance is, in some sense, a materially expressive translation of the dramatic text.18 Robert Ormsby’s analysis of the Stratford Festival’s 2007 Merchant of Venice illustrates the adaptive status of any production as a latent cultural reality waiting to be activated. In ‘“Bold, but Seemingly Marketable”: The 2007 Stratford Ontario Merchant,’ Ormsby profiles the Stratford Festival’s contradictory attempts to situate itself as a ‘Canadian Belmont’ where histories of racial and imperial conflict are allegedly reconciled in a Shakespearean spirit of sympathy for the human experience of social exclusion. Ormsby relates such aspirations to an older romantic tradition of attempting to shield Shakespeare from charges of illiberality and anti-Semitism by foregrounding Shylock’s story as a Jewish tragedy (a theatrical practice of recuperation that also unconsciously ‘writes back’ in ways that remind actors and spectators of how un-innocent Shakespeare’s original text really is). This defensive strategy has been updated by a globalized tourist Shakespeare, whereby corporatized interculturalism uses a liberal-humanist veneer to distance the play from post-Holocaust and postcolonial histories of injustice. Ormsby reveals how these attempts at cultural reconciliation fall short in the face of unpredictable audience responses. This production’s contested reception also elided potentially revealing comparisons between the Canadian actor and Oneida Native Thomas Greene and

Introduction

15

his role as Shylock. By sacrificing Greene’s Native identity in favour of a more familiar and, to some degree, now assimilated history of Western anti-Semitism, the production depoliticized local histories of aboriginal oppression and conflicted land claims. Shakespeare Adapting Himself Adaptation encompasses not only formal and cultural transposition of an earlier writer’s source material but also the internal process of interpretive re-creation, as the essays in this section variously illustrate. James C. Bulman charts Shakespeare’s changing use of his historical sources between writing Parts One and Two of Henry IV. In ‘“To gain the language, ’tis needful that the most immodest word be looked upon and learnt”: Editing the Bawdy in Henry IV, Part Two,’ Bulman (editor of the forthcoming Arden 3 Henry IV, Part Two) focuses on the vernacular richness of this sequel play’s scenes of everyday urban and rural life and their relationship to topical social conflicts. Collectively these moments create a counter-history to the chronicle-derived narrative of court politics that dominates Henry IV, Part One. Bulman illustrates the under-realized critical potential of this alternative narrative by examining previous editors’ limited engagements with the play’s rich veins of sexual and vernacular wordplay. Despite the ostensible interest of New Historicist criticism in subversive material culture and social protest from below, timidity towards explicating the demotic language of the Boar’s Head Tavern world and the military satire of the Gloucestershire recruiting scenes has effectively depoliticized much of the play in favour of easy humour and Hal’s self-vindicating succession (or ‘long goodbye,’ as Barbara Hodgdon calls the textual and critical deference towards the prince’s troubling break with Falstaff).19 By making political and social critique the heart of the play rather than the character-focused competition between Hal and his competitors, topical controversy creates a unique identity for Part Two as an adaptive vehicle to engage late 1590s London audiences in vibrant cultural debate. Taking King Lear as an instance, Stanley Wells implicitly combines Bulman’s perception of Shakespeare’s habit of self-adaptation with Kidnie’s focus on multilateral response and re-creation. In ‘Extremes of Passion,’ Wells examines the ways by which Shakespeare writes emotion into his script to enable his characters ‘to speak feelingly’ and generate affective reactions from onstage and offstage listeners. He first shows how Shakespeare converts his professional experience as a dramatic poet into the

16 Randall Martin and Katherine Scheil

formally voiced rhetoric of Lear’s public speeches in the play’s opening scenes. Wells likens the self-consciously premeditated quality of this language to Shakespeare’s experience of writing his script and imagining, but not feeling personally, the emotional conviction of his characters’ lines. From this stylistic benchmark Lear goes on to exhibit four distinct ways that diversify his expression of emotion, which Wells categorizes as stylistic disjunction, disruption, dissociation, and submission. As Lear’s story unfolds, these styles mark a successive divestment of linguistic control comparable to his stripping away of sumptuous clothes and political authority. At the same time they chart an inwardly reflective journey of authentic emotion expressed as a deeply charged but sincerely simple speech that finally positions Lear to die as a ‘fully realized’ albeit deeply suffering human being. Continuing this thread of creative self-adaptation, Alexander Leggatt argues in ‘Shakespeare and the Indifference of Nature’ that the playwright’s view of the relationship between human imagination and nature evolved over the course of his career. This shift is traceable in Shakespeare’s reworking of the ancient archetype of shipwreck, first introduced by Comedy of Errors and Twelfth Night, and reworked in several later romances, beginning with Pericles and ending with The Tempest. Leggatt reminds us that most of Shakespeare’s plays bear evidence of what John F. Danby identified as two competing early modern ideas about nature (Shakespeare’s Doctrine of Nature [1949]): one traditional, in which nature reflects a preternatural connection to natural law and divine providence and is responsive to human needs and conflicts; another in which nature is a purely material and potentially estranging entity, resistant to interpretation in anthropocentric terms, and therefore able to be used by characters such as Richard of Gloucester or Edmond as support for their amoral ambitions. But in Shakespeare’s later plays featuring metaphorical or literal shipwrecks, Leggatt detects a shift towards the second of these views of nature, and a greater openness to the idea of its absolute sovereignty over or indifference to human life, a shift that by implication suggests a more existential view of the human condition. Leggatt’s observation opens up fascinating questions about the origins of this change in perception: Shakespeare’s life experiences? His reading of sceptical natural philosophers such as Montaigne, or deployment of the ancient and early modern Cynic tradition (discussed by Hanna Scolnicov, below, pp 218–31)? Or his awareness of challenges to traditional ideas of natural history by post-Copernican cosmology and New World discoveries of biology, geography, and ethnography?

Introduction

17

One additional possibility lies in the evidence of Shakespeare’s transposition of the shipwreck archetype from biblical as well as classical contexts (most evident, perhaps, in Pericles), with the alternative source text suggesting different epistemological and cultural authorities. In ‘Pauline Cartography, Missionary Nationalism, and The Tempest,’ Randall Martin examines cartographic depictions of the first-century travels of St Paul to explore The Tempest’s relationships with early modern geography’s construction of a new spatialized ideology of missionary conversion. Drawing on Renaissance Bible maps and atlases that encode Paul’s experiences of shipwreck and religious conversion as motivating tropes for proselytizing New World ‘gentiles,’ Martin argues that early modern cartography’s synchronizing of these past and future events created a culturally productive framework for understanding the topicality of The Tempest’s island shipwreck (which references both the Pauline archetype and the 1609 wreck of the Virginia-bound Sea Venture off Bermuda), as well as Caliban’s final ambiguous ‘turn to grace.’ Spectators with interests in the Virginia Company, in particular, would have related such historically interlayered moments to contemporary debates about the potential convertibility of New World peoples that were used to justify American colonization. The last essay in this section touches on themes of both internal and external adaptation. In ‘Lear’s Conversation with the Philosopher,’ Hanna Scolnicov examines Lear’s turn to Poor Tom and the stripping away of his clothes in Act Three, scene four, as a symbolic adoption of subversive cynic philosophy, which emphasized the repudiation of conventional material values and institutional culture in favour of personal self-sufficiency and intellectual freedom. In so far as the cynic’s material divestments were meant to provoke attitudinal change in his listeners, they were performative. This intention connects the analogous moment in King Lear with the Brechtian concept of Gestus, and more generally with modern drama’s desire (illustrated in many of this volume’s essays) to appropriate Shakespeare for a radical alternative politics. Scolnicov’s reading finds theatrical and critical explanations for the apparent failure of Lear’s ‘conversation’ with Tom to develop in any meaningful way, since cynic philosophy was committed to a non-discursive Lebenswelt, or way of living in the world. Figuring this moment as a Gestus also propels its stage energy outward, implicitly positioning the audience as objects of the cynic’s provocations and inviting them to adopt Lear’s exemplary act of divestment imaginatively as a moment of shared existential recognition. From a historical perspective, Scolnicov also discerns unresolved

18 Randall Martin and Katherine Scheil

tensions in this reading between classical and Christian viewpoints that make it stand as a meta-dramatic emblem of the Renaissance humanist tradition, tensions that dramatically anticipate the non-redemptive reversal of fortune and final non-containment of human suffering in Cordelia’s death. Modern Drama Adaptations The essays in this final section suggest that the adaptive mode may be one of the most characteristically generative features that modern drama shares with Shakespeare. In partial contrast to Andrea’s Most’s reading of West Side Story as an ambiguous endorsement of American theatrical liberalism, Alan Ackerman argues that My Fair Lady, performed on Broadway the year before, represents this ideology positively in appropriating George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion. In ‘An Experiment in Teaching: Pygmalion, My Fair Lady, and the Pursuit of Happiness,’ Ackerman contextualizes Lerner and Loewe’s 1956 adaptation of Shaw’s 1914 play as a series of linguistic, musical, pedagogical, and social transformations aimed at celebrating the post–Second World War ideology of American liberalism. With the musical’s shift in focus from Professor Higgins’s didactic social theorizing to the authenticity of Eliza Doolittle’s inner life, Lerner and Loewe rejected Shaw’s male, imperial, and rationalist models of reform and instead celebrated the power of imaginative desire to achieve personal freedom and emotional fulfilment. Eliza’s triumph, Ackerman contends, is to express this liberal subjectivity as a communal American discourse characterized by the enabling conditions of cultural pluralism and social equity. Eliza’s controversial return to Higgins at the end of the musical, but not in Shaw’s play, can be understood as an effect of her growth as a performative subject with socially rejuvenating but unpredictable desires. Just as Shakespeare reworked his own narrative genres and theatrical metaphors, so have dramatists from the modern period. Brian Parker’s analysis of the multiple drafts and generic versions related over thirtyone years to the two published texts of Tennessee Williams’s landmark play The Night of the Iguana represents a fascinating documented instance of self-adaptation. In ‘“The Going to Pieces of T. Lawrence Shannon”: Notes on Tennessee Williams’s Drafts of The Night of the Iguana (1961),’ Parker demonstrates the outwardly autobiographical yet continually shifting and locally determined nature of many individual character details. His essay also clarifies the interweaving modes of naturalism and

Introduction

19

expressionism (or symbolism) that are a hallmark not only of Iguana but of many of Williams’s other dramatic works. By focusing on certain under-recognized ambiguities in the otherwise self-sacrificing and spiritually serene Hannah (who is left alone to carry on at the end of the play), Parker demonstrates how her role finally channels the play into existential tragedy. Its theme becomes ‘how to live beyond despair and still live,’ as Williams insisted, rather than redemptive tragicomedy, which John Huston’s influential 1964 film version reconstructed as the play’s stilldominant critical framework. Contemporary playwrights often use adaptation to explore postmodern issues of presence and absence, and language’s role in mediating between identity and performance. Rebecca S. Cameron’s ‘“How do you play this game?”: Nonsensical Language Games in Shaw, Coward, and Pinter’ connects post-Saussurian theories of language as the product of social relationships and self-referential systems with Wittgenstein’s insight that these features make linguistic interactions resemble both a ‘rule-governed game’ and a play. The formal boundaries of these language systems become more visible when they are adapted to artificial, unfamiliar, or disjunctive social situations that create temporary moments of verbal instability or nonsense. Similarly, the context-sensitive and collaborative conditions of stage performance allow the theatre to reinstall the negotiated fluidity of linguistic conventions on both representational and metadramatic levels. Cameron identifies three such episodes in Pygmalion, Hay Fever, and The Birthday Party that move respectively from being humorously to menacingly transgressive. These ludic ‘games’ of verbal incongruity expose not only the situational contingency of linguistic conventions but also their already appropriated status as markers of social differentiation manifesting wider structures of power relations. In his 1850 essay ‘Shakespeare, or the Poet,’ Ralph Waldo Emerson remarked that Shakespeare ‘wrote the text of modern life.’ As Jill Levenson has shown through her rich and stimulating scholarship, modern dramatic adaptations led the way not by deferring to his poetic genius but by seizing on the semantic and textual instabilities of his plays to recontextualize their perceptions of ideological conflict and public anxiety over social and institutional change. In our day, generic fragmentation and multifarious user platforms continue to reinvent the Shakespeare ‘text’ in ways that suggest its apparently infinite malleability. Considered both individually and in dialogue with each other, the essays in this volume open new perspectives on the interactive relationships between Shake-

20 Randall Martin and Katherine Scheil

speare and modern drama, while also demonstrating how scholarly reinterpretation contributes to this global practice of creative adaptation. Notes 1 Jill Levenson, Introduction, Shakespeare and Modern Drama (Oxford: Oxford University Press, forthcoming). 2 As Sonia Massai observes, ‘if any signifying practice, including Shakespearean appropriation as a mode of (inter)cultural production, is local, then the categories of “local” and “global,” which are increasingly invoked to define the current stage in the history of the afterlife of Shakespeare’s works, need careful reconsideration.’ ‘Defining Local Shakespeares,’ in World-Wide Shakespeares: Local Appropriations in Film and Performance, ed. Sonia Massai (London and New York: Routledge, 2005), 3. 3 Julie Sanders, Adaptation and Appropriation (The New Critical Idiom) (London and New York: Routledge, 2006); Linda Hutcheon, A Theory of Adaptation (New York and London: Routledge, 2006). 4 Sanders, Adaptation and Appropriation, 26. 5 ‘When We Dead Awaken: Writing as Re-vision,’ College English 34.1 (October 1972), 18–30. 6 Daniel Fischlin and Mark Fortier, eds, Adaptations of Shakespeare: A Critical Anthology of Plays from the Seventeenth Century to the Present (London and New York: Routledge, 2000), Introduction, 1–11. 7 ‘What Is a Text?’ reproduced in Stephen Orgel’s collection The Authentic Shakespeare: And Other Problems of the Early Modern Stage (New York and London: Routledge, 2002), 1–5, at 1. Orgel’s arguments draw on two classic studies: E.A.J. Honigmann’s The Stability of Shakespeare’s Text (1965), and G.E. Bentley’s The Profession of Dramatist in Shakespeare’s Time (1971). For an engaging rebuttal of Orgel’s extended claim that, in the case of Shakespeare, ‘the authority represented by the text – I am now talking about the performing text – is that of the company, the owners, not that of the playwright’ (2), see Jeffrey Knapp, Shakespeare Only (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009). 8 John Jowett, Shakespeare and Text (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007); Tiffany Stern, Documents of Performance in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009); Lukas Erne, Shakespeare as Literary Dramatist (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003). 9 Margaret Jane Kidnie, Shakespeare and the Problem of Adaptation (London and New York: Routledge, 2009), 2. 10 Hutcheon, A Theory of Adaptation, 39.

Introduction

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11 See James C. Bulman’s introduction, ‘Shakespeare and Performance Theory,’ to his edited collection of essays, Shakespeare, Theory, and Performance (London and New York: Routledge, 1996), 1–11. 12 Fischlin and Fortier, Adaptations of Shakespeare, 4. 13 Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1983, 1991). 14 Sanders, Adaptation and Appropriation, 21. 15 See Barbara Hodgdon and W.B. Worthen, eds, ‘Introduction: A Kind of History,’ A Companion to Shakespeare in Performance (Oxford: Blackwell, 2005). 16 Kidnie, Shakespeare and the Problem of Adaptation, 8–9. 17 See Christy Desmet, Introduction, Shakespeare and Appropriation, ed. Christy Desmet and Robert Sawyer (New York and London, 1999), 1–12. 18 Partly because of the potentially atomizing effects of this critical approach, and partly because actors and audiences typically judge only certain, usually controversial, productions to have passed into the category of adaptations, theatrical performance of a dramatic text is not usually classified as adaptation. See Hutcheon, A Theory of Adaptation, 36, 39; Kidnie, Shakespeare and the Problem of Adaptation, 9. 19 Barbara Hodgdon, The End Crowns All: Closure and Contradiction in Shakespeare’s History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991).

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PART I

Shakespeare and Modern Drama

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1 Unwinding Coriolanus: Osborne, Grass, and Brecht peter holland

I haven’t been reading much. Most recently Coriolanus. Wonderful! Bertolt Brecht (1917)1 W. Can we amend Shakespeare? B. I think we can amend Shakespeare if we can amend him. Bertolt Brecht (1953)2

In simple terms my concern would be with unwinding the history of a sequence of four interlocked plays: from Shakespeare’s Coriolanus to Brecht’s Coriolan (begun in 1950) to Günter Grass’s The Plebeians Rehearse the Uprising (1966) to John Osborne’s A Place Calling Itself Rome (published in 1973). But the terms can never really be simple. The materials do not stay sitting comfortingly adjacent on a shelf, asking no more than to be taken down and read. What we choose to read and observe alongside these play texts, responding to our demand for contexts, including demanding the three other plays as contexts for each one of the group of four, transforms the materials as soon as we adduce them. Thus much is obvious. But our reconstructions of interconnections, even in a grouping as apparently natural as mine, are necessarily constructions in their own right, creations we use to try to define something of the meaning we find. Some contexts are themselves simple to bring to bear. It is impossible to read Brecht’s unfinished adaptation of Coriolanus without its most obvious accompaniments in Brecht’s writings on the play, in particular his account of a conversation with his aides about the first scene of Shakespeare’s play, marking out his movement towards the adaptation. The first scene of the adaptation was published in 1952 in a preliminary ver-

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Peter Holland

sion. The ‘Study of the First Scene of Shakespeare’s Coriolanus’ was written in 1953 or 1954 and first published in 1956 as the main item in a collection of notes on a number of productions, Dialectics in the Theatre.3 That dialogue is more of a playlet performing the investigation of Shakespeare’s text than an accurate transcription of a day’s discussion – for this is Brecht’s account, not a stenographer’s. As playlet the transcription becomes, in effect, another play in my sequence.4 By the time the ‘Study’ had appeared in print, Brecht had already considered going beyond the need for adaptation: in 1955, as he prepared the materials for Dialectics, he noted ‘I again make an analysis of the first act of Coriolanus, and wonder if it would be possible to stage it without additions … or with very few, just by skilful production.’5 As Brecht blurs the line between play and analysis – for his analysis is a play and his play is an analysis – other materials prove even more complex to recover and define, not least two crucial productions. The work of Manfred Wekwerth and Joachim Tenschert in staging their version of Brecht’s version at the Berliner Ensemble in 1964, after Brecht’s death, marks out a movement away from the purposes of Brecht’s adaptation, its political work rewoven along with its material texture towards a postBrechtian retreat from Brechtianism, a formulation that is more widely politically acceptable, less intransigent in its confrontations. Theatre as a space of collaboration also becomes here an act that is ostensibly doubly pious, a means of celebrating Brecht and Shakespeare at the same time. Brecht’s company without Brecht finally completes Brecht’s unfinished labour by staging a production that is also the Berliner Ensemble’s first ‘Shakespeare’ production, as part of the Shakespeare quatercentenary celebrations, defining the kind of Shakespeare that Brecht’s company will perform. As the company produces a work that is now neither Brecht’s play nor Shakespeare’s, it may also be marking its impieties as much as its obligations, its separation from one tradition, the tradition of its founder, and the establishment of its own modality. Admired by powerful theatre critics like Kenneth Tynan and Robert Brustein, Coriolan was one of the productions the company brought to London for their season at the National Theatre in 1965. And something of that vexed interrelationship between the two directors and Brecht/Shakespeare continues when the team of Wekwerth and Tenschert is invited to direct the play for the National Theatre in London in 1971 – but what is ‘the play’? Which play is it to be? Brecht’s or Shakespeare’s or a recreation of the Berliner Ensemble’s production or some variant drawn from all three?

Unwinding Coriolanus 27

More direct than the cultural imprecisions of these theatre productions in defining their responses to Brecht, Grass’s play, springing off from its imaginary staging of Brecht’s rehearsals of Coriolan, has to be read alongside Grass’s Shakespeare Birthday Lecture of 1964, given to the Berlin Academy of Arts and Letters, a piece deliberately immodestly and playfully titled ‘The Prehistory and Posthistory of the Tragedy of Coriolanus from Livy and Plutarch via Shakespeare down to Brecht and Myself’; as Grass himself comments, ‘Presumption has the floor!’6 It has to be read alongside the play not least because the published translation precedes the play text with the lecture, demanding that it function as preface to the play, just as it also defines the historical context by providing Uta Gerhardt’s ‘documentary report’ of the 1953 uprising, its ideological positioning (for there is no documentary report that is not positioned) defining the way in which the ‘German tragedy’ Grass wrote, as his subtitle glosses his play, is to be perceived. The report’s history is to be read in relation to the history for which Grass’s play provides its own documentation, now play not report, dramatic fiction not documentary, but functioning as a rehistoricization both of the uprising and of Brecht himself (The Boss in the play) that recalls in some measure Shakespeare’s creation of the history we know.7 It seems oddly right that Grass’s play would then be produced in London by the Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC) (at its London home, the Aldwych Theatre, premiered on 21 July 1970) so that it becomes, incidentally, the way in which Peggy Ashcroft could perform Volumnia, since she played that role in Grass’s play, a role that is both the character in the Brecht-Shakespeare play The Boss is rehearsing and also a performance of Helene Weigel, Brecht’s wife. Barely five years after Weigel had played Volumnia in London during the Ensemble’s visit, Ashcroft performs what is, in some senses, Weigel’s performance in Coriolanus. Brecht’s dialogue performing the analysis, if not yet the rehearsal, of his adaptation becomes Grass’s play which performs the rehearsal of Brecht’s version. And, finally, meshed in with this increasingly messy sequence as one play morphs into another and no one is quite sure which play is which – or what, indeed, is a play if Brecht’s representation of the analysis that precedes rehearsal is one – there is Osborne’s version, a play published but not performed, a response to something, but whether to Shakespeare’s play, Brecht’s adaptation, one or both of Wekwerth and Tenschert’s productions, or Grass’s play (or indeed its RSC production) is far from clear. What begins as a sequence of four plays will now prove necessarily to include three productions, one lecture, one quasi-play,

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and, perhaps most intriguingly, the absence of a production. Though Osborne’s play is chronologically the terminus of my sequence, it is also the best place to start. Osborne versus Brecht In 1989 Eurographica published in Helsinki a new edition of John Osborne’s A Place Calling Itself Rome, the first since the play was first published by Faber and Faber in 1973. Beautifully typeset on fine paper, it is number 30 in their series ‘Contemporary Authors in Signed Limited Editions,’ in an edition of 350, each numbered and signed by the author. Osborne follows a line of great writers, some of whom he may have admired, many of whom he certainly must have loathed: Graham Greene, Mailer, Vidal, Ionesco, Gordimer, Fowles, Lessing, Updike, Kundera, and Duras among them. For all the quality of the typesetting and book production, what makes this one of the oddest pieces of book making I have come across is simply the choice of play. Probably Osborne’s least successful work, his adaptation of Coriolanus has, as far as I can establish, never received a professional production. The play was turned down by the Royal Court Theatre on the grounds of its huge cast, by Peter Hall at the National Theatre on the grounds that the schedule was full for the next few years,8 and at the Royal Shakespeare Company, apparently on the grounds that ‘it was too like Shakespeare’s original,’9 though also because Trevor Nunn was already creating a season of Shakespeare’s Roman plays. Osborne ‘shopped his script around for over a year to a total of thirty producers and directors and was met by “iron apathy.”’10 It seems likely that the problem lay both in its treatment of Shakespeare’s language and in its venomously reactionary politics. It has been defended only by the most energetic of Osborne’s supporters and largely ignored by Shakespeare scholars.11 Most critics who have turned to it at all have pointed to Osborne’s inevitable sympathy with ‘the overbearing Roman,’ ‘a typical Osborne hero,’12 for ‘[h]ow could Osborne resist identifying himself’ with Coriolanus?’13 Osborne did not usually warm to the task of adaptation. As Anderson suggests, ‘he rarely gives the impression that he is using another writer’s insight as a starting-point for his own creativity – he appears rather to seize on certain obvious parallels with his own artistic interests and to exploit them with little of his customary linguistic subtlety.’14 Inevitably one feels obliged to quote a passage or two to demonstrate how uninteresting Osborne makes the climactic moments of the play, how what is potent

Unwinding Coriolanus 29

and rhythmic in Shakespeare becomes flattened in its awkward turn to a supposedly modern idiom: Oh, Mother, Mother! What have you done? Look, everyone watches this scene and laughs at every single element in it. Oh, Mother, Mother! Oh! You’ve won a skilful victory for Rome, but, for your son, believe it, oh, believe it! – you don’t know what you’ve done to him. But perhaps you do, and you were right to have done it. So be it …15

There is no room, can be no room here for the gods to be the ones who laugh. The victory is no longer ‘happy,’ that wryest of choices of words, but merely ‘skilful.’ The focus on the fatal danger of that victory is replaced by a focus on whether or not Volumnia knows the consequences of her actions, something that different Volumnias have explored in precisely contrary ways. At other moments Osborne’s need to include the targets of modern society he most detests makes him veer farther away from Shakespeare, making the preserved traces of the original even more disconcertingly discrepant: You common cry of curs. You take up my air. Banish me? I banish you! Stay here in your slum. And strike. Communicate. Get shaken with rumours; fads; modishness; greed; fashion; your clannishness; your lives in depth. May you, but you won’t, [know] one minute of that depth, know desolation. May your enemies barter and exchange you coolly in their own better market-places … I have seen the future … here … and it doesn’t work! I turn my back. There is a world elsewhere!16

Osborne leaves in the semantic obscurity of Shakespeare’s ‘common cry’ before turning to the words and actions of 1970s England that always depress and anger him: inner-city slums, working-class protest, the hyping of communication that, of course, for Osborne constitutes the denial of true communication. But he cannot leave Shakespeare’s superb and unaltered last line at Coriolanus’s exit as his own last words for the hero. Instead, Coriolanus goes off, borne away by his supporters and sorely harassed escort. coriolanus sings down at them a parody of ‘The Red Flag’ … ‘The Working Class Can Kiss My Arse

30

Peter Holland And keep their Red Rag flying high.’

(58)

There is at least energy here in the parody and in the list of hated characteristics, the energy that is sustainedly apparent in his experimental, plotless, and almost characterless debate play, A Sense of Detachment (produced at the Royal Court Theatre in 1972), with its extreme contrasts between, say, the playing of the Adagietto from Mahler’s Fifth Symphony and the long recitation by the character identified only as the Old Lady of the titles and descriptions of pornographic films in a mail-order catalogue. It is not that Osborne’s writing had in some clichéd sense lost its way: West of Suez (Royal Court Theatre, 1971) is sharp and powerful in its exploration of a postcolonial Britain through the eyes of an aging writer. Nor is it that Osborne’s work was unpopular: West of Suez played to 97 per cent capacity (92 per cent box office) in a standard-length Royal Court run of thirty-two performances.17 The Times Literary Supplement (TLS) review of the published texts of A Sense of Detachment and A Place Calling Itself Rome was headlined ‘Damn You, and You, and You …,’ pointing out that Osborne’s career was ‘founded upon anger’ before turning to the opening of Osborne’s famous letter to The Tribune, ‘Damn You, England,’ a comment that Osborne was to use for his collection of his journalism and essays published in 1994 just before his death: ‘You have instructed me in my hatred for thirty years. You have perfected it and made it the blunt, obsolete instrument it is. I only hope it will keep me going. I think it will.’18 The anger that was once Jimmy Porter’s in Look Back in Anger is now unquestionably the playwright’s. There is no perceptible gap between Osborne’s Coriolanus’s vituperative comments on and to the tribunes or the people (the TLS piece singles out the transformation of Shakespeare’s ‘old goat’ into ‘policeman of the piss-poor … hairy charm-pits’) and the consistent identification of the citizens as a ‘mob’: … a cross-section mob of students, fixers, pushers, policemen, unidentifiable public, obvious trade unionists, journalists and the odd news camera team … screaming girls, banners of the nineteenth-century sort, banners of the modern kind – ‘caius marcius: go fuck yourself’; ‘we want a lay not delay’; … ‘no more trix just a fix’; … ‘caius marcius is the berk – let him go and do the work’19

Osborne’s original intention had been to ‘set the play’s action in an African republic,’20 but ‘Rome could have called itself London or Moscow

Unwinding Coriolanus 31

or Noa-Noa for Osborne’s purposes.’21 Just as Shakespeare’s Rome is so profoundly a place that both is and is not early modern London, Osborne’s Rome is the site of the post-imperial London that might call itself Rome but has no conceivable justification in seeing itself as a true recapitulation of Romanness. The translatio imperii is, for Osborne, always a lie, and the shabbiness of modern Britain belies its wish to be more than a nation in a state of terminal decline. The patricians are here always honourable men and the tribunes rigorously demonstrated to be dishonourable, with a small additional dose of Osborne’s racism and dislike for Britain’s increasing multiculturalism when, for no discernible reason, he turns Sicinius into ‘a pale-skinned coloured woman’ (21), primarily so that Coriolanus can mock her as ‘this frightening black-faced lady’ (50). The action follows Shakespeare’s plot, with everything given both a modern and a reactionary emphasis. There is the use of modern urban warfare, as Coriolanus and Aufidius ‘are seen to be stalking each other with rifles and/or pistols through street windows and doors and crouching behind rubble and oil cans’ (31), something Osborne could have found in numerous contemporary productions of Shakespeare unaltered.22 But, more particularly, there is Osborne’s fascination with the language of obscenity and invective – and, wherever possible, of both combined. Only in the very first scene does Osborne do much more than cut text and modernize language. Without precedent in Shakespeare, the play opens with Coriolanus in bed with Virgilia, waking from a nightmare and then, as she sleeps again, writing his diary, noting his sexual impotence, his being close to tears, his self-starving, heavy drinking, so that, in the double privacy of bedroom and journal writing, that which Coriolanus is to be shown to be in public is revealed to be motivated by a self-destructive anomie, a despair and incoherence, the ‘able, neurotic, self-absorbed’ markers of ‘a typical Osborne protagonist.’23 As he settles back into bed, Virgilia drowsily asks him why he was singing – it was the parody of ‘The Red Flag’ he will sing so loudly later: Coriolanus. I’m not. With words is … Virgilia. What? Coriolanus. Words is that they, that is, people, expect them to mean either what they say, don’t say, or may say … Virgilia. People? Coriolanus. The people. Goodnight. (13)

It is of course always both easy and tempting to read a hero back onto

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the author, to see, here, that Coriolanus is a function of Osborne’s self. Yet it is an easy temptation that I cannot find a way around. Shakespeare operates here as a marker for a space within which the political self can be written again but now with some cultural authority and with some redefinition of the ways in which Shakespeare can come to mean in the now of the then of the 1970s. Brecht in London – Twice Asked by Ruby Cohn about Osborne’s impulse to create the adaptation, Osborne’s secretary replied that it ‘was not a reaction against the Brecht version but a reaction to the Shakespeare version.’24 Cohn claims that Osborne had seen the Berliner Ensemble production and ‘may have read hostile accounts of the 1971 Old Vic production.’25 It is difficult to imagine that he was not aware of that production and perhaps he had been at or at least interested in the Berliner Ensemble’s production, widely reviewed in England both when it opened in Germany and when the company came to London. That the Berliner Ensemble was able to come to London at all was a mark of a political change. Members of the company had been invited to attend an International Drama Conference in Edinburgh in 1963, but the Foreign Office indicated that visas would be refused since, in the aftermath of the construction of the Berlin Wall, the British government did not recognize the East German state, and hence its citizens were not permitted entry into the United Kingdom, except for trade. Tynan, chair of the conference, was furious, and the matter was a major news item in The Times (28 August 1963, 8), provoking letters to The Times protesting the government’s action from Stephen Spender and others. Osborne, writing to The Times from Germany, mockingly noted that the government has clearly been somewhat over-zealous in its display of solidarity with the west Germans. Although banned from Edinburgh, members of the Berliner Ensemble were able to give, in Erlangen on July 30, a performance … and on the following day to take part in a discussion of the performance, two of the most popular events in this year’s International Student Drama Festival.26

By 1965 the Berliner Ensemble were able to play a three-week season at the National Theatre at the Old Vic, bringing with them a four-play repertoire of Brecht plays: The Threepenny Opera, The Days of the Commune,

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The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui, and Coriolanus, as Brecht’s play was titled for the visit. Kenneth Tynan, Laurence Olivier’s literary manager at the National Theatre and the most passionate Brechtian in British theatre, had seen the production of Coriolan in Berlin in 1964 and wrote of the first half of the production as ‘a masterpiece: politics and theatre exquisitely wedded.’ He was overwhelmed by the elaborately choreographed battle scene and by the detailing of the plebeians, ‘by no means a mob: for each of them a name has been invented,’ whose protest over corn is a ‘sit-down strike’ and whose response to Coriolanus’s contempt ‘is not rage but passive resistance, a steady expressionless stare: they are used to it.’27 As Shakespeare, for Tynan, moves farther towards the personal in the later stages of the action ‘in a way that goes against the Brechtian grain,’ so Brecht’s adaptation has to work against Shakespeare’s belief ‘that heroes were indispensable’ to create an ‘anti-hero’ and make Brecht’s point: ‘that the play’s theme is the downfall of “the individual who blackmails society with his indispensability.”’28 As Tynan astutely observes, The hallmark of Brechtian theatre is that it judges men by their actions, not by their personalities. The animus of the production is not against Coriolanus himself but the social role in which he is cast.29

The anti-heroic in Ekkehard Schall’s performance was repeatedly noted by the London reviewers, along with the identification of this Coriolanus as ‘a plump narcissist who smiles as he kills and has a frightening capacity to cut out when people are urgently communicating with him,’30 as a ‘fire-breathing, resolute, self-sacrificing, yet half-adolescent Coriolanus [who] raged through the play,’31 and as ‘an unforgettable embodiment of the bullet-headed Junker – a loud-mouthed golden boy, his lips set in a fixed sneer, and his cat-like walk never far from violence.’32 One reviewer who was disappointed to find him ‘powerful but not noble’ was confused, wondering whether he was ‘not meant to be,’33 while another noted Schall’s ‘prizefighter’s iron-necked and swaggering power. All nobility has gone. Endurance remains.’34 Throughout the reviewing there was, inevitably, repeated rejection of what was usually assumed to be Brecht’s work, and of the way in which the production’s politics could be seen as fundamentally at odds with Shakespeare’s play: This is described in the programme as Brecht’s ‘adaptation’ of Shakespeare’s play; but ‘contradiction’ would have been a more honest word. This is Shakespeare’s play as it might have been if the Bard had been a

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Only The Times separated Brecht from the production: one would like to believe that if [Brecht] had lived to see the project through, his ironic and contradictory spirit would have saved it from the rigidly perverse treatment that disfigures the finished product. (11 August 1965)

If there was doubt about the production when played by a company visiting the National Theatre – for all that the spectacle could be wondered at for the brilliance of Ruth Berghaus’s terrifying and balletic staging of the battle scenes or for the ensemble work of a great company with a nine-month rehearsal period – the doubt could only intensify when Wekwerth and Tenschert worked on the play in English for the National Theatre itself. Rumours spread that it was a little way into rehearsal before the directors realized they were expected to direct Shakespeare’s play, not Brecht’s. Christopher Plummer, originally cast as Coriolanus, walked out after disagreements with the directors and was replaced by Anthony Hopkins, who joined rehearsals a third of the way in. In some respects the production could be seen to have turned into an attempt to produce Brecht’s interpretation without Brecht’s rewriting, to achieve that version about which Brecht himself wondered: ‘if it would be possible to stage it without additions … or with very few, just by skilful production.’36 Certainly the production imported a great deal of what had been central to the Berliner Ensemble’s production. The sets, for instance, were identified as Karl von Appen’s designs from the earlier version ‘re-created for the National Theatre,’ as the publicity put it. The production files in the archives include twenty-one ground plans from the Berliner Ensemble, a scene-by-scene identification of how the great revolve was to move with the two massive entranceways on it that represented the two city-states, monumental white brick for Rome, black timber for Antium and Corioli. A careful plot of the movement of the arches and a diagram sequence also attest to the patterning that was being recreated: white for scene one, black for scene two, and so on. Moves, like the moment when the revolve carries Coriolanus to each waiting citizen to ask for their ‘voices,’ thereby making the action something that moves him rather than that he appears to instigate, are repeated exactly from the Berliner

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Ensemble. The production even borrowed the sound tapes of the chanting armies for the battle, calling the names of their leaders (but the Romans therefore shouting Coriolan, not Coriolanus). Production photographs are uncannily exact repetitions of the earlier ones, with only the actors’ bodies different: for his triumphal return, Coriolanus is borne aloft in a chair carried by four soldiers, his arms spread exultantly, preceded by Volumnia carrying his sword over her head, her face radiant with his glory. Only the rough stone of the Berliner Ensemble set compared with the neat brickwork of the National Theatre’s suggests a different meaning: the former closer in style to the Volscian gateway, indicating the effective parity of the two nations, while the latter points to a more achieved, perhaps even more civilized Rome than its neighbour. The earlier production had borrowed from passages from a number of Shakespeare plays with, for instance, Aufidius’s serving men using some of the Porter in Macbeth. But the domestic scene for Volumnia and Virgilia (1.3) at the National Theatre, like that of the Berliner Ensemble, includes both Coriolanus being armed for war by his mother and his speaking Antony’s lines to Cleopatra as she does so: O, love, That thou couldst see my wars to-day, and knew’st The royal occupation! Thou shouldst see A workman in’t. (Enter a CAPTAIN armed) Cap. Good morrow, general. Mar. To business that we love we rise betime And go to’t with delight.37

The scene ends with a passage displaced from Coriolanus’s leaving Rome in 4.1: Come, my sweet wife, my dearest mother, and My friends of noble touch, when I am forth Bid me farewell, and smile. I pray you. Come.

before the soundtape breaks in with a repeated cry of ‘Let war begin! Let war begin!’38 Perhaps most strikingly, the production took from Brecht’s version and from the Berliner Ensemble’s production the decision to have the

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play’s climactic line, ‘O mother, mother what have you done?,’ spoken not as Coriolanus ‘holds her by the hand silent’ but after the women have left the stage: in Brecht, ‘the women go out’ (142), and, at the National Theatre, Coriolanus’s line is spoken to their departing backs, ‘Cor X’s DL [crosses downstage left] looking after them,’39 so that they ‘trail off stage without an answer.’40 In these and numerous other ways the 1971 production tied itself back to the Berliner Ensemble’s production of Brecht’s Coriolan – it was no accident that the program included a passage from Brecht’s Messingkauf Dialogues, alongside ones from Hazlitt, Heine, and other critics. Brecht’s last instructions to the Berliner Ensemble before his death, as the company was about to embark on its first tour to London, had been to emphasize the need to play lightly and fast. The opening night of the 1971 Coriolanus was anything but that: the nightly stage-manager reports show that the first night (5 May) ran 3 hours 11 minutes, but by mid-June they had shaved twenty minutes off that time and were down to 2.51 (both timings including the interval).41 The reviews usually praised Anthony Hopkins while savaging the production as having ‘no ethical centre of gravity,’42 as creating a Shakespeare who ‘cannot function in an alien political context,’43 and, ‘[w]ithout actually infringing the Trade Descriptions Act … [as] more like Brecht’s “Coriolan” translated by Shakespeare than Shakespeare’s “Coriolanus” interpreted by Brecht’s heirs.’44 Ronald Bryden recognized that there might be a central difference between Shakespeare at the National Theatre and Shakespeare at the RSC with the former having ‘licence to take liberties’ and ‘to dress the classics in arresting new versions’ while the latter must ‘guard the authorized versions,’45 but could only find the production not ‘wholly a disaster.’ Only Frank Marcus in the Sunday Telegraph praised it enthusiastically, calling it ‘one of the most succinct and exciting Shakespeare productions that I have seen’ and finding ‘the real fascination … in observing the collision of the ambiguities of two great poets,’ adding, strangely, ‘neither of whom managed to be didactic,’ a direct challenge to the conventional British view of at least Brecht, if not Shakespeare.46 Most complained of the gap between playing Shakespeare’s language or what is assumed to be Shakespeare’s ideological position and giving something seen as a Brechtian reading: This is no longer the tragedy of a proud patrician who scorned to curry favour with the dissentious rabble. It becomes a report on a roistering bully boy who rode roughshod over some poor, misguided, starving working-men

Unwinding Coriolanus 37 … And the fickle mob, whom Shakespeare despised for usurping the place of their betters, are deprived here of their contemptible nature.47 The political message is hammered home … But as it goes on – and it does go on – it resembles more and more a dramatised political lecture.48 Shakespeare meant Coriolanus to be a hero even if a faulted one … This Coriolanus is never noble at all.49 Shakespeare’s lines simply won’t support the Brechtian translation of the Roman mob into a council of grimly responsible trade union activists.50

But in what sense and to what extent was the Berliner Ensemble’s work a production of Brecht’s play? Certainly there were aspects of Brecht’s text which Wekwerth and Tenschert found weak. Brecht added a final stage in Volumnia’s plea to Coriolanus to turn back, in a powerful passage for which there is no parallel in Shakespeare: … The Rome you will be marching on Is very different from the Rome you left. You are no longer indispensable Merely a deadly threat to all. Don’t expect To see submissive smoke. If you see smoke It will be rising from the smithies forging Weapons to fight you who, to subject your Own people, have submitted to your enemy.

(142)

Brecht’s belief in the proletariat willingly arming to defend themselves has nothing to do with Shakespeare’s desperately scared citizens who turn on their tribunes. In an interview in 1965, Wekwerth ‘agreed that the ideologically reslanted ending of his production of Coriolanus was “more pious than realistic.”’51 The uncovering of the extent to which the patrician warrior could become irrelevant was central to Brecht’s project. The Berliner Ensemble’s London program had included an article, unsigned but presumably by the directors, on their text and their completion, as they saw it, of Brecht’s unfinished adaptation. They emphasize that Brecht’s version was unfinished and that, in particular, Brecht had not tackled the war scenes, leaving in his text Dorothea Tieck’s original translation of Shakespeare and intending to ‘write this scene during the

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production as it seemed to him essential to adjust the text to the actor’s [sic] positions and their moves during rehearsal.’52 The crucial shift in their thinking comes with the movement from the internal class conflict within Rome to the antagonism of the two war-leaders: The struggle between the Plebeians and the Patricians is not just the setting of the play but its whole basis. The Plebeians are starving. They neither possess nor are they given any corn – because the ‘duel’ of two ambitious warriors exhausts all the resources of the State and prevents corn from being either sown or distributed. Thus the ‘duel’ between Caius Marcius and Tullus Aufidius – at the expense of the people – is the force that sets the story in motion. So that two great individuals can settle a personal feud, a war is made.

The directors enlarged on their perspective on the play in their program note for the 1971 production, finding the central concern of the century and of the play in the conflict of ‘Man versus Mankind.’53 Since Coriolanus ‘is a magnificent fighter,’ they put the battle scenes ‘at the centre of the production’ as ‘the achievements of two great specialists in war, Coriolanus and Aufidius’: they make war on everything that opposes their wishes. War is the showcase for their individual passions: the two great heroes must have their duel, even if the earth is forfeit. This is what gives the fable its impetus.

Without warrant in Shakespeare, they place the cause of Coriolanus’s changing his mind in the purely Brechtian version: ‘the great man’s belief in his own indispensability’ is confronted not by what Volumnia says but ‘[p]erhaps it is what she does not say. What he hopes she will say. And what she refrains from saying.’ It is a striking reading of the gap in her speeches and in Menenius’s as well: all of those who intercede with Coriolanus beg him merely to turn back and spare the city. At no point does any of them suggest that Coriolanus should come back to Rome. But that is precisely what Coriolanus – in our opinion – wants to hear … [this] leads us to the implicit conclusion: that anyone who believes himself to be indispensable will be destroyed by that belief.

But it is also equally strikingly a perverse reading both against the grain

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of Shakespeare’s language (how would one act that gap?) and with the grain of Brecht’s rewriting. Though none of the reviewers of the 1965 or 1971 performances accepted it, the directors identified themselves as strongly concerned to resist the tendency of other productions which ‘no longer take pains over the recreation of greatness’ and ‘underline the ordinariness of the hero.’ Instead Wekwerth and Tenschert wanted to show ‘not only that great men are replaceable, but the corollary, that a great man can use the belief in his own indispensability to coerce society.’54 The play becomes, as the headnote to their account defines it, ‘a conflict between the liberties of a great individual, a hero passionately alive, and the liberties of the social entity which he threatened, the State.’55 Grass versus Brecht Almost all the writing on Brecht’s Coriolan – and the literature on it is vast56 – assumes, when it mentions the production at all, that the Berliner Ensemble’s 1964 production is, to all intents and purposes, fully a version of Brecht’s play. But Darko Suvin, in a superb and detailed study, shows how different the ideological positions are between the production (his ‘spectacle text’) and Brecht’s original adaptation.57 What is central for Brecht in his work is continually being shifted away from centrality or otherwise diminished in the production. Hence, for instance, the Roman citizens, who for Brecht are being organized into a fighting force to relieve their oppression, not a group entering carrying weapons but a group ‘to whom clubs, knives, and other weapons are distributed,’58 are no longer a crowd prepared to ‘fight and make a better Rome for Tertius.’59 Tertius is Brecht’s invention, the child of one of the citizens brought onstage by him, but the visible sign is cut completely so that there is no future generation for whom the struggle is being waged. As Suvin points out, Brecht’s ‘active rebellion becomes with [the production] a passive strike, the hesitating plebeians … prepared for action become a dour and loose assemblage.’60 If it was inevitable that, for Brecht, the tribunes had to become intelligent party workers with no trace of the self-serving buffoons that the play’s production history had found normative, it was equally inevitable that Wekwerth and Tenschert ‘stripped [them] of foresight and political wisdom.’61 And one of Brecht’s finest interventions, the after-echo of Volumnia’s new and strongest argument to Coriolanus at the play’s climax that imaged the smoke signifying the arming of the people to resist the invader,

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has also been eliminated. The brief scene (5.5) of the news of the women’s success – a scene that follows sharply on the abbreviated ending of the previous scene – has gone completely: Coriolanus. O mother, mother! What have you done? 5 Rome. A Guarded gate. Brutus and Sicinius. A messenger. Messenger. News! The Volscians have withdrawn and Marcius with them! Brutus. The stone has moved. The people takes Up weapons, and the old earth shakes.

(142–3)

In place of such a vision of the people and their tribunes, the production, as I have already begun to suggest, refocuses the argument onto Coriolanus as ‘a martial super-hero.’62 In the analysis of the first scene that Brecht wrote up, ‘B.,’ that is, Brecht himself, is trying to explore why the plebeians move from a resistance to Menenius Agrippa’s attempt to pacify them to a more cowardly acquiescence: I’ve been considering one possibility: I’d suggest having Marcius and his armed men enter rather earlier than is indicated by Agrippa’s ‘Hail, noble Marcius!’ … The plebeians would then see the armed men looming up behind the speaker, and it would be perfectly reasonable for them to show signs of indecision. W. But you’ve gone and armed the plebeians better than ever before in theatrical history, and here they are retreating before Marcius’s legionaries … B. The legionaries are better armed still.63

W.’s resistance to the idea turned out to be something he could later put into effect, for this W. is Wekwerth, who, at this moment, as throughout the study, is one of the interlocutors whose ideas and objections Brecht can override with consummate ease. Brecht’s entry for Marcius ‘escorted by armed men’ (63) becomes in Wekwerth’s production a solo entry. What in Brecht is a powerful opposition between the City (i.e., the Citizens) and the Hero is fundamentally weakened by the lessening of the stature of the people and the return to something remarkably close to the aura of invincible – and dehumanized – power that surrounds Shakespeare’s Coriolanus. Wekwerth and Tenschert’s Coriolan, as Wekwerth argued during rehearsal, ‘remained, in spite of the social aspects, an Elizabethan character tragedy.’64

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Though the London critics were impressed by the individualization of the members of the crowd of citizens in the Berliner Ensemble’s production, the most memorable scenes of the production were the extraordinary representation of war, the exactingly choreographed ballet of the dehumanization of the citizen into the soldier. Brecht’s careful exploration of ways of viewing the people’s theatrical representation as politicization turns instead into an argument about the mythic power of the war machine. The class conflict within Rome, which Brecht altered so strongly in order to bolster his desired image of the workers as beginning independent insurrectionary activities in the first scene and taking up arms against the invader by the end, was reversed by Wekwerth and Tenschert into something much closer to the conventional view of how Shakespeare depicts the people in the play, a view I would want to counter (but not now). What Wekwerth was prepared to see as ‘a serious error’ by Brecht, ‘the idealization of the people,’ can then be corrected, for here there is no need for the piety that elsewhere Wekwerth saw as dogging the enterprise.65 It is far beyond the limits of this article to offer a full analysis of the political circumstances that might be seen as contextualizing this radical redefinition of Brecht’s concerns, created while ostensibly producing a staging of Brecht’s adaptation, or indeed a satisfactory analysis of the personal concerns that drove Wekwerth and Tenschert to be both the high priests at Brecht’s theatrical shrine of the Berliner Ensemble while subverting the divine message (or, to use a more Freudian metaphor, to be killing the theatrical father while apparently idolizing him). Darko Suvin offers a highly intelligent reading of the political while ignoring the personal/psychological dynamics involved.66 What is significant in the chronology of dramas and theatre productions that underpins my argument is the compatibility between the production’s uneasiness with its ostensible source text and Grass’s vehement rejection of the Brechtian rethinking of Shakespeare into the political ideologies of the East German state, something he sets out to demonstrate both in the lecture and in his dramatization of an imagined confrontation between Brecht (aka The Boss) in rehearsal and a group of ‘real’ plebeians who, rising against the tyrannies of the German Democratic Republic, turn to the famous writer for help. If The Plebeians Rehearse the Uprising is ‘a German tragedy’ it is also a claim by its author to be the German playwright, the figure who could voice the state of the nation and the nature of the state. Certainly The Boss is a ‘caricature of a fence-sitting Brecht,’67 but he is also a figure who, as Valerie Rudolph argues, ‘has become curiously close to Shake-

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speare’s Coriolanus – the man who, in Grass’s view, ultimately cannot belong to any party simply because he is what he is.’68 Grass sees Brecht himself (never mind about his dramatized alter ego) as ‘inconclusive, vacillating behind partisanship and history,’69 as if the responsibility of the dramatist is to be accurate in the representation of Roman history, a responsibility that clearly does not extend into Grass’s own play where history is rewritten into the partisanship of Grass’s need to destroy the idol Brecht is seen as having become, the sign of the limitation of the effect of Brecht’s comparative freedom within the German Democratic Republic’s repressive nation-state. As Grass notes, ‘the case of Brecht … seems to encourage the falsification of theatrical history … for the benefit of historical drama,’ for, apart from any other issues, Brecht was ‘not rehearsing Coriolan,’ though he certainly ‘did not interrupt rehearsals’ to respond to the ‘revolt’ (xxxiv). Brecht’s adaptation is an attempt to inscribe into Shakespeare’s play – or, if one believes it already implicit in Shakespeare’s writing, to re-emphasize its potentiality – a view of Coriolanus as someone who discovers that his indispensability is a myth. Grass’s play and lecture deny Brecht’s indispensability even though the play indicts Brecht’s failure publicly to support the modern East German plebeians as a significant contributory factor in the failure of their uprising, a reinscription of Brecht as verging on the indispensable. The paradoxes multiply; for, if Brecht is attacked by Grass for having ‘emerged without visible harm from the workers’ revolt’ (xxxv), he is also blamed for the way in which, ‘as usual, everything turns to theater in his hands’ (xxxvi) in the lecture at the point at which Grass is outlining his own play, a text in which the attack on Brecht has become theatre in Grass’s hands. Grass accepts a view of Shakespeare’s play as ideologically positioned in opposition to the workers – for, as he notes, his German edition of Coriolanus is prefaced with the comment that ‘[b]ecause of its antidemocratic character, the play is seldom produced’ (viii) – and then writes a play and delivers a lecture to complain of the partisanship, the complicity with the patricians of the East German state, that Brecht both lives and rewrites Coriolanus into being. Grass’s response to Brecht’s arguments, to the reasoned and imaginatively argued rethinking of Shakespeare into a new and modern play, is a refusal to allow Coriolanus to become what Shakespeare might in the mid-twentieth century have made it. ‘I believe,’ wrote Brecht, ‘he would have taken the spirit of our time into account much as we have done, with less conviction no doubt, but with more talent.’70 As my epigraph from Brecht notes, when ‘W.’ asked ‘Can we amend Shakespeare?,’ ‘B.’s’

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response was ‘I think we can amend Shakespeare if we can amend him,’71 and later Wekwerth, ‘W.,’ can amend Brecht since he can amend him. The unwinding of history with which I have been playing throughout this article could unroll much farther: to the earlier history of German translations of Shakespeare that so profoundly define ‘unser [our] Shakespeare,’ the Shakespeare that Brecht knew and resisted, and to the history of earlier German adaptations; for, shortly before he began the adaptation of Coriolanus, Brecht adapted The Tutor by J.M.R. Lenz, and Lenz had, as Brecht knew, rethought Shakespeare’s Coriolanus into a closet drama, Coriolan, in1776 when he was only twenty-five. Lenz’s version, which would last barely an hour if performed, concentrates the action on the inner struggles of Coriolanus, paying as little attention as possible to the city and civil conflict.72 Lenz, perhaps the greatest dramatist of sleep as the space of changed consciousness, brings me back to the nightmares of Osborne’s Caius Martius and to his adaptation which proved, so unwillingly, to be a closet drama. But Lenz’s excitement at the possibilities of the narrative lead inexorably to Brecht and to that excitement he felt on encountering Coriolanus in 1917, the excitement shared by all whose work I have been setting out: ‘Wonderful!’ Notes 1 Bertolt Brecht, letter to Max Hohenester, 8 June 1917, in Bertolt Brecht, Letters, ed. and trans. Ralph Manheim and John Willett (London: Methuen, 1990), 23. 2 Bertolt Brecht, ‘Study of the First Scene of Shakespeare’s Coriolanus,’ in John Willett, ed., Brecht on Theatre (London: Methuen, 1964), 259. 3 Willett describes the ‘Study’ as ‘dated 1953’ in the notes to his translation in Brecht on Theatre, 265. The notes to Willett and Manheim’s translation of Brecht’s Coriolan date the ‘Study’ as 1954; see Bertolt Brecht, Collected Plays, vol. 9, ed. and trans. Ralph Manheim and John Willett (New York: Vintage Books, 1973), 394. Dialektik auf dem Theater was ‘published’ in mimeographed form. 4 As Ruby Cohn comments, ‘Since the Berliner Ensemble staged the Messingkauf Dialogues with considerable verve, one can imagine staging the Coriolanus dialogue as a curtain-raiser to the play’ (see Ruby Cohn, Modern Shakespeare Offshoots [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1976], 369). 5 Brecht on Theatre, 265. 6 Günter Grass, The Plebeians Rehearse the Uprising, trans. Ralph Manheim (London: Secker and Warburg, 1967), viii.

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7 The lecture is printed as an ‘Introductory Address by the Author’ ([v]) on vii–xxxvi, while Gerhardt’s report follows the play (113–22). 8 John Heilpern, John Osborne: The Many Lives of the Angry Young Man (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2007), 376. 9 R.B. Parker, ed., Coriolanus (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994), 125. 10 Heilpern, Osborne, 376. 11 But see Norbert H. Platz, ‘Coriolan und das persönliche in der politik: John Osbornes A Place Calling Itself Rome,’ in Horst Priessnitz, ed., Anglo-Amerikanische Shakespeare-Bearbeitungen des 20. Jahrhunderts (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1980), 190–202. 12 Michael Anderson, Anger and Detachment (London: Pitman Publishing, 1976), 31. 13 Luc Gilleman, John Osborne, Vituperative Artist (New York: Routledge, 2002), 168. 14 Anderson, Anger, 31. For an unusually positive response to Osborne’s dramatic language here as ‘clipped, direct, vital’ and his ‘skill with language’ as ‘adept in modernizing Shakespeare … in order to avoid boredom,’ see Eugene Greeley Prater, An Existential View of John Osborne (Freeman, SD: Pine Hill Press, 1993), 183. 15 John Osborne, A Place Calling Itself Rome (London: Faber and Faber, 1973), 74 16 Ibid., 57–8, ellipses in original. I suspect the word ‘know’ has dropped out before ‘one minute’ and offer this emendation. 17 See Terry W. Browne, Playwrights’ Theatre (London: Pitman Publishing, 1975), 127. 18 ‘Damn You, and You, and You …,’ Times Literary Supplement, 4 January 1974, 14. The article was anonymous as usual at that time, but the TLS Centenary Archive identifies the author as Ned Chaillet. 19 Osborne, A Place, 13–14. 20 Gilleman, Osborne, 169. 21 ‘Damn You, and You, and You…,’ 14. 22 A production of Henry V at the Mermaid Theatre in London in 1962 was costumed in modern dress with the text unsubtly altered to match: ‘Think, when we speak of tanks, that you see them / Printing their proud tracks i’th’ receiving earth.’ 23 Cohn, Modern Shakespeare Offshoots, 23. 24 Ibid., 22. 25 Ibid. 26 John Osborne, ‘Berliner Ensemble,’ The Times, 5 September 1963, 13. 27 Kenneth Tynan, Right and Left (New York: Atheneum, 1968), 160–1.

Unwinding Coriolanus 45 28 Ibid., 162. 29 Ibid., 161. By contrast, Robert Brustein, who saw the production in 1965, found that ‘what is most striking about the evening is not so much its political as its theatrical values,’ describing the production at length but not engaging with its thinking; see Robert Brustein, ‘Live Blossoms in Dead Soil,’ in The Third Theatre (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1969), 130–40, especially 137–40 (quotation from 137). 30 Penelope Gilliatt in the Observer, 15 August 1965. This review, as with all the ones of the London tour and the 1971 production, is taken from the production files in the National Theatre’s (NT) Archive. 31 Bob Leeson in the Daily Worker, 12 August 1965. 32 Anonymous review in The Times, 11 August 1965. 33 Philip Hope-Wallace in the Guardian, 11 August 1965. 34 D.H. in the Bristol Evening Post, 11 August 1965. 35 W.A. Darlington in the Daily Telegraph, undated. 36 See note 3. 37 Promptbook, 3.10, NT Archive. The passage is, roughly, Antony and Cleopatra, 4.4.15–21. It is not clear from the promptbook whether the referent for ‘love’ in the first line of the passage is Virgilia or Volumnia. 38 Ibid., 3.11 39 Promptbook, facing 24.80. 40 Irving Wardle in The Times, 7 May 1971. 41 The stage manager’s reports are in the production file in the NT Archive. 42 Irving Wardle in The Times, 7 May 1971. 43 John Barber in the Daily Telegraph, 7 May 1971. 44 Ronald Bryden in the Observer, 9 May 1971. 45 Ibid. 46 Frank Marcus in the Sunday Telegraph, 9 May 1971. 47 John Barber in the Daily Telegraph, 7 May 1971. 48 Peter Lewis in the Daily Mail, 7 May 1971. 49 B.A. Young in the Financial Times, 7 May 1971. 50 Ronald Bryden in the Observer, 9 May 1971. On the production and the Berliner Ensemble’s version, see also John Ripley’s account in his fine stage history, ‘Coriolanus’ on Stage in England and America, 1609–1994 (London: Associated University Presses, 1998), 308–12. 51 ‘Behind the Scenes with the Berliner Ensemble,’ The Times, 18 August 1965. 52 ‘Version of the Berliner Ensemble,’ in the program for Coriolanus, National Theatre at the Old Vic, 9–28 August 1965, NT Archive, unpaginated. This and the quotations that follow come from the editorial note in Brecht’s collected works.

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53 Joachim Tenschert and Manfred Wekwerth, ‘Notes on this production,’ in the program for Coriolanus at the National Theatre, 1971, unpaginated. 54 This passage comes from the extended and revised version of their program note, published as the Introduction to William Shakespeare, The Tragedy of Coriolanus (London: The Folio Society, 1975), 6. 55 Ibid., 3. Wekwerth and Tenschert also described their approach in ‘What “Coriolanus” has to say to a modern audience,’ an interview with Alan Clarke in the Morning Star, 4 May 1971, 4; and in Manfred Wekwerth, ‘Experiments at the Berliner Ensemble,’ World Theatre 15 (1966): 210–14. 56 I list here only those pieces that seem to me most useful: Arrigo Subiotto, Bertolt Brecht’s Adaptations for the Berliner Ensemble (London: Modern Humanities Research Association, 1975); Ladislaus Lob and Laurence Lerner, ‘Views of Roman History: Coriolanus and Coriolan,’ Comparative Literature 29 (1977): 35–53; Darko Suvin, To Brecht and Beyond (Brighton: Harvester, 1984), 185– 207; Martin Scofield, ‘Drama, Politics, and the Hero: Coriolanus, Brecht, and Grass,’ Comparative Drama 24 (1991): 322–41; Paula K. Kamenish, ‘Brecht’s Coriolan: The Tragedy of Rome,’ Communications from the International Brecht Society 20 (1991): 53–69; Bryan Reynolds, ‘“What is the city but the people?”: Transversal Performance and Radical Politics in Shakespeare’s Coriolanus and Brecht’s Coriolan,’ in Shakespeare Without Class, ed. Donald K. Hedrick and Bryan Reynolds (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2000), 107–32; Antony Tatlow, Shakespeare, Brecht, and the Intercultural Sign (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001), 151–88. Tatlow’s and Suvin’s articles were previously published in other versions. 57 Darko Suvin, ‘Brechtian or Pseudo-Brechtian: Mythical Estrangement in the Berliner Adaptation of Coriolanus,’ Assaph, Section C: Studies in Theatre 3 (1986): 135–58; quotation at 135. 58 Brecht, Collected Works, 59. 59 Ibid., 60. 60 Suvin, ‘Brechtian or Pseudo-Brechtian,’ 139. 61 Ibid., 140. 62 Ibid., 142. 63 Brecht, ‘Study of the First Scene,’ 258. 64 Quoted in Suvin, ‘Brechtian or Pseudo-Brechtian,’ 143. 65 Quoted in ibid., 150. 66 See ibid., 148–54. 67 Valerie C. Rudolph, ‘Going to Grass; or, Coriolanus Revisited,’ Educational Theatre Journal 27 (2003): 498–503; 499. 68 Ibid., 503. 69 Grass, Plebeians, xxviii. All further page references will be cited in the text.

Unwinding Coriolanus 47 70 Brecht, Collected Plays, 377. 71 Brecht, ‘Study of the First Scene,’ 259. 72 On Lenz’s version, see Margot Paterson, ‘“But where am I?”: Coriolan by J.M.R. Lenz,’ Restoration and Eighteenth-Century Theatre Research 20.1–2 (2005): 34–44.

2 Three Men in a Boat: Stoppard, Beckett, and the Ghost of Arnold Geulincx hersh zeifman

In the opening scene of Tom Stoppard’s The Invention of Love, the poet and classical scholar A.E. Housman, ‘aged seventy-seven and getting no older, wearing a buttoned-up dark suit and neat black boots, stands on the bank of the Styx watching the approach of the ferryman, Charon.’ ‘I’m dead, then,’1 he concludes; but he is not quite dead, only dying. As his body breathes its last gasps at the Evelyn Nursing Home, his entire life (and imminent death) flashes before him. Significantly, his first flash of memory is of the great, and unrequited, love of his life, Moses Jackson, whom he met as an undergraduate at Oxford. Like Charon, Mo glides onto the stage, and into Housman’s reverie, in a rowboat, accompanied by Housman as a young man, by a fellow undergraduate named Pollard, and by a small yapping dog. This idyllic moment frozen in time, recurring throughout the play, deliberately evokes the central image of the 1889 comic novel Three Men in a Boat (To Say Nothing of the Dog!) by Jerome K. Jerome – who later turns up in the same boat as an actual character in Stoppard’s play. Nor is this the first time this particular boat has floated through Stoppard’s work: in 1975 Stoppard adapted Jerome’s novel, which he acknowledged as ‘one of [his] favourite books,’2 for BBC television. The Invention of Love was produced in London at the National Theatre in 1997. Precisely thirty years earlier, in 1967, the same theatre presented the play that first made Stoppard’s reputation, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead (R&GAD), in which a very different kind of boat can be found: the boat carrying, among others, Shakespeare’s Hamlet to England. That boat, unlike Jerome’s, is crowded with characters; and yet, on a purely metaphoric level, it too contains three men (to say nothing of the dog!). As Jill Levenson has noted, ‘R&GAD performs like the theatrical version of a metaphysical conceit: it draws connec-

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tions which can be seen and heard between unlikely partners.’3 One of these men is obviously Stoppard himself, the play’s author; the second is Samuel Beckett, whose profound influence on the play has been repeatedly cited both by scholars and by Stoppard himself; and the third, lurking obscurely in the boat’s darker recesses and continually haunting the text, is the ghost of the seventeenth-century Belgian philosopher Arnold Geulincx.4 The metaphoric presence in this boat of Samuel Beckett is by now a critical commonplace; Stoppard has expressed his intense admiration of Beckett’s work on countless occasions. ‘There’s no telling,’ he has written, ‘what sort of effect [Waiting for Godot] had on our society, who wrote because of it, or wrote in a different way because of it … Of course it would be absurd to deny my enormous debt to it, and love for it.’5 But Stoppard has also issued a significant warning. ‘[O]f the influences that have been invoked on my behalf,’ he once remarked, ‘I suppose Beckett is the easiest to make, yet the most deceptive. Most people who say Beckett mean Waiting for Godot. They haven’t read his novels, for example.’6 And he added in a different interview, ‘I’m an enormous admirer of Beckett, but if I have to look at my own stuff objectively, I’d say that the Beckett novels show as much as the plays.’7 What Stoppard especially admired in Beckett’s novels, he later noted, was ‘that particular tone of helpless or wry bemusement in the face of death and in the face of mystery unknown – peripheral visions of what’s going on in your life and what it all means.’8 In Beckett’s novel Molloy, first published in English in 1955, the eponymous protagonist, on a precarious bicycling journey to see his mother, encounters along the way a bizarre woman named Lousse (to say nothing of the dog!). But in this instance something must be said, since the hapless Molloy somehow manages to collide with Lousse’s dog; in the titular words of Stoppard’s 1982 radio play, the dog it was that died. Despite this ‘absurd mishap,’9 Lousse becomes enamoured of Molloy, psychologically ‘imprisoning’ him in her home. Molloy comments: Now as to telling you why I stayed a good while with Lousse, no, I cannot. That is to say I could I suppose, if I took the trouble. But why should I? In order to establish beyond all question that I could not do otherwise? For that is the conclusion I would come to, fatally. I who had loved the image of old Geulincx, dead young, who left me free, on the black boat of Ulysses, to crawl towards the East, along the deck. That is a great measure of freedom, for him who has not the pioneering spirit. And from the poop, poring upon

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Hersh Zeifman the wave, a sadly rejoicing slave, I follow with my eyes the proud and futile wake. (67–8)

The ‘dead young’ figure invoked here is one of Beckett’s favourite philosophers, the occasionalist Arnold Geulincx (1624–69). As an occasionalist, Geulincx belonged to the philosophical movement which attempted to resolve the Cartesian mind/body problem by positing some form of divine intervention to explain their interaction: the mind’s willing a particular action does not cause that action, but merely provides the occasion for God’s intervention. In the above passage from Molloy, however, Geulincx’s occasionalism is not the primary issue; Beckett is instead alluding to a specific image from Geulincx’s posthumously published Ethica, in which a passenger walking along the deck of a boat becomes a paradigm of free will versus determinism. Beckett presumably read Geulincx in the original Latin since, as far as I can tell, the philosopher’s work has not been translated into English; here is my own translation: ‘While the speeding boat carries the passenger towards the west, nothing prevents that passenger from walking along the deck towards the east.’10 It’s a striking image, and a paradoxical one: what at first glance appears to be a celebration of individual freedom turns out to be just the reverse. Think of the image as the opening shot of a film: a medium close-up of a man walking purposefully in one particular direction, seemingly free and self-determined. But then the camera slowly moves back, and in the resulting long shot we see that the man is walking specifically on the deck of a boat, a boat that is heading in the opposite direction. We may think we’re in control of our own movements, but in reality those movements are contained within a larger ‘vessel’ that has its own, often diametrically different, agenda. A voyage by boat is the climactic image not only in R&GAD but in its precursor as well: a one-act Shakespearean pastiche Stoppard wrote in the spring of 1964, titled ‘Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Meet King Lear.’ It has never been published, but the typescript is part of the Stoppard archive housed in the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center at the University of Texas. According to John Fleming, who has examined it, ‘[t]his earliest version focused on the boat voyage to England … The first scene closes with … the characters going aboard the boat. The second scene concerns the voyage to England.’11 Other than a few key speeches and his interest in the two main characters as ‘existential immortals,’ Stoppard retained relatively little from what he later dismissed as this ‘burlesque Shakespeare farce.’12 The one thing he made

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a point of retaining, however, was the central presence and significance of the boat. The entire last act of R&GAD thus takes place on a boat – as the text makes abundantly, and comically, clear. The act opens ‘in pitch darkness’ with ‘soft sea sounds’ in the background. ‘Are you there?’ Guil anxiously inquires, to which Ros responds ‘Where?’ As usual, these two ‘bewildered innocents,’13 as Stoppard has referred to them, are totally in the dark, but the text quickly illuminates their location. For soon we hear the ‘shouts of sailors calling obscure but inescapably nautical instructions from all directions,’ deliberately clichéd instructions like ‘Hard a larboard!,’ ‘Is that you, cox’n?,’ and ‘Tops’l up, me maties!’ ‘When the point has been well made and more so,’ the text continues, Ros declares, triumphantly (and redundantly), ‘We’re on a boat.’14 On the level of plot, of course, the boat on which they’re journeying derives from Hamlet, but its thematic implications stem primarily from Geulincx’s paradigm of illusory freedom. In a very real sense, R&GAD consists of nothing but Geulincx’s paradigm, dramatized in a series of discrete yet interlocking theatrical similes. In Stoppard’s The Real Thing, such similes are disparaged by its protagonist, Henry, as merely simplistic slogans. When, for example, his teenage daughter Debbie compares happiness to a warm puppy, Henry replies ‘Dear Christ, is that what it’s all come down to? – no philosophy that can’t be printed on a T-shirt.’15 The philosophy in R&GAD comprises precisely the kind of epigrammatic similes that might be printed on a T-shirt, but they are far from simplistic; they attempt to explore, with comic rigour, the very nature of human existence. Life, one of these similes suggests – the verbal and visual simile with which the play opens – is like a game of chance, a game we are destined to lose; as the Player later comments, ‘Life is a gamble, at terrible odds – if it was a bet you wouldn’t take it’ (84). A second, even more pervasive simile likens life to a play: one of the hoariest of theatrical clichés, but here made fresh through an audacious and dazzling use of Hamlet. Ros and Guil desire to see themselves as autonomous beings in control of their own lives; what they unfortunately fail to realize is that they are merely characters in a pre-existing text, that their fate (as Stoppard’s title makes agonizingly clear) is literally ‘written.’ Might not the same be said of all human existence? Like Ros and Guil, we too are characters in a play – our life – which, like Hamlet, is in one sense a tragedy, in that it inevitably ends with our death, but in another sense is also a kind of farce. For we are not given even the dignity of occupying centre stage. Life is like the play Hamlet, and we find ourselves cast as Rosencrantz and Guildenstern: secondary characters who are expendable in more

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ways than one (some productions of Hamlet – including, most famously, Laurence Olivier’s Oscar-winning 1948 film – omit them entirely). ‘The most expendable people of all time,’16 Stoppard has called them: insignificant little ciphers who never really understand what is going on. It is this total incomprehension that was the impetus for Stoppard’s writing the play in the first place; as he told Mel Gussow: ‘The real beginning … had very much to do with having these two outsiders knocking about the court and not understanding what was happening.’17 The play of our life proceeds bewilderingly around us, as Hamlet does around Ros and Guil; like them, all we can do is try desperately to pick up our cues, to muddle through it somehow, with no sense of the plot, our place in the action, our motivations – the purpose of it all. Or perhaps, Stoppard’s play finally suggests, life is like a boat: Geulincx’s boat, and therefore yet another image of illusory freedom. Both Rosencrantz and Guildenstern cling desperately to that illusion, despite all evidence to the contrary. In the following passage, for example, Ros tries hard to convince himself that his actions on the boat are not predetermined: Ros. I could jump over the side. That would put a spoke in their wheel. Guil. Unless they’re counting on it. Ros. I shall remain on board. That’ll put a spoke in their wheel. (79)

Guil is equally stymied. ‘One is free on a boat,’ he declares hopefully at the start of their sea journey, but then is compelled to add: ‘For a time. Relatively’ (74). The relative freedom of this Geulincxian boat is in fact an oxymoron, a viciously cruel joke, like the ‘relatively free’ press as defined by the dictator Mageeba in Stoppard’s Night and Day: ‘a free press which is edited by one of my relatives.’18 ‘Where we went wrong,’ Guil ultimately concedes, ‘was getting on a boat. We can move, of course, change direction, rattle about, but our movement is contained within a larger one that carries us along as inexorably as the wind and current …’ (90). And Ros sorrowfully concurs: ‘We have no control. None at all … [F]or all the compasses in the world, there’s only one direction, and time is its only measure’ (52). In the excerpt from Molloy quoted earlier in this essay, Beckett alters, and characteristically darkens, the Geulincxian paradigm: the boat’s passenger is presented specifically as a ‘slave’ who, instead of walking, ‘crawls’ along the deck. And the ship he is on is ‘the black boat of Ulysses’ described so movingly in Canto 26 of Dante’s Inferno, the boat of Ulysses’ final voyage destroyed – ‘as fate decreed’19 – by a violent storm. It is

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a fate, moreover, about which this ‘sadly rejoicing’ slave is decidedly ambivalent. For Beckett’s characters, life is simultaneously utterly wretched and wretchedly brief; yearning for an end, they nevertheless resent the inevitable end of yearning. Stoppard, of course, is never quite as bleak as Beckett, here or elsewhere, but Rosencrantz and Guildenstern may likewise be seen as ‘slaves’: shackled by fate, by a narrative steamroller of a plot about which they are totally clueless, by their very names. Nobody (themselves comically included) ever seems to know for certain which of them is which, but they can be only one or the other; as Guil comments, they have been given ‘alternatives … [b]ut not choice’ (30). ‘Their very facelessness,’ Stoppard has said, ‘makes them dramatic; the fact that they die without ever really understanding why they lived makes them somehow cosmic.’20 It makes perfect sense, then, to discover that the songs Stoppard played over and over again while writing R&GAD were ‘two Bob Dylan tracks, “Like a Rolling Stone” and “Subterranean Homesick Blues.”’21 ‘How does it feel / To be on your own / With no direction home / A complete unknown,’ runs the refrain of the former, while the latter warns ‘Look out kid / Don’t matter what you did … / You’re gonna get hit.’22 Could there be more fitting lyrics to accompany Rosencrantz and Guildenstern in their incomprehensible dance with destiny? The ending of Stoppard’s first major play thus ironically prefigures the opening of one of his most recent ones. For the ‘life-boat’ the title characters enter in the final act of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead – the boat that symbolizes their life – might as well be ferried by Charon. However purposefully they walk (or crawl, or do cartwheels) towards the east, the boat on which they’re journeying, as Geulincx reminds us, inexorably carries them towards the west; as the protagonist of Beckett’s novel How It Is notes, ‘and death in the west as a rule.’23 When all is said and done, their sole consolation is Guil’s wistful ‘Well, we’ll know better next time’ (92). As usual, however, Guil is mistaken, for the ‘next time’ will only be yet another performance of Stoppard’s play, yet another repetition of a theatrical journey in which Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, like the audience watching them, ‘move idly towards eternity, without possibility of reprieve or hope of explanation’ (88) – always already trapped in the same boat. Notes 1 Tom Stoppard, The Invention of Love, rev. ed. (London: Faber, 1998), 1. 2 David Gollob and David Roper, ‘Trad Tom Pops In,’ Gambit 10.37 (1981): 13. 3 Jill L. Levenson, ‘Stoppard’s Shakespeare: Textual Re-visions,’ The Cambridge

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4

5 6

7 8 9

10

11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19

Hersh Zeifman Companion to Tom Stoppard, ed. Katherine E. Kelly (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 160. As for Shakespeare, whose Hamlet dogs Stoppard’s play at every turn as its central intertext, the only role left for him in this metaphoric boat appears to be that of a yapping canine – which is strangely appropriate, given Stoppard’s later cannibalizing of Shakespeare’s most famous tragedy in his fortuitously titled Dogg’s Hamlet. As Stoppard has noted in another context, such whimsical coincidences are ‘almost like little signs from God that you’re on the right track.’ See Ronald Hayman, Tom Stoppard (London: Heinemann, 1977), 143. Tom Stoppard, ‘Something to Declare,’ Sunday Times [London], 25 February 1968, 47. Giles Gordon, ‘Tom Stoppard,’ Transatlantic Review 29 (1968). Rpt in Tom Stoppard in Conversation, ed. Paul Delaney (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1994), 21. Hayman, Stoppard, 7. Tom Stoppard, ‘Interview,’ Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, dir. Stoppard (Image Entertainment, 2005), DVD. Samuel Beckett, Molloy, trans. Patrick Bowles in collaboration with Beckett [1955] (New York: Grove, 1970), 42. All further page references will be cited in the text. In Geulincx’s original Latin: ‘Navis occissime vectorem abripiens versus occidentem, nihil impedit quominus ille in navi ipsa deambulet versus orientem.’ Arnold Geulincx, Ethica, vol. 2 of Opera Philosophica [3 vols], ed. J.P.N. Land (The Hague: Martin Nijhoff, 1891–3), 167. John Fleming, Stoppard’s Theatre: Finding Order amid Chaos (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2001), 30–1. Tom Stoppard, ‘The Writer and the Theatre: The Definite Maybe,’ Author 78 (1967): 19. Gordon, ‘Tom Stoppard,’ 18. Tom Stoppard, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead (London: Faber, 1967), 71–2. All further page references will be cited in the text. Tom Stoppard, The Real Thing, rev. ed. (London: Faber, 1984), 60. Dan Sullivan, ‘Young British Playwright Here for Rehearsal of Rosencrantz,’ New York Times, 29 August 1967, 27. Mel Gussow, Conversations with Stoppard (New York: Limelight, 1995), 90. Tom Stoppard, Night and Day, rev. ed. (London: Faber, 1979), 85. In Dante’s original Italian: ‘com’altrui piacque.’ My translation. Dante Alighieri, Inferno, La Divina commedia, commento di C.T. Dragone (Alba: Edizioni Paoline, 1960), Canto 26, line 141.

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20 Sullivan, ‘Young British Playwright,’ 27. 21 See Stephen Schiff, ‘Full Stoppard,’ Vanity Fair, May 1989. Rpt in Stoppard in Conversation, 213–14. Stoppard was especially enamoured of ‘Subterranean Homesick Blues’; ‘I adore it,’ he told Schiff. One of the lyrics he doubtless particularly admired in the song is ‘You don’t need a weather man / To know which way the wind blows’ – since Shakespeare’s Hamlet says much the same thing: ‘I am but mad north-northwest. When the wind is southerly, I know a hawk from a handsaw.’ William Shakespeare, Hamlet, The Complete Works, ed. G.B. Harrison (New York: Harcourt, 1968), 2.2.396–7. 22 Bob Dylan, ‘Like a Rolling Stone’ and ‘Subterranean Homesick Blues’: http://www.sing365.com, 20 October 2009. 23 Samuel Beckett, How It Is (London: John Calder, 1964), 134.

3 West Side Story and the Vestiges of Theatrical Liberalism andrea most

When West Side Story opened on Broadway in 1957, it caused a sensation in the world of musical theatre. Americans had seen Shakespeare adapted for the Broadway stage before. Cole Porter’s Kiss Me, Kate (based on The Taming of the Shrew) and Rodgers and Hart’s The Boys from Syracuse (based on The Comedy of Errors) were both enormously popular musical adaptations of the Bard’s work. But these were both comedies. West Side Story was something different – a musical based on one of Shakespeare’s tragedies. Drawing on the conventions both of musical comedy and of Shakespearean tragedy, West Side Story tests the boundaries of both genres, ultimately inhabiting a hybrid form ideally suited to express the tensions and concerns of 1950s American liberal culture.1 Created by Leonard Bernstein (music), Arthur Laurents (book), Jerome Robbins (direction and choreography), and Stephen Sondheim (lyrics), West Side Story closely follows the plot of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, with some notable differences.2 Originally intending to create a drama of Jewish/Catholic rivalry on New York’s East Side, the writers eventually chose to focus on the more timely problems of juvenile delinquency, gang violence, and tensions between Puerto Rican immigrants and ‘white’ Americans on Manhattan’s West Side. Many of the characters map neatly onto Shakespeare’s script: Romeo becomes Tony, a Polish-American, and Juliet becomes Maria, a newly arrived Puerto Rican immigrant. Tony’s best friend, and the leader of the Jets street gang, is Riff, who, like Mercutio, is cut down by Bernardo, Maria’s brother (closely modelled on Juliet’s cousin Tybalt) and a member of the rival gang, the Sharks. Like Romeo and Juliet at the masked ball, Tony and Maria meet at a (settlement house) dance, and fall in love at first sight. With the soaring musical number ‘Tonight,’

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Bernstein and Sondheim effect a remarkable transformation of the balcony scene in musical theatre terms. A rumble between the rival gangs at the end of the first act leaves both Riff and Bernardo dead, and Tony in hiding at the drugstore where he works, protected by Doc, adapted from Shakespeare’s Friar Lawrence into a hapless shop owner (‘I have no mind,’ Doc says at one point, ‘I am the village idiot’). In a brilliant adaptation of the philtre device, Maria sends her friend Anita (Bernardo’s lover) to the drugstore to give Tony a message, but Anita is attacked and nearly gang-raped by the Jets. In retaliation, instead of giving Maria’s message to Tony, she tells them all that Maria is dead. Maria’s false death becomes not just a plot device but a passionately impulsive response on Anita’s part to the racial and sexual mistreatment she has suffered at the hands of the Jets. In making this choice, Laurents further entrenches the fate of the two lovers in the racial prejudice which infects the entire world of West Side Story. Tony, hearing Anita’s ‘news,’ runs out into the street offering himself up to the Sharks. He sees Maria approaching, and realizes he has been misled, but at the same moment, Chino (a member of the Sharks who, like Paris in Romeo and Juliet, was intended to marry Maria), emerges from the shadows and shoots him. In the penultimate tableau, Maria cradles Tony’s dying body in her arms like a modern pietà, just before grabbing the gun from Chino and threatening to shoot all of them and then herself. In a turn away from Shakespeare’s script, Maria’s despair gives way to a resigned determination as she – instead of the Prince, or in this case the police – insists that the gang members join together to carry Tony’s body off the stage. While the writers clearly took great pains to remain faithful to the spirit of Romeo and Juliet, West Side Story is, like any adaptation, a product of its time and place.3 The ethos of 1950s America is evident not only in the modern dress and setting of the play but also in many of its key formal and thematic choices. Perhaps most obviously, the two gangs are not ‘two households both alike in dignity’ as the Chorus describes the Montagues and Capulets in the Prologue to Romeo and Juliet. While all the characters in West Side Story are poor and struggling to survive on the city streets, the Jets have a clear edge in gaining the sympathy of both the police and the audience. The Jets, of course, are perceived by the Sharks to be privileged because they were born in America. The authority structure represented by Lt Shrank and Officer Krupke supports this perception. While neither of them is fond of the Jet boys, Shrank, in particular, claims to be on their side. Calling the Jets ‘regular Americans’ and the Sharks ‘gold-teeth,’ Shrank insists ‘I’m for you. I want this beat cleaned

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up and you can do it for me. I’ll even lend a hand if it gets rough’ (179).4 The liberal American audience is clearly meant to recognize Shrank’s racism and to be repulsed by it. In refusing Shrank’s offer of help, the Jets manage to maintain the moral high ground. Although they fight the Sharks on a daily basis, they are not so low as to become stool pigeons for the police. Indeed, the fact that they refrain from almost all racist language is remarkable, considering the level of otherwise unjustified hatred they express for the Sharks. The Jets are indeed privileged, not only because they are ‘American’ but also because, unlike the Sharks, they are a group of well-developed characters with songs, dances, and psychological motivations for their actions. Both groups are eager to fight, but the structure of the musical ensures that the audience’s sympathy lies with the Jets. The play opens with a remarkable dance number, the famous Robbins kicks, jumps, and finger-snapping, performed by the Jets with joyous energy, peaking in a glorious moment of virtuoso unison dancing, immortalized in the advertisements for the Hollywood film.5 The Sharks, who interrupt this dance with a fight, ultimately wounding one of the younger, more innocent members of the Jets, have no comparable number. The opening stage directions plotting out the action of the dance likewise offer detailed descriptions of each Jet boy: Their leader is Riff: glowing, driving, intelligent, slightly whacky [sic]. His lieutenant is Diesel: big, slow, steady, nice. The youngest member of the gang is Baby John: awed at everything, including that he is a Jet, trying to act the big man. His buddy is A-rab: an explosive little ferret who enjoys everything and understands the seriousness of nothing. The most aggressive is Action: a catlike ball of fury. We will get to know these boys better later, as well as Snowboy: a bespectacled self-styled expert. (137)

We will not, on the other hand, get to know the Sharks better later. On the contrary, aside from a brief description of Bernardo which lacks any of the mitigating qualities given to the Jet boys (‘handsome, proud, fluid, a chip on his sardonic shoulder’), the stage directions give us no details about the Sharks except that they are numerous and that they choose to gang up on little A-rab, who is innocently pretending to be an airplane, viciously branding him by piercing his ear. The Jets have multiple scenes in which they discuss their plans, concerns, and friendships. They also have three important ensemble numbers in the play, ‘The Jet Song,’ ‘Cool,’ and ‘Gee, Officer Krupke,’ all of which work further to develop

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character, to establish sympathy, and, of course, to entertain. The Sharks have barely any dialogue and no songs at all. Unlike the Puerto Rican girls, the Sharks are apparently too foreign to sing in the Broadway style and therefore remain uneasy outsiders to the main performance action. Even in their one scene that establishes their own turf, which precedes the Puerto Rican girls’ song ‘America,’ Bernardo (the only Shark to have a real speaking part) reveals his discomfort with American conventions (‘back home, women know their place,’ he says to Chino). For a musical ostensibly about the pitfalls of prejudice, then, the theatrical scales are surprisingly skewed in favour of the ‘white’ boys. West Side Story also responds to the historical and theatrical context in which it emerges by questioning and blurring generic conventions. In Romeo and Juliet, Romeo is a lover from the beginning. In love with Rosalind, he moons about, depressed that she will not return his love. A teenage romantic, he cannot imagine that anyone or anything will change his heart – until he sees Juliet, of course: ‘Did my heart love till now? Forswear it, sight, / For I ne’er saw true beauty till this night’ (1.5, 49–50). And because Juliet returns his affections, Romeo’s fate is sealed. In this way, Romeo and Juliet bears a resemblance to many of Shakespeare’s comedies, most notably A Midsummer Night’s Dream, in which romantic love is represented as a temporary and blinding affliction. Romeo and Juliet are as much in love with the drama of love as with each other. This implicit critique of the drama of romantic love was likewise a staple of many Broadway musical comedies of an earlier generation. In Rodgers and Hart’s hat-tip to Shakespeare, The Boys from Syracuse (1938), romantic love is repeatedly treated with suspicion and world-weary sophistication. Two of the most successful songs in that show deliberately reference the dangers of getting caught up in the drama of romance. ‘Falling in Love with Love’ laments: ‘Falling in love with love / Is falling for makebelieve. Falling in love with love / Is playing the fool.’ And ‘This Can’t be Love’ draws a direct comparison between the love represented in Romeo and Juliet, the kind of love that makes one sick or dead, and the more selfaware kind of romance privileged by the comic characters in the play: In Verona, my late cousin Romeo Was three times as stupid as my Dromio. For he fell in love And then he died of it. Poor half-wit! This can’t be love

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Andrea Most Because I feel so well – No sobs, no sorrows, no sighs. This can’t be love, I get no dizzy spell, My head is not in the skies.6

The familial relationship Lorenz Hart assumes between Dromio and Romeo extends to many features of the play, but ultimately Romeo and Juliet is not a comedy. The lovers’ fascination with romance leads to death, and the reconciliation at the end of the play is effected not by romantic love but by the parents’ grief and the Prince’s forbearance. West Side Story similarly wrestles with its generic constraints. It is deeply indebted to the Broadway musical comedy, yet resists the kind of happy ending audience members in the 1950s might have expected. West Side Story takes its cues more from the postwar musicals of the 1940s and 1950s, which privileged a certain kind of realism and treated the highly self-conscious theatricality of the earlier comedies with ambivalence. The wildly successful South Pacific (1949), by Rodgers and Hammerstein, for example, also explored the violence emerging from racial prejudice, but the ending of that play, while eschewing a grand celebratory musical comedy finale, nonetheless offered a utopian image of the triumph of tolerance over racial prejudice through the redeeming power of romantic love. West Side Story straddles the fence. On the one hand, the ending of the play, following Shakespeare, is tragic; on the other hand, unlike in Romeo and Juliet, romantic love forms the moral touchstone of the play.7 The ability of the play earnestly to champion romantic love – even romantic love thwarted by violence – to insist that romantic love is the redemptive force which can break down the barriers of prejudice – lies at the heart of what makes this version of Romeo and Juliet so American. The play begins with Tony, not in love like Romeo but disenchanted with gangs and fighting. Tony is growing up and it seems he has lost his taste for the kind of performance necessary to be a Jet. ‘Now go play nice with the Jets,’ he tells Riff. He has taken on a responsible job and imagines a bright future for himself, convinced that ‘something’s coming,’ as he sings in his opening song. That something, it turns out, is Maria. There is no irony in their first meeting at the dance at the gym and certainly no scepticism about the drama of romance. The lights dim to a single spotlight, the dance music fades out, and a dreamy quality overtakes the entire stage. Their love is immediate, passionate, and true. While Romeo’s friends treat his various love affairs with scepticism, Tony and Maria’s

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constancy and judgment are never in doubt. The love scene is cut off suddenly when Bernardo pulls Maria away, but Tony is unfazed and moments later breaks into the soaring aria ‘Maria,’ suggesting that anyone who can sing like that must be really in love. The authority of romantic love in this musical is such that the lovers are fully capable of marrying themselves. No friar or church is needed. In the bridal shop, a couple of scenes later, Tony and Maria kneel next to mannequins (which stand in for their parents), pledge their vows, and are married.8 By the end of the play, the power of romantic love reigns supreme. Although Tony dies, Maria’s love lives on and effects the reconciliation between the gangs that no other authority could achieve – not the police, parents, war councils, or death itself. West Side Story’ s generic instability emerges from a fundamental contradiction between the musical’s ideological roots in early twentiethcentury American Jewish theatrical liberalism and the concerns of the historical moment in which the play appeared (the decades following the Second World War) when the basic values of theatrical liberalism increasingly came under attack. Theatrical liberalism is a world view that developed from the encounter of immigrant Jews with Protestant American liberalism in the early and mid-twentieth century. Negotiating a space for themselves within the American public sphere, large numbers of first- and second-generation Jewish Americans turned to the world of popular entertainment to articulate a model of secular space which re-imagined familiar Jewish values, practices, and attitudes in theatrical terms, simultaneously easing their own acculturation and creating enormously successful works that tapped into early twentieth-century America’s inherent theatricality. The new genres that emerged to express this secular and theatrical Judaism – backstage musicals, fast-talking comedies, musical plays – are both Jewish and American. To identify this elusive American Jewish secular culture is not, for the most part, to look for overtly religious or ethnic representations on stage and screen. There are, for example, neither Jews nor Jewish practices in West Side Story. Rather, these works of secular American Jewish culture combine familiar Jewish rhetorical structures, attitudes, and behaviours with more typically American characters and settings, creating a hybrid culture that speaks to a broad American public. There are four key features that define works of theatrical liberalism. First, these works imagine the theatre as a sacred space, a venue for spiritual expression and the performance of acts of devotion, thereby turning theatricality into an acceptable cultural mode. Second, in cel-

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ebrating theatricality, these plays and films privilege a particularly Jewish attitude towards action and acting in the world, stressing the external over the internal, public over private. Third, these works strenuously resist essentialized identity categories, promoting a particular kind of individual freedom based on self-fashioning. Theatrical liberalism guaranteed the freedom to perform the self, a freedom particularly cherished by a people so often denied the right to self-definition, whether by Christian dogma or racial science. And fourth, that individual freedom is circumscribed by a set of incontrovertible obligations to the theatrical community. In the popular culture of theatrical liberalism, there is a palpable tension between the liberal and American rhetoric of rights and the Judaic rhetoric of obligation (mitzvot). In countless films and musicals from the period, characters are asked to work together for the good of the stage community. They struggle to reconcile the Judaic insistence on legal and communal obligation with the liberal sense that individuals should have the right to choose their own fate. The moral weight of these stories ultimately depends on the fulfilment of theatrical obligations, even at the expense of individual rights. ‘The show must go on’ emerged in the early twentieth century as the new dogma of the theatrical liberal.9 Theatrical liberalism developed and thrived in the early and midtwentieth century, particularly in the period between the two world wars. During this time, the musical came into its own as a decidedly American form, and the worlds of Broadway and Hollywood began to be seen – for better and worse – as Jewish. Jewish writers shaped a new American comic genre, one that thrived on fast-talking wisecracks, urban settings and cosmopolitan characters, self-consciously theatrical behaviour, an easily penetrated fourth wall, and a deep investment in the power of theatricality to shape reality. In the wake of the Second World War, however, Jewish writers began to question their devotion to all things theatrical. Having witnessed, both at home and abroad, the failures of theatrical liberalism to prevent real-life catastrophe (‘acting’ like a German in Nazi Germany was no protection against persecution; neither was acting like an American during the most anti-Semitic years in U.S. history), Jewish writers and directors expressed ambivalence about the principles of theatrical liberalism and began to reject the artifice associated with theatricality, instead flirting with authenticity and embracing realism.10 Even writers like Lorenz Hart who, before the war, had been deeply suspicious of the anti-theatricality inherent in notions of the authentic self began to reconsider the stability it offered.11 In a world in which the active fashioning and performing of a self offered little protection against violence, the

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seductions of authenticity are understandable. In 1949, Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman presented a powerful – and powerfully Jewish – articulation of this new ambivalence towards theatrical liberalism, severely critiquing Willy Loman’s propensity for dreaming, for making up stories, indeed, for relying on theatricality as a route to personal and financial fulfilment.12 Salesman was quickly followed by numerous plays, stories, films, and musicals, most notably West Side Story and Gypsy, that engaged with similar issues, many of them written, produced, and/or directed by Jews.13 While it may come as no surprise that West Side Story privileges distinctively American values in its adaptation of Shakespeare’s play, what is surprising is the way in which the play wrestles with the basic thematic and formal values of theatrical liberalism, the American and Jewish world view by which Broadway had been shaped for decades. A key feature of theatrical liberalism is a belief in the power of external action to effect real and lasting change in the internal self.14 Space constraints do not allow me to relate in detail the genealogy of this belief – which represents a secularized version of Jewish attitudes towards faith and prescribed behaviour. Suffice it to say that when most American Jewish writers and thinkers of the early and mid-twentieth century departed from the orthodox Jewish practice of their immigrant parents and grandparents, even the most assimilated of them did not completely embrace the Protestant Enlightenment world view that relegated religious action to the private sphere. Rather, Jewish writers and performers shaped a new kind of American public sphere, one which relocated the Jewish spiritual obligation to act in the world from an Old World religious context to a legitimately American arena, the world of popular entertainment. In the self-consciously theatrical world of early twentieth-century plays and films, a good performance was the measure of a good actor. What an actor did on the stage is what mattered; what an actor believed – who an actor really was – was of little interest. Theatrical liberalism privileged this external and public version of a self, the acting self. Just as the prominent American Jewish theologian Abraham Joshua Heschel insisted that ‘we do not have faith because of deeds; we may attain faith through sacred deeds,’ the plays, films, and novels of theatrical liberalism argue for the power of acting to shape belief and feeling. When Anna in The King and I whistled a happy tune, she changed her internal state from frightened to brave. When Ravenal and Magnolia ‘Make Believe’ they are in love in Show Boat, they really do fall in love. David Belasco and other directors of the early twentieth century argued for a style of acting that largely

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involved the disciplining and refining of voice, gesture, movement, and expression. Convincing performances started from expert technique, and progressed from there to persuasive emotional performances. Acting created new emotional realities on the stage. By the 1950s, however, new ideas about acting, theatre, and the sources of the self began to reshape Broadway. With the success of Death of a Salesman and A Streetcar Named Desire, method acting became the gold standard for stellar performances, an acting technique that turned Belasco’s theory on its head, insisting that authentic feeling must come first. Once an actor has figured out how to ‘feel’ the part, then he or she can begin to perform it. There were problems, of course, with this radical shift in dramaturgical fashion, the most obvious being that it led to an ironically anti-theatrical attitude towards performance. The best performances were considered to be those which came from the most authentic place, which were, in effect, the least theatrical. The push for realism in American drama of the 1950s is well known, but how to translate this anti-theatrical embrace of authenticity to a musical? While critics praised the heightened realism of the ‘integrated’ musicals of the time, they also tacitly acknowledged that musicals are inherently theatrical. Musicals represent extremes of emotion in highly unrealistic ways: through song and dance. West Side Story is obsessed with the problem of performative action and with whether or not external action actually has the power to shape reality. This concern first becomes apparent in the bridal shop scene with Maria and Tony which culminates in the song ‘One Hand, One Heart.’ Using the dress dummies that surround them in the bridal shop, Tony and Maria pretend that they are meeting each other’s parents, asking for permission to marry, and receiving it. They then don costumes – Maria a bridal veil and Tony a top hat – and set up a theatrical wedding scene for themselves. The two appoint dummies to serve as maid of honour and best man; then they kneel solemnly before the audience, which serves as the priest. Engaging in the paradigmatic performative speech act, as described by J.L. Austin in his famous lectures at Harvard in 1955, two years before the opening of West Side Story, Tony and Maria recite their wedding vows, exchange rings, kiss, and sing of their love in ‘One Hand, One Heart.’ They use speech that Austin calls performative; it doesn’t just state facts, it actually brings about change. In musically and choreographically consenting to be married, within the context of a proper wedding ceremony, they actually become married. Their speech is action; their acting changes their reality. The stage directions indicate that

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the actors should demonstrate awareness of this transition from ‘acting’ to ‘reality’: ‘They look at each other – and the playacting vanishes.’ And a bit later, ‘They look at each other, and at the reality of their “game”’ (185). Tony and Maria have performed a wedding ceremony, and this action has changed their internal sense of themselves. From this point on, they believe they are married. Austin does stress repeatedly, however, that for language to be performative, the circumstances of the situation must be correct. Language can only be performative when spoken by someone with the authority to bring about change. Do Tony and Maria have the authority to marry themselves, with only the audience and a few dress dummies as witnesses? Does anyone in this scene have the authority to speak the words, ‘I now pronounce you man and wife’? In their song, Tony and Maria appeal to some unnamed higher authority to ‘Make of our hands one hand / Make of our hearts one heart.’ The song is structured like a prayer, but to whom are they praying? God is not mentioned. Rather, they appeal directly to the audience. The stage directions read: ‘Slowly, seriously, they turn front, and together kneel as before an altar’ (184). An altar to what? In the world view of theatrical liberalism, the theatre itself becomes a sacred space. Authority, in this sacred universe, lies with the audience, and with the formal conventions of the stage. No one literally speaks the words that confirm the marriage, but they are symbolically indicated by the audience, which has been invested with the authority belonging to the friar – and the church – in Shakespeare’s version. When the audience applauds at the end of ‘One Hand, One Heart,’ it has given its consent to this marriage. The sound of applause pronounces the young couple man and wife.15 Elsewhere in West Side Story, however, the power of action to shape reality is a source of anxiety, a power that needs to be questioned, analysed, and controlled. Action is not only the motivating force behind theatrical liberalism, he is also a character in the play. Action, a member of the Jets, is the boy eager to fight, to perform, to act. Always preferring action over talk, he is characterized by lines such as ‘I say go, go!’ (142) and ‘In, out, let’s get cracking!’ (144). Riff spends a great deal of energy trying to calm Action down, to keep him under control. In the very first scene, Action is ready to rumble and Riff replies, ‘Cool, Action boy’ (142). When Riff enters the drugstore before the ‘war council,’ he again needs to pacify Action – ‘Unwind, Action’ (171) – and a few pages later, physically holding him back, he insists, ‘Easy, Action, save your steam for the rumble’ (173). And when Action can barely control himself be-

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fore the big fight, Riff lectures him on the nuances of different kinds of acting: Action. I swear the next creep who calls me hoodlum – Riff. You’ll laugh! Yeah. Now you all better dig this and dig it the most. No matter who or what is eatin’ at you, you show it, buddy boys, and you are dead. You are cuttin’ a hole in yourselves for them to stick in a red-hot umbrella and open it. Wide. You wanna live? You play it cool. (173)

Riff then moves into the number ‘Cool,’ a musical response to Action’s impulsive energy, in which he tutors the boys in a form of acting that involves self-control and the performance of a believable, cool ‘front.’ The number is fraught with tension and ambivalence. Action is one of the most dangerous characters in the play. His need to express his deepest emotions, to act on his uncontrolled violent impulses, represents both the dark force that drives the tragic denouement of the play and the aesthetic impulse, in 1950s drama and literature, to probe the depths of the soul and reveal the honest ‘truth’ of a character.16 Riff also counsels the boys to ‘act,’ but he means something quite different by it. Riff speaks the language of theatrical liberalism. For Riff, external performance is the best way to shape reality, not the other way around. The boys should not show their anger; according to Riff, rather, they should laugh. Riff is concerned that the impulsive expression of authentic feelings will get the boys killed. Laughing (i.e., acting) will save them. Riff resists Action’s instinctive energy, his desire to feel first and act second, and favours instead a performance style which depends on the exterior presentation of self as a means of shaping both the plot of the boys’ lives and the ways in which they respond to provocation.17 ‘Take it slow, and daddy-o, you can live it up and die in bed,’ Riff sings. Alas, Riff does not die in bed. Instead he falls victim to the impulsive action of another character, Tony, and is killed in the rumble. The style of acting Riff preaches suffers along with him. Following the rumble, early in Act Two, the boys regroup to try to figure out how to act now that Riff is gone. Acting/Action is the subject of one of the most theatrical and rousing numbers in the show, and a welcome bit of comic relief in an otherwise unrelenting second act. Action and Snowboy meet up with the other boys on the street after a brief encounter in the station house. The boys want to know how they got off so easily. Snowboy replies, ‘Cops believe everything they read in the papers,’ and Action adds, ‘To them we ain’t human, we’re cruddy juvenile delinquents. So that’s what we give ’em’ (205). Action argues here for performance, for ‘putting on a front’

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and giving the audience – in this case the police – what they want and expect. But in performing for the cops, the boys are also compromising themselves, presenting themselves as if they ‘ain’t human.’ Performance is both necessary and suspect. The gang then launches into a song, ‘Gee, Officer Krupke,’ in which one boy after another plays the role of an expert trying to figure out who or what Action really is. First, Action appeals to ‘Officer Krupke’ (played by Snowboy), insisting that he has been shaped by his family and therefore is not responsible for his behaviour: Action. Dear kindly Sergeant Krupke, You gotta understand – It’s just our bringin’ upke That gets us out of hand, Our mothers all are junkies, Our fathers all are drunks. All. Golly Moses – natcherly we’re punks!

(206)

In this verse, Action’s bad behaviour is a response to his environment but doesn’t represent his true ‘good’ self. He is just acting that way: Gee, Officer Krupke, we’re very upset; We never had the love that every child oughta get. We ain’t no delinquents, We’re misunderstood. Deep down inside us there is good!

So is Action bad, as his behaviour would suggest, or good, as he insists? Is there a difference between who he is and how he acts? What makes Action act badly, and who is responsible for him? The song becomes a highly theatrical tour de force, with Action shunted from judge to psychoanalyst to social worker, with the other boys taking on roles as needed in quick-change vaudevillian style. It ends with a crowd-pleasing, chorus-line-style refrain, topped off by a final curse at Krupke. The boys satirize each of the experts they encounter, experts eager to find out what motivates Action and the other boys, making it clear that they have little sympathy for those who think they can explain them with a simple unifying diagnosis: Diesel [as judge]. The trouble is he’s crazy. A-Rab [as psychiatrist]. The trouble is he drinks. Baby John [as social worker]. The trouble is he’s lazy.

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(208)

The more the experts probe, the more ridiculous and contradictory their responses (‘growing? Grown?’).18 These boys fault the adults around them for making judgments based on surfaces, for jumping to conclusions about them based on their behaviour. The truth about them, and about Action in particular, lies deep inside them. Action perceives his encounters with the world of adults as an exhausting process of being explained, pinned down, flattened into one stereotypical character trait or behaviour pattern after another. What Action seems to need is the very thing denied him by the poverty of the city streets, by the institutional structures designed to keep him out of jail, and also by the cult of authenticity that has him in its grip: the freedom to shape his own life. The song ‘Gee, Officer Krupke’ is both uplifting and horrifying. In its form, it represents the freeing power of theatricality in a liberal society. As the boys perform multiple roles, and see Action in multiple ways, they demonstrate the very social mobility promised by theatrical liberalism. At the same time, the boys sing this song in the wake of the death of their good friend and leader in a pointless fight over racial prejudice, the very boy who counselled them on appropriate acting styles, on the ways to ‘act cool’ in order to cheat death. The placement of this song in the second act raises questions about the efficacy of this kind of acting to prevent real violence and about the possibilities for theatrical freedom, for personal agency, in a world so circumscribed by poverty, prejudice, and the pursuit of authenticity. The freedom to perform the self is a key feature of theatrical liberalism, representing for Jewish writers a means by which to integrate into American society, to achieve social and economic mobility, and to ensure the widest possible application of these freedoms for all Americans. This embrace of self-fashioning, and rejection of any race-based identity labels, became particularly urgent in the wake of 1920s American nativism and 1930s Nazism, when the dangers of allowing others to affix ‘scientific’ labels to the self became horribly apparent for Jews. In the musical theatre of the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s, American Jewish writers and artists argued forcefully against the snare of racial self-definition. In numerous plays and movies of the time, the theatre served as a liberating

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space in which the right to self-fashion was fundamental and decisions about inclusion and advancement were based on the merit of particular performances (and often on the ability to play multiple roles effectively) and not on the possession of an essential, consistent self.19 The late 1920s and 1930s witnessed an explosion of Jewish-created popular performance styles that celebrated changeability itself. The ethnic comedians of vaudeville, who could adopt a character with the change of a hat, a nose, a feather, or coloured face paint were a central feature of high-class Broadway revues of the 1920s and 1930s such as the Zeigfeld Follies. Comedian Fannie Brice was well known for her ability to do ‘imitations.’ And in Betty Boop (created by the Fleischer Brothers) and Looney Tunes (created by a team of Warner Brothers artists), cartoon characters regularly changed shape, size, character, gender, costume, and performance style in order to outwit pursuers or seduce lovers. Superheroes like Superman and Batman, invented by Jewish comic-book artists in the 1930s, based their success on their ability to change identity, thereby eluding and ultimately triumphing over their enemies.20 Action and the boys evoke this history of liberating quick-change performance in ‘Gee, Officer Krupke.’ They seem to be arguing for broad freedom to self-fashion, but this is a freedom that they reserve for themselves, insisting in the second act that the Puerto Rican Anita cannot escape her racial self, that she is ‘too dark to pass,’ and that Anybodys, the tomboy who wants to be a member of the Jets, should stop acting like a boy and wear a dress. Tony and Maria also reject the possibilities of self-fashioning, instead succumbing to the romantic mysteries of the heart and the authentic self. When Anita bursts into Maria’s room in the second act, just missing Tony who has escaped out the window, she berates Maria for having anything to do with him: ‘a boy like that, who’d kill your brother / forget that boy and find another / one of your own kind, stick to your own kind!’ (212). Maria responds with the language of the immutable interior self, the heart: I hear your words And in my head I know they’re smart, But my heart, Anita, But my heart!

(213)

Not only is she incapable of changing herself and her feelings, she is destined to be in love with Tony no matter what he does:

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(213)

For Maria, and for Anita, too, who eventually concedes that Maria is right, agency is not the issue. Only the truth revealed by romantic love matters. Maria has no control over who she is, what she feels, or how she acts. Her heart has taken over – a space deep inside which works of its own accord – and she willingly trades the freedom to perform her own self for the assurance of a fixed, true, and authentic love. Convinced that Maria is dead, and crazed by grief, Tony rejects the possibility of disguise, escape, or acting ‘cool’ and instead acts on impulse, racing into the street and daring Chino to come and get him. Suddenly, the tomboy Anybodys emerges from the shadows and attempts to bring him to his senses: Anybodys. [a whisper from the dark] Tony … Tony. [swings around] Who’s that? Anybodys. [darting on] Me: Anybodys. Tony. Get outa here. HEY, CHINO, COME GET ME, DAMN YOU! Anybodys. What’re you doin’, Tony? Tony. I said get outa here! CHINO! Anybodys. Look, maybe if you and me just –

(222)

Like Action, Anybodys is aptly named. A girl who wishes she were a boy, she represents the core of theatrical liberalism’s promise: the freedom to become anybody at all. Anybodys brags, ‘I’m very big with shadows, ya know. I can slip in and out of ’em like wind through a fence’ (210). Echoing Shakespeare’s Puck (‘If we shadows have offended’), Anybodys is as changeable as the fairies in A Midsummer Night’s Dream and the actors on Shakespeare’s stage. She lurks in the wings, ready to emerge on cue and play her part. At this crucial moment in the play, she offers Tony a safe haven, encouraging him to retreat to the shadows, to make use of the magic of the theatre to effect his escape. But Tony sees no hope in the solution Anybodys offers. He rejects not only her offer of assistance, but also her entire ethos of self-fashioning: Tony. [savagely] It’s not playing any more! Can’t any of you get that?

West Side Story and the Vestiges of Theatrical Liberalism Anybodys. But the gang – Tony. You’re a girl: be a girl!

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(222)

Insisting that Anybodys must be who she is biologically destined to be, Tony crushes both her fantasy and his own, as he rushes into the light, only to be confronted by another character from the shadows, Maria. She offers a radically different philosophy. ‘I didn’t believe hard enough,’ Tony laments. ‘Loving is enough,’ she insists as Tony lies dying in her arms. And in the final tableau, Maria’s faith in the power of romantic love triumphs as she brings together Sharks and Jets in a funeral procession, ‘the same procession they made in the dream ballet,’ making real the utopian vision of love and harmony Tony and Maria had dreamed of the night before. In Modern Tragedy, published only a few years after the successful opening of West Side Story, Raymond Williams argues that liberal tragedy of the twentieth century differs markedly from the Greek model. Our modern tragedy, he asserts, is rooted in the psychological struggles of a lone individual, a heroic figure who battles against society, ultimately becoming a tragic victim as he recognizes the limitations of his individual strength. We pity this hero, a victim of the false promises of liberal individualism.21 This may describe the liberal tragedy of Ibsen or O’Neill, but it does not fully take into account the peculiarly American theatrical liberalism of West Side Story. Tony does not easily fit Williams’s model of the liberal tragic hero. He seems to aspire to individual happiness; he tells Doc of his dream that he and Maria will start a new life together in the country. But when this dream is expressed in the haunting song ‘Somewhere,’ he and Maria sing of a place for us, and as they are joined, in song and dance, by the entire chorus of street kids, this ‘us’ is clearly meant to be larger than the two of them.22 Tony’s death certainly limits his ability to achieve individual happiness. But Tony dies not because he rages against society. He dies because he has given up that fight. Anybodys, and the theatrical liberalism she represents, offers him a way out, and he rejects it: ‘I didn’t believe hard enough,’ he laments as he dies. In what? In the eternal possibilities of romantic love, of course, but also in the eternal optimism of theatrical liberalism, the ideology which made that love possible. A final feature of theatrical liberalism is its ultimate privileging of obligations to the theatrical community, even at the expense of individual rights. While the love story between Tony and Maria is of course central to the play, West Side Story is not a story of a lone individual, or even of a couple. It is the story of a community. The central characters

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are not really the lovers, but the gangs, two groups of American kids who battle over a bit of sidewalk, who struggle to create ‘a place for us.’ They dream not of overcoming theatrical liberalism but rather of achieving it. If the play ended with Maria acting on her threat to shoot all of them and then herself (because ‘now she has learned to hate too’), this would be liberal tragedy. But the final tableau, in which she drops the gun and instead brings the warring gangs together to mourn their failure restores hope in the audience, as the curtain falls, that the promise of theatrical liberalism lives on. Notes 1 The musical is alert to a rising teenager culture and accompanying concerns about juvenile delinquency (as we will see in this essay) as well as the complexities of cold war hysteria, the increasingly urgent fight for black civil rights, and creeping consciousness about the horrors of the Holocaust. 2 The play confounds generic expectations in other ways as well. Bernstein’s score – and the ways in which many of the songs and much of the underscoring intersect with the dialogue – veers towards the operatic and deviates in important ways from standard musical-theatre conventions of its day, which tended to make clear distinctions between story and song. Likewise, Jerome Robbins’s choreography further obscures the lines between musical theatre and ballet, both in dance style and in the relationship among the constituent parts of the play. All professional productions of West Side Story are required to maintain not only the Bernstein score and the Laurents libretto but also the Robbins choreography, a practice common in classical ballet but unheard of in the musical theatre. 3 The literature on Shakespeare adaptations, and even just on adaptations of Romeo and Juliet, is enormous. For an excellent overview, see Jill Levenson, ‘The Adaptations of Juliet and Her Romeo’ (Teaching Adaptations: A Guide and Sourcebook, ed. Nassim W. Balestrini, forthcoming) as well as the ‘further reading’ section linked to chapter one (‘Introduction’) in Levenson’s forthcoming book Shakespeare and Modern Drama (Oxford University Press). In her article, Levenson discusses the many possible ways in which specific aspects of Romeo and Juliet can be emphasized (or ignored) through adaptation – particularly the shifting importance of the love story and the political context. 4 All citations are taken from the mass market paperback Romeo and Juliet / West Side Story, edited by Norris Houghton (New York: Dell Publishing, 1965). Every reasonable effort has been made to obtain permission to cite lyrics.

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5 While the choreography for this opening number was very similar in both play and film, other key aspects of the play addressed in this essay were changed for the 1961 film. For this reason, this essay deals exclusively with the play and with the particular theatrical conventions that made the play distinctive. 6 The Complete Lyrics of Lorenz Hart, ed. Dorothy Hart and Robert Kimball (New York: Knopf, 1986), 253. © 1938 (Renewed) Chappell & Co., Inc. Used with permission. See also George and Ira Gershwin’s ‘Blah Blah Blah,’ which mocks the same language of romantic love. 7 For another example of the generic trouble with endings, especially in the case of an adaptation, see Alan Ackerman, ‘An Experiment in Teaching: Pygmalion, My Fair Lady, and the Pursuit of Happiness,’ in this volume. 8 This type of scene was not uncommon in early modern drama, since (in real life) the necessity and authority of church weddings to make marriages legally binding was still in question; see, for example, Rosalind and Orlando’s betrothal in As You Like It. In 1950s America, this assumption of authority by the lovers is seen as rebellious (marriage can only take place under the proper institutional structures) but also morally acceptable (in a democracy like the United States, rebellion is sometimes necessary to ensure rights). For Tony and Maria, free choice in romantic love authorizes them to make their own decisions. 9 I discuss each of these elements of theatrical liberalism in detail in chapter two of my book Theatrical Liberalism, forthcoming from New York University Press. For details on the historical development of the first two elements, see my chapter ‘The Birth of Theatrical Liberalism’ in After Pluralism, eds. Courtney Bender and Pamela Klassen (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010). 10 Rising American nativism, calls for immigration restriction, the inclusion of Jews among the stated targets of the Ku Klux Klan, the increasing prominence on radio of anti-Semitic figures like Charles Lindbergh and Father Coughlin, not to mention the power of Nazism abroad, all contributed to making the later 1920s and 1930s the most difficult and dangerous period for Jews in American history. See Andrea Most, Making Americans: Jews and the Broadway Musical (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004), 19–28, for an elaboration on the relationship between this anti-Semitism and the rise of the American musical. 11 See Andrea Most, ‘The H(e)art of the Matter: Modernist Theatrical Liberalism in Pal Joey,’ University of Toronto Quarterly 79.3 (2010). 12 For an extended discussion of Miller’s response to theatrical liberalism, see Andrea Most, ‘Opening the Windshield,’ in Modern Drama 50.4 (2007). 13 Some examples include Saul Bellow, Seize the Day (1956), Philip Roth,

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Andrea Most Goodbye, Columbus (1959), and David Mamet’s later incarnation of a similar impulse in Glengarry Glen Ross (1984). As I describe in my longer work on this subject, the tension between the Protestant Enlightenment notion of the private nature of faith and the Jewish emphasis on the importance of external ritual and action led to a particular kind of Jewish secularization which focused on the importance of acting in the public sphere via theatricality. Austin does note that ‘a performative utterance will … be in a peculiar way hollow or void if said by an actor or spoken in a soliloquy’ (22). But in this case the concern is with the performative speech of the characters, not the actors playing those characters. See Austin, How to Do Things with Words, 2nd ed. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1962). Action bears some resemblance here to a young Stanley Kowalski, from A Streetcar Named Desire, a character both sympathetic in his authenticity and reprehensible in his inability to control his animal instincts. Riff’s embrace of performance as the most sensible way to deal with provocation must have resonated with the writers, at least three of whom later openly acknowledged their homosexuality. All were in the closet when they were writing the show, however. We see here as well a none-too-subtle critique of the extremely popular behaviourist psychology of the 1950s, developed and popularized by B.F. Skinner, as well as the ongoing debates between psychoanalysts and behaviourists about where to locate the ‘truth’ of the self. The term ‘self-fashioning’ was first popularized by Stephen Greenblatt in his discussion of selfhood in the Renaissance (Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981]). Jews were not alone in turning to the theatre as an alternative model for constructing identity. Indeed, we see similar impulses among black and Irish Americans, both of whom had a stake in retaining control over their own identity-formation and who used self-fashioning as a way of resisting racialized identity definitions imposed by an unsympathetic majority. And while the nineteenth-century rise of racial science made this type of theatricality especially urgent, this kind of minority-group self-fashioning is present in African-American, Jewish, and other Western theatre traditions at least as far back as the early modern period. This qualification also applies, to a certain extent, to gay men, although the dynamic of self-fashioning is somewhat different. Many gay writers and directors, like those who created West Side Story, were also members of the other groups. However, during the early and mid-twentieth century, it is in Jewish-created performance that the freedom inherent in self-fashioning is thematized most directly and persistently. For

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detailed discussion of the relationship between gay men and the musical theatre, see D.A. Miller, Place for Us (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998). For a discussion of lesbians and musical theatre, see Stacy Wolf, A Problem Like Maria: Gender and Sexuality in the American Musical (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2002). 21 Raymond Williams, Modern Tragedy (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1966), 87–9. 22 ‘There’s a place for us / somewhere a place for us. Peace and quiet and open air / wait for us / somewhere.’

4 Staging Shakespeare for ‘Live’ Performance in The Eyre Affair and Stage Beauty margaret jane kidnie

In an important essay published in The Drama Review in 1990, Roger Copeland takes issue with the idea that what is ‘unique about the theatre,’ setting it apart from other arts such as the movies, literature, or sculpture, is ‘the fact that it’s live and unmediated, that it can put us in the presence of other living, breathing human beings.’1 His argument against this ‘traditional (if middlebrow)’ position is twofold (32). First he reminds us that presence has not always been regarded as an exclusively theatrical trait, or even an effect best achieved through performance. He recounts how formalist painters such as Frank Stella and Morris Louis sought to achieve a ‘presentness and instantaneousness’ that Michael Fried, among others, characterizes as a ‘defeat’ of theatre. Standing in front of their paintings, one is struck by a two-dimensional ‘flatness’ that allows the work to be ‘wholly manifest’ to the viewer ‘at every moment’ in a way that theatre, which depends both on temporal duration and concealment, cannot approach.2 He then develops the position, in some ways anticipating Philip Auslander’s research into ‘liveness,’ commerce, and media exchange, that ‘no [theatrical] experience (no matter how “live”) is entirely unmediated’ (42). Firmly rejecting as ‘naive and self-deceptive’ analyses that describe performance as a communal, restorative experience that relies for its effect on the direct interaction of actor(s) and audience, Copeland concludes that ‘the idea that the theatre’s “liveness” is – in and of itself – a virtue, a source of automatic, unearned moral superiority to film and television, is sheer bourgeois sentimentality’ (42). The polemical critique of theatre as mediated – as always already ‘live,’ rather than live – is perhaps best associated, however, with Auslander’s ongoing research. In Liveness: Performance in a Mediatized Culture, Aus-

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lander focuses on the fluid divides and borrowings between mass media and theatrical performance in order to debunk the view that live performance remains (or ever was) a ‘pure’ artistic preserve independent of capital. His examples range from the musical stage’s increasing awareness of future existences in alternative media to the frequent deployment of multimedia effects in theatre and performance art. Drawing attention to the etymological embeddedness of ‘mediate’ in ‘im-mediate,’ a quality so prized of live theatre, Auslander further argues that ‘live’ and ‘recorded’ are ideas so caught up in each other that the former was not even available as a conceptual category before the latter became a technological reality.3 In this, Auslander aims squarely at a perception of live theatre that is widespread among both practitioners and audiences. Peter Brook, for example, celebrates theatre as inherently, necessarily, ephemeral. For Brook, a live performance is ‘an event for that moment in time, for that [audience] in that place – and it’s gone. Gone without a trace. There was no journalist; there was no photographer; the only witnesses were the people present; the only record is what they retained.’4 This position perhaps receives its most theoretically sophisticated articulation in Peggy Phelan’s Unmarked: The Politics of Performance. In a much-cited chapter, Phelan argues that the essence of performance is to exist only in a present moment. Once it is recorded or documented, ‘it betrays and lessens the promise of its own ontology’: performance, for Phelan, ‘becomes itself through disappearance.’5 Taking the art of Angelika Festa as a case study, Phelan explains that it is the ‘physical, psychic, and visual cost’ exacted of both performer and spectator in a piece such as Unfitted, the felt experience of the ‘performative exchange,’ that makes possible innovative insights into subjectivity, theory, and feminist performance practice (162). A theoretical and political commitment to the impossibility of repeating the performance event without difference motivates Phelan’s resistance to pressures on performance to accommodate – or perhaps, rather, capitulate to – what she describes as ‘the laws of the reproductive economy’ (146).6 While one can understand Auslander’s impatience with analyses that fall back on clichés about ‘“the magic of live theatre,” the “energy” that supposedly exists between performers and spectators in a live event, and the “community” that live performance is often said to create among performers and spectators,’7 and further accept, at least in a qualified way, his rejection of the live/mediatized binary as reductive, it nonetheless seems important not to lose sight of the fact that audiences go to the theatre and occasionally experience something exceptional in live

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performance. Although this experience is perhaps not unique to theatre, nor ‘purely’ theatrical in the sense that it is achieved without an awareness of or recourse to other media, it nonetheless remains closely associated with a performance event that takes place in a particular space and at a particular moment in time. Moreover, this is typically an experience that cannot be reproduced through digital recording, archival fragments, or narrative reports – what Phelan calls ‘the circulation of representations of representations’– or even, because of the influence of an audience on the theatrical event, by attending the same production on subsequent evenings.8 Barbara Hodgdon evocatively speaks to the elusive quality of live Shakespearean performance in her account of the body memories physically traced in theatrical costume and the subjective memories of embodied performance to which they give rise – costumes and memories which, in a few notable examples, are overwritten, palimpsest-like, by other bodies in subsequent performances.9 Laurie E. Osborne, noting the frequency with which films of staged Shakespeare sit side by side on the shelf with Shakespearean feature films as DVD recordings watched either on television or computer, calls for Shakespeare scholars to engage the debate between presence ‘posited as the precondition of performance’ and a mediatized liveness that ‘depends upon the potential of reproducibility.’10 Through an analysis of four live staged productions later broadcast on television and now remastered from the Broadway Theatre Archive for DVD circulation – a sequencing of performance media that provides unusual opportunity to explore the manipulation of theatrical/televisual codes and the remediation of television as film – Osborne comes to the perhaps surprising conclusion that even twice removed from the live stage, the idea of presence remains a ‘crucial’ part of the viewing experience, ‘so important that mediatized reproductions exploit and develop codes of sound, mise-en-scène and camera work to represent the “liveness” that reproduction both celebrates and eliminates’ (62). In this essay, I want to take up some of these competing perspectives through a study of two performances of Shakespeare, one an enactment of Richard III in Jasper Fforde’s The Eyre Affair, the other a staging of Othello in Stage Beauty, directed by Richard Eyre. Each of these performances, one unfolding in a novel, the other in a feature film, is witnessed by the reader or viewer ‘as though’ rather than ‘actually’ live. My purpose in studying two fictionalized treatments of live theatre is to examine how the effects of successful performance – what commentators refer to when they fall back on a phrase like ‘the magic of theatre’ – might be faked

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for readers and film audiences through non-theatrical devices. Through this analysis, I want to suggest that, to the extent these mediatized stagings simulate for their intended audience the experience of some of the pleasures of live theatre, they implicitly challenge (in keeping with the work of Copeland and Auslander) assumptions about the effects of live performance depending on, or otherwise being tied to, a conception of theatre as an art of presence and disappearance. Paradoxically, though, and despite their metafictional/metafilmic potential to disrupt notions of the ‘purity’ of theatre, these embedded stagings ultimately serve to reinforce such perceptions, celebrating the (supposedly) irreproducible pleasures of psychic investment and release associated with having been there in person at a particular live performance. In this, the presentation of Shakespeare’s drama in The Eyre Affair and Stage Beauty underscores an ongoing aesthetic commitment to live performance as an art form, as distinct from either film or the novel, that uniquely resists repetition, while yet allowing the reader or viewer the option to revisit the one-off theatrical scene, ‘live.’ The Richard History Stage Show About half-way through The Eyre Affair, Thursday Next accompanies her former fiancé, Landen Parke-Laine, to a live performance of Richard III at the Ritz Theatre in Swindon. The reader is positioned with Next among the audience in front of a shabby proscenium- arch stage complete with dusty plaster mouldings and a water-stained curtain. The Ritz has been the exclusive home of this production of Richard III for more than fifteen years, and it plays once a week on a Friday night. As so often happens in Fforde’s novels, it quickly becomes apparent that this production of Shakespeare is not quite what one expects. Not only is it the ‘Garrick cut,’ performed in about two and a half hours, but there are no professional actors. Instead, the parts are distributed among eager spectators half an hour before the show starts, all of whom, Next tells us, ‘had been to the play so many times they knew it back to front.’11 Those not chosen to perform that evening take numbered seats in the stalls, many of them still in the costumes they wore to the show in the hope that they might be cast: There was a moment’s pause and then the curtains reopened, revealing Richard at the side of the stage. He limped up and down the boards, eyeing the audience malevolently past a particularly ugly prosthetic nose.

80 Margaret Jane Kidnie ‘Ham!’ yelled someone at the back. Richard opened his mouth to speak and the whole audience erupted in unison: ‘When is the winter of our discontent?’ ‘Now,’ replied Richard with a cruel smile, ‘is the winter of our discontent …’ A cheer went up to the chandeliers high in the ceiling. The play had begun. Landen and I cheered with them. Richard III was one of those plays that could repeal the law of diminishing returns; it could be enjoyed over and over again. ‘… made glorious summer by this son of York,’ continued Richard, limping to the side of the stage. On the word ‘summer’ six hundred people placed sunglasses on and looked up at an imaginary sun. ‘… and all the clouds that lower’d upon our house in the deep bosom of the ocean, buried …’ ‘When were our brows bound?’ yelled the audience. ‘Now are our brows bound with victorious wreaths,’ continued Richard, ignoring them completely. We must have been to this show thirty times and even now I could feel myself mouthing the words with the actor on the stage. ‘… to the lascivious pleasing of a lute …’ continued Richard, saying ‘lute’ loudly as several other members of the audience gave alternative suggestions. ‘Piano!’ shouted out one person near us. ‘Bagpipes!’ said another. Someone at the back, missing the cue entirely, shouted in a high voice ‘Euphonium!’ halfway through the next line and was drowned out when the audience yelled: ‘Pick a card!’ as Richard told them that he ‘was not shaped for sportive tricks …’ Landen looked across at me and smiled. I returned the smile instinctively; I was enjoying myself. (182–3)

The production continues through the wooing of Anne and the murder of the princes in the tower, and climaxes at Bosworth field when ‘most of the audience ended up on the stage as they helped re-enact the battle’ (184). The already blurred distinction between stage and stalls is finally erased entirely as the reader follows Thursday and the rest of the characters into the foyer where the victorious Richmond, taking ‘one of the girls from behind the ice-cream counter as his Elizabeth,’ delivers the line ‘God say Amen!’ to his promenade warriors who shout back in unison, ‘Amen!’ (184). Fforde’s brand of fiction is directed at readers who, like his imagined audience for Shakespeare’s history, come to the novel with a prior knowl-

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edge of classic and popular literature.12 The pleasure that comes from reading about this weekly show at the Ritz depends on a perception of comic incongruity as one realizes that in this alternative Ffordian world, a version of Shakespeare’s play credited as the eighteenth-century Colley Cibber adaptation of Richard III has accrued over three centuries its own heavily codified and participatory conventions of performance to become a cult phenomenon, a sort of Shakespearean Richard History Stage Show.13 The scene, however, offers something more than just a sense of comic playfulness to those readers who ‘get’ the literary and theatrical in-joke. Its first person narration also seeks to immerse the reader in the exhilarating spectatorly experience of an utterly absorbing live performance by recreating as narrative effect not an actual staging of Richard III (we get only about half a dozen lines, and reference to even fewer scenes, from the play) but the thrill of a performance that ‘works.’ Fforde constructs this effect of theatrical pleasure through the manipulation of what semiotic theorists describe as competing horizons of expectations.14 Readers are given clues about the pair’s outing to the theatre which for the most part are not inconsistent with one’s expectations of mainstream performance: the drama is canonical; it is performed at the Ritz Theatre, a name which perhaps summons up the architectural grandeur of a former generation; Parke-Laine has purchased tickets in advance; and they meet at the theatre after work, Next getting washed and changed before leaving her hotel. The only detail that might strike a reader as peculiar is Next’s comment that the show plays every Friday night and that she and Parke-Laine ‘used to attend almost every week when [they] were going out together’ (179). Fforde thus pre-activates the reader’s ‘receptive processes’ in ‘anticipation of a particular kind of event,’15 thereby maximizing a sense of disruption when the event begins to unfold and readers are forced to bring their expectations more into line with those of the theatregoers within the narrative. Not only is this production of Richard III participatory theatre, it consists of nothing but participation. Even the codes of behaviour associated with proscenium architecture are transgressed. Instead of remaining passive and isolated viewers onto the picture box stage – a disciplining effect implicitly imposed by one’s physical experience of a darkened auditorium in which fixed seats are all directed towards the lit stage – these spectators interact with the stage verbally and gesturally, eventually abandoning their seats (and the auditorium) altogether. Typically, as Susan Bennett comments, the ‘intelligibility and/or success of a particular performance’ depends on ‘the degree to which a

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performance is accessible through the codes audiences are accustomed to utilizing, the conventions they are used to recognizing, at a theatrical event’ (104). In this instance, however, the narration depends on a failure of expectations contributing, not to reader alienation, but to Fforde’s depiction of ‘a good show’ made even better by its audience (179). The potential for confusion is buffered through what Keir Elam describes as feedback signals which lead to a ‘homogeneity of response’ among audience members and readers alike.16 Next’s first-person description of the capacity house, the noisy chatter of excited costumed theatregoers in the lobby, some of whom had driven ‘from all over the country to participate,’ the ‘electricity in the air,’ the ‘cheer [that] went up to the chandeliers high in the ceiling’ in response to Richard’s opening line, the audience’s animated contributions throughout the show, and their ‘happy applause’ at the end, all serve to encourage the reader, the performance’s vicarious spectator, ‘to surrender his individual function in favour of the larger unit of which he is part.’17 Interpretive disruption for the reader is further neutralized by the quirky pleasure of (mis)recognizing Shakespeare’s Richard III played as The Rocky Horror Picture Show. The theatrical conventions that enable the performance at the Ritz, from the compère’s pre-show introduction of the actors taking the roles of Richard and Lady Anne to the pink pantomime horse that appears on cue when Richard offers his kingdom for just such an animal in the final scene, are readily accessible as versions of the performative codes that have grown up around the midnight cinema classic. Even the physical space of the performance is suggestive of this confusion of media, the ambiguously named Ritz Theatre with its proscenium stage, dusty gold-painted plaster mouldings, and stained curtain potentially serving in its day as either playhouse or movie palace. The sense of ‘being there’ generated by the show’s electric atmosphere and the audience’s formulaic and improvised responses to the live onstage action is thus already mediatized, instantly (and perhaps only) legible to Fforde’s readers through prior knowledge of American film history. The ability of mediatized performance to offer a heightened experience of community is, of course, one of Auslander’s key arguments against claims for live theatre as a unique art form, and it is a point he even illustrates through reference to Rocky Horror.18 This particular filmic example, however, is unusually complex since it is so caught up in its own stage legacies. Rocky Horror was a musical stage show unsuccessfully adapted for cinema release that became a cultural phenomenon only when recontextualized as a midnight screening. In

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effect, this new format allowed the film to evolve into a form of participatory theatre dominated by a live paratextual commentary, its eventual popularity resulting from ‘return[ing] live, in-the-flesh theatricality and confrontation to a flashy work which utterly depends on them.’19 Fforde takes this development one step further, substituting a staged performance of Richard III for the film at the heart of the event. Not only is the multimedia component thus removed entirely, but the ‘host text,’ like its parasitic paratext, is also premised on audience participation. The supposedly necessary distance between actor and audience that Auslander, citing Herbert Blau, presents as generating a failed desire for community,20 is here collapsed by a show that consists of only audience (or depending on your perspective, only actors, which in practice amounts to the same thing). Fforde thus depicts for his reader that ideal of theatre as communal event through a staging of Shakespeare’s history twice adapted for live performance. However, the spectators’ ability to repeat the experience in the same space every Friday night situates this performance as something other than an irreproducible event, the expectation of spontaneous contributions to the paratext, if anything, contributing to this perception of continuity. It is rather a representation of mediatized theatre that, shot through with traces of its cinematic heritage, achieves its effect through a communal expression of shared values – a community, and effect, that is implicitly extended to the reader. Fforde’s narration vividly captures a grassroots participatory commitment to Shakespeare in performance, his portrayal of the audience’s self-aware bardolatrous abandon serving to construct this probably impossible production of Shakespeare as one of the best ‘live’ performances of Richard III (n)ever seen. Getting Desdemona’s Death Scene Right I want to extend this analysis of audience, community, and not-quite-live performance to Jeffrey Hatcher’s Compleat Female Stage Beauty, released in cinemas in 2004 as Stage Beauty, starring Billy Crudup and Claire Danes (dir. Richard Eyre).21 Stage Beauty is set in Restoration England and tells the story of Ned Kynaston and Margaret Hughes, the last man and the first woman legally to play women’s roles on the seventeenth-century professional English stage. Both stage play and film are book-ended by live performances of the murder scene in Othello. Throughout these embedded enactments, the modern viewer’s attention shifts between Shakespeare’s stage action and the reception of the actors’ perform-

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ance by their Restoration contemporaries. The part of Desdemona, first played by Kynaston opposite Betterton as Othello, is taken by Hughes, who plays opposite Kynaston in the final staging. The distance between watching the theatrical event at one remove (as a play within a play or a play within a film) and as a spectator having – or at least seeming to have – direct access to the experience of a performance that ‘works’ is the metatheatrical difference that functions to reposition the final staging of Othello in Stage Beauty between tragic performance and comic adaptation. I will then turn to consider the film as distinct from the stage play, to suggest how this particular transfer between media manipulates assumptions of theatrical presence. Stage Beauty takes the critical historical moment when English theatre practice was transformed through the introduction of female actresses as an opportunity to engage in a behind-the-scenes exploration of what makes a great actor, particularly an actor of female roles. The two setpiece audition scenes in which Hughes and Kynaston each fail to deliver a convincing portrayal of, respectively, Desdemona and Othello, affirm the position that successful performance depends on actorly technique, and that such technique is the result of long training. The film version underscores this view by building into the action scenes in which Maria, Kynaston’s dresser, stands unseen either in the wings or in the galleries mirroring Kynaston’s physical attitudes and gestures, trying to learn to play Desdemona through a process of mimicry that Tiffany Stern has explained was typical of how an early modern apprentice was rehearsed in a part by a senior actor.22 The ‘five positions of feminine subjugation,’ ‘the Supplicant’s Clasp,’ and ‘the Attitude of Prostrate Grief’ – highly stylized postures Kynaston later demonstrates in the film as evidence of his theatrical proficiency (and Hughes’s lack of it) – explicitly construct an ability to play women as a knowledge-based craft.23 This perception of transvestite performance as a learned skill is reinforced by the portrayal of discerning audiences who reward the actor according to his (and subsequently his or her) ability. Spectators applaud and cheer Kynaston’s performance of Desdemona’s death, stopping the show, whereas audience attendance falls drastically once Hughes’s onstage presence is no longer a novelty. Explicitly asked by Hughes if she was a ‘good actress’ when she made her debut as Desdemona, Samuel Pepys cagily replies that ‘there was no comparison,’ Nell Gwynn bluntly telling Kynaston that ‘it’s the end what’s bad. When she dies.’24 Regardless of how Kynaston actually performs the death scene, a modern audience’s acceptance of his Desdemona as a successful stage en-

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actment is encouraged by means of the onstage audience’s unanimity of response, a critical judgment given credibility by the care with which attention is called to Kynaston’s professional training. A twenty-firstcentury lack of familiarity with the mannered behaviours of the Restoration stage or possible reservations about the verisimilitude of transvestite theatre are thus minimized as interpretive obstacles. Kynaston himself, however, criticizes the scene as not working: ‘Something is eluding me. Perhaps it’s a gesture, a tone …’25 The death scene thus comes to signify the mark of actorly expertise that eludes both Hughes and, at least in his own opinion, Kynaston. By fetishizing the role of Desdemona in this way, locating the supposed essence of the character’s ‘true’ femininity in the live spectacle of an actor’s stage death, Stage Beauty gives voice to a tradition of theatrical commentary that began with Henry Jackson in Oxford in 1610. In an account that is telling for the way it sees only the enacted role, and not the male actor playing it, Jackson described this scene as the most affecting part of ‘her’ performance: ‘Desdemona, killed in front of us by her husband, although she acted her part excellently throughout, in her death moved us especially when, as she lay in her bed, with her face alone she implored the pity of the audience.’26 Hughes and Kynaston finally ‘[get] the death scene right’27 by sacrificing their audience’s security in the enactment as representation, and thus generating the effect and energy of ‘real’ danger. This performance of Desdemona’s death is anticipated by a rehearsal scene that substitutes one form of theatrical expertise with another, Kynaston’s stylized postures of vulnerable and oppressed femininity overwritten with staging choices seemingly discovered through an exploration of character and situation. The interpretive emphasis during this anachronistic staging of the techniques of method acting is on Desdemona’s thoughts when Othello wakes her from her sleep, the development of a subtext to the action which involves a secret desire on Desdemona’s part for Cassio, and Hughes’s instinctive responses to Othello’s physicality. Whereas Kynaston relies on formal artifice when he plays Desdemona, Hughes has to find theatrical success in the same role through total identification with the woman’s part. The rehearsal thus in part consists of ‘undoing’ Kynaston’s performance in favour of psychologically motivated responses: Kynaston. You start on the bed. Go. (Margaret drapes herself on the bed.) Not like that. That’s like me […] (Margaret turns over on her stomach and curls up in fetal position.) Good, curled up in a ball, spread over both sides of the bed. Sounds right to me […]

86 Margaret Jane Kidnie Margaret. (Rises, smiles uncertainly.) ‘Talk you of killing?’ Kynaston. Why are you smiling? Margaret. YOU always – I think he’s joking. Kynaston. Othello’s funny? Plays jokes on you a lot, does he? Margaret. No, but – Kynaston. Then don’t act with what isn’t there! The man’s been a festering boil for three fucking hours, hasn’t he? Margaret. Yes. Kynaston. And now he’s come to your bedroom, woke you up, and told you to pray before you die! Margaret. Yes. Kynaston. So what’s the line? Margaret. (Shocked, stands.) ‘Talk you of killing?’ Kynaston. Keep going. (Othello voice.) ‘Ay, I do.’ (69–70)

Desdemona should do what Hughes would do in the same circumstances. And she does. In an earlier scene, Hughes attacks Kynaston’s portrayal of Desdemona’s death, saying that no woman would die so passively. According to Hughes, a real woman ‘would fight’ (63) – and this is exactly how we see her Desdemona behave in performance, kicking, screaming, tearing down the bed curtains, and escaping the bed to be killed on the floor in her effort to escape a murderous husband. The rehearsal thus enables Hughes to play Desdemona by translating into staging choices an individualized perception of authentic female psyche and behaviour. This identification of actor and character encouraged through rehearsal is further reinforced by the framing narrative within which Shakespeare’s tragedy is embedded. Stripped of his livelihood and sense of identity, and embittered by the advent of the professional actress, Kynaston is preoccupied by the figure of Hughes even before he is summoned to rehearse her in ‘his’ role. As they part after the rehearsal to dress for the evening’s performance of Othello, he casually remarks, ‘I blame you for my death’ (73), reciting to himself part of Othello’s ‘Put out the light’ soliloquy after she exits. His enigmatic non sequitur and choice of speech underscore an Othello-like sense of betrayal, jealousy, and, potentially, desire for revenge that Kynaston feels towards Hughes, his one-time rival, now his Desdemona. The film ratchets up this effect even further through a plot adjustment that sees Kynaston’s dresser, Maria, adopt the stage name ‘Margaret Hughes’ when she enters the acting profession, so conflating two separate characters in the stage play and building into Kynaston’s professional rivalry with Hughes the inti-

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macy and potential love interest previously limited to the figure of Maria. The interpretive impact of the death scene is thus overdetermined for both the onstage and theatre/film audiences through prior knowledge of correspondences between the actors’ personal histories and Shakespeare’s tragedy. When Desdemona’s death is finally played out according to method acting strategies that deliberately seek to erase the histrionic distinction between murder and stage murder that was apparent in the scene’s first performance, spectators are left with no way to know whether Othello is killing Desdemona, or Kynaston is killing Hughes. Cues for both offstage audience noises and non-verbal business on the part of the actress playing Emilia (75–6), along with camera cuts in the film from the stage action to an increasingly disconcerted front of house and backstage audience, establish that these spectators are uncertain how to interpret the stage spectacle. Significantly, the theatre/filmic audience shares this uncertainty. Neither audience knows for certain whether this is a real death, or merely a stage death played as real, until Hughes as Desdemona takes a breath and absolves her husband of blame. The sense of presence and immediacy that the ‘gender-correct’ enactment of the death scene achieves in performance – the perception that one is witness to a unique moment of live theatre that can never be repeated – thus depends on a metatheatrical sleight of hand. The device is particularly effective because of the way it accesses and organizes already existing audience desires. Sam Mendes’s production of Othello, which played at the National Theatre in 1997, starring David Harewood in the title role, Claire Skinner as Desdemona, and Simon Russell-Beale as Iago, nicely captured the emotional ambiguity of the murder. The scene as Shakespeare writes it opens quietly, even introspectively, as Othello reflects on his ability to light again the flame he carries into the room but his inability to give Desdemona, figured as a rose on a tree, ‘vital growth’ once that life has been plucked (5.2.14). This metaphorical conceit of living things that either can, or cannot, be brought back to life was transformed by Harewood into a physical gesture as he attempted in an utterly concentrated yet also distracted manner to get his dead wife to stand up, who in turn kept collapsing like a limp doll. The sight of Othello literally and metaphorically trying to set Desdemona back on her feet captured the depth of conflicted affection this character feels for the wife he believes he has ‘sacrifice[d]’ rather than murdered, whom he kills in order to ‘love … after’ (5.2.70, 19). The power of Shakespeare’s murder scene is thus sharpened by the desire – implicit in the imagery

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of the opening speech, picked up through Harewood’s stage business in the Mendes production, and too briefly realized when Desdemona recovers only to die again – that Desdemona, Hermione-like, might be brought back to life. Stage Beauty allows its audience to have it both ways. As unwitting firsttime spectators to Kynaston and Hughes’s performance of the murder scene, we get the tragic impact of Shakespeare’s troubling resolution, but also the pleasure of an escape from it. The identification between actor and character prompted by the rehearsal scene and the narrative construction of Hughes as a Desdemona figure who ‘must die’ if she is not to ‘betray more men’ (5.2.6) establishes actor and character as a seamless continuity, so making it seem possible, even probable, that Hughes will suffer the same fate as Desdemona. However, actor and character are not self-identical, and the seeming link between actor and character is shattered in a moment of psychic release when the audience witnesses Hughes suddenly wake from death. Desdemona dies, but Hughes-asDesdemona lives, a theatrical doubling that reinvents this staging of the death scene as simultaneously tragic performance and comic adaptation. ‘Very different, Betterton,’ Charles II comments after the show. ‘That new ending was very real. Almost too much so. But restorative somehow’ (77). The king’s description of the performance’s effect implies, with a nod to Aristotle, that the reconceived conclusion restores the audience to ‘a healthy or vigorous state,’ while also potentially suggesting that it restores Shakespeare’s death scene itself to an ‘original … condition.’28 At the beginning of the drama, puzzled by what could be missing from his performance, Kynaston speculates that the surviving texts are corrupt: ‘You know what I think? I think the first fellow who did this role had a [final] speech and Richard Burbage complained he was being upstaged, so Shakespeare cut it’ (15).29 The doubling effect made possible, not through textual emendation or supplementation, but through the sudden fracturing in live performance of the actor, Hughes, from her character of Desdemona, allows Hughes and Kynaston to recover for spectators that presumed original Shakespeare, a death scene that ‘work[s].’ Stage performance in some ways enhances the metatheatrical trick at the heart of Stage Beauty since the physical space of the modern theatre audience is self-identical to that of the supposed Restoration audience, a staging choice that implicitly blurs the two levels of viewing. Modern spectators, in other words, while ultimately protected from a perception of real danger (unlike their fictional Restoration counterparts, they can assume that the actor playing Desdemona will survive

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to play the show again), nonetheless share with that other audience a physical proximity to the stage and sense of presence in a theatrical moment. The film version, by comparison, has to fake an effect of theatrical immediacy through wide-angle shots of the stage and stalls, close-up shots of attentive spectators, and ambient sounds such as coughs and gasps. It also seeks to intensify the ‘live’ experience through shot reverse shot sequences that fail to correspond to any actual theatre spectator’s sightline, and by underscoring the action with mood enhancement music. The fading out of the musical soundtrack just at Othello’s line ‘Not dead? Not quite yet dead?’ (75) subtly shapes the filmic effect by directing the viewer’s attention away from an immersion in the actors’ performances to an awareness of the shocked near-silence of the audience in the stalls and galleries. This aural ‘empty space’ maximizes the impact of the audience’s shocked gasps when Hughes suddenly recovers. These filmic choices are unremarkable in themselves since the drama’s narrative action is premised on a theatrical enactment, or a play within a film. More interesting, however, is the way such choices potentially unsettle assumptions that the effects of live performance are peculiar to the medium. Kynaston delivers with Hughes a performance that depends for its intensity on the sorts of unique contextual conditions that make the experience of live theatre unrepeatable – and by means of film, one can relive that ‘one-off’ experience time and again on television, computer screen, or iPod. Richard Burt offers a sharp critique of the film’s politics of race, arguing that Stage Beauty is ‘a smudged film that attempts to pass as clean … It is faux Shakespeare and a faux English film.’30 He might have added that it is also faux live performance. Stage Beauty is notable in the way it tries to replicate for its film audience something that might pass as an experience of theatrical liveness. This is the respect in which Richard III in The Eyre Affair and Desdemona’s death scene in Stage Beauty are striking: these stagings of performances as events generate for the reader or film audience the desire for theatrical presence, a desire these fictions then, through use of the narrative means available to them, set out to satisfy. Crucially, the novel and film formats permit – unlike stage production – a potentially endless return to the site of that desire. An ideal of live performance as uncontaminated by media intrusions, as Copeland and Auslander argue, may be little more than ‘bourgeois sentimentality.’ However, and especially if these theorists are correct, The Eyre Affair and Stage Beauty are testimony to the enduring cultural force of a perception that ‘getting Shakespeare right’ depends, finally, on being there.

90 Margaret Jane Kidnie Notes 1 Roger Copeland, ‘The Presence of Mediation,’ The Drama Review 34.4 (1990): 31. 2 Ibid., 38–9, citing Michael Fried, ‘Art and Objecthood,’ in Minimal Art, ed. Gregory Battcock (New York: E.P. Dutton, 1968), 145–6. ‘Flatness’ as a term to describe how this aesthetic is premised on constant self-revelation is from Stanley Cavell, The World Viewed (New York: Viking Press, 1971), 109. 3 Philip Auslander, Liveness: Performance in a Mediatized Culture (London and New York: Routledge, 2008), 56–60. 4 As quoted by Annabelle Melzer, ‘Best Betrayal’: The Documentation of Performance on Film and Video, Part 1,’ New Theatre Quarterly 11 (1995): 148. 5 Peggy Phelan, Unmarked: The Politics of Performance (New York and London: Routledge, 1993), 146, emphasis added. Further page references are cited in the text. 6 See Auslander’s critique of Phelan’s analysis in which he notes the irony (a complexity on which Phelan herself remarks) that Festa constructs her effects of presence precisely by relying on relayed and recorded video display. ‘Liveness: Performance and the Anxiety of Simulation,’ in Performance and Cultural Politics, ed. Elin Diamond (London and New York: Routledge, 1996), 196–7; Liveness: Performance in a Mediatized Culture, 40–4. 7 Auslander, Liveness, 2. 8 Phelan, Unmarked, 146. Describing the variety of ways an audience can ‘alter the rhythms of the show and change the nature of the performance,’ Andrew J. Hartley argues that it is this ‘semiotically reflexive’ relationship between actors and audience that generates the ‘essential fragility that makes [performance] electrifying and polymorphous.’ The Shakespearean Dramaturg: A Theoretical and Practical Guide (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 31–2. 9 Barbara Hodgdon, ‘Shopping in the Archives: Material Memories,’ in Shakespeare, Memory, and Performance, ed. Peter Holland (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006). 10 Laurie E. Osborne, ‘Speculations on Shakespearean Cinematic Liveness,’ Shakespeare Bulletin 24.3 (2006): 49. 11 Jasper Fforde, The Eyre Affair (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 2001), 180. 12 Laurie Osborne briefly discusses Fforde’s brand of postmodern play with specific reference to Something Rotten (2004) in ‘Narration and Staging in Hamlet and Its Afternovels,’ in The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare and Popular Culture, ed. Robert Shaughnessy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 130–1.

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13 Despite Next’s allusion to the ‘Garrick cut,’ the text of Richard III which Fforde cites is Shakespeare’s, not Cibber’s; the acting version that dominated the stage from 1700 to the mid-nineteenth century cut the first four lines of Richard’s opening soliloquy and began with a scene invented by Cibber. 14 Keir Elam succinctly defines the horizon of expectations as ‘the spectator’s cognitive hold on the theatrical frame, his knowledge of texts, textual laws and conventions, together with his general cultural preparation and the influence of critics, friends, and so forth.’ The Semiotics of Theatre and Drama (London and New York: Methuen, 1980), 94; see also Susan Bennett, Theatre Audiences: A Theory of Production and Reception (London and New York: Routledge, 2003), 48–9. Recent work in the history of reading has emphasized the need to avoid analysing readers as monolithic groups; see Leah Price, ‘Reading: The State of the Discipline,’ Book History 7 (2004): 303–20. However, the international success of The Eyre Affair (well received in Britain, it entered the New York Times bestseller list in its first week of publication) suggests that a substantial number of readers were able to take up what I later describe as the chapter’s implicit invitation to a theatrical/ filmic/literary community. 15 Bennett, Theatre Audiences, 104. 16 Elam, Semiotics of Theatre and Drama, 96. 17 Fforde, Eyre Affair, 183–4; Elam, Semiotics of Theatre and Drama, 97. 18 Auslander, Liveness, 64–5. 19 Jonathan Rosenbaum, ‘The Rocky Horror Picture Cult,’ Sight and Sound 49.2 (1980): 78. 20 Auslander, Liveness, 65–6. 21 Compleat Female Stage Beauty, commissioned by the Contemporary American Theater Festival, West Virginia, and City Theatre Company, Pittsburgh, was given its first performance on 9 July 1999 at the Contemporary American Theater Festival in Shepherdstown, West Virginia. Hatcher adapted the script for film himself, introducing a number of verbal and structural changes. This essay will only address these alterations where relevant to the analysis, and for ease of reference will otherwise indicate both stage play and film with the title Stage Beauty. 22 Tiffany Stern, Rehearsal from Shakespeare to Sheridan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 58–9, 67–70. 23 In the stage play, a briefer version of this confrontation between Kynaston and Hughes is built into her rehearsal for Betterton’s theatre. Jeffrey Hatcher, Compleat Female Stage Beauty (New York: Dramatists Play Service, Inc., 2006), 37. By developing it as a separate scene, the film allows Kynas-

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24 25

26

27 28 29 30

ton to enact ‘the tricks and turns’ of transvestite theatre into which he was illegally initiated as a child. Hatcher, Compleat Female Stage Beauty, 57, 65. Ibid., 14. Hatcher gives no guidance on how the actor should play Desdemona in his opening scene, so refraining from an authorial or seemingly ‘objective’ comment on Kynaston’s performance. Anthony B. Dawson, ‘Performance and Participation: Desdemona, Foucault, and the Actor’s Body,’ in Shakespeare, Theory, and Performance, ed. James C. Bulman (London and New York: Routledge, 1996), 35. Jackson’s original Latin with a slightly different translation is found in GaF mini SalgaF do, ed., Eyewitnesses of Shakespeare (London: Sussex University Press, 1975), 30: ‘At verò Desdemona illa apud nos a marito occisa, quanquam optimè semper causam egit, interfecta tamen magis movebat; cum in lecto decumbens spectantium misericordiam ipso vultu imploraret.’ Hatcher, Compleat Female Stage Beauty, 78. Oxford English Dictionary Online, ‘restore,’ v.1 4c, 6a (accessed 9 February 2010). This short speech was cut from the film version. Richard Burt, ‘Backstage Pass(ing): Stage Beauty, Othello and the Make-up of Race,’ in Screening Shakespeare in the Twenty-First Century, ed. Mark Thornton Burnett and Ramona Wray (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2006), 67.

5 Macbeth and Modern Politics john h. astington

In later 2008, Canadian politics – rarely the focus of worldwide attention, or even of the attention of Canada’s continental neighbour to the south – were somewhat enlivened by a contest for the leadership of the Liberal Party and potential inheritance of the throne, successively, of Lester Pearson, Pierre Trudeau, Jean Chrétien, and Paul Martin. The incumbent Liberal leader at the time, Stéphane Dion, had been much mocked for his apparently ineffectual style, not least by the Great White Shark of early twenty-first-century Canadian politics, Stephen Harper, who defeated him in a general election. The competition for Dion’s replacement was chiefly between two men of evident ability, but each wearing his own albatross. Michael Ignatieff, who was to prevail, had spent much of his career as a public intellectual and academic; worse, he had spent it in England and the United States. His antagonist, Bob Rae, had not only moved political parties, from left to centre, but had, alas, a track record as a political leader, as premier of an Ontario provincial administration that those who had lived under it did not generally regard with warm memories. How could Rae ever carry Ontario for the Liberals in a federal vote? And without Ontario, barring some unlikely huge seismic shift in provincial voting patterns, a majority government in Ottawa was unthinkable. Writing in the Globe and Mail, Jeffrey Simpson described Rae’s situation thus: ‘Like Macbeth’s “horrible shadow” Mr. Rae could not escape the reality and mythologies of his years as NDP premier of Ontario. They have stuck to him and tormented his career as a Liberal.’1 Quite what or who the symbolic Banquo might be is unclear, but the reader gets the general point: Bob Rae had blood on his hands, curses, some of them quite loud, and the bad luck habitually attending on the Scottish

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play. No informed modern voters, one hopes, would elect a Macbeth, and it might seem odd that Shakespeare’s plays of power politics, and particularly those set in the framework of a monarchy, should remain popular as touchstones for modern political commentators, analysts, and satirists. Ambition and infighting within political groups have hardly disappeared, however, and the cartoon showing the sharpening and wielding of knives once a leader loses political traction is a genre of some hoariness. Harold Macmillan, who was to succeed Anthony Eden as British prime minister, was caricatured by the Evening Standard cartoonist Vicky as ‘Mac the Knife’ at the time of the Suez crisis, 1956. The weapons of Brutus and Cassius, Richard III, and Macbeth remain an imaginative reality, if not in palpable form. Michael Ignatieff, by then leader of his party, was at the premiere of the Stratford Shakespeare Festival Macbeth in June 2009, observing carefully: ‘eyes fixed unblinkingly ahead on the stony tragedy of the urgencies of ambition and the ambiguities of power in a small country to the north.’2 Margaret Thatcher drew worldwide attention in ways of which Canadian politicians might only dream. In the earlier years of her reign, the English left-wing dramatist Howard Brenton wrote a relatively short play that, in his words, ‘plays ducks and drakes with the plot of Macbeth.’3 This was Thirteenth Night, produced by the Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC) at the Warehouse (now the Donmar Warehouse) in London in the summer of 1981. It followed, perhaps incidentally, the famous Nunn-McKellen-Dench production of Shakespeare’s Macbeth, first seen at the Other Place in Stratford-upon-Avon in later 1976, but continuing in repertory at various places including the Warehouse until 1978, and eventually televised and recorded. The strongly marked initial physical relationship between the principals of that production seems suggestive for the design of Thirteenth Night, and the decided ambiguity of its smooth but elusive Ross, played by Ian McDiarmid, may have had some influence on Brenton’s equivalent of that character. In the years between his leaving Cambridge (1965) and the early eighties, Brenton had benefited from the subsidized English theatre system that developed after the war, and particularly flowered in the sixties and seventies, with the transformation of the Shakespeare enterprise at Stratford-upon-Avon under Peter Hall, and the much-delayed opening of the National Theatre in London, by then also under Hall, in 1976. The funding for the National had been finally approved under a Conservative government, a fact emphasized in the program for Brenton’s latest play to be produced there. This was Never So Good, which opened

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in March 2008, and which takes its title from a famous phrase of its subject, Harold Macmillan, British prime minister between 1957 and 1963, played in the National Theatre production by Jeremy Irons. It was something of a return home for Brenton, in that Macmillan was the dominant politician of his youth, and that one of his earliest successes, The Churchill Play (1974), had taken the influence of Britain’s iconic leader as the subject of radical analysis; Macmillan had served under Churchill in cabinet (1951–5), and the great man appears as a character in Never So Good. Politics have remained at the centre of Brenton’s work, influenced by a tradition in dramatic writing since the romantics; Brenton produced English versions, again for the National Theatre, of Büchner’s Danton’s Death (1835) in 1982 and Brecht’s Galileo (1939) in 1980. For all his appalled fascination with Thatcher, however, Brenton has not, to date, written a major play about her. The subsidized theatre and the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) were both to take something of a beating under Thatcherism, with its typical distrust of state support and enthusiasm for privatization. One early sign of trouble was the furore over Michael Bogdanov’s production of Brenton’s play The Romans in Britain at the National Theatre in 1980, prosecuted for indecency over a complaint by the ‘moral crusader’ Mary Whitehouse, the subsequent proceedings extending over two years before being dropped. Rather earlier in the same year of 1980 Brenton, writing with Tony Howard, made one immediate response to Thatcher, in the play A Short Sharp Shock! (a Thatcher phrase about policy), shown in two simultaneous productions in Sheffield and London. This is very much a broad cartoon, and is less about Thatcher herself than the men, and ghosts of men, among whom she rose to power. As a satirical view of developments in the British political realm between 1964 – the first advent of a Labour government since that of 1945 under Clement Attlee – and 1979, Thatcher’s election as prime minister, the play is lively and amusing, dramatizing some now largely forgotten names. Mr Wilson and Mr Heath live on in the popular imagination through their allusive invocation in the Beatles number ‘Taxman,’ but an audience today would need a good deal of supplementary explanation to make much sense of A Short Sharp Shock!, tied as it is to the immediate memories of audiences – British audiences, at least – in 1980. The play’s main connection with Thirteenth Night, I think, is that its style suggested some of the phantasmagoric effects of the later piece, although it also includes a Macbeth joke. The cartoonish Alec Douglas-Home, in real life prime minister for a year, has been ousted from leadership of the Conservative

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Party through the machinations, it is suggested, of Edward Heath: ‘What I can never understand about Edward is why – on the night I resigned – he went to see Macbeth.’4 Thirteenth Night starts in the context of the Labour Party, rather than the Conservatives, but includes no real-life names and quickly becomes a dream play in which an extreme-left government descends into anarchy, out of which a dictatorship emerges. Its relationship with Macbeth is oblique, the Shakespearean action providing a kind of shadow that becomes stronger at certain moments of the play – evidently when, as occasionally happens, lines from Macbeth are included in the dialogue. The only overlapping character name from the older play is ‘Ross,’ but in its first production the play had other kinds of extra dimension, provided by the actors. David Waller, for example, played the old-fashioned prime minister of the play’s dream world, Bill Dunn (the surname indicating that he is the closest approach to Shakespeare’s Duncan, a part Waller played in the year following), a smoking, drinking, broad-spoken man of the people, to considerable comic effect. Those who had followed Royal Shakespeare Company productions since the 1960s had seen Waller rise from smaller character parts – he was the Gravedigger in the Peter Hall Hamlet of 1965 – to the string-vested Bottom in the celebrated Peter Brook A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1970). The central male character, Jack Beaty, in whose unconscious fantasy most of the action unfolds, was played by Michael Pennington, then in his later thirties, and over his career to that point more associated with Hamlet than with Macbeth: he had played Fortinbras in the Hall production of 1965, Laertes to Nicol Williamson’s prince at the Roundhouse in 1969, and the title role at Stratford in 1980. When the last production was revived at the Aldwych in the September following Thirteenth Night, David Waller took over the role of the Ghost. Dunn and Beaty of the first production were haunted by Shakespearean presences. Thirteenth Night is a liberal’s nightmare: Jack Beaty, minor local political-party operative, knocked unconscious in a street fight with right-wing hooligans, dreams himself into power and its corruptions, mediated by half-recalled memories of Macbeth. His colleagues Bernard Feast and Henry Murgatroyd become his Banquo and Malcolm, as the old-fashioned Labourite Bill Dunn becomes the political ‘king’ he murders. Feast, whose name recalls an ironic injunction from Shakespeare’s play (‘Fail not our feast’ Macbeth, 3.1.29),5 facing assassination at the hands of Beaty’s enforcers, has as his last line ‘Evil. Evil. Oh, what evil.’6 This discovery of the moral world of Macbeth is perhaps the chief point of

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Brenton’s reflective technique. The grubby and half-comic world of political deal making, competition, and compromise in which the characters of Thirteenth Night live obscures the central humane imperatives of thought, language, and action directed to social ends, particularly to the eyes and ears of those who idealize revolutionary political freedom. The significantly named Jenny Gaze is the play’s closest approach to Lady Macbeth; although she is a sharp critic of the cosy and complacent male world of Labour politics, her vision is disturbingly partial and violent. Beaty’s own mundane moral failure is signalled by his relationship with Gaze as occasional furtive lover; an offstage wife and children remain part of his life, but his commitment to his closest personal relationships suspended and uncertain. (In the dream fantasy it is she who has a second lover, in the ambiguous and threatening Ross.) The play ends with an ‘Epilogue’ and a return from the dream: the recovering Beaty walks with Gaze on a beach, invoked by the sound of breaking waves. Their edgy and fractured conversation indicates that the tensions of Beaty’s nightmare have not been removed, and ‘peace’ remains elusive. In the last moments of the scene Gaze ‘picks up a stone,’ and the play ends with an interrupted gesture: ‘She is about to throw the stone. A blackout just before it leaves her hand.’7 A perfectly unremarkable event, throwing stones into the sea, becomes by its theatrical placement an act of frustration, revolt, and challenge, in its suspension as much as in its violence. The time, at the conclusion of Thirteenth Night, is not free, but we have returned from the ‘wild and violent sea’ (Macbeth, 4.2.21, and one likely referent for the setting) to the ordinary difficulties of life. Brenton transposes and ironizes motifs from the Shakespearean play, deliberately blurring the moral poles of saintliness and damnation, light and dark, innocence and corruption that Macbeth marks so strongly. One sign of the change is the entire absence of children from Thirteenth Night, save two oblique references to offstage families. Gaze, urging Beaty to decisive action, brutally declares she will ‘cut out [her] own sex’ if she is wrong,8 but such unsexing is not accompanied by any recognition of the ‘tender’ love of childbearing and lactation, abandoned for sterner ends. Beaty’s temptation to take over the means of power is a double seduction: he is urged on not only by Gaze but also by the sinister and mysterious Ross, Gaze’s first and continuing lover, a situation which gives the plotting a rather different edge of sexual suggestion from that in Macbeth. Ross, master of the state security system, offers Beaty ‘a thought from a dark corner’: ‘It couldn’t be done without you. I am a policeman, but you are a leader. Look. It’s there. Now. In front of our faces. He makes

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a grasping gesture before his face.’9 Ross thus provides the dagger of Beaty’s mind. Bill Dunn, prime minister of an administration spinning out of control, retreats to the creature comforts of his own bathroom. Apparently naked in the bath, he muses ‘Before I became Prime Minister, every midnight, for three and a half decades, I’d go for a walk. Wherever I was. To look at the streets, listen. Now I do not dare … Instead, I wash myself.’10 The words invoke both Pontius Pilate and Lady Macbeth, but the entire scene, scene four of the play’s succession of nineteen relatively short episodes, has other echoes, including Winston Churchill’s attachment to daily baths, and to summoning cabinet ministers to conferences in the bathroom. Dunn’s monarchical bath suggests further associations to its observers, offstage and on: ‘MURGATROYD with a towel, ROSS goes off and comes back with clothes and a suit on a hanger. DUNN gets out of the bath and wraps the towel around him like a toga, as he talks … He stumbles. The others glance at each other.’11 The turning of the tide in Macbeth, 4.3, the ‘England scene,’ has an ironic equivalent in Thirteenth Night. Ross, outflanked by the increasingly paranoid Beaty, comes to visit the exiled Murgatroyd, installed ‘in large floral swimming trunks’ and surrounded by CIA bimbos by the side of a Californian pool, drunken, hopeless, and doomed.12 After Ross leaves, the vodka-soaked Murgatroyd drowns, lured to the pool by a vision of Beaty walking across the water, a mocking saviour. Beaty’s overthrow comes not at the hands of his former colleagues but as the result of an anonymous riot, the kind of spontaneous disorder that helped him to power. His charred corpse is sardonically observed by the three ‘witches’ of the play, ‘delegates’ of left-wing feminism or ‘Women with a question,’ who appear to Beaty and Feast in scene three, and are there dismissed by Feast as ‘loonies’: ‘You Anarchos! Ultras, dreamers.’13 The play’s suggestions of an alternative feminist politics, a sisterhood of a rather different kind from that of Shakespeare’s three, provide one of its sharpest edges, possibly still of interest to readers and audiences thirty years later. Jenny Gaze’s sharp dismissal of traditional political practice as the cyclical game of complacent men is shared by the three women, completely unnamed in the spoken dialogue,14 who confront Beaty with the need for ‘a new politics,’ but Gaze’s own embrace of egocentric power brings on her eventual dismissal by them as a ‘bitch,’ incapable of understanding true socialism.15 Their response to both her and Beaty is mocking laughter, but it is they who dispel the dream, with the promise of further talking and thinking.

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If Brenton’s play ultimately carries more freight than its style and structure can bear, the same cannot be said for a television entertainment that came at the very end and in the immediate aftermath of the Thatcher years and made comic hay with the ruthless machinations of an imaginary British Conservative administration in every way as tyrannical as that of Jack Beaty, but presided over with brio and relish by the charming Right Honourable Francis Urquhart, played in three distinct series of programs over the course of five years (1990–5) by the veteran Shakespearean actor Ian Richardson, whose late-career triumph the role became, even if he complained about subsequently being rather too identified, as a versatile performer, with the character type. Hugely popular as the programs and the subsequent DVDs became, and evidently seen by a far larger and wider audience than ever encountered Thirteenth Night, which played only for a limited run in a small London theatre, the House of Cards series managed to upset some of the same constituencies as those Brenton had disturbed in the preceding decade. Royalists without a sense of humour were particularly incensed by Michael Kitchen’s clever and subtle portrayal of the new idealistic king with whom Urquhart does battle in the second instalment of the series, To Play the King (1993), a character recognizably drawing on the predilections, manners, and contemporary marital status of the current Prince of Wales, although the satire was a good deal gentler and more sympathetic than that of another television version of the royals to be seen in the early nineties, Spitting Image. The origin of the television programs was a novel by Michael Dobbs, House of Cards, published in 1989. Dobbs had worked in the Conservative central office, and his version of the rise of the ruthless Urquhart is informed with evident insider knowledge, although the written style of the book, and of the sequels produced as a result of the success of the television adaptation, remains on the level of the airport potboiler, mostly lacking the wit and allusiveness of Andrew Davies’s television script, which first took up House of Cards in 1990, and through its transformations of plot suggesting the sequels Dobbs then first wrote as novels, To Play the King and The Final Cut. Dobbs had the cornered Urquhart commit suicide at the end of his first novel, where Davies has him live on to rise to further dazzling and outrageous success, before being cut down by a rival plotter. Davies also considerably amplified the allusiveness of the script, which quotes not only Shakespeare (with whole lines and phrases from Macbeth, Richard III, The Winter’s Tale, the Sonnets, King Lear, Hamlet, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Coriolanus, Henry V, and

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Troilus and Cressida, at the least) but also from Middleton and Rowley’s The Changeling and Franklin D. Roosevelt’s inaugural address; Urquhart himself ironically acknowledges Beatrix Potter as an influence on his style of political rhetoric. We also hear Wagner’s Ring of the Nibelung, a favourite of Urquhart’s wife, and glimpse a framed portrait of Napoleon, which decorates a prominent wall of his house; a grateful client presents the Urquharts with a finely bound antique copy of Machiavelli’s The Prince. By a coincidence which hardly could have been planned, the rise of the fictional television Urquhart directly overlapped with the fall of the real, and much televised, Thatcher: Deputy Prime Minister Geoffrey Howe delivered his devastating resignation speech in the House of Commons on 13 November 1990, triggering a challenge for the leadership of the Conservative Party by Michael Heseltine, while the initial episode of House of Cards was broadcast by the BBC on 18 November, and on 22 November Margaret Thatcher resigned as prime minister. The series began with a shot of Urquhart at a desk, contemplating a silver-framed photograph of Thatcher; speaking to the photograph he delivers the opening line, ‘Nothing lasts for ever,’ and turning to face the camera, in tight close-up, ‘Even the longest, most glittering reign must come to an end some day.’16 House of Cards came to bury Margaret Thatcher rather before the event itself. The eventually successful campaign of John Major to replace her was apparently suspended during the weekly showings of the further episodes of House of Cards, so thoroughly had they caught the spirit of the moment. Ian Richardson as the charismatic and wily Urquhart was in his midfifties when the series began, and he drew, by his own account, on having played Richard III on stage, which he had done for the RSC in 1975, towards the end of fifteen years with the company. Davies’s screenplay for and Paul Seed’s direction of the House of Cards series calls for a good deal of confidential and frequently sardonic address by the lead actor to the camera, in the tradition of the Shakespearean aside. Richardson’s successes as a younger actor with the RSC, and a colleague of Waller and Pennington, had included his Antipholus of Ephesus in Clifford Williams’s celebrated Comedy of Errors (1962), Vendice in a revelatory production of The Revenger’s Tragedy (1966), and a notable double performance, alternating with Richard Pasco, as Richard II and Bolingbroke in John Barton’s Richard II (1974). He had also played Malcolm, with Paul Scofield in the title role, in a production of Macbeth staged at Stratford-uponAvon in 1967, and in an interview with Gareth Lloyd Evans he spoke about his view of the part, his performance of which was widely praised

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as subtle and suggestive: ‘Malcolm is not the sweet, young, good, holierthan-thou hero that everybody thinks he is. In the England scene when he talks about the wives, daughters, his lust and desire, he is putting on a pretty good show to test Macduff. But it is such a good show because, like all men who are correctly moulded for power, he probably has, deep down inside him, a considerable amount of megalomania. The power to have women, money, to “uproar the universal peace” and to “pour the sweet milk of concord into hell,” although he is over-dramatizing it, suggests that deep down inside he has a slight conscious knowledge of the possibilities of something bad in himself. The reason why he seems good and tends to be a little holier-than-thou is because he is aware of the weakness that is in himself, and in the people he deals with.’ He further notes that in managing Malcolm’s compassion for Macduff’s loss of his family ‘there is in the man a ruthless ability to take a situation and turn it to his own use.’17 By the time he came to play Urquhart, Richardson had been thinking for some time about the ambiguities of action, motive, and self-presentation. The particular relationship of the House of Cards series to Macbeth is considerably more oblique than that of Thirteenth Night to the older play, and is rather a matter of allusive motifs rather than direct parallels of plot and situation. We are eventually to find out that Francis Urquhart has secret murders sticking on his hands, and at the climax of the first part of the series we watch him commit one of them (the invention of Andrew Davies rather than Michael Dobbs), the killing of a woman, and simultaneously a kind of infanticide, a compressed version of the slaughter of Lady Macduff and her children, perhaps, but with a rather different meaning. The symbolic murder of the king, or rather prime minister, is done by other means, a campaign of innuendo, calculated leaks, and dirty tricks of which Urquhart and his pale, weaselly hatchet man, significantly called Stamper, are masters, as the Conservative Party’s enforcers of discipline: ‘putting a bit of stick about,’ in Urquhart’s phrase. Unlike Macbeth, Urquhart is adept at the false face, the varying masks of which he freely reveals to the viewer; he is amused, rather than terrified, by what he does, and invites us to share in the amusement. A chief mode of House of Cards is comic, then, and to that extent it is quite remote from the horrific tension of Macbeth. The opening moments of House of Cards quickly develop the framework of plot and character, deftly demonstrating that Urquhart is ‘not without ambition’ but also is well provided with the ‘illness’ that should attend it. His superiority to his colleagues is stressed by his viewpoint above them,

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at the head of a staircase, as they assemble for the initial leadership meeting following the implied departure of Thatcher, his scathing characterization of each of the leading contenders continuing as they move across the camera shot. A subsequent outdoor scene of Urquhart alone, still speaking to the camera, in weekend tweeds, shooting, in front of his substantial country house, emphasizes both his skill at killing things and his considerable social distance from the newly chosen prime minister, the humbly born Henry Collingridge. Self-possessed, Urquhart is prepared to wait for the advancement Collingridge has promised him, but as he and his wife leave an election-night party, complaining about the quality of people with whom they have to mix, he remarks that his hostess thought that he should be prime minister. As his wife agrees he stands momentarily by his car, half-quoting, with an amused air, ‘Glamis, and Cawdor, and king hereafter.’18 Female suggestion, to which Urquhart pays attention, nudges him towards a goal rather than providing the surprising jolt of Macbeth’s prophecy. Denied true advancement by Collingridge, who, influenced by the devious éminence grise Lord Billsborough, wants to retain him as an effective and apparently dutiful chief whip, Urquhart moves to discredit the new leader through a succession of contrived incriminating circumstances, even while retaining Collingridge’s gratitude for his perceived loyalty. ‘He was a gentleman on whom I built / An absolute trust,’ Duncan remarks of the traitorous Cawdor (Macbeth, 1.4.13–14); Urquhart’s strategy is to cultivate trustworthiness, promising and enlisting trust, while he himself trusts no one. The screenplay of the House of Cards series picks up as an insistent motif a word that also significantly scores Macbeth. Contemplating the murder, Macbeth recognizes the ‘double trust’ he will break in killing Duncan, as kinsman and subject, and as host (1.7.12–16); Macbeth’s impatience with the elusive witches leads to his exasperated curse that ‘all those that trust them’ be ‘damn’d,’ implicitly dooming himself (4.1.155). One of Urquhart’s tools in his game of trust is the young journalist Mattie Storin, who in the television version of the story has a rather different significance than she does in the novel. Pursuing Urquhart for information, she becomes increasingly fascinated with him, until, with the explicit approval of Urquhart’s mysterious wife, Elizabeth, the young woman and the old politician become lovers. Storin, played by Susannah Harker, is a peculiar combination of dewy-eyed ingénue and shrewdly calculating investigator, and something of a spy, keeping concealed tape recordings of all her interviews, including her last, aligning her with the chain of blackmailers we observe throughout the entire series. She is, in

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a process of mutually admiring seduction, a further influence and stimulus on Urquhart’s bid for power, less a witch than an enchantress, urging him in sexually charged whispers to fulfil all his capacity. The affair is further complicated by Mattie’s chosen nom d’amour for her partner, ‘Daddy,’ an oddly cosy title for the haughty and dignified Urquhart, perhaps (unless it makes an allusive nod to Sylvia Plath), but one in which he acquiesces, even pointing out that he and his wife (like the Macbeths) have no children. His own musings on the extent of his relationship with Storin are summed up directly following one of their assignations. As the two figures move up a stairway, framed in long shot through a dark doorway, Urquhart’s voice muses ‘Does passion engender trust? Not necessarily.’ The shot fades to a half-length of Urquhart, as at a desk, speaking directly to the camera: ‘She trusts me absolutely, I believe. I trust she does. And I? I trust her absolutely – to be absolutely human.’19 In the course of the last phrase the shot changes to that of a rat running across the railings of Westminster Bridge, a repeated ironic analogical motif throughout House of Cards. Explicit quotation from Macbeth scores each of the four episodes of House of Cards. Towards the start of the second, set at the party conference at Brighton, Urquhart, surveying the arrival of the already damaged Collingridge at the hotel, once again from a high viewpoint on a balcony, intones ‘Good things of day begin to droop and drowse’ (Macbeth, 3.2.53); his own black agents are to get up to more mischief during the conference itself. Collingridge’s collapse comes at the beginning of the third episode; following the Prime Minister’s announcement of his resignation at a tense cabinet meeting, Urquhart, accompanied by the camera, retires to the bathroom, mulling over the success of his scheme with a further quotation, ‘After life’s fitful fever he sleeps well’ (Macbeth, 3.2.25), and, significantly, elaborately washing his hands. The closest approach to Macbeth comes in the fourth and concluding episode, as Urquhart moves to secure his succession to the prime ministership, and Storin attempts to put all her investigative clues together. Disturbed by her revelations, the unstable Roger O’Neill, one of Urquhart’s not entirely willing tools, begins to crack up. Urquhart’s sudden violence in shoving him roughly into an office chair is the first, shocking revelation of physical toughness and ruthlessness we have seen, breaking from the habitually smooth and mannered exterior; it is shortly to be followed by another. O’Neill, calmed down and reassured, is invited to Urquhart’s country house to rest. Soon after his arrival the light begins to fade; as O’Neill is plied with whisky and some encouragement in the

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drawing room, an exterior shot shows Elizabeth Urquhart in murky silhouette, burning leaves in the grounds, tossing them into the fire with a broom; we hear crows – rather than ravens – cawing raucously. O’Neill, drunk and maudlin, appears in close-up in the dark interior, with the largely silent but observant Urquhart, reduced to the pale oval of his face, watching from the background. As O’Neill reminisces about his childhood, Urquhart speaks the line ‘If you can look into the seeds of time’ (Macbeth, 1.3.56), a reference the befuddled O’Neill doesn’t register. Once he passes out, a close-up shot shows Urquhart’s hands putting on surgical gloves, then rummaging through O’Neill’s night bag and extracting his supply of cocaine. As the camera follows him to a workroom, Urquhart speaks to us as he meticulously spikes the white powder with rat poison then returns it to its place, the camera resuming the close shot of the bag and the hands. As Urquhart’s hands strip off the latex gloves another pair of hands extends into the frame to take them – an arresting break in the secret knowledge we have shared with the plotter. Reassuringly, they briefly embrace his own, the bond between conspiratorial husband and wife registered through their joined hands, all we see of them. The allusive relationship with the crucial 2.2 of Macbeth seems obvious. The hands of the murderer are transformed not by their redness but by a ghostly whiteness, removed, and their act sanctioned, by a second pair of hands. O’Neill is then roughly awakened and with an invented excuse sent off to his doom. Urquhart’s triumphal emergence as the newly chosen prime minister corresponds with Mattie Storin’s final realization of the truth about how he has played most foully for it, and she confronts him in another high place, site of an earlier seductively charged meeting, the roof garden of the House of Commons. Now that she stands in his way he suddenly lifts her over the parapet, her falling scream of ‘Daddy!’ lending a blackly erotic edge to the murder. His act combines the mercilessness of Macbeth and the ruthless vow of Lady Macbeth not to let the bond of parenthood interfere with more highly willed purpose. Like Banquo’s murder it will become a crucial retrospective marker within the subsequent action, made possible only by Andrew Davies’s reversal of the outcome of Dobbs’s plot. Much of the first sequel, To Play the King, is frankly comic, beginning and ending with coronation scenes. The real-life Charles and Diana saga, by the time of the appearance of the series in 1993, had ensured that any reference to figures based on them would be received in an ironic light. The sexual adventures of minor royalty and their sensationalizing

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in the popular press also provide some satirical fun. Otherwise the plot of Urquhart’s continuing career has deliberate reminders of House of Cards: once again Urquhart, with his wife’s complicity, takes up with an intelligent and attractive younger woman who is herself fascinated by his aura of power; once again she is destroyed when she comes to know too much. Confronting the necessity of this, Urquhart repeats, more seriously and heavily than his earlier, somewhat flippant quotations, ‘I am in blood / Steeped [sic] in so far.’20 The moment of Storin’s death recurs as a ghost that haunts him, twice replayed visually, and in the form of the tape recording retrieved from Storin’s bag by the devious Stamper, incriminating evidence against him, with which his lover, Sarah Harding, is made familiar. Otherwise the script of To Play the King is somewhat less allusive than the other two programs in the series. Determined to stand up to the political challenge posed by the social idealism of the new (and always unnamed) king, Urquhart expresses his determination to force an abdication should things go that far, as eventually they do, with the rather ambiguous declaration, ‘I dare do all that may become a man’ (Macbeth, 1.7.46). Generally the contest of wills arouses his competitive edge, and revives his amused energy. Visiting the rival household of the estranged princess, ironically dubbed Sloane Castle, Urquhart makes his entry speaking to the camera as he crosses the hall and bounds up a stairway: ‘I love it here … It even smells different. “The air / Nimbly and sweetly recommends itself / Unto our gentle senses,” and so on’ (see Macbeth, 1.6.1–3). Thus he makes light of the chance of his being deceived by appearances. Urquhart’s killing of the king is, he insists, not an attack on the institution, which his family has defended since the time of Macbeth; the royal rival is defeated politically. Murders in To Play the King, those of the unfortunate John Krajewski, former colleague and intimate of Mattie Storin, of the disaffected Stamper, and of Sarah Harding, all of whom know too much, are undertaken by the nameless enforcers of state security and blamed when convenient on their enemies, the Provisional IRA. These forces are not entirely faceless, and the emergence of the tall, dark presence of Corder, always at hand in the Urquharts’ outer rooms, is a sign of a rather changed political atmosphere. He and Elizabeth Urquhart are lovers; quoting Middleton and Rowley’s The Changeling, she calls him ‘a wondrous necessary man’ (5.1.93), like his original, DeFlores, both paramour and efficient hit man. In The Final Cut (1995), explicit quotation from Macbeth is entirely absent, although there is a considerable amount of recurrence and resolution of earlier themes. Before the opening titles

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Urquhart shoots the ageing dog we had seen retrieving his game at the very start of House of Cards. In requiem he speaks to the camera, reminding us that ‘Nothing lasts for ever’: ‘She was a good bitch. She had a good life.’ Cheekily, the shot then changes to the state funeral for Margaret Thatcher, about whom Urquhart’s sentiments are different: ‘The woman simply hung around too long. Better a quick exit than clinging to the wreckage of a lost career.’21 Thatcher is one of the ghosts haunting Urquhart; his ambition is to outlast the term of her prime ministership, which he just barely achieves. He is still possessed by memories of the death of Mattie Storin, and yet earlier memories return to plague him: his killing of two young men in Cyprus, while an army officer during the EOKA violence of the 1950s. These coincide with a new treaty of agreement in Cyprus, Urquhart’s attempt to make a mark on the European scene. Its breakdown, over the discovery of offshore oil, triggers a decisive British response that goes badly wrong: children and unarmed civilians are killed in a demonstration. The ‘small war’ that Urquhart had calculated to boost his reputation, in the style of the Falklands campaign, has entirely the opposite effect, and he seems headed for political humiliation at the hands of the coming man, Tom Makepeace, a significantly named former foreign secretary. His own exit, like his faithful dog’s, arrives with a gunshot, ironically at the unveiling of a statue of Baroness Thatcher, which he has bitterly watched being prepared during the course of the four episodes of The Final Cut. His shooting is made to look as if it is the work of an avenging Greek Cypriot, a surviving brother of the men he killed many years ago, but the viewer sees that Urquhart is felled by a sniper, one of Corder’s men. As his wife bends over the dying Urquhart we realize that she has arranged his ending: ‘It was the only way, my darling. You do understand.’ Corder chillingly reassures Makepeace, Urquhart’s successor, that ‘We’re right behind you.’ The series ends, then, not with a resumption of enlightened order, as in Macbeth, but with an ironic demonstration of the true power in the land, hidden behind the facade of parliamentary democracy. Violence and coercion have hardly been removed from political life: villainy has become institutionalized. Urquhart, like Macbeth, goes down after some desperately misdirected fighting and as his past sins are being called to account, but in the end, because ‘the angel’ he still served and who supported all his schemes has realized, he no longer has a future.22 Elizabeth Urquhart’s sanction and prompting of his initiatives have been withdrawn. What her future may be remains open: the ‘fiend-like queen’

Figure 5.1 Tony Blair plays Macbeth. Cartoon by Steve Bell, The Guardian, 27 January 2010

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lives on. To revert to the point raised earlier, as to why Shakespeare’s plays should retain their force as a point of reference for modern thought about political conditions, the trickeries and manipulations of the powerful, and of those aspiring to power, have recently been borne in on the peoples of the English-speaking democracies by the dubiously justified path towards a war of ‘regime change’ in Iraq. The legitimacy of that war under the terms of international law was not endorsed by the United Nations, and hardly produced the results that were blithely promised by an American president with a distinctly aggressive partisan outlook, manipulated by powerful figures without much public accountability. Subsequent investigations, still continuing as I write this essay, have revealed considerable prevarication, and outright ignorance, on the part of those responsible for many deaths and much devastation. The tradition of Shakespearean cartooning was continued during the course of the British Chilcot Enquiry by the Guardian cartoonist Steve Bell, who drew Tony Blair as a consciously actorish politician putting on a performance, reciting Macbeth’s ‘Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow’ speech (5.4.18–27), with an added exculpatory conclusion. The evidence of Iraqi ‘weapons of mass destruction’ was never there; nor were the weapons themselves. Our contemporary distrust of executive power without sufficient representative control, particularly when wrapped in the flag or masked by the demands of ‘national security,’ ensures that we continue to respond to Shakespeare’s plays about the abuses and corruptions of power. Notes 1 Jeffrey Simpson, ‘A Matter of Unity,’ Globe and Mail, 10 December 2008, A1– A9. 2 Adam Gopnik, ‘The Return of the Native,’ New Yorker, 7 September 2009, 26–32: 32. 3 Howard Brenton, Hot Irons (London: Nick Hern, 1995), 32. 4 Howard Brenton, with Tony Howard, Thirteenth Night and A Short Sharp Shock! (London: Eyre Methuen, 1981), 48. 5 On the Shakespearean roots of the play generally, see Harry Lane, ‘Infirm of Purpose,’ in Howard Brenton: A Casebook, ed. Ann Wilson (New York: Garland, 1992), 85–100. 6 Thirteenth Night, 31. 7 Ibid., 41. 8 Ibid., 21.

Macbeth and Modern Politics 9 10 11 12 13 14

15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22

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Ibid., 18–19. Ibid., 16. Ibid., 16. Ibid., scene fourteen, 35–6. Ibid., 13. In the speech prefixes they are differentiated as Rose, Cygna, and Joan, the second standing out from the other two rather ordinary names. If they signify anything – to readers only – they perhaps hint at the natural roots of human life, elsewhere parodied in Beaty’s tyrannical hobby of gardening, in scene eleven of the play. Thirteenth Night, 37. Quoted from the soundtrack of the BBC video recording, 1990. Gareth Lloyd Evans, ‘Shakespeare and the Actors: Notes towards Interpretations,’ Shakespeare Survey 21 (1968): 115–25, at 124. BBC video recording. See Macbeth, 1.3.46–8. Quoted from soundtrack, BBC video recording, 1990. BBC video recording soundtrack, 1993. Cf Macbeth, 3.4.135–6. Soundtrack, BBC video recording, 1995. See Macbeth, 5.10.13–16.

6 Shakespeare as Memoir katherine scheil

Shakespeare has a long history of adaptation for public and personal commemoration. In addition to the many civic memorials, individual memorials are abundant as well. Countless teenagers have marked their adolescence through study of Romeo and Juliet in high school.1 For actors, mastering a Shakespeare role often corresponds to various life stages – too young or too old to play Hamlet, not old enough for Lear.2 Likewise, scholars often measure their achievements in terms of Shakespeare, writing the consummate ‘Shakespeare book’ as the pinnacle of a career.3 Given the variety of ways Shakespeare has been used to represent various stages of life, it is thus no surprise to see Shakespeare recently incorporated into what has been called ‘the signature literary genre of the age’: the memoir, a form that combines identity, memory, history, and the past.4 Although the memoir is often thought of as a personal form of writing, recent work on memoirs has argued for the public nature and political potential of the form. Patricia Hampl and Elaine Tyler May maintain that the memoir is ‘to be read as personal and public.’5 Similarly, Cheri Register points out that ‘Despite beginning with “me,” both orthographically and narratively, memoir draws on shared, or public, memory as well as the strictly personal. The most fully realized memoirs situate personal memory in precise public places, the specific geographical, historical, and cultural settings where life-shaping events occur.’6 Thus, we might consider the memoir as a document of public memory, which John Bodnar defines as ‘a body of beliefs and ideas about the past that help a public or society understand both its past, present, and by implication, its future.’7 Memoirs connected with Shakespeare articulate a personal history in dialogue with Shakespeare, and produce a public record of a pri-

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vate (though constructed) relationship with Shakespeare. In his recent memoir Will & Me: How Shakespeare Took over My Life (2006), Globe Theatre director Dominic Dromgoole tells a story of how he ‘stumbled, shambled and occasionally glided through a life with Shakespeare as a guide.’ In a similarly titled memoir Me & Shakespeare: Adventures with the Bard (2002), former editor Herman Gollob describes his relationship with Shakespeare as ‘a mystical experience, a religious experience … not unlike my return to Judaism seven years previously,’ even referring to his new Shakespeare-inspired life as a ‘born again’ experience and ‘a reinvention of myself.’8 If memoir is ‘our means of establishing and preserving cultural memory,’ to use Fenton Johnson’s description, what ‘Shakespeare’ is adapted and then preserved in these contemporary cultural memories, and for what end(s)?9 In what ways does the commemoration of a particular ‘Shakespeare’ authorize aspects of the memoir? What identities are constructed by each memoirist, and what ‘Shakespeare’ do they adapt and commemorate in order to shape these creations?10 In turn, what do these newly constructed ‘Shakespeares’ tell us about how the past (here, specifically Shakespeare) is used to shape the present? Shakespeare for Blokes: Dominic Dromgoole’s Will & Me: How Shakespeare Took over My Life (2006)11 Dominic Dromgoole’s memoir Will & Me: How Shakespeare Took over My Life constructs two ‘Shakespeares’ in the two parts of the memoir. The first section is a fairly straightforward account of the role of Shakespeare in Dromgoole’s youth and young adulthood, including his claim to have been ‘a passionate Shakespearean since birth.’12 Shakespeare was ‘printed on me early,’ he remarks, from his father reciting blank verse at bedtime, to the veneration for Shakespeare inherited from his grandparents, who believed that ‘culture was something you were given with your daily glass of milk, and at the centre of that health-giving was Shakespeare’ (9). ‘Fragments of Shakespeare surrounded me as a child,’ he recalls, and he fondly remembers Shakespeare’s Complete Works as ‘the family bible’ in the centre of his home, a book that ‘exuded comfort and value’ and was ‘permanently available to anyone’ (33, 12). His actress mother and director father enacted their courtship around Shakespeare and were mutually ‘dazzled’ by each other’s ‘knowledge and love of Shakespeare,’ even travelling to Stratford on their honeymoon to see Peter O’Toole as Shylock (14). Dromgoole recounts the origins of his own du-

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bious Shakespeare debut, where he recited Mark Antony’s speech from Julius Caesar to a herd of cows. Some of his earliest memories of Shakespeare involve bodily functions (to which he returns in the second part of the memoir), such as attending a performance of Romeo and Juliet in Stratford memorable mainly for its effect on his bladder after too much underage beer drinking. The ‘Shakespeare’ memorialized in the first part of the memoir is part of Dromgoole’s family heritage, the source of daily culture and the text used to commemorate birth, courtship, adolescence, marriage, and even death. Dromgoole remembers reading Shakespeare’s sonnets at his 104-year-old grandfather’s death bed, because the poems were his ‘silent communion’ with his wife (Dromgoole’s grandmother), who had died thirty years earlier (26). When his father recites Sonnet 29 at the naming ceremony for Dromgoole’s daughter, he interprets it as ‘a gentle reminder, through Shakespeare, that there is something sacred in the bond between human and human that no church can match’ (203). Likewise, Shakespeare is a way for Dromgoole to participate in his family legacy by following in his father’s footsteps; when he goes on tour with Romeo and Juliet, he remembers that ‘touring Shakespeare was part of the mythology of my youth’ (106), and for Dromgoole Shakespeare becomes a surrogate father figure. Later in life he concludes that the ‘patterns described by [Shakespeare’s] great stories chimed with events large and small within my life’ (91). Partaking in Shakespeare is thus a way to connect with his past as well as a way to understand his present (to paraphrase John Bodnar). As Dromgoole puts it, ‘All through my life, when wounds had opened, Shakespeare had appeared with comic balm or tragic suture, to patch things up’ (211). The ‘Shakespeare’ that Dromgoole commemorates in the first part of his memoir functions as the ‘family bible’: he provides comic and tragic triage at major life moments and is passed down from one generation to the next. In the second part of Will & Me, Shakespeare takes on the active agency of Dromgoole’s subtitle, literally taking over his life for a week as he orchestrates a scenario where he must prove his mastery of Shakespeare through physical exploits on a pilgrimage from Stratford-upon-Avon to London, a corporeal tour de force where he wears out both shoes and companions who aren’t man enough for the journey. The seven-day trip from Holy Trinity Church in Stratford to the Globe Theatre in London ‘was an idea born of drunken enthusiasm two months before’ with ‘a muted element of pilgrimage to it’ (216); this inebriated plan of self-fashioning will later serve as part of his credentials for the Globe directorship.

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We might note that Dominic Dromgoole is not the first writer who has sought to get closer to Shakespeare by walking in his footsteps. A.D. Nuttall, in Shakespeare the Thinker, for example, relates a similar personal journey along the streets of Stratford: ‘The author of the best plays ever written must often have walked in the street in which I was standing … I struggled to imagine him, there in the street. What was he actually like? … I decided to walk to Shottery as Shakespeare must often have done … As it grew darker the idea of re-enacting Shakespeare’s walk became gradually less fatuous … I felt, sentimentalist that I am, momentarily close to the dead poet.’ 13 Similarly, Samuel Schoenbaum recounts the genesis of Shakespeare’s Lives in a Stratford pilgrimage, where he ‘wandered down to the Avon, speckled white with swans, and entered for the first time, the splendid Collegiate Church of the Holy Trinity … As I stood there I thought of the pilgrims, many thousands strong, who had looked up as I now did and pondered the inconceivable mystery of creation.’14 As we shall see, one of the major differences between these other Shakespeare pilgrims and Dromgoole is that he emphasizes his physical endurance as a way to reach an emotional connection with Shakespeare. In order to manufacture a situation where he can create and then memorialize a particular ‘Shakespeare,’ Dromgoole carries out his ‘idea born of drunken enthusiasm,’ which entails bodily suffering where the only relief is Shakespeare’s verse. On the second day of the journey, for instance, he writes, ‘The physical difficulties have travelled up the body and are now establishing themselves largely in the genital area. Mark [Rosenblatt] announces that his thighs seem to think that his scrotum is a cactus. There seems to be an unsavoury war waging between stiff thighs and scraped gonads. On top of fucked feet’ (232). Alternating between male physical pain and analysis of Shakespeare becomes a refrain in the memoir, as if ‘stiff thighs and scraped gonads’ can substitute for other kinds of credentials. Later in the journey Dromgoole writes, ‘My legs are turning into a vicious blend of cement and raw nerve endings. A good ranty monologue is one of the few ways to distract myself. In the absence of beer’ (233). His companion Mark Rosenblatt similarly combines Shakespeare’s poetry with physical duress: ‘To reroute us back to Shakespeare, Mark gets out the Complete Works and starts belting out some sonnets. This is hard enough at the best of times, but yet harder when nettles and brambles pull you back. But, however much we are hobbled and cobbled, and whatever ancestral fears assault us as we walk through a wood beside dancing waters, the sonnets pull our spirits up and out again’ (237). Through such an encounter, Dromgoole can

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memorialize a story where Shakespeare’s words literally provide ‘comic balm or tragic suture’ to remedy his physical condition and later serve as part of his training for directing Shakespeare. Rather than reading the scholarship on The Sonnets or exploring their textual history, Dromgoole contends that the way to gain access to Shakespeare’s poetry and attain expertise is through physically belting out the verse while enduring intense discomfort. Likewise, reading out lines from Julius Caesar at high volume (as opposed to studying the criticism of the play, for example) provides some respite from physical pain: ‘To counter the yowl of pain now screaming up from solid legs and nerve-end feet, I return to my childhood and read Mark Antony’s oration to the crowd in a loud and belting voice’ (256). Triumphant in their achievements, at the end of the fourth day, Dromgoole and his companion Quentin take pride in showing off their war wounds to a local pub audience: ‘I fall into another snug pub and pull a chair up in front of the fire … I peel off my mud-, bush- and grass-encrusted sandals, and splay my wet and rotting toes out in front of the fire. Quentin does the same with socks and shoes. A lounge bar full of people is silenced by the weight of our silence. We have acquired the presence of the wholly exhausted and the completely fucked’ (257). Through such milestones, Dromgoole builds a résumé of Shakespeare experience, not through performance or publication, but through bodily suffering and endurance in service to Shakespeare. One wonders what the ‘local pub audience’ would have made of the future Globe director. At the end of his journey, Dromgoole arrives at a performance of Romeo and Juliet at Hampton Court, where his physical state simultaneously merges with Shakespeare’s play: ‘So I struggle in, lame, sweaty, wild-eyed and filthy. I find our seats, and spread myself out over both of them, unable to cross my legs or fold them into the correct space. I slowly unpeel my sandals to reveal feet that are yellow with bruising, red with bleeding, green and brown from our country walking, and with a brand new layer of grime from the appropriately named Staines. They have also slowly flattened themselves out like pancakes, so I look like a filthy duck. I groan frequently. The other audience members start to give me filthy looks. The ushers at the theatre start to exchange glances’ (283–4). Far from the typical urbane pilgrimage of Tony Nuttall or Sam Schoenbaum strolling around Stratford, Dromgoole immerses himself in dirt, filth, and bodily mutilation as part of his struggle to get closer to Shakespeare, while subjecting his fellow audience members to the sordid physical results of his experiment. Finally, successful in his mis-

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sion and with the war wounds to prove he has earned his competence in Shakespeare, Dromgoole arrives at the Globe, where he will soon arrive in a capacity other than pilgrim – as the new director. Of course, Dromgoole’s commemoration of Shakespeare in his memoir is not a private one, but rather is a public statement by the (then soon-to-be) director of the most famous Shakespeare theatre, the Globe. As such, it exemplifies the public commemoration of Shakespeare through the ostensibly private genre of the memoir.15 The ‘Shakespeare’ constructed in Will & Me is a selective vision, aimed at producing a particular life story. As Alice Kaplan remarks, ‘A memoir can never achieve a total truthfulness, in part because you the author have to decide which part of yourself to narrate.’16 Dromgoole himself comments that his memoir is ‘not the truth, it is my truth’ (294). We might ask what ‘truth’ is narrated in this memoir, and for what ends? ‘To say [Dromgoole] has no great track record as a Shakespearean is an understatement,’17 wrote one reviewer shortly after Dromgoole was appointed as the new director of the Globe Theatre. In fact, when invited to apply for the directorship of the Globe, Dromgoole remarked on his scant Shakespeare credentials: ‘I told the search committee, “If you want to know my Shakespeare credentials, here’s a 400-page manuscript.”’18 As a Shakespeare résumé, Dromgoole’s memoir establishes his credentials not by various accounts of successful Shakespeare productions or chronicles of his learning, but rather through a physical engagement with Shakespeare (‘sweaty, wild-eyed and filthy’) and through a celebration of Shakespeare as part of his inheritance, from the books on his fireplace to his parents’ relationship. In fact, Dromgoole critiques ‘people who think that their knowledge of Shakespeare makes them uniquely qualified to understand Shakespeare.’19 Instead, Dromgoole constructs a particular ‘Shakespeare’ with whom he can engage – one who serves as a ‘family bible,’ a quasi-religious repository of family heritage who offers ‘comic balm and tragic suture’ through his texts and is passed down from one generation to the next. As the latter part of Dromgoole’s memoir shows, the way to demonstrate expertise in this ‘Shakespeare’ is not through literary analysis or performance but rather through ‘stiff thighs,’ ‘scraped gonads,’ ‘fucked feet,’ and verse belted out. The ‘Shakespeare’ that he constructs in his memoir is one based not on acquired knowledge, academic learning, or theatre experience but rather on physical endurance and a kind of osmosis gained from being in the same climate, from walking across ‘the land [Shakespeare] would have crossed’ (221) in a neo-romantic venture. Indeed, the act of writing

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the memoir made Dromgoole feel ‘Shakespeared up,’ as he put it, and in part inspired his application to the Globe.20 The ‘Shakespeare’ that Dromgoole commemorates reflects his vision of Shakespeare in contemporary theatre, and perhaps in culture at large (in terms of accessibility). Dromgoole’s Shakespeare is ‘the great high priest of the inconsistent, the anarchic, the life-loving,’ much like the audience he courts at the Globe.21 According to Rhoda Koenig, ‘far from discouraging the love of dirt among young playgoers, Dromgoole sees it as a way of getting them to appreciate Shakespeare’;22 Benedict Nightingale similarly describes Dromgoole’s ‘Shakespeare’ as ‘the all-too-human chronicler of the world’s abundance,’23 a Shakespeare who gives you scraped gonads and fucked feet but is ultimately one of the guys. In her review of Will & Me, Fiona Shaw uses the title ‘Shakespeare for Blokes,’ and describes the book as a sort of men’s club, where Dromgoole has an ‘intense and almost solipsistic relationship to Shakespeare’ told in ‘a laddish, rough-and-ready style.’24 Dromgoole’s choice for his first season at the Globe reflects this physical, masculine Shakespeare that we see constructed in the memoir. Explaining his choice of Coriolanus and Titus Andronicus, he remarks that ‘those plays are very visceral, full of guts and muscle … I felt it would be good to make a bit of a mess and spill some blood in the theatre.’25 As a public document of memory, Will & Me pays homage to Dromgoole’s interpretation of the playwright; he complains that Shakespeare has been ‘sanitized and treated as if he’s a safe place to hide from vulgarity,’ but instead he feels that ‘British theatre at its best is salty. It is wild and anarchic … It has always been an uncontainable blend of observation and insight, or camp good humour and hatred of bullshit, of farty jokes and unexpected lyrical beauty.’26 This is the ‘Shakespeare’ he constructs in his memoir. As he journeys on foot from Stratford to London with his ‘wet and rotting toes,’ Dromgoole argues that this physical experience brings him closer to an understanding of Shakespeare: ‘Every weird cul-de-sac he travels down is proof of his genius, every stupid fart joke, every ludicrous nonsensical non-sequitur … He meanders, he loses his way, he refinds it. Just as we are now’ (269). Dromgoole’s memoir both creates and commemorates an accessible Shakespeare, the ‘Will & Me’ of his title, as ‘just one of the guys’ who tells fart jokes and engages in non sequiturs, a physical ‘bard for blokes,’ accessible through means other than ‘knowledge’ (via performance and publication) and one with whom you can commune through physical escapades and shared experiences. Readers are left to conclude for themselves how this memoir serves as a credential for directing Shakespeare.

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Spiritual Shakespeare: Herman Gollob’s Me & Shakespeare: Adventures with the Bard (2002) In his memoir Me & Shakespeare: Adventures with the Bard, former editor Herman Gollob celebrates a ‘Shakespeare’ who functions as a Messiah figure, offers both intellectual and spiritual rebirth, and inspires a ‘heightened sensitivity to the promise of life’ (339).27 Gollob commemorates Shakespeare through three sections in his memoir. ‘Gladly Learn, Gladly Teach’ chronicles his development as a teacher of Shakespeare in his new-found career as a lifelong learning instructor; the second part describes his pilgrimage to Oxford and brief formal study of Shakespeare; and in the third part, entitled ‘Shakespeare’s Jew (and Other Notables),’ Gollob constructs a spiritual Shakespeare by visiting several shrines and reinvigorating his Jewish faith. Me & Shakespeare connects Gollob’s Judaism to his reincarnation as a Shakespeare pedagogue, linking his religious faith to his authority to teach Shakespeare. Gollob’s rebirth as a teacher of Shakespeare began with an epiphany after seeing Ralph Fiennes’s Hamlet on Broadway, which ‘galvanized me into a life-changing exploration of the planet Shakespeare’ (330). Previously indifferent to Shakespeare, at sixty-five Gollob has now been converted to ‘an old man made mad by a love of Shakespeare’ (3). He then begins a process of self-education and indoctrination into the cult of Shakespeare studies. In the process, while viewing John Barton’s Playing Shakespeare series, he has a second epiphany: ‘I felt I was sharing some kind of mystery, that I was being drawn in by a spiritual quality, that I was being transformed and lifted out of reality into something deeper and more profound. The passion I’d begun to develop for Shakespeare was a mystical experience, a religious experience. And I realized that it was not unlike my return to Judaism seven years previously, a spiritual reawakening …’ (15). He thus embarks on his ‘Bardomania,’ a pseudo-religious study of Shakespeare where he ‘subject[s] Shakespeare’s plays to the kind of close reading I’d devoted to the Bible ten years earlier, as if they were indeed Holy Writ’ (25). To facilitate his religious awakening, Gollob constructs a Shakespeare whose work serves as a religious text, much like the ‘family bible’ in Dromgoole’s memoir. For Gollob, Shakespeare is ‘a prophet chosen by God to help us find the moral and spiritual strength in our struggle with good and evil in the world and within ourselves by creating works that, like scripture, sound the mysteries and riddles of existence and eternally challenge us to fathom their significance’ (85). He later describes Shakespeare in a passage reminiscent of Genesis, as ‘the man who like God

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created a world and all its creatures with his word’ (179) with ‘godlike qualities’ (188). As we might predict, Gollob goes on several pilgrimages – to the Folger Shakespeare Library, to Oxford, to Stratford, and to the Globe Theatre – and each journey infuses additional religious fervour (and indeed fetishization) into the narrative. His trip to the Shakespeare birthplace makes him ‘a born-again true believer’ (63) in Shakespeare. Likewise, like a true religious pilgrim, he travels to the Globe ‘to observe the reenactment of sacred myths and to worship Shakespeare the Creator in the manner of those who were there in the beginning’ (69). As ‘the holy of holies’ (322), the Globe Theatre thus resembles ‘the ecstatic dream of rebuilding the Temple in Jerusalem’ (69). Similarly, the Folger is a ‘holy temple of Herodian grandeur erected to the world’s supreme literary deity, a shrine in which sacred writings were preserved and where study was the form of worship by priests and scribes who labored over learned and sometimes arcane exegeses’ (179). Gollob uses his own religious awakening as a qualification to spread Shakespeare’s gospel; he even describes this first teaching experience as ‘an ecstasy bordering on the evangelical’ (107), and contends that teachers of Shakespeare are ‘on a mission, dedicated to preserving the sacred texts, spreading the gospel’ (186). However, because he lacks formal credentials, Gollob describes himself as ‘a layman posturing as a priest,’ unlearned in the full religious significance of ‘Bardomania’ (189). In order to justify his ability to spread the gospel of Shakespeare, Gollob initiates a frantic course of ‘Bardomania,’ involving pilgrimages, reverent readings, and the like. To prepare himself as a Shakespeare ‘priest,’ Gollob paradoxically must become a more devout Jew. In order to do this, he crafts a narrative that associates ‘the Stratford Immortal’ with Judaism, even giving a Shakespeare lecture at a Shabbat service (164) and arguing that ‘Shakespeare had the Torah in mind’ when he wrote King Lear (251). He explores the possibility of ‘Shakespeare the Midrashist, inspired by the Jewish Cabalist’ (339), and imagines Shakespeare joining a Seder and ‘observing the Great Sabbath in the friend’s home, participating in a discussion of Malachi’s prophecy of the coming of Elijah’ (303). Gollob’s trip to the Globe at the end of the memoir is the culmination of his Judaism and his Bardomania, as he relates ‘the sheer excitement of a pilgrim anticipating the moment when he’d reach at last the shrine he’d waited so long to visit. It was akin to the way I felt in 1989 when Barbara and I were on the bus from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, approaching the

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site of the Holy Temple …’ (312). When he first sees the ‘sacred space’ of the Globe, he does not recall Shakespeare’s poetry, but instead evokes ‘lines from the morning prayers that are part of the Jewish liturgy,’ and describes the Globe as a ‘temple … built to worship another creator, one who had created a world with words, one whose word was performance’ (322–3). Further linking Shakespeare to Judaism, when he sees a performance at the Globe, he compares it to ‘the bar mitzvah, which combines solemnity with jocular reactions between those on the bimah – the platform where the Torah is read – and the congregation’ (326). His experience at the Globe is thus a religious encounter, and the Globe becomes the embodiment of creation, ‘wherein was enacted the Cosmic Poet’s version of Holy Scripture’ (332). Like Dominic Dromgoole, Herman Gollob uses the form of the memoir to construct his credentials as a Shakespearean, thereby linking his religious rebirth to Shakespeare. And, like Dromgoole, he confesses his lack of qualifications: ‘Had my late development as a Bardomaniac, without the proper scholarly underpinnings, doomed me, half-educated, if that, in Shakespeare, to scattershot dilettantism?’ (78). Gollob considers ‘passion’ and ‘zeal’ as valid credentials for interpreting Shakespeare, and he gets a job at the Lifelong Learning Institute on the strength of his enthusiasm for Shakespeare: ‘While not an expert, I did feel qualified by my consuming passion for Shakespeare and the scope and intensity of my studies. The zeal to pass along what I was learning to my peers …’ (102). As Gollob’s wife puts it, his goal is to ‘set their souls on fire with the passion for Shakespeare that’s inflamed you since you retired’ (111). Readers of the memoir have commended Gollob’s spiritual resurrection through Shakespeare; in his review Pat Conroy praises the fact that the apostle ‘Shakespeare deepened and shaped him and opened him into a new and joyous life.’ In his construction of Shakespeare as a spiritual guide, Gollob joins a number of works aimed at a popular readership, where Shakespeare serves as a spiritual leader.28 Martin Lings’s Shakespeare’s Window into the Soul: The Mystical Wisdom in Shakespeare’s Characters, for example, includes a foreword by H.R.H. The Prince of Wales, who calls it ‘a book I found hard to put down.’ Lings contends that Shakespeare’s plays show ‘far more than the workings of the human psyche: they are sacred, visionary works that, through the use of esoteric symbol and form, mirror the inner drama of the journey of all souls.’29 Apparently Lings has had half a century of followers; his book was originally published in 1966, and reprinted in 1984, 1996, 1998, and 2006. Craig Stephans’s Shakespeare

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on Spirituality: Life-Changing Wisdom from Shakespeare’s Plays similarly contends that the plays contain ‘eternal truths,’ which ‘touch us spiritually, emotionally and mentally.’ In his book of wisdom, Stephans pledges to ‘reveal treasures of spiritual, life-changing wisdom’ taken from Shakespeare’s plays, and promises that readers ‘will marvel at just how much Shakespeare’s plays divulge about spirituality.’30 Central to Gollob’s religious transformation in this memoir is the relationship he forges with his spiritually adapted Shakespeare across denominations; as he puts it, ‘a twentieth-century Texas Jew long transplanted to New Jersey/New York, was developing a kinship with a sixteenth-century Stratfordian Protestant transplanted to London’ (30). It doesn’t seem to matter that Shakespeare is Protestant and Gollob is Jewish; perhaps this is the purpose of Gollob’s subtitle, ‘Adventures with the Bard,’ which casts Shakespeare as a jolly sidekick on Gollob’s religious journey. But of course this is part of the way Shakespeare is commemorated, as a close relation – Gollob constructs a ‘Shakespeare’ with whom to have a ‘kinship’ and share ‘adventures.’ As he recounts his youth, he often refers to Shakespeare’s characters and plays, constructing the story of ‘me and that young man from Stratford, William Shakespeare’ (53). Towards the end of the memoir, he admits Shakespeare’s active intervention in his life: ‘there was no escaping the bard of Avon, my own hound of Heaven, which pursued me relentlessly down the nights and down the days, down the labyrinthine ways of my own mind’ (298). The ‘Shakespeare’ that Gollob commemorates is a spiritual guide (a ‘Cosmic Poet’), whose works (his ‘Holy Scripture’) inspire passion and zeal in their followers, and who is best understood through pilgrimages, epiphanies, and worship (‘Bardomania’). In conclusion, we might ask how these memoirs adapt and commemorate particular ‘Shakespeares’ and for what ends? First, both advocate the accessibility and mastery of Shakespeare outside the academy; Shakespeare’s cultural legitimacy, authority, and universality are determined and sustained not only by learned scholars but also by a more general public. Gollob’s Shakespeare is available to retirees, veterans, nuns, and retired kindergarten teachers who ‘had survived three wars and a depression, heart attacks and chemotherapy; they’d been to their share of weddings and funerals, baptisms and bar mitzvahs; they’d been hired and fired, passed over and pensioned’ (102). He is eager to ‘engender in others my own high-octane enthusiasm’ for ‘the Stratford Immortal’ regardless of their qualifications or backgrounds (102–3). In line with this, Dromgoole similarly critiques ‘people who think that their knowl-

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edge of Shakespeare makes them uniquely qualified to understand Shakespeare,’31 and his memoir makes a case for mastery of Shakespeare through means other than study. The ‘Shakespeare’ preserved in both memoirs advances the notion that Shakespeare is available to the masses, that one can refashion oneself as a Shakespearean with either enough enthusiasm and hard work or with enough physical endurance. Both memoirists celebrate the preservation of a populist Shakespeare accessible outside of academia, through self-study, religious zeal, and physical stamina, a Shakespeare who is dehistoricized almost entirely from the original contexts of production and reception. Patricia Hampl notes that ‘travel narrative is the natural form for a memoir,’32 and while both Dromgoole and Gollob include pilgrimages, they also have secondary aims. As Nicola Watson suggests, literary tourism is connected to ‘anxieties on the part of both writers and readers about the erosion of the intimacy of the relationship between the two in an age of mass readership,’ resulting in ‘a desire to re-experience the text by interpolating the reader’s body into an imperfect dialogue with the dead author … to follow in their footsteps, to see with their eyes, to inhabit, however briefly, their homes and haunts.’33 Both Dromgoole and Gollob seek to create an intimacy with Shakespeare by crafting a life story around their relationship with the author, who becomes an active presence in each memoir – he ‘takes over’ Dromgoole’s life and embarks on spiritual ‘adventures’ with Gollob. In addition, both memoirists have ulterior motives other than telling a life story. Dromgoole’s memoir serves as his Shakespeare credentials for his appointment as director of the Globe, and Gollob’s memoir validates his career change from editor to Shakespeare pedagogue, affirming his religious reawakening to Judaism and combining a personal memory with a public commemoration. Both memoirists realize that by paying homage to Shakespeare, they also participate in the construction of a public memorial to a particular conception of Shakespeare that resonates beyond the confines of the memoir. Notes 1 Scott Hall and William D. Dyer discuss the phenomenon of Romeo and Juliet and high school students in ‘Stepping off a Small Cliff: Going Back to Ninth Grade with Romeo and Juliet,’ Minnesota English Journal 42.1 (Fall 2006): 66–93. 2 See, for example, Kenneth Branagh’s autobiography, Beginning (London:

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Chatto and Windus, 1989), and Michael Pennington’s recent one-man show, Sweet William, which commemorates his life story through Shakespeare and celebrates ‘a sense of fellowship with him … some of his biography and mine.’ Program notes from the Cottlesloe, National Theatre, London, 11 May 2007. Marjorie Garber’s Shakespeare after All (New York: Pantheon Books, 2004), is such a magnum opus. She attests that ‘The process of writing this book began at least as early as the mid-1970s,’ and that after spending ‘a lifetime’ with Shakespeare, she composed her book (943–4). Likewise, Harold Bloom describes Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human (New York: Riverhead Books, 1998) as ‘the expression of a long (though hardly unique) passion, and the culmination of a life’s work …’ (xvii). Patricia Hampl and Elaine Tyler May, eds, Tell Me True: Memoir, History, and Writing a Life (St Paul, MN: Borealis Books, 2008), 4–5. The tactic of writing a memoir in connection with a literary, artistic, or other influential figure is not new; most recently, Phyllis Rose’s The Year of Reading Proust: A Memoir in Real Time (New York: Scribner, 1997) and Alain de Botton’s How Proust Can Change Your Life (New York: Random House, 1997) both employ this form. Hampl and May, Tell Me True, 5. The arguments I make might be equally applicable to autobiography. Cheri Register, ‘Memoir Matters,’ in Hampl and May, Tell Me True, 149. John Bodnar, Remaking America: Public Memory, Commemoration, and Patriotism in the Twentieth Century (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992), 15. John R. Gillis remarks that memories are ‘embedded in complex class, gender, and power relations that determine what is remembered (or forgotten), by whom, and for what end.’ Commemorations: The Politics of National Identity (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), 3. Dominic Dromgoole, Will & Me: How Shakespeare Took Over My Life (London: Allen Lane, 2006), x; Herman Gollob, Me & Shakespeare: Adventures with the Bard (New York: Doubleday, 2002), 15, 63, 3. Further page references to Dromgoole and Gollob are cited in the text. Fenton Johnson, ‘The Lion and the Lamb, or the Facts and the Truth: Memoir as Bridge,’ in Hampl and May, Tell Me True, 19. As Gillis points out, memory and identity are inextricably linked: ‘the notion of identity depends on the idea of memory, and vice versa,’ and both are unstable: ‘We are constantly revising our memories to suit our own current identities.’ Commemorations, 3. I’ve taken this title from Fiona Shaw’s review of Dromgoole’s book. This phrase occurs in the ‘About the Author’ section opposite the title page. A.D. Nuttall, Shakespeare the Thinker (New Haven: Yale University Press,

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2007), 1–3. Like the Shakespeare works mentioned in my opening paragraph, Nuttall’s book has been described as a work that ‘comes to crown the distinguished career of a Shakespeare scholar’: http://yalepress.yale.edu/ yupbooks/book.asp?isbn=0300119283. Another reviewer calls it ‘a summa of the author’s lifetime of teaching and scholarship on Shakespeare’: William J. Kennedy, Review, in Renaissance Quarterly 60.4 (2007): 1471–3. Samuel Schoenbaum, Shakespeare’s Lives (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1970), vii. Dromgoole’s memoir fits the description of life writing as ‘the story of living in this place and time through the cultural figures and processes that share that space.’ Louise Krasniewicz and Michael Blitz, ‘Morphing Identities: Arnold Schwarzenegger – Write Us,’ in Getting a Life: Everyday Uses of Autobiography, ed. Sidonie Smith and Julie Watson (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), 90. Alice Kaplan, ‘Lady of the Lake,’ in Hampl and May, Tell Me True, 100. ‘Dominic Dromgoole: Globe’s Artistic Director on a Lifelong Love Affair,’ The Independent, 14 April 2006. Alan Riding, ‘Shakespeare’s Globe Is an American’s Experiment Thriving in London,’ The New York Times, 20 May 2006. ‘Dominic Dromgoole: Globe’s Artistic Director on a Lifelong Love Affair,’ The Independent, 14 April 2006. Ibid. Murrough O’Brien, ‘Will and Me By Dominic Dromgoole,’ The Independent, 2 April 2006. Rhoda Koenig, ‘Dominic Dromgoole: Shakespeare’s Rule-Breaker,’ The Independent, 1 May 2008. Benedict Nightingale, ‘Swan of Avon Calling,’ The Times, 3 April 2006. Fiona Shaw, ‘Shakespeare for Blokes,’ The Guardian, 8 April 2006. Benedict Nightingale, ‘Swan of Avon Calling,’ The Times, 3 April 2006. Dominic Dromgoole, ‘Theatre Forgets What It’s There For,’ The Sunday Times, 2 March 2008. Ron Rosenbaum begins The Shakespeare Wars: Clashing Scholars, Public Fiascoes, Palace Coups (New York: Random House, 2008) with a similar lifechanging experience attributed to Shakespeare: ‘On the last evening of the summer of 1970 in the village of Stratford-on-Avon, birthplace of Shakespeare, I had an experience that changed my life and has haunted me ever since.’ That experience was the Royal Shakespeare Company’s Peter Brook production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, which he asserts ‘changed more lives than mine: it changed the lives of an entire generation of Shakespearean players and directors, changed the way Shakespeare has been played

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ever since.’ Rosenbaum dedicates his book to ‘Peter Brook and the cast of his Dream. / For changing my life forever’ (3). Ewan Fernie’s collection Spiritual Shakespeares (London and New York: Routledge, 2005) offers a more academic discussion of ‘the strange connections between the spiritual vitality of the plays and our contemporary moment’ (25). Quoted on the book’s back cover. Perhaps on the edge of the ‘mystical Shakespeare’ genre is A. Bronwyn Llewellyn’s The Shakespeare Oracle Kit: Let the Bard Predict Your Future (Gloucester, MA: Fair Winds Press, 2003). She claims that Shakespeare is an appropriate spiritual guide because ‘Shakespeare has survived rewriting, bowdlerizing, cleaning up, cutting down, pillaging, prima donnas, academics, adulation, censorship, revisionists, and modernization – he can stand up to divination, too.’ She cautions that ‘Shakespeare won’t tell you how to run your life,’ but can serve as ‘just one tool to carry as you strut and fret your hour upon the stage’ (11). Jonathan Bate’s recent biography of Shakespeare draws on the same linguistic material as the ‘mystical Shakespeare’ genre with its title Soul of the Age: A Biography of the Mind of William Shakespeare. ‘Dominic Dromgoole: Globe’s Artistic Director on a Lifelong Love Affair,’ The Independent, 14 April 2006. Patricia Hampl, ‘You’re History,’ in Hampl and May, Tell Me True, 140. Nicola J. Watson, The Literary Tourist: Readers and Places in Romantic and Victorian Britain (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), 13.

7 ‘Bold, but Seemingly Marketable’: The 2007 Stratford Ontario Merchant robert ormsby

As Jill Levenson remarks, since ‘the mid-nineteenth century, The Merchant of Venice has attracted more creative adaptations than Shakespeare’s other comedies.’1 She makes this observation with reference to James Bulman’s stage history of Merchant, in which he argues that directors at least since Henry Irving have conceived productions that reflect their own liberal humanist values, ‘intervene[ing] to save “their” Shakespeare from the embarrassing stigma of anti-Semitism.’2 The postwar era has seen many such productions, along with others of a more radical nature, which have eschewed liberal humanist interventions that ostensibly respected the authority of ‘gentle’ Shakespeare as the source for the meaning of the play. These radical reworkings include appropriations in the 1960s and 1970s by practitioners such as Arnold Wesker, Georg Tabori, and Charles Marowitz, who, in their various ways, emphasize both the legacies of anti-Semitism to which Merchant’s long production history has contributed and the audience’s complicity in the play’s spectacle of racist violence.3 More recent intercultural treatments shift the emphasis again in ways that reflect, implicitly or explicitly, the effects of globalization. Such intercultural or cross-cultural performance is, to borrow Jacqueline Lo and Helen Gilbert’s phrasing, ‘characterized by the conjunction of specific cultural resources at the level of narrative content, performance aesthetics, production processes, and/or reception by an interpretive community.’4 However, as a spate of recent scholarship suggests, intercultural and global Shakespeare production includes a great variety of conjunctions of specific cultural resources.5 For instance, La Compaña de Teatro’s The Merchant of Santa Fe, which depicts converso Jews in seventeenth-century New Spain, adapts Shakespeare’s play to explore local

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histories of colonial oppression that resulted from European expansion across the globe.6 Whereas The Merchant of Santa Fe served primarily local interests because of its circumstances of performance, other intercultural Shakespeare reveals different aspects of globalization. As Mark Thornton Burnett argues, Michael Radford’s cinematic Merchant of Venice (2004), starring Al Pacino, not only draws on the globalized vernacular of Hollywood’s representation of the Holocaust, but its ‘representation of Shylock’s eviction strikes a chord in the context of the geographical displacements and cultural disorientations that have been generated in part by the global process.’7 Other (non-Merchant) productions, like the work of Robert Lepage, whose Shakespeare Cycle and Elsinore reflect vaguely global or Euro-North American avant-garde staging techniques, benefit from the government subsidies of numerous countries’ theatre festivals and companies that co-produced these shows at their various international tour stops. Then there are productions such as Umabatha Macbeth at London’s Globe Theatre, which brought ‘foreign’ performance practices to an anglophone locale that draws both a multinational tourist audience and a professional journalistic audience, the latter of which has historically judged this type of intercultural theatre according to a liberal-humanist understanding of Shakespeare.8 The Stratford Festival of Canada’s 2007 Merchant, its eighth production of the play in the company’s fifty-five-year history, shared the Radford film’s use of colour-blind star-vehicle casting and its serious and sympathetic treatment of Shylock. Yet, with its combination of imported ‘foreign’ elements performed before a tourist audience in an anglophone locale, and its community of reviewers whose assumptions about Shakespearean theatre were the same as those of its producers, the 2007 Merchant is probably most comparable to intercultural performances at the Globe. The Stratford production sought to convey a liberal-humanist message while (perhaps inadvertently) implicating the audience in the drama’s bigotry and shedding light on some of the effects of globalization on Shakespearean performance. By making what one critic called the ‘bold but seemingly marketable move to cast Graham Greene,’9 a Native Canadian actor well known for his Hollywood roles, the Festival hinted that the production might reflect histories of European oppression of First Nations peoples in Ontario and Canada. However, the Festival’s artistic director, Richard Monette, seemed more interested in Greene’s ability as a star performer to attract audiences to a ‘traditional’ performance, which treated Shylock’s plight sympathetically and thereby reassured theatre-goers about their supposed common humanity.

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Nonetheless, while this Merchant did not directly engage with local intercultural tensions related to Greene’s ethnicity, director Richard Rose concerned himself with a multinational interculturalism in the scenes between Severn Thompson’s Portia and her suitors. The production’s combination of colour-blind casting and an accentuation of ethnic difference illustrates the kinds of contradictory roles that festivals like Stratford play in contemporary performance of Shakespeare, in particular how the cultivation of a tourist audience and the appeal to Shakespeare’s cultural authority affect such festivals’ negotiation of race, interculturalism, and economic imperatives. In the last decade, critics have levelled charges at the Festival regarding the casting of visible-minority performers. Writing about Stratford’s 1998 season, Gary Taylor argued that ‘Ontario … now looks more racist than the American Deep South.’10 He substantiated this characteristic hyperbole by observing that, in the season’s Julius Caesar, the black actor Roy Lewis ‘was relegated to being a bare-chested Pindarus, climbing the set like a monkey’ and that ‘[t]he only other black performer in the 1998 company, Sandi Ross, played two benevolent maids …’11 For contrast, Taylor pointed to the Alabama Shakespeare Festival, which had ‘actively embraced “colorblind” casting’ and thereby ‘driven intellectual experimentation,’ especially in cases where a play’s ‘director is also black and therefore not simply deploying black skin in the service of a white agenda but reconceptualizing the play from a different racial perspective.’12 Closer to the Festival, in 2003, actor and playwright Andrew Moodie published an article in Now Magazine, a prominent Toronto weekly, in which he recalled how he had been told unofficially that, as a black performer at Stratford, he would never be given a lead part in a Festival Theatre production because the company had ‘an unspoken policy never to hire a member of a visible minority in a starring role on the main stage’ due to fears that doing so ‘would adversely affect box office sales.’13 Moodie acknowledged that by 2003 Stratford was hiring visible-minority performers in ‘prominent roles,’ but argued that it was still not casting them in ‘marquee roles,’ such as Romeo or Hamlet. Comparing the situation in Ontario to that in England, he concluded that, while English theatres had cast actors of colour in the 1970s and 1980s ‘to make a statement,’ when Adrian Lester played Hamlet in 2003, ‘he [was] simply accepted as the Prince of Denmark and nobody [gave] a damn.’ Unlike Taylor, for whom colour-blind casting might instigate experimentation with racial perspectives, Moodie seemed to suggest that Stratford could effectively make race cease to matter by casting against

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and ignoring colour, specifically by enlisting such well-known visibleminority Canadian actors as Sandra Oh (‘probably the most famous Asian actor in all of North America’) and Greene himself, who was, Moodie noted, an Oscar nominee.14 Stratford’s 2007 Merchant was closer to Moodie’s than to Taylor’s vision of colour-blind casting, insofar as it diminished the significance of Greene’s Native identity to the performance. In Festival publicity and other material used to frame interpretation of the production, Greene’s heritage is repeatedly suppressed as meaningful to the show’s concept. Neither the Festival’s ‘Pocket Guide’ nor the expanded 2007 season brochure mentions that Greene is an Oneida Indian.15 Instead, both use an image of him scowling at the camera in a dark suit, suggesting that the play belongs to Shylock and that the role is a star vehicle for the actor, which is hardly exceptional, given that it has served the same purpose for leading men as diverse as Irving, Sir Laurence Olivier, Dustin Hoffman, and, as noted above, Al Pacino. There is nothing in the image specifically linking Greene’s Native ancestry with his character’s Jewishness, and elsewhere the matter of Greene’s ethnicity is raised only to be subsumed in references to his commercial success or the more general imperatives of acting. The actor’s biography in the production program does refer to him as Oneida, but it also immediately lists his ‘starring performances,’ including his Academy Award nomination for his role in Dances with Wolves.16 While listing credits in the program is conventional, director Richard Rose commented in a video on the Festival’s website that although he was certain that Greene had experienced prejudice, they had not discussed the topic at length in rehearsal.17 Rose noted Greene’s successful career and remarked, ‘Graham brings an understanding of how to work in this world and negotiate the prejudices and how to try and get past that so he can keep doing the work.’18 Greene described his own performance in a similar fashion. During interviews, the actor drew parallels between Shylock’s and Native Canadians’ forced conversion to Christianity. He also saw connections between the Venetians’ treatment of Shylock and the Caledonia land claims dispute, a fight over a housing development which took the form of a series of sometimes violent confrontations in 2006 among police, Six Nations Native protesters, and non-Native residents of Caledonia, Ontario, approximately one hundred kilometres from Stratford and directly outside the Six Nations reserve on which Greene was born.19 However, Greene was unwilling to make a direct personal link between his own Native identity and Shylock’s Jewishness, expressing reluctance about being described as a ‘Native actor,’20

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and claiming that he did not take the role because of such parallels but because he ‘just wanted to get back on the stage’ since ‘[f]ilm and television weren’t interesting to [him] any more.’21 Furthermore, unlike such productions as Peter Sellers’s 1994 Merchant, in which Shylock’s Jewishness became ‘a figure of speech’ for African-Americans in contemporary American society, Rose’s staging made no overt effort to treat Shylock’s religion as a metaphor for Canadian persecution of First Nations peoples.22 Instead, he invited the audience to blind itself to Greene’s ethnicity by tracking the moneylender’s transformation in the play through a series of costume changes. Greene’s Shylock first appeared as a contemporary businessman in a grey double-breasted business suit, but as the drama progressed, the actor was gradually subsumed in Shylock’s Jewish habit: by 3.1 he has acquired a kipa and talith; in 3.3, tailors were fitting him for a long dark Hasidic overcoat; and in 4.1 he wore this coat and the broad-brimmed black hat favoured by observant Ashkenazi Jews.23 Although Greene’s suit marked him as different from the more colourfully costumed Venetians, his character’s transformation was thus not so much from Oneida to Jew as it was from ‘ordinary person’ to sartorial cliché; Greene himself may have been a constant subtle reminder of the production’s intercultural context, but the real interest was in how Shylock the character became more outwardly or visibly Jewish as the play unfolded. Indeed, Rose’s principal concern was the conflict between Christians and Jews within the fictional world of the play, and he carefully employed religious symbolism to map onto this conflict a movement from Carnival to Lent, a central feature of which was Scott Wentworth’s portrayal of the Venetian merchant as a sacrificial Christ figure. The opening set, visible upon entering the theatre, suggested the Last Supper: a long table draped in a white cloth was laid with twelve glasses, two wine decanters, and a roast pig. As the show began, techno dance music echoed through the theatre and a group of revellers in two-faced masks – pig on the front, human on the back – appeared. Among them was a figure sporting a balance-scale headdress and wielding an executioner’s axe, a costume that anticipates Shylock’s ready scales and whetted blade in 4.1. The group led in a rope-bound reveller, later revealed to be Antonio, wearing a bull’s head, and the dance culminated in the bull’s mock sacrifice. If this dumbshow implicitly recapitulated the accusation of Jewish responsibility for the Crucifixion in its convergence of Christian symbolism, ritualistic violence, and almost pagan celebration, the trial of 4.1 fulfilled Antonio’s depiction as a nearly crucified Christ. Rose’s trial scene

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specifically echoed the dumbshow: Wentworth, his shirt opened to reveal a cross tattooed on his chest, was stretched out with ropes as though crucified on the stage floor. As the trial proceeded to its conclusion and Antonio was saved or ‘resurrected,’ the dumbshow’s symbolism was thus transformed: Carnival became Lent; defeat in death became victory in life; Jewish executioner became Christian scapegoat. Rose also followed a performance tradition of purposefully amplifying the mutual antagonism of the play’s two principal religions to inflect the action with a tone of high seriousness, if not outright tragedy, which positioned Shylock as the (not wholly innocent) victim of specifically Christian authority and hatred.24 In the production, the characters’ antiJewish rhetoric emanated from Christian worship itself: Antonio stepped from a religious procession to debate angrily with Shylock over the terms of the loan; Salerio and Salanio discussed ‘the villain Jew’ (2.8.4) during a Palm Sunday mass; and in 3.5 Lancelot Gobbo mocked Jessica’s conversion as both knelt praying in another church. The Venetian justice to which Shylock was subjected was similarly coded as overtly Christian. At the start of 3.1, the two horizontal white fabric panels that hung perpendicular to the tall upstage-centre slot of an exit were illuminated to suggest patterned stone carvings and the winged Lion of Venice’s St Mark’s Square; at the scene’s conclusion the two panels and both vertical ones on either side of the slot, through which Shylock exited for the intermission, were lit to form a cross, suggesting the Christian quality of the impending trial scene. During the trial itself Shylock not only prepared to strike at Antonio’s cross-tattooed heart, but glared defiantly at a priest as he removed his knife and scales from his bag; once defeated, he relinquished his kipa and wide-brimmed hat, the very Jewish symbols in which he had clothed himself. The violent gagging and shuddering that Greene suffered as Bassanio’s friends circled him while clapping jeeringly, meanwhile, left little doubt about the viciousness that Antonio’s ‘resurrection’ and Christian justice require. The violence of Shylock’s conversion and the loss of his religion were mirrored in Sarah Topham’s Jessica. She eagerly eloped with Lorenzo and fervently defended herself against Gobbo’s sarcastic remarks in 3.5 about being damned because of her Jewish parents. Yet by the end of 3.5, her banter with her husband lost its flirtatiousness, and when Lorenzo then used considerable force to help her cross herself, his assistance was more like a threatening gesture. Jessica’s reticence was yet more palpable in the final scene, where her unhappy presence served to counteract the drama’s comic resolutions. She recovered none of her

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flirtatiousness at the top of the scene, so that when Topham remarked that Lorenzo had stolen ‘her soul with many vows of faith / And ne’er a true one’ (5.1.20), her voice rang with conviction. The actor stood, motionless and silent, among the other guests at Belmont, watching with an air of regret the spectacle of Bassanio’s and Gratiano’s protests and Portia’s and Nerissa’s revelations playing out noisily up and down the Festival’s thrust stage. Jessica’s regret turned to guilt and dismay when Nerissa announced that she and Lorenzo would inherit Shylock’s wealth. The production’s final half-minute solidified Jessica’s role as an index of her father’s Jewish suffering; alone on stage with Antonio, who watched her pensively, she broke her silence by pulling her shawl over her head and praying mournfully in Hebrew. The moment underscored the production’s intention to spare ‘Shakespeare from the embarrassing stigma of anti-Semitism.’ On the one hand, Jessica’s mourning, which coded Shylock’s conversion as a form of death and reasserted this conversion as the drama’s focal point, helped to reassure the audience by distancing them from the play’s romantic comedy and transforming the Christians’ celebration into Jewish tragedy. On the other hand, Antonio’s almost kindly regard for Jessica’s grief hinted at a rapprochement – or at least identification – between Christian and Jew, and invited the audience to consider such a reconciliation as the appropriate conclusion to the play’s action. Significantly, the production’s focus on a palatable version of the fictional conflict (and potential reconciliation) between Jews and Christians intersects with ‘the relationship between England’s most distinguished playwright and the ever increasingly pervasive and prosperous world tourism industry.’25 Stratford’s substantial contribution to this global industry coincides with what Ric Knowles labels the Festival’s ‘current “multinationalist” moment.’26 Unlike the previous ‘moment’ (approximately 1967–80), during which, Knowles suggests, discourse about Stratford was shaped by a context of ‘“localist” … nationalism,’27 the multinationalist phase has ostensibly seen the Festival become an exponent of ‘corporate colonialism in a post-national world, in which emerging post-colonial interculturalisms struggle to resist appropriation as markets or as raw materials in the now dominant discourses of free trade, “globalization” and “the world economy.”’28 In this dispensation, ‘the corporate bard, [is] appropriated in the service of globalization,’29 Stratford audiences are imagined as ‘a privileged and culturally dominant group of consumers, for whom “globalization” mean[s] market access,’30 and the Festival becomes ‘the embracing subject positioned to welcome, comprehend,

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and contain all aspects of humanity and all human cultures, which are silently constructed as the objects of that consuming subjectivity.’31 In 2007, the combination of multinational capital, which underwrites the ‘corporate bard’ and the universalist embrace of ‘all human cultures’ was undoubtedly central to the Festival’s framing strategy of its season and work. Both the large season brochure and the production program announced the Scotiabank Group as Merchant’s sponsor, and the individual Merchant program (like all the Festival’s 2007 production programs) included a ‘Salute’ to the Festival’s sixteen corporate sponsors, most of them financial institutions or insurance companies.32 The two booklets featured a large advertisement for American Express’s ‘Front of the Line’ service, which ‘offers advanced ticket access to some of the best seats in the house before tickets go on sale to the general public.’33 Advertising the ‘market access’ that Amex’s global reach secured for its privileged ‘Cardmembers’ was not only unexceptional, it was a crucial aspect of the Festival’s larger strategy of construing itself as a cultural entity distant from metropolitan hubs but at the centre of a tourist destination welcoming spectator-consumers with numerous local amenities: 40 per cent of the season brochure was devoted to listing and advertising ‘Accommodation,’ ‘Dining,’ ‘Shopping,’ and ‘Diversions’ in and around Stratford.34 Susan Bennett is right to suggest that this sort of ‘refined marketing practice’ ‘humbles … the authority of the theatrical event,’35 but the two are closely connected, both practically and symbolically. In fact, the Festival’s peculiar disposition – at once isolated and central – was obliquely reflected in Artistic Director Monette’s description of the Merchant’s relation to the season’s theme, ‘The Outsider.’ His artistic director’s message, printed in all production programs, reminded audiences that ‘None of us today can know the experience of a Jewish moneylender in 16th-century Venice’ even though Shylock ‘pleads for understanding across the centuries.’36 However, Monette assured readers that ‘each of us knows what it is to be kept from the centre of things, shunted to the margins, made to feel the pangs of not belonging … So universal is the outsider experience that its depiction brings us, ironically, to a renewed sense of commonality – of belonging itself.’37 This comforting irony, in which the marginality of a sixteenth-century Jewish moneylender becomes the symbol of human commonality, confers upon Stratford the Bard’s banal universality and portrays the Festival as reaching out in time and space to ‘welcome, comprehend, and contain all aspects of humanity.’38 We might understand this Merchant, then, as central to the way in which the Festival conceives of itself as another kind of Belmont. The

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hint of rapprochement between Jessica and Antonio is not simply part of a long tradition of ‘liberal humanist’ interventions in Merchant’s history; it serves the particular needs of the Festival (and, by extension, the economy of the Stratford region) by helping to portray it as a pastoral retreat where worldly conflicts are resolved by accommodating locals, where sojourners can witness the marginalized made central as they themselves experience a sense of belonging. Nor did the colour-blindness that the production invited us to engage in regarding Greene’s Native identity merely subsume that identity in a form of the ‘Other’ defined by a vague Shakespearean ‘whiteness’; we were implicitly asked not to see the local, national, and continental exclusions of First Nations peoples that continue to be sources of conflict in the ‘outside’ world, at places like Caledonia. Yet Belmont, as Shakespeare and Rose construed it, is more than a bucolic haven. Shakespeare may have resolved the Venetians’ worldly cares in this fairy-tale locale, but he also uses Belmont to dramatize the exclusions of all but one of Portia’s suitors; Rose may have addressed centuries of anti-Semitism by qualifying the action’s comic resolution with tragedy, but he also staged the suitors’ exclusions as explicitly clichéd intercultural encounters. The treatment of race in these encounters is reminiscent of Stratford’s 2003 The Adventures of Pericles, where, as Margaret Jane Kidnie writes, audiences had to ‘settle on an imprecise binarism between “familiar” and “foreign” self and other.’39 Early in the play, Rose established that he would exploit the stereotypes resulting from such imprecise binarism for levity. For Portia’s and Nerissa’s discussion of the suitors in 1.2, the opening scene’s long ‘Last Supper’ table was broken up into smaller ones spread around the stage, and on each sat or stood one of the men seeking Portia’s hand. Whereas the joined tables had symbolized Venice’s specifically Christian hatred of its Jews, their fragmentation was like splitting light through a prism, with each table representing a different hue in a spectrum of (sometimes odd) ethnic or national caricatures: the bereted ‘Monsieur le Bon’ made incomprehensible guttural exclamations; the Neapolitan lord wore a fox-hunting costume; Falconbridge was a foppish 1960s British hipster; the County Palatine had a business suit; and the German lord, wearing lederhosen, was slumped drunk over his table. Rose set the tone for the next three suitor scenes by having Jacob James’s Scottish lord recoil in disgust at the odour of the flower he took from under his own kilt to offer Portia, a gesture which located the lord’s otherness in a humorously repulsive corporeality and sexuality. However, Portia’s encounters with Morocco and Aragon more accurately reflect

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Kidnie’s remark about Stratford’s Pericles, that ‘[t]he conception shaping the exotic, marked body … presented a stereotyped and imprecisely executed treatment of race and culture that did little to challenge the assumptions that the “real” Shakespearean body is white and of European (preferably British) descent.’40 In the last of these scenes, Tim MacDonald’s Aragon was more effete but no less stereotyped than the Scottish suitor. He was accompanied by Spanish guitar music and attendants dressed in tight black suits with silver embroidery inspired by matador costumes. As MacDonald’s pony-tailed Aragon swept across the stage in what appeared to be a caped smoking jacket, pursing his thinly mustachioed lips and peering through hand-held spectacles at the caskets, his attendants struck various ridiculous Flamenco-like poses as guitar flourishes sounded. After this second prince exited in failure, Thompson executed her own Flamenco gesture and, mimicking his lisping Spanish accent, spoke Portia’s ‘Thus hath the candle singed the moth’ (3.1.78) in a mocking echo of Aragon’s final words, ‘I’ll keep my oath / Patiently to bear my wroth’ (3.1.76–7). She quickly returned to her normal posture and North American accent for rest of the scene, emphasizing the difference between Aragon’s foreign bodily comportment and speech and her own ‘appropriate’ and ‘real’ Shakespearean body. Jamie Robinson’s Morocco in this Merchant was more interesting than MacDonald’s Aragon, in part because his behaviour was simultaneously comically inappropriate and attractive in its sexual menace. Robinson’s prince was, moreover, a compendium of contemporary Western anxieties and preconceptions about Middle Eastern or North African Islam. This robed figure, large jewels on his fingers and turban, was preceded by remixed techno-Arabic music, the sound of a descending helicopter, and an entourage of similarly dressed bodyguards. The guards occasionally put hands to earpieces as though to coordinate security operations, and one performed a sword dance, waving a scimitar. As a group they evoked both the lure of wealth and the security concerns that characterize a clichéd Western view of oil-rich but politically unstable Islamic nations. The dangerous erotic magnetism that Robinson exuded when striding confidently among the caskets did not disturb Portia’s composure, but her servants, dressed as French maids, cooed loudly at the poetry of his lines, and one of them swooned when Morocco pointed the scimitar at her. As in the other suitor scenes, Robinson’s comically orientalist vision of Islam positioned the European Belmontese as consumers of an exotic spectacle; yet unlike the easily rejected foreign sexuality of the Scottish lord and Aragon, Morocco’s charisma affected Portia’s servants in a way

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that briefly threatened to expose the depth of their desire for, and their complicity in, this intercultural encounter before the danger it represented could be safely banished. Like the other suitors, Morocco challenged the assumptions of inclusiveness behind the colour-blind casting of Greene in the production and threatened to expose the complicity of the Festival’s audiences in this intercultural drama by inviting them simultaneously to distance themselves from and partake of the comically exotic depictions of race. The action surrounding Morocco’s choice of caskets in particular threatened the Festival’s self-image as a site removed from historical exigencies, where consumer-spectators could safely enjoy a spectacle that reinforced their sense of a common humanity which spans the centuries. As Morocco prepared to choose the golden casket, one of his guards prostrated himself in prayer as though he were in a mosque. This prayer was yet another sign of difference between the Moroccans and the Belmontese and yet one more stock gesture that signalled unambiguously to the audience the supposedly comic otherness of Islam. The guard’s prayer was, in fact, specifically reminiscent of the controversy that erupted over Stratford’s last Merchant (2001), when Morocco prostrated himself before Portia. The Canadian branch of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR-CAN) complained to the Festival in June of 2001, and Monette, the show’s director, responded by having Morocco bend one knee instead.41 Bernie Farber, speaking on behalf of the Canadian Jewish Congress (CJC), responded to the controversy at the time by saying that the media attention ‘takes away from what the play is about, and that’s antiSemitism’ and that ‘The play has always been offensive to Jews, even with Paul Soles’ sympathetic portrayal (of Shylock).’42 Just as the ‘real world’ concerns of Venice impinge upon Shakespeare’s Belmont, so the echo of the 2001 production serves as a reminder of the contemporary global political concerns and conflicts that can undermine Stratford’s attempts to contain ‘emerging postcolonial interculturalisms.’ The difference in response that emerged in 2001 between the CAIRCAN and the CJC may encapsulate the contradictions at play within Stratford’s 2007 Merchant, but such tensions invite further questions. Was Rose employing a comic interculturalism to critique the Festival’s marketing of universalism? When interviewed, he did not suggest that he was offering such a critique, although he portrayed Shakespeare’s conclusion as complex rather than happy, asking rhetorically, ‘What is inclusiveness if you lose your identity?’43 To ask another question about the production, how are we to interpret the behaviour of Wentworth’s

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Antonio in 3.3? Rose set the scene in a Venetian market, where a Jewish tailor measured Shylock’s Hasidic outfit for him. Surrounding Shylock were various stalls: at one a Jewish trader operated a currency exchange; at another, Morocco was selling weapons; at a third, a priest displayed religious goods, the most prominent being a t-shirt with a ‘Jesus’ logo that mimicked the ‘Reese’ chocolate company’s logo. Before Antonio was led away by the jailor for defaulting on his loan, he started to smash the goods on display. Given that Rose so carefully depicted Antonio as a Christ figure, are we to read this act typologically as a latter-day version of Jesus evicting the money-changers and merchants from the temple? Given that Rose treated this setting as a locus of global capital and trade, one that specifically reduced religious or national identity to a stereotyped commodity, are we to read Antonio’s fury as an assault on the profanation of such identity by its exchange in a globalized cultural marketplace? To an extent, the director understood the scene this way, arguing that Antonio here assails ‘the hypocrisy of the people in the market,’44 though again he did not suggest any specific connection between this scene and the Festival’s marketing of Shakespeare. Perhaps it is more useful to ask what kinds of readings such scenes actually generate, especially when no ‘outside’ group publicly complains as, indeed, no group officially did for the 2007 Merchant.45 Unsurprisingly, journalistic response replicated the Festival’s effort to frame the purpose of Shakespearean production as the embodiment of fundamental, transhistorical human truths. Only half of the reviews mentioned the suitors, and of those that did, most alluded to their comic function; only one linked Morocco (in passing) to Rose’s supposed ‘fundamental clash of cultures – between the dominant Christians and the ghettoized but reviled Jews,’46 and none mentioned the 2001 CAIR-CAN protest, despite the fact that a number of the reviewers had covered either the 2001 production or the controversy itself.47 Of the three reviewers who mentioned Greene’s Native identity at all, only Christopher Rawson made any effort to draw a connection between histories of Native Canadians’ oppression and the racism that Shylock experiences. Critics made no mention of land disputes, nor did they discuss the production in relation to the tourist experiences that Stratford offers, or in relation to any aspect of the ‘outside’ world. Instead, reviewers policed the individualist and essentialist sentiment embodied in Monette’s artistic director’s note more carefully than he did himself, holding Greene to vague standards of Shakespearean characterization. Reviewers frequently criticized Greene’s inability to ‘handle’ Shakespeare’s language due to a lack of

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classical theatre training,48 and typically accused him of not providing a sufficiently complex or passionate ‘human’ portrait of the moneylender: his ‘hath not a Jew eyes’ speech lacked ‘passion, some sense that it comes from some place deep within’;49 ‘It’s also actually somewhat disturbing that Greene delivers his “hath not a Jew eyes” speech with less passion than his subsequent rant over the jewels his daughter has stolen from him’;50 rather than allowing Shylock to ‘become a touchstone for understanding … Greene reduces the role to a pale shadow.’51 Such predictable critical responses may have matched the Festival’s construction of an audience eager to endorse a palatable treatment of the other as ‘fundamentally human,’ but, to borrow Bennett’s phrasing, ‘what relationship do these fantasies of audience have to the actual spectatorship [Stratford] attracts?’52 The audiences at the two performances I attended thoroughly appreciated the suitor scenes, laughing often and enthusiastically at the comic interculturalism. More surprising was the audiences’ complicity in Shylock’s victimization. At the first performance, more than just the school children in the theatre actually clapped in unison with the Venetians as they circled the defeated and desperate moneylender.53 During the second performance, the audience not only found Gobbo’s quips about Jessica’s conversion raising the price of pork hilarious but laughed appreciatively in the following scene when Gratiano derided Shylock with his own words, at least until he began aggressively insisting ‘Beg that thou mayst have leave to hang thyself’ (4.1.361). Admittedly, this evidence represents only two performances, but Anna Morgan reported similar responses to a preview of the production.54 Why, in these instances, had the apparent effort to ‘save’ Shakespeare from the stigma of anti-Semitism failed? Was it simply that the audiences had been prepared for humour and, as is often the case in performance, found the humour spreading to more serious scenes? Or perhaps there is something peculiar to theatre-going at Stratford – some pressure to enjoy the tourist experience – that sparks mirthful reaction that can undermine the Festival’s inclusive embrace. W.B. Worthen’s assertion that ‘[w]hile it is possible to articulate the structure of a performance’s claim on meaning, it is much more difficult to determine its reception’55 is certainly borne out by the differences between live and written responses to the Stratford Merchant’s conflicted claims on meaning. As I have suggested, the production’s contradictions encapsulate those of the Festival itself: Greene’s colour-blind performance and Rose’s Lenten interpretation underwrote the company’s avowed liberal humanist ideology at the expense of grappling with local

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histories of Native and European relationships; Greene’s star turn and the intercultural humour of the suitor scenes offered the pleasure that tourist audiences presumably seek to the detriment of Stratford’s supposed inclusiveness. In concentrating on the juncture of production and reception within the tourist context that Stratford fosters, I have tried to suggest what is at stake in the Festival’s conception of itself as a Canadian Belmont. Understanding these stakes offers a perspective on how fiscal imperatives, such as the flow of capital to a local economy from corporate sponsors and visitors alike, and the historical imperatives of various emerging interculturalisms affect and are affected by Shakespeare’s cultural weight. This perspective, in other words, offers a clearer understanding of how the performance of tourist Shakespeare influences the negotiation of cultural identities by determining whose stories get told and whose remain unspoken. Notes 1 Jill. L. Levenson, ‘Love in a Naughty World: Modern Dramatic Adaptations of The Merchant of Venice,’ in Shakespeare’s Comedies of Love: Essays in Honour of Alexander Leggatt, ed. Karen Bamford and Ric Knowles (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2008), 247. 2 James C. Bulman, The Merchant of Venice (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1990), 152–3. 3 For an account of the productions by Wesker and Tabori, see Bulman, Merchant. For an account of Marowitz’s production, see Levenson, ‘Love in a Naughty World.’ 4 Jacqueline Lo and Helen Gilbert, ‘Toward a Topography of Cross-Cultural Theatre Praxis,’ The Drama Review 46.3 (Fall 2002): 31. 5 See, for instance: Richard Fotheringham et al., eds, Shakespeare’s World / World Shakespeare: The Selected Proceedings of the International Shakespeare Association World Congress Brisbane, 2006 (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2008), 209–393; Yong Li Lan, ‘Shakespeare and the Fiction of the Intercultural,’ in A Companion to Shakespeare and Performance, ed. Barbara Hodgdon and W.B. Worthen (Oxford: Blackwell, 2005), 527–49; Sonia Massai, ed., World-Wide Shakespeares: Local Appropriations in Film and Performance (London and New York: Routledge, 2005); Robert Ormsby, ‘richardthesecond: Adapting Shakespeare to the Local in a Culture of Global Celebrity,’ Modern Drama 52.1 (Spring 2009): 19–37; Denis Salter, ‘Between Wor(l)ds: Lepage’s Shakespeare Cycle,’ in Theater Sans Frontières: Essays on the Dramatic Universe of Robert Lepage, ed. Joseph I. Donohue and Jane M. Koustas (East Lansing:

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Michigan State University Press, 2000), 191–204; Joanne Tomkins, ‘Conflicting Fields of Vision: Performing Self and Other in Two Intercultural Shakespeare Productions,’ in A Companion to Shakespeare and Performance, ed. Hodgdon and Worthen, 610–24; W.B. Worthen, Shakespeare and the Force of Modern Performance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 117–68. For an account of The Merchant of Santa Fe, see Elizabeth Klein and Michael Shapiro, ‘Shylock as Crypto-Jew: A New Mexican Adaptation of The Merchant of Venice,’ in World-Wide Shakespeares, ed. Massai, 31–9. Mark Thornton Burnett, Filming Shakespeare in the Global Marketplace (New York and Houndmills: Palgrave: 2007), 101. For an account of this kind of intercultural Shakespeare at the Globe Theatre, see Worthen, Shakespeare and the Force, 117–68. Michael Posner, ‘A Strange, Incoherent Merchant of Venice,’ Globe and Mail, 28 June 2007. Gary Taylor, ‘Theatrical Proximities: The Stratford Festival 1998,’ Shakespeare Quarterly 50 (1999): 342. Ibid. Ibid. Andrew Moodie, ‘Alas, I Am Not Hamlet,’ Now Magazine, 28 August 2003. For a discussion about the benefits and drawbacks that colour-blind casting offers, see Ayanna Thompson, ‘Practising a Theory / Theorizing a Practice: An Introduction to Shakespearean Colorblind Casting’ in Colorblind Shakespeare: New Perspectives on Race and Performance, ed. Ayanna Thompson (London and New York: Routledge, 2006), 1–26. For more on colour-blind casting and Shakespearean performance, see Thompson ed., passim. Stratford Festival of Canada, Pocket Guide, Stratford, ON, 2007; Stratford Festival of Canada, Season Guide, Stratford, ON, 2007. Stratford Festival of Canada, Merchant of Venice Program, Stratford, ON, 2007. Richard Rose, Interview, Stratford Festival of Canada: http://www .stratfordfestival.ca/video/#07_merchant_rrose. Ibid. Martin Morrow, ‘Native Empathy: Graham Greene Tackles Shakespeare’s Shylock,’ Canadian Broadcasting Corporation: http://www.cbc.ca/arts/ theatre/grahamgreene.html. For an outline of events at Caledonia, see Anon., ‘In Depth: Caledonia Land Claim,’ Canadian Broadcasting Corporation: http://www.cbc.ca/news/background/caledonia-landclaim/index .html. Violence erupted again in September 2007 when a builder was hospitalized after a confrontation with Native protesters. For more on this

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see James Rusk, ‘Police Stood by as Man Was Beaten, Brother Says,’ GlobeandMail.com: http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/ LAC.20070915.CALEDONIA15/TPStory/TPNational/Ontario/. Jamie Portman, ‘Graham Greene Moves beyond His Native Image to Portray Shylock in Merchant of Venice,’ CanWest News: http://proquest.umi.com/ pqdlink?index=9&did=1274288631&SrchMode=1&sid=6&Fmt=3&VInst= PROD&VType=PQD&RQT=309&VName=PQD&TS=1181996281&client Id+12520. Morrow, ‘Native Empathy.’ Michael C. Kotzin, ‘Modern-day “Merchant” Leaves Little to Hold On To,’ JUF News (November 1994): 77–9. Quoted in W.B. Worthen, Shakespeare and the Authority of Performance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 82. For an account of Sellers’s production, see Worthen, Shakespeare and the Authority, 76–94. All references to The Merchant of Venice are from William Shakespeare, William Shakespeare: The Complete Works, ed. Stanley Wells, Gary Taylor, John Jowett, and William Montgomery (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986). As Bulman relates, this ‘tragic’ interpretation goes back as far as Edmund Kean’s Shylock in the early nineteenth century. However, the overt nature of the animosity between Christians and Jews is, in fact, most similar to Bill Alexander’s 1987 Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC) Merchant, starring Antony Sher. For more on this RSC production, see also Bulman, Merchant, 117–42. For more on both the tradition of the ‘tragic’ Shylock and Alexander’s Merchant, see Randall Martin, ‘Introduction’ in The Merchant of Venice, ed. Randall Martin, with a stage commentary by Peter Lichtenfels (New York and London: Applause, 2001). Susan Bennett, ‘Shakespeare on Vacation,’ in A Companion to Shakespeare and Performance, ed. Hodgdon and Worthen, 494. Ric Knowles, Shakespeare and Canada: Essays on Production, Translation, and Adaptation (Brussels: Peter Lang, 2004), 30. Ibid., 30. Ibid., 47. Ibid., 47. Ibid., 54. Ibid., 51–2. Stratford Festival of Canada, Merchant of Venice Program, 42–3. Ibid., 3. Monette himself was fully aware of the theatre’s importance to the town: ‘It is the only theater that I know where the theater itself is responsible for the commercial health of the city. So there’s a real pressure that cannot be ignored.’ However, he did not regard Festival patrons as tourists:

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‘Tyrone Guthrie, our founding artistic director, said something wonderful. He said there are no tourists in Stratford, just theatergoers.’ Quoted. in Martin F. Kohn, ‘The Stars Shine at Stratford,’ Detroit Free Press, 27 May 2007: http://www.freep.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20070527/ ENT05/705270540/1035. Bennett, ‘Shakespeare on Vacation,’ 506. Stratford Festival of Canada, Merchant of Venice Program, 3. Ibid. Ibid. Margaret Jane Kidnie, ‘“What world is this?”: Pericles at the Stratford Festival of Canada, 2003,’ Shakespeare Quarterly 55 (2004): 317. Ibid., 318. Anon., ‘Stratford Merchant Morocco Modified,’ Toronto Star, 21 June 2001: E09. Ibid. Richard Rose, ‘Flipping the Coin on Colorblind Casting? Richard Rose on Directing The Merchant of Venice,’ Interview with Robert Ormsby, Borrowers and Lenders 4.1 (Fall/Winter 2008–9): http://www.borrowers.uga.edu/ cocoon/borrowers/current_issue. Richard Rose, ‘Flipping the Coin on Colorblind Casting?’ As of September 2007. Posner, ‘A Strange, Incoherent Merchant of Venice.’ Richard Ouzounian and Portman reviewed the 2001 Merchant, and Posner wrote an article about the controversy. Jeniva Berger, rev. of The Merchant of Venice, Scenechanges: http:// scenechanges.com/stratford.html; Christopher Rawson, ‘Among Stratford’s 14 plays these 2 draw varied reactions,’ Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, 30 July 2007: http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/07211/805418-325.stm; Gary Smith, Rev. of The Merchant of Venice. Hamilton Spectator, 13 June 2007: http://www .hamiltonspectator.com/NASApp/cs/ContentServer?pagename=hamilton/ Layout/Article_Type1&c=Article&cid=1181710711398&call_pageid= 1126519607402&col=1126519607416; Toby Zinman, ‘O Bard! O Shaw! O Canada!,’ Philadelphia Inquirer: http://www.philly.com/inquirer/ entertainment/8015502.html. Posner, ‘A Strange, Incoherent Merchant of Venice.’ Richard Ouzounian, ‘This Merchant Is a Strain on Our Patience,’ Toronto Star, 2 June 2007. Smith, review of 2007 Merchant. Bennett ‘Shakespeare on Vacation,’ 502. As Bulman (Merchant, 119) relates, Antony Sher ‘noted with dismay that audiences spontaneously applauded’ Portia’s comment that the bond allows

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Shylock a pound of flesh but ‘no jot of blood’ in Alexander’s 1987 RSC production. 54 Anna Morgan, ‘Much Ado about Shakespeare’s Shylock; Stratford Play Exposes Both Promise and Danger of the Merchant of Venice,’ Toronto Star, 13 May 2007: A17. 55 Worthen, Shakespeare and the Force, 208.

PART II

Shakespeare

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8 ‘To gain the language, ’tis needful that the most immodest word be looked upon and learnt’: Editing the Bawdy in Henry IV, Part Two james c. bulman

Henry IV, Part Two is Shakespeare’s most daringly alternative history. In it, he draws minimally from the chronicle sources that govern the plots of his other history plays: the inclusion of so much chronicle history in Part One resulted in very little royal narrative left to be dramatized in Part Two – only the defeat of the Archbishop’s rebellion, the death of the King, and the accession of Prince Henry, all of which occur in the last two acts. What makes Part Two radically different from the other histories in the second tetralogy, however, is not so much its relegation of the King and Prince to the margins as its moving to the centre those unhistorical characters, largely of Shakespeare’s invention, who dramatize a social history of the ‘other’ England – its city streets, taverns, and farms – which rivals the chronicle history in importance and surpasses it in the sheer energy and copiousness of its detail. For Part Two Shakespeare created a world rich in the quotidian life of Elizabethan subcultures and populated by figures more authentically idiosyncratic than most of the historical characters: tavern hostess and whore, swaggering ensign and impecunious knight, menials and hangers-on, rag-tag recruits and country justices, who collectively enable a Marxist understanding of history from the bottom up rather than from the top down. The diverse idioms in Part Two through which socially marginalized characters reveal differences in region, class, and occupation dramatize an expansion of the cultural boundaries of nationhood to a far greater degree than Shakespeare’s earlier history plays do.1 In Part One the Prince, who boasts that he ‘can drink with any tinker in his own language’ (2.4.18–19),2 implies that learning the vernacular will be essential if he intends to govern an emerging English nation, though he does not show much linguistic virtuosity beyond thieves’ cant.3 In Part Two, the

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importance of a vernacular education is made explicit: ‘The Prince but studies his companions / Like a strange tongue,’ Warwick assures the King, ‘wherein, to gain the language, / ’Tis needful that the most immodest word / Be looked upon and learnt’ (4.3.68–71).4 In the distinctive idioms of the Prince’s companions – Bardolph, Doll, Pistol, Mistress Quickly, and, above all, Falstaff – Shakespeare provides alternatives to the official speech of the court: as a recent study puts it, ‘the distance of various characters from the culture’s center of power and importance is marked by their linguistic distance from perfect command of the King’s English.’5 Surprisingly, however, scant attention has been paid to what characterizes the language spoken by these characters. Brian Vickers has written brilliantly on Falstaff’s prose idiom, and various sources have been identified for Pistol’s parody of the heroic rant found in unfashionable plays of the previous generation.6 But little has been revealed about how the language spoken by the ‘low’ characters in Part Two, particularly their use of bawdy double entendre, does its ideological work; and as a result, the intricate wordplay of many passages has gone unnoticed or has been incompletely understood by readers, audiences, and actors alike. Yet bawdy wordplay is more fundamental to the linguistic structure of Part Two than in any other history play. Through it, Shakespeare points to an Elizabethan material culture in opposition to the medievalism of the chronicle plot. As uttered by Falstaff, Mistress Quickly, Doll Tearsheet, and others, such wordplay becomes politically transgressive, a site of resistance to the operation of law and to the hegemony of the official language of the court. In the following pages, I shall explore what the play’s bawdy wordplay reveals about social and power relations among characters and about Elizabethan cultural practices, and shall also speculate about why even recent editors have failed to gloss such wordplay adequately. The figures who frequent the tavern represent Shakespeare’s most explicit foray into the material world of Elizabethan ‘low’ culture. Some who appeared in Part One, such as Mistress Quickly and Bardolph, are more fully fleshed and idiosyncratic in Part Two – she in her determination that neighbours respect her as a gentlewoman and her tavern as a respectable house, he in his caricature as a flaming-nosed alcoholic who serves as Falstaff’s lackey. Mistress Quickly’s role is significantly different from what it was in the earlier play, more deeply embedded in the social matrix of Elizabethan London. Managing a tavern was one of the

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few avenues for lower-class women to achieve economic independence and social recognition, and Mistress Quickly is acutely aware of her position.7 A widow of a certain age, she has lived in hope that Falstaff would marry her, and thus gentle her condition, for the past twenty years; and although she attempts to have him arrested for non-payment of his tavern debt – a debt which substitutes for his failure to honour his promise of marriage – her affection for him eventually prompts her, in a comic about-face, to agree to lend him another ten pounds, evidence of her prosperity as a businesswoman. Her memory of Falstaff’s proposal is marked by details of her material surroundings – he was sitting in her ‘Dolphin chamber’ by a ‘sea-coal fire’ and swore ‘upon a parcel-gilt goblet’ (2.1.67–8) – and the list of goods she must pawn in order to pay for his new wardrobe betokens a culture of getting and spending anachronistically Elizabethan in temper: plate and tapestries, glasses for drinking, and German hunting scenes painted in distemper (a thin paint made of water, chalk, and pigment) for wall-hangings. Furthermore, far more than in Part One, Mistress Quickly has an absurdly original way of speaking through which she unwittingly reveals her sexual history with Falstaff and punctures her pretence to respectability. In her riotous misuse of English, Mistress Quickly introduces a form of linguistic subversion that has come to be known as Quicklyism. Unlike Falstaff’s wordplay, which is devious and self-serving, the Hostess’s involves the unintentional use of malapropisms and double entendres through which she unconsciously exposes herself and her situation. Her comic attempt to use a vocabulary beyond her ken betrays her bourgeois social aspirations and desire for respectability, just as her bawdy puns betray her profession as a brothel keeper and her sexual relationship with Falstaff. In the following passage from Act Two, scene one, which I print in full prior to discussing it, she addresses the two officers whom she has enlisted to arrest Falstaff for failing to pay his bill: Hostess. Alas the day, take heed of him. He stabbed me in mine own house, most beastly in good faith. ’A cares not what mischief he does; if his weapon be out, he will foin like any devil. He will spare neither man, woman, nor child. Fang. If I can close with him, I care not for his thrust. Hostess. No, nor I neither. I’ll be at your elbow. Fang. An I but fist him once; an ’a come but within my vice –

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148 James C. Bulman Hostess. I am undone by his going, I warrant you: he’s an infinitive thing upon my score. Good Master Fang, hold him sure! Good Master Snare, let him not ’scape! ’A comes continuantly to Pie Corner, saving your manhoods, to buy a saddle, and he is indited to dinner to the Lubber’s Head in Lumbert Street to Master Smooths the silkman. I pray you, since my exion is entered and my case so openly known to the world, let him be brought in to his answer. A hundred mark is a long one for a poor lone woman to bear; and I have borne, and borne, and borne, and have been fubbed off, and fubbed off, and fubbed off, from this day to that day, that it is a shame to be thought on. There is no honesty in such dealing, unless a woman should be made an ass and a beast to bear every knave’s wrong.

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This passage is riddled with humorous sexual innuendo. The Hostess admits that Falstaff has ‘stabbed’ her ‘most beastly’ in her ‘house,’ conjuring an image of his mounting her from the rear; and further, she claims that if his weapon is out, he will ‘foin’ (a fencing term meaning to pierce or prick) his victims indiscriminately. As a gloss on this line, Partridge cites the undictionaried proverb ‘A standing prick hath no conscience.’8 Also worth noting, though unremarked by editors, is that the Quarto’s punctuation, which places only a comma after ‘out’ and thus links ‘weapon’ with ‘foin’ in the same sentence, makes a more pointed joke than the Folio, in which ‘if his weapon be out’ is the final clause of a sentence and ends with a full stop, thus separating ‘Hee will foyne like any diuell’ from the previous subjunctive condition and lessening the humour. Fang and Snare share in the Hostess’s ignorant double entendres by talking about Falstaff’s ‘thrust’ (which the Hostess is presumably ready to receive, since she will be ‘at [his] elbow’) and about their intention to ‘fist him,’ meaning to grab or punch, but with a possible play on masturbate – a pun which would lend bawdy potential to ‘an ’a but come,’ understood as slang for achieving orgasm. Although the OED lists the first use of ‘come’ in this way as 1650, Williams and Partridge both cite numerous instances of it in plays by Shakespeare and his contemporaries.9 The Folio’s substitution of ‘vice,’ meaning firm grip, for the Quarto’s ‘view’ reinforces the sexual joke of Fang’s bringing Falstaff to a sexual climax. At the opening of her next speech, the Hostess inadvertently reveals two sources of frustration with Falstaff rather than one: his refusal to

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repay the money he owes her, and his unwillingness to compensate her with marriage for his use of her body. Her being ‘undone’ by his ‘going’ most obviously refers to her being financially ruined by his leaving for war, either because he owes her a vast sum which he presumably will never repay or because she will be losing her best customer. But ‘go’ also was a slang term for having sex, and her being ‘undone’ by Falstaff’s ‘going’ thus glances ironically at the use he has presumably made of her virtue and the consequent ruining of her reputation. These humorous innuendos are reinforced by her complaint that ‘he’s an infinitive thing upon my score.’ The first of the Hostess’s malapropisms, ‘infinitive’ is a mistake for ‘infinite’: she means that Falstaff has countless debits recorded by means of chalk markings on a board. But there is a hint of sexual indebtedness as well, her ‘score’ being the number of times he has ‘had’ her; and given this possibility, the following lines may read as much as a tacit admission of her sexual relationship with Falstaff as an accusation that he has spent his money elsewhere, such as at Pie Corner. Adjacent to the centre of horse trading in Smithfield and so-named for the cooks’ shops there, Pie Corner was a familiar resort of prostitutes. Known for its brothels since 1393, it was still mentioned in court records two centuries later: in 1586 a parson committed ‘carnal copulation … twice in one Theals house a cook by Pye Corner,’ and in 1608 a woman was seen ‘occupied in a stable at Pye Corner.’10 Unsurprisingly, the phrase itself had become slang for the female pudendum. Therefore, by complaining that Falstaff comes ‘continuantly’ (a humorous malapropism which conflates continually and continently – i.e., chastely) to Pie Corner, the Hostess may unwittingly suggest that he frequents her own tavern for sex, especially since ‘buy[ing] a saddle’ was a popular euphemism for whoring (as in a saddle of mutton; hence, a piece of flesh). Her double entendres thus sound like what today might be called unconscious slips by which she reveals what she most wants to keep hidden. She continues her inadvertent self-exposure by mispronouncing the legal phrase for filing a lawsuit, ‘enter the action,’ when she begins her plea with ‘since my exion is entered and my case so openly known to the world’: entering her ‘exion’ plays on sexual penetration, and her phonetic rendering of ‘action’ suggests that she is imitating the way her betters pronounce it. Furthermore, ‘case,’ defined as a receptacle or seed-vessel, was a common slang term for vagina, so the fact that her case is ‘openly known to the world’ becomes a rich confession. As the offending party in her ‘case,’ Falstaff, she insists, must be ‘brought to an

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answer’: that is, either brought to court to answer the charges, or made to marry her. Her accusations reach a climax when she protests that she has put up with (‘borne’) Falstaff’s huge reckoning (‘a long one’ she calls it, in another phallic reference) and been put off (‘fubbed off’) by his excuses for an unconscionably long time; but ‘borne’ also implies that she has borne him – the full weight of his body – repeatedly; and ‘fubbed,’ that he has fornicated with her so often ‘that it is a shame to be thought on.’ The Hostess’s lust for bourgeois respectability is palpable here. She wants Sir John to make her a lady and thereby to cleanse the unsavoury reputation (the ‘ill name’ she complains of in 2.4.87) that she fears she has gained by running a tavern, which, she later protests, is not a bawdy house. Although in Part One she identifies herself as ‘an honest man’s wife’ (3.3.119), in this scene she calls herself a ‘poor widow’ (56), a status that grants her the independence of an entrepreneurial business owner and at the same time allows her to claim the vulnerability of a ‘poor lone woman’ whose business could be ruined by a customer’s non-payment of debt. As Jean Howard and Phyllis Rackin remark, the Hostess is both empowered by her economic independence yet threatened by a man who has the power to undo her.11 This threat explains the urgency behind her desire to arrest Falstaff: the only way she can preserve her status will be either through immediate payment (thus securing her economic independence) or through marriage, which, although it would forfeit her legal independence, will ‘gentle’ her condition and allow her not to be bothered by others’ censure of her. That her unwitting sexual wordplay and malapropisms implicate her in the very behaviours that she is trying to disavow is the major source of humour in this passage; and her final image of herself as ‘an ass and a beast to bear every knave’s wrong’ rounds out her self-exposure by recalling the image of bestial copulation with which she began her list of grievances against Falstaff. My brief analysis of the wordplay in this passage is in no way exhaustive, but it illustrates the importance of making explicit those meanings that are only implicit in the text, providing social contexts in which to understand those meanings, and explaining the importance of punctuation and syntax, especially when variations between the Quarto and Folio texts yield the possibility of different interpretations. Elucidating such things for the reader or actor, it seems to me, should be the responsibility of any editor. Yet editors of Henry IV, Part Two have typically glossed such passages with faint hearts, declined to unpack the layers of wordplay

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or ambiguities of syntax and phrasing, and thus tempted directors to shorten or excise such passages as unplayable in performance. Whether contemporary editors are simply prudish or, instead, fearful that their texts won’t be adopted if their glosses are too sexually explicit, they have neglected to clarify the more recondite meanings of this passage and thus failed to provide the guidance that one should be able to count on an editor to provide. How have recent editors explained the wordplay? Among those whose editions are widely adopted for university use, David Bevington is fairly typical: in one note, he lists many of the phrases as having ‘an unintended sexual double meaning,’ and then, with only a couple of exceptions, leaves it to the reader to figure out what those meanings are. The Signet editor, who confesses only that the Hostess’s lines have many ‘indecent second meanings,’ is more judgmental and even less helpful; and the Folger editors similarly gloss ‘foin’ as ‘one of many words … that may carry sexual meanings, among them stabbed, weapon, and thrust,’ and leave it at that. The editor of the new Pelican edition, published in 2000, is franker in her glosses, but only marginally so: she records that ‘stabbed me’ implies sexual intercourse, ‘saddle’ can mean prostitute, and ‘case’ is slang for female sexual organs, but stops there, elucidating no other sexual wordplay. As might be expected in an edition that foregrounds cultural contexts, editors of the Norton Shakespeare provide a more extensive glossing of the double entendres, noting that ‘weapon’ can signify penis; ‘fist,’ masturbate; ‘case,’ vagina; and ‘saddle,’ female genitalia. The Norton editors also acknowledge that ‘stabbed’ is a pun meaning sexually penetrated, that ‘entered’ suggests sexual penetration, and that ‘borne’ means ‘supported the weight of a partner in sexual relations’ – though, as in the Oxford edition on which their own is based, they silently emend ‘fubbed’ to ‘fobbed’ and thus obscure the bawdy innuendo. The editors of the most recent one-volume edition, sponsored by the Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC), determined not to bowdlerize their glosses, elucidate many of the meanings discussed above, even adding one to the list – that the Hostess’s bearing ‘every knave’s wrong’ may refer to her having an illegitimate child. All these glosses are of course good to have, but the RSC’s editors, like the Norton’s, provide no explanation for why the Hostess should unconsciously use such sexual language, how her puns form a pattern of self-exposure, and what the dramatic or cultural significance of such self-exposure might be. In other words, though the glosses are fairly explicit, they provide no guidance for the reader to understand the work they do.

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Of scholarly editions currently in use, the Arden 2, first published in 1966, is even more reluctant than recent editions to gloss sexual wordplay. A.R. Humphreys, like many of his generation, was clearly uncomfortable with bawdy language. In one note he identifies ‘stabbed,’ ‘weapon,’ ‘foin,’ and ‘thrust’ simply as ‘equivoques’ with no further clarification. The only other word he admits as a possible pun is ‘case,’ a term which, he says in a telling distancing manoeuvre, an article in NQ convincingly suggests is ‘a sexual equivoque.’ P.H. Davison’s New Penguin edition (1977) is somewhat more enlightening, offering sexual glosses for ‘buying a saddle’ and for ‘case,’ coyly allowing that Pie Corner may have ‘sold other flesh than that of the pig,’ and arguing that the Hostess’s ‘protestations are full of words that need no stretch of imagination to take on sexual meanings’ – but then leaving it to the reader to imagine what those meanings might be. Giorgio Melchiori’s edition for the New Cambridge Shakespeare (1989) is no better, noting merely that ‘stabbed,’ ‘weapon,’ ‘foin,’ and ‘thrust’ are ‘sexual quibble[s] typical of the Hostess’s language’ and that ‘case’ was a ‘popular designation of the female genitals.’ Finally, René Weis’s Oxford Shakespeare edition (1998), despite its considerable erudition, is no more explicit than other editions in its glossing of sexual language in this passage. Weis notes ‘a string of unwitting bawdy double-entendres’ on ‘stabbed,’ ‘weapon,’ and ‘foin,’ but ignores the associations of ‘Pie Corner’ and ‘saddle’ with prostitution, mentions ‘a similar sexual use’ of ‘case’ in Merry Wives without defining the term, and, like the Norton editors, silently emends ‘fubbed’ to ‘fobbed.’ That is the full sum of his sexual glossing. In a 1994 lecture titled ‘Sexuality and Textuality in the Editing of Shakespeare,’ Ann Thompson laments that ‘one does not know whether to laugh or cry when one comes to examine the traditional editorial procedures for dealing with obscenity in Shakespearean texts’ and remarks that editors ‘go to extraordinary lengths to avoid using “rude” words themselves.’12 As a general editor of the Arden 3, Thompson protests that ‘the editing of Shakespeare has until very recently suffered from a certain domination by old fogeys (and even some young fogeys), many of whom are more sexist or misogynist than Shakespeare himself’; and she asserts – presumably hinting at what one may expect of Arden 3 editions – that ‘a modern feminist editor would surely make less of a fuss about printing “fuck” and “cunt” and commenting on the kind of humour which is being generated’ in a scene full of double entendres. Indeed, her point about the greater candour of feminist editors was borne out just a few years later by the Oxford edition of Romeo and Juliet,

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in which Jill Levenson glossed the play’s considerable sexual wordplay with exemplary frankness and thereby substantiated her wider thematic exploration of adolescent sexuality.13 Thompson made these charges against male editors sixteen years ago, yet the tendency among editors to euphemize or ignore sexual wordplay persists. In an essay two years later, she and Neil Taylor speculated more judiciously that this tendency may have something to do with editors’ or publishers’ desire to appease teachers who do not want their students to be ‘embarrassed to find themselves reading in the formal classroom setting’ words which most of them are ‘quite used to saying or hearing in informal conversations outside the classroom.’14 This points to a fundamental hypocrisy in contemporary culture about the impropriety of using sexual language; and because of it, editors find themselves ‘in a conflictual set of relations involving authors, general editors, publishers, scholars, teachers, students, actors and members of the general public.’15 How, Thompson and Taylor ask, are editors to respond? One form of response is to focus on the sexual meanings of phrases at the expense of other meanings. Such a response is typified in a trade book by Pauline Kiernan published in 2007 and popular among students. Filthy Shakespeare presumes to unlock the secret meanings of passages that editors have wilfully overlooked or marked simply as a ‘bawdy quibble’ or a ‘sexual equivoque.’ Under the section ‘Fellatio,’ for example, she prints Falstaff and Pistol’s exchange about toasting (‘charging’) the Hostess with a cup of sack (Part Two, 2.4.109–17) and then translates it into contemporary English, offering in place of Shakespeare’s words only their modern sexual equivalents. Thus Pistol’s line, ‘I will discharge upon her, Sir John, with two bullets,’ becomes ‘I will ejaculate into her, Sir John, with the spunk from my two balls,’ to which the Hostess responds, ‘I’ll drink from no balls, I’ll drink no spunk’ – a crude reduction of her original line, ‘I’ll drink no proofs, nor no bullets.’16 What Kiernan offers is a titillating corrective to editions that ignore the puns, but she is also tone-deaf: she strays as far in one direction as euphemizing editors stray in the other. What Kiernan occludes in this brief exchange is the humour of Shakespeare’s wordplay, the imaginative associations of Pistol’s ostensible military prowess (pistol, discharging, bullets) with his penchant for drinking and toasting (charging, proofs) and, finally, with his using the Hostess for sexual gratification. By ignoring these associations, Kiernan robs readers of the pleasure of keeping multiple meanings in play; and it is just such pleasure, I would argue, that it is incumbent on editors to provide in their glosses.

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The bawdy wordplay in Part Two is not merely pleasurable in and of itself, however. It performs cultural work that keeps the play finely poised between chronicle history and contemporary social critique. Prostitution, for example, is of central importance to Part Two, both as a social issue that would resonate with Elizabethan audiences aware of the growing number of prostitutes – and the increasing incidence of sexually transmitted disease – in a burgeoning London,17 and as a metaphor for the behaviour of those historical figures in the play for whom selling themselves, or screwing others, had become a political fact of life. Doll Tearsheet, the ‘parish heifer’ (2.2.120), whom Mistress Quickly brings to Falstaff for a last night of merriment before he goes off to war, operates on the lowest rung of a distinctly contemporary social ladder. As a prostitute, she is a woman of independent if meagre means, as she reveals when she accosts Pistol for ‘tearing a poor whore’s ruff in a bawdy house’ (2.4.140–1) – the large ruff being an item of costume that Elizabethan prostitutes commonly wore, and whose ‘tearing’ off signified sexual assault in drama of the period.18 Swaggerers (that is, quarrellers) such as Pistol were expected to be found in brothels. Indeed, as a brothel ‘captain’ with an anachronistically phallic name (whose bawdy potential the Hostess reveals when she pronounces it as ‘Peesel,’ or Pizzle, at line 159), Pistol may be directly involved in Doll’s trade, for she intimates that he ‘lives upon mouldy stewed prunes’ (142), food associated with brothels because they were thought to be ‘part of the cure for venereal disease.’19 This bond between Doll and Pistol grows even stronger when, in Act Five, scene four, the Beadle who is arresting the Hostess and Doll tells them that ‘the man is dead that you and Pistol beat amongst you’ (16–17) – testimony to the violence that commonly erupted in brothels, and evidence that, despite her protestations, the Hostess does indeed run a bawdy house. The insistence of references in 2.4 to the world of prostitution in contemporary London invests the scene’s subsequent wordplay with a surprising cultural urgency. The Hostess, for example, reveals her profession when Falstaff accuses her of having ‘another indictment upon thee, for suffering flesh to be eaten in thy house contrary to the law’ (2.4.341–3) – ‘flesh’ being a double entendre equating meat with women (as it is in Measure for Measure), both of which are consumed on her premises. She unwittingly proves his accusation true by protesting, ‘All vict’lers do so. What’s a joint of mutton or two in a whole Lent?’ (345–6), wherein she uses common terms for whores (joints of mutton; cf her use of ‘saddle’ at 2.1.26) and their purveyors (victuallers). By confessing a minor infringement of the proclamation passed by the Privy Council

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in 1588 forbidding the consumption of meat during Lent, she also, in a wonderful if inadvertent expression of moral laxity, pleads guilty to the larger crime of running a brothel. The Hostess’s comic misuse of language, then, serves as a site of carnivalesque resistance to the laws of the land by which enterprising women such as herself and Doll are criminalized.20 Like many in the 1590s, Falstaff demonizes prostitutes as threats to the health of men and to the moral health of society. He accuses Doll of being a vector of disease who infects her clients: presuming to speak for all men, he says, ‘you help to make the diseases, Doll. We catch of you’ (44–5). When she retorts that the only thing her clients ‘catch’ – that is, steal – from her are her ‘chains’ and her ‘jewels’ (47), Falstaff with characteristic dexterity turns her words into their scatological equivalents – ‘Your brooches, pearls, and ouches!’ (48–9) – all of which are euphemisms for the carbuncles, skin sores, pimples, and pustules caused by venereal diseases. He then introduces a brilliant barrage of military double entendres which equate the sickness that results from sexual ‘combat’ with the wounds of war and, in so doing, recall his own service at Shrewsbury. ‘[T]o serve bravely,’ he asserts – in bed or in battle – ‘is to come halting off’ (49) – that is, to limp owing to a wound or to sexual exertion that leaves one unable to stand. His next line – ‘to come off the breach with his pike bent bravely’ – makes the association even more explicit. In a military sense, a breach is a gap in a fortification made during an assault from which the soldier returns with his pike (a shaft with a pointed head of steel or iron) bent after engaging the enemy; but in a sexual sense, the breach is the hole, or vagina, from which the penis (pike) emerges bent from vigorous copulation. Falstaff’s wordplay grows more pointed when, as one destined for the war in the North, he figures ‘the rake’s passage from quean to quack … as a move from field of battle to field dressing station’;21 for the wounded soldier goes ‘to surgery bravely’ (51), an association of the dressing of war wounds with treatment for the pox which continues his demonization of Doll. His recapitulation of the main event, ‘to venture upon the charged chambers bravely’ (51–2), advances his own claim to sexual and military prowess even as it indicts Doll once again as a vector of disease, for it means both (a) to dare to face the loaded guns of the enemy, and (b) to penetrate a vagina (chamber) which is infected (charged) with the pox. Ultimately, Falstaff asserts, whores lead men to damnation. Doll, he tells the Prince, is ‘in hell already, and burns poor souls’ (334–5) – word-

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play that condemns the effect of her trade on clients, for burning means infecting with venereal diseases, just as it does in Sonnet 144: ‘Till my bad angel fire my good one out’ (14). Falstaff’s stream of misogynist double entendre in this scene thus potently demeans women as agents of the spiritual and physical corruption of men, a displacement of responsibility that was common among Elizabethan writers. By analogy, too, Falstaff’s wordplay about the pox provides a gloss on the diseases that fester in the King and Northumberland, men whose ills, both physical and moral, inform the scenes that flank this one (2.3, 3.1) and are of far greater consequence to the state – if not to the play – than Falstaff’s. This tissue of bawdy wordplay is not confined to the tavern. Though seldom noted by editors, it extends to more remote reaches of the kingdom as well, even to Justice Shallow’s farm in Gloucestershire, where a world of rustic pleasures, foison, and good fellowship is undercut by a cynical strain of sexual innuendo which suggests that greed and selfinterest are as common in the country as they are in the city. Falstaff, of course, carries these values with him. His recruitment of foot soldiers is tainted by a scheme to make money wherein he seeks to impress men who will be able to buy out their service. When the ablest recruits bribe Bardolph to let them go, Falstaff proves guilty of the same corrupt practices that brought shame to Elizabethan commanders whose abuses were catalogued in military conduct books. Although levying men for service had become so difficult by the late sixteenth century that soldiers were being recruited from prisons or by means of the press gang, corruption among recruiters was never condoned, and Falstaff’s behaviour, however comic, is morally censurable.22 The most common verb for recruiting was ‘prick,’ and Falstaff’s repeated command for Bardolph to ‘Prick him’ – that is, to mark down a recruit’s name in the impressment log – filled yeomen and householders such as Mouldy and Bullcalf with dread. But ‘prick’ is also a word on whose bawdy potential Shakespeare plays relentlessly. Mouldy, for example, employs it in the interest of self-preservation: ‘I was pricked well enough before, an you could have let me alone,’ he protests (3.2.110– 11); and while ‘pricked’ here could simply mean henpecked, it more suggestively refers to his sexual endowment. As a ribald pun, it alerts the listener to continued wordplay in the next line, when he complains that his ‘old dame will be undone now for one to do her husbandry and her drudgery’ (111–12). For a yeoman, husbandry and drudgery signify farm work; but they had bawdy double meanings as well. Husbandry referred to fulfilling a man’s conjugal role, and drudgery was a comic term for

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the sexual labour involved in cuckolding another man, as Shakespeare would use it in All’s Well: ‘He that ears my land spares my team, and gives me leave to in the crop. If I be his cuckold, he’s my drudge’ (1.3.44–6). Without such labour, Mouldy argues, his ‘old lady’ will be, like the Hostess at 2.1.22, ‘undone,’ the now-unearthed pun on ‘do’ intimating that she will go unfucked in his absence.23 Although Mouldy’s second mention of his ‘old dame’ later in the scene more clearly indicates that he is referring to his mother (227), his first use of it allows the listener to infer that he means his wife, making his wordplay on husbandry and drudgery, in retrospect, look deceptively opportunistic. Despite the apparent innocence of the rural society on view, then, Mouldy and Bullcalf betray the same human frailties and will to deceive as their political counterparts. For his part, Falstaff employs double entendres to disparage the recruits as incisively as he has done the Hostess and Doll. His bawdy mockery of Feeble the tailor is particularly potent. The term ‘tailor’ itself was a sexual pun signifying a fornicator, a man who used his ‘tail’ or penis to penetrate a customer. Falstaff plays on the contemporary stereotype of tailors as voracious sexual deviants when he warns Shallow about the danger of pricking Feeble, for ‘if he had been a man’s tailor, he’d a’ pricked you’ (150–1): just as a tailor could make a suit of clothes for Shallow, that same tailor could thrust him through with his needle or his prick. Falstaff mocks Feeble further when he accuses him of taking advantage of his trade to make a conquest of female clients – ‘Wilt thou make as many holes in an enemy’s battle as thou hast done in a woman’s petticoat?’ (151–3) – a conflation of his sewing skills with his sexual prowess that confirms the stereotype an Elizabethan audience would have shared. Falstaff concludes the recruiting scene with a scathing indictment of Justice Shallow that is stitched together with bawdy. He witheringly exposes the self-delusion of a man who remembers himself as a Lothario at Clement’s Inn, a friend to all the ‘bona robas’ (23) such as the aptly named Jane Nightwork (194–5), but who, in Falstaff’s clear-eyed corrective, ‘was the very genius of famine, yet lecherous as a monkey, and the whores called him mandrake’ (308–10). A mandrake was a plant whose root, according to Gerard’s Herball, resembled ‘the legs of a man, with other parts of his body, adioining thereto as the priuie parts,’ and was thought since ancient times to be an aphrodisiac.24 If the whores thus ridiculed Shallow’s insatiable lust, Falstaff’s wordplay calls his taste into question as well: ‘’A came ever in the rearward of the fashion’ (310–11), Falstaff asserts, suggesting that Shallow was socially inept but also implying, according to Partridge, that he may have practised buggery – that is,

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‘rustic’ or ‘country’ sex.25 Furthermore, Shallow’s singing popular tunes to ‘the overscutched housewives’ he wished to impress deepens Falstaff’s ridicule of him, for the phrase implies that Shallow consorted not with the bona robas he claims to have known but with the commonest of whores: the term ‘housewives,’ pronounced hussies, was slang for prostitutes, and ‘overscutched’ meant either thoroughly whipped (which will be Doll’s punishment at 5.4.5) or simply washed-up, with a play on the word ‘scut,’ the tail of a doe, as a bawdy term equivalent to ‘cunt’ (as it is in Merry Wives, 5.5.18). Having thoroughly exposed Shallow as a liar, Falstaff vows to ‘make him a philosopher’s two stones to me’ (323–4). Alchemists believed that one of these stones would confer eternal youth and the other would transmute base metals into gold. Since Falstaff intends to grow rich by Shallow and is presumably interested in only one of the stones, his mention of two stones increases the likelihood that he is playing on stones as slang for a man’s testicles, a pun Thisbe uses to comic effect in A Midsummer Night’s Dream (5.1.189–90). In other words, Falstaff swears to have Shallow by the balls – a situation in which Shallow, eager to buy a friend at court, is a willing accomplice. The vein of bawdy wordplay that runs through the recruitment scene, therefore, creates a subtext of social anarchy and cultural debasement which counters the nostalgic ideals of the virtuous country life – the values of hard work, honesty, and loyalty thought to be conspicuously absent in the city. Despite the traditional view of Shallow’s farm as Shakespeare’s paean to a passing world, the recruiting scene suggests that corruption flourishes as much among the gentry and yeomen in Gloucestershire as among the prostitutes, swaggerers, and old soldiers in the city, or, indeed, among the lords who are vying for power in the play’s chronicle history. The pervasive double entendres expose a culture of greed, selfinterest, and duplicity – both verbal and moral – that lurks beneath the good fellowship which the scene ostensibly celebrates. Rural England turns out to be not so much an idyllic alternative to the tavern world as an extension of it. If this is the vernacular in which Hal must be educated if he is to govern England in all its diversity of regions and social classes, then his exchange with Poins in Act Two, scene two, demonstrates that he has already gone a long way towards mastering it. In this scene, the Prince, at odds with himself, addresses Poins with an uncharacteristic aggression which Poins in turn will displace onto Bardolph. Poins is a character of uncertain social standing, though his assertion that ‘the worst they can say of me is that

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I am a second brother’ (59–60) suggests that he may be a gentlemen with no inheritance, his gentility making him an appropriate companion for Hal.26 Nevertheless, if Falstaff’s allegation that Poins has sworn that Hal should marry his sister is accurate, he is certainly guilty of inappropriate social aspirations for his family. In a passage often cut in performance, Hal’s self-censure involves a caustic belittling of Poins’s social situation: What a disgrace is it to me to remember thy name, or to know thy face tomorrow! Or to take note how many pair of silk stockings thou hast, with these and those that were thy peach-coloured once; or to bear the inventory of thy shirts, as: one for superfluity and another for use! But that the tennis-court keeper knows better than I, for it is a low ebb of linen with thee when thou keepest not racket there, as thou hast not done a great while, because the rest of the low countries have made a shift to eat up thy holland. And God knows whether those that bawl out the ruins of thy linen shall inherit His kingdom, but the midwives say the children are not in the fault whereupon the world increases and kindreds are mightily strengthened.

15

20

As in the scenes discussed earlier, this passage is full of anachronistic references to the material culture of contemporary London. From the general premise that it is ignoble for a prince to mix with, or even deign to recognize, a person of lower social station, Hal proceeds to condemn Poins’s wardrobe as evidence of his impecuniousness, beginning with his stockings. The gist of his remark at 15–17 is that Poins’s stockings were once a fashionable colour, peach being a fleshy pink favoured by gallants, but have faded from too much wear and washing. The Folio’s substitution of the word ‘ones’ for the Quarto’s ‘once’ weakens the point that Poins’s stockings are no longer fashionable. With regard to shirts – one to wear, another for a spare – Hal may be mocking Poins for owning only two, although, like stockings, shirts were expensive items, and Philip Stubbes in his Anatomie of Abuses (1595) scathingly censures the extravagance of men who wear them for fashion.27 Poins apparently has frequented tennis courts often enough for Hal to joke that the keeper knows Poins’s wardrobe better than anyone else (‘that’ in line 17 functions as the direct object of ‘knows,’ and I italicize it to make the syntax clear): tennis had become a popular sport in London in the late

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sixteenth century, though Puritans frowned on tennis courts as dens of iniquity little different from alehouses, dicing houses, and brothels. Indeed, with a pun on ‘racket’ meaning both a light bat used for tennis and an uproar (19), Hal insinuates that Poins has caused riotous disturbances there. But clearly a change in Poins’s circumstances has made it impossible for him to visit the tennis court for ‘a great while’ (19–20), since players changed shirts often during a match and Poins no longer owns enough to do so. Hal’s concern with Poins’s ‘low ebb of linen’ (18) introduces an intricate web of wordplay as unflattering as it is bawdy. Poins has stopped frequenting the tennis court, according to Hal, because ‘the rest of the low countries have made a shift to eat up thy holland’ (20–1). This line keeps multiple meanings in play: first, it alludes to regional political tensions and the risk of the Netherlands’ being swallowed (‘eat up’) by its hostile neighbours. Second, it suggests that Poins has pawned his shirts (Holland being the source of fine linen, called ‘holland’) to finance his sexual indulgences – those involving ‘the low countries’ – that is, lower regions of the body, or possibly low haunts, brothels, which Shakespeare in a pun he would use again in Hamlet calls ‘cunteries.’ A third alternative allows that ‘the low countries’ may refer to Poins’s own genitals, either dirty from poor hygiene or suppurating from venereal disease, and that these have ruined his undergarments, which, like shirts, were sometimes made of linen. The phrase ‘made a shift to,’ found only in the Folio, is clearly authorial wordplay; most obviously it means contrived or managed, but in this context it refers to Poins’s need to change his linen (‘shift’ = shirt) as well. The final five lines of the passage were omitted in the Folio, perhaps owing not so much to their bawdy innuendo about Poins’s begetting bastard children as to their profanity: bringing God into Poins’s dirty linen probably was beyond the pale after Parliament passed the Act to Restraine Abuses of Players – outlawing profanity on the stage – in 1606. The assertion that Poins’s offspring ‘bawl out’ of – that is, cry while wrapped in – the ‘ruins’ of his ‘linen’ suggests either that their swaddling clothes are made from his discarded shirts or that his pawning of those shirts led directly to the sexual congress by which the bastards were conceived. Their conception, in other words, is a consequence of his visits to ‘the low countries.’ The Quarto’s spelling of ‘bawl’ as ‘bal’ may also contain a pun on balls: Partridge detects a glance at ‘the etymological significance of … “testicles” [as] “the little witnesses”’ to a man’s virility, so that babies would be the little witnesses to Poins’s procreative prow-

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ess.28 The last three lines are especially difficult to gloss. Most editors adopt Theobald’s punctuation, using an end stop or a semi-colon after ‘fault,’ which oddly disjoins ‘whereupon’ from ‘fault’ and gives the final two clauses the force of an aphorism: ‘this is the way the world multiplies and families [kindreds] are fortified.’ But the lack of punctuation in the Quarto (there are commas only after ‘say’ and ‘increases’) implies a syntactically dependent relationship among the clauses which makes perfectly good sense: that the bastards ‘are not in the fault whereupon’ means that they are not to blame for being the cause that ‘the world increases’ and families are fortified. There is therefore no reason to reject the Quarto’s punctuation and adopt Theobald’s, although almost all the major scholarly editions of the play do so, without explanation. Editions of the play adopted at colleges and universities do little to elucidate this difficult passage and pay scant attention to either the sexual double entendres or to the cultural references that would allow readers to understand the force of Hal’s acerbically witty wordplay. Typically, they choose one option for phrases with multiple meanings, thus making life easy for the reader but erasing the complexity of the text. The Signet edition, for example, glosses ‘low countries’ simply as ‘Netherlands (with an obscene pun)’; the Pelican edition, as ‘brothels (with a pun on “Netherlands”)’; and the Bevington edition, as ‘the brothels where you spend your money (with a pun on “the Netherlands”).’ Scholarly editions such as the Cambridge and the Oxford provide much better notes on the passage’s references to Holland, fashion, tennis courts, and brothels, and in doing so alert readers to the multiple ways in which lines may be interpreted. Nevertheless, they fall short of explaining the intricacy of Hal’s wordplay: indeed, the New Penguin editor metaphorically throws up his hands because ‘so many puns … are possible … that the permutations are almost endless.’ Editors also are silent about syntactical cruxes and how differences between the Quarto and Folio can affect meaning; and above all, they ignore the cultural significance of Hal’s disparagement of Poins’s wardrobe, love of sport, sexual habits, and the reduced circumstances in which such habits have left him. Yet this network of allusions not only creates a rich social context for understanding Hal’s relationship with Poins; it also becomes part of the play’s larger canvas of Elizabethan society, a feature of Part Two which distinguishes it from the prevailing medievalism of Shakespeare’s other history plays – even, in degree, from Part One. The reluctance of editors to elucidate the play’s verbal intricacies and to gloss its sexual wordplay has had unforeseen consequences. It has led

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to a cutting of many of the play’s bawdy passages in performance; and more seriously, it has led to a foregrounding of the royal play – King Henry’s conflict with the rebels, Prince John’s Machiavellian ploy at Gaultree, Hal’s final scene of reconciliation with his father and his accession to the throne – at the expense of the comic scenes that give the play its energy and its distinction from the other histories. Ironically, for the past two decades, when scholars have increasingly turned their attention to the social history and material culture of early modern England, the editing of this play has veered in another direction, towards elucidating political scenes and their focus on power relations, but has added little to our understanding of the rich cultural matrix of ordinary people’s lives – dramatized most imaginatively in the scenes on the London street, in the Hostess’s tavern, and at Justice Shallow’s farm in Gloucestershire – by which Shakespeare drew ‘attention to the gap between official history and the social domains it must exclude to constitute itself.’29 By neglecting to unpack passages such as those I have discussed here, editors have denied readers the pleasure of grasping some of Shakespeare’s most potent and culturally subversive humour. They have thus, however unintentionally, been complicit in subordinating the histories of marginalized groups to the play’s ‘official history.’ Editions of Shakespeare Cited Bate, Jonathan, and Eric Rasmussen. William Shakespeare: Complete Works. Royal Shakespeare Company. London: Macmillan/Palgrave, 2006. Bevington, David. The Complete Works of Shakespeare, 6th ed. New York: Longman, 2009. Davidson, P.H. Henry IV, Part Two. The New Penguin Shakespeare. London: Penguin Books, 1977; reissued with new introduction, 2005. Greenblatt, Stephen, et al. The Norton Shakespeare. New York: W.W. Norton, 1997. Holland, Norman. Henry IV, Part Two. The Signet Classic Shakespeare. New York: New American Library, 1965. Humphreys, A.R. King Henry IV, Part 2. The Arden Shakespeare. London: Methuen, 1966. McEachern, Claire. Henry IV, Part II. The Pelican Shakespeare. New York: Penguin Books, 2000. Melchiori, Giorgio. The Second Part of King Henry IV. The New Cambridge Shakespeare. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989. Mowat, Barbara, and Paul Werstine. Henry IV, Part 2. The New Folger Library Shakespeare. New York: Washington Square Press, 1999.

Editing the Bawdy in Henry IV, Part Two 163 Weis, René. Henry IV, Part 2. The Oxford Shakespeare. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998. Wells, Stanley, and Gary Taylor. William Shakespeare: The Complete Works. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986. Notes 1 Of the early histories, only Henry VI, Part Two attempts to dramatize an expansion of such boundaries by including Jack Cade’s rebellion, which echoes Hacket’s 1591 London uprising and reflects (anachronistically) cultural anxieties of that decade. 2 With the exception of those from Henry IV, Part Two, all quotations are taken from William Shakespeare, The Complete Works, ed. Stanley Wells and Gary Taylor (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986). 3 Barbara Hodgdon cites Thomas Dekker’s Lantern and Candlelight as a guide to the hierarchy of London’s vagrant population and reprints his first chapter, ‘Of Canting,’ as a context in which to read the colloquialisms, ‘strange tongues,’ and ‘gross terms’ used by the low-lifes in 1 Henry IV. See The First Part of King Henry the Fourth: Texts and Contexts (Boston: Bedford/St Martin’s, 1997), 210–11, 250–7. 4 All quotations from Henry IV, Part Two are from my edition for the Arden Shakespeare, 3rd Series (London: Bloomsbury, forthcoming). Steven Mullaney, in The Place of the Stage: License, Play, and Power in Renaissance England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), 76–85, discusses Hal’s language lesson in terms of the evolution of an English vernacular in the sixteenth century, a time when ‘an imaginative sympathy’ allowed ‘alien voices and ideologies not merely to be recorded or studied, but entered into and enacted quite fully,’ a process imitated when the Prince’s study of a ‘strange tongue’ involved his developing ‘an appetite for the unfamiliar details of popular culture, for the manners and morals, the ways of speech and material conditions of life on the margins of society, among the masterless men, bawds, bankrupts, wayward apprentices, and refugees from country reforms’ to which his father so strenuously objects (79–80). 5 Jean E. Howard and Phyllis Rackin, Engendering a Nation: A Feminist Account of Shakespeare’s English Histories (London: Routledge, 1997), 182. 6 See Vickers, The Artistry of Shakespeare’s Prose (London: Methuen, 1968), 118–41. Editors have found numerous echoes of plays by Marlowe, Greene, Peele, and others in Pistol’s comic fustian, but J.W. Lever claims that Shakespeare’s more direct debt was to the absurd boasts of the Braggart in John Eliot’s Ortho-epia Gallica, Eliots Fruits for the French (1593): see ‘Shakespeare’s

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7

8 9

10

11 12 13 14

15 16 17

18

19 20

French Fruits,’ Shakespeare Survey 6 (1953): 79–90. Nick de Somogyi considers Pistol’s extravagant speech in the context of the speech of other stage war veterans and concludes that Pistol’s erratic behaviour, which sets him apart from them, is symptomatic of a derangement akin to shell shock, in Shakespeare’s Theatre of War (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1998), 160–78. On stereotypes of the entrepreneurial alewife, see Peter Clark, The English Alehouse: A Social History, 1200–1830 (London: Longman, 1983), 111–15. Howard and Rackin discuss Mistress Quickly as an anarchic figure, the sexualizing and criminalizing of whom coincide with her economic prosperity, in Engendering a Nation, 176–85. Eric Partridge, Shakespeare’s Bawdy (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1947), 114–15. See Partridge, Shakespeare’s Bawdy, 89; also Gordon Williams, Dictionary of Sexual Language and Imagery in Shakespearean and Stuart Literature (London: Athlone, 1994) and A Glossary of Shakespeare’s Sexual Language (London: Athlone, 1997), 75. See Laura Gowing, ‘Gender and the Language of Insult in Early Modern London,’ History Workshop 35 (Spring 1993): 16; and Gordon Williams, Shakespeare, Sex, and the Print Revolution (London: Athlone, 1996), 259. Howard and Rackin, Engendering a Nation, 176–85. Ann Thompson, Inaugural Lecture (London: Roehampton Institute, 6 June 1994), 13. Jill Levenson, ed., Romeo and Juliet (Oxford: Oxford Shakespeare, 2000). Ann Thompson and Neil Taylor, ‘Obscenity in Hamlet III.ii: “Country Matters,”’ Textus: English Studies in Italy, special issue on Shakespeare’s Texts, vol. 9 (1996): 499. Ibid. Pauline Kiernan, Filthy Shakespeare: Shakespeare’s Most Outrageous Sexual Puns (New York: Gotham Books, 2007), 147–9. This vexing social problem would be featured more prominently a few years later in Measure for Measure, which deals explicitly with the government’s crackdown on brothels. In her discussion of how Part Two uses anachronism to confute ‘the nostalgic binary opposition between a degraded present and an idealized medieval past,’ Phyllis Rackin notes that the Prince consorts with unhistorical characters at the Boar’s Head whose anachronistic behaviours include drinking sack and wearing ruffs: see Stages of History: Shakespeare’s English Chronicles (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990), 138–9. W. Clowes, The Cure of … Lues Venerea (London, 1596), 161. Barbara Hodgdon observes that by the end of the play, ‘the potential threats

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21 22

23

24 25 26

27

28 29

Carnival represents are displaced onto the play’s women,’ who are ‘demonized as corrupt, set aside and excluded from the commonwealth,’ in The End Crowns All: Closure and Contradiction in Shakespeare’s History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991), 172. Williams, Shakespeare, Sex and the Print Revolution, 211. See de Somogyi, ‘You a captain?,’ Shakespeare’s Theatre of War, 42–51, and J.W. Fortescue, ‘The Army: Military Service and Equipment,’ in Shakespeare’s England: An Account of the Life and Manners of His Age, ed. Sidney Lee and C.T. Onions, vol. 1 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1916), 112–26. Among contemporary observers, Barnaby Riche asserts in Path-Way to Military Practise (1587) that captains were often incompetent and corrupt, negligent of their men and provisions, cowardly and undisciplined, and, at worst, thieving murderers; and Thomas Nashe, in Pierce Pennilesse (1592), ranks captains among those who devote themselves to corrupt pleasures such as gaming, drinking, and whoring. R.W. Dent quotes an early modern source: ‘To dig anothers garden’ meant ‘to Cuckold one, to do his work and drudgery, as they say for him’ (L57). Shakespeare’s Proverbial Language: An Index (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981). John Gerard, The Herball, or Generall Historie of Plantes (London, 1597), 2.280. Partridge, Shakespeare’s Bawdy, 145. In The Famous Victories of Henry the Fifth, an important source play for both parts of Henry IV, the Prince’s boon companions, called Ned, Tom, and Oldcastle, are thrice referred to as knights; thus Shakespeare’s choice of the name Ned Poins for Hal’s companion may allude to the character in that play. See Stubbes, ‘Of Costly Shirtes in England,’ in The Anatomie of Abuses, ed. Margaret Jane Kidnie (Tempe: Renaissance English Text Society, 2002), 94–6. See Partridge, Shakespeare’s Bawdy, 27–8, 71; also Williams, A Glossary of Shakespeare’s Sexual Language, 34–5. Howard and Rackin, Engendering a Nation, 176.

9 Extremes of Passion stanley wells

I take my title from the passage towards the end of King Lear in which the Earl of Gloucester’s elder son, Edgar, tells how his father, blinded and outcast, died. ‘List a brief tale,’ he says, and continues The bloody proclamation to escape That followed me so near – O, our lives’ sweetness, That we the pain of death would hourly die Rather than die at once! – taught me to shift Into a madman’s rags, t’assume a semblance That very dogs disdained; and in this habit Met I my father with his bleeding rings, Their precious stones new-lost; became his guide, Led him, begged for him, saved him from despair; Never – O fault! – revealed myself unto him Until some half hour past, when I was armed. Not sure, though hoping, of this good success, I asked his blessing, and from first to last Told him our pilgrimage; but his flawed heart – Alack, too weak the conflict to support – ’Twixt two extremes of passion, joy and grief, Burst smilingly. (The Tragedy of King Lear, 5.3.173–91)

This is one of those recapitulatory passages not uncommon in the final stretches of Shakespeare’s plays – a conspicuous example is the Friar’s long speech in the last scene of Romeo and Juliet (5.3.228–68) – which provide for the onstage characters information that is already known to the audience, and which for that reason are often abbreviated or even omitted in performance. So here Edgar describes in brief the journey we

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have seen him take through the play – how, disguised as Tom o’ Bedlam, he met his newly blinded father, ‘became his guide, / Led him, begged for him, saved him from despair,’ until at last he revealed his true identity ‘and from first to last / Told him our pilgrimage’; but it was too late. Gloucester’s ‘flawed heart – / Alack, too weak the conflict to support – / ’Twixt two extremes of passion, joy and grief, / Burst smilingly.’ ‘Extremes of passion.’ Traditionally, drama’s most fundamental requirement is neither more nor less than ‘two bare boards and a passion.’ Passion is of the essence of drama to the extent that drama portrays people in action, and all action is driven by feeling or emotion, of one kind or another. The specific task of the writer of dramatic dialogue, then, is so to imagine himself into the minds of the fictional characters as to cause them not merely to speak what the plot requires them to say, but to speak feelingly. To say this is not to assert that every speech in a play needs to create the impression that its speaker is in a high state of emotion at the moment of its delivery. That would be absurd. None of us can live intensely at every moment of our lives. Any competent dramatist knows that the emotional temperature of a play must rise and fall, that peaks of passion are rendered more credible if they are represented as growing and then lessening in intensity. But it does mean that even speeches which aim mainly to represent narrative or abstract thought need to seem impelled by some inner necessity on the part of the speaker. The emphasis in Edgar’s speech is on events that have already happened; to that extent it describes rather than enacts an emotional situation. But it is not simply an objective piece of story telling. It is punctuated with exclamations expressive of the speaker’s emotion, and the account of Edgar’s father’s – and his own – sufferings bespeaks pain and compassion. And though the speech may well arouse emotion in the spectator, its principal dramatic purpose is to do so in one of Edgar’s onstage hearers, his brother, Edmond. In this it succeeds. Edmond, who until now has seemed indifferent to other people’s sufferings, remarks ‘This speech of yours hath moved me, / And shall perchance do good’ (5.3.191–2). This speech, then, is relevant to my theme in at least three different ways: it describes a character (Gloucester) undergoing an emotional and physical crisis; it does so in a manner that in itself expresses emotion in the speaker (Edgar) deriving from his personal involvement with the feelings of the person whose emotion he describes; and it evokes an emotional – and also, incidentally, a moral and practical – response in the person to whom it is addressed. To this we may add a

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fourth function, though one that is more difficult both to predicate and to analyse: the speech (and the situation that precipitates it) are likely to provoke the emotional engagement of the offstage spectators – the audience. We cannot absolutely say that they do so because drama – like all art – depends for its emotional effect upon a sympathetic and imaginative response from an understanding recipient. Readers and spectators of King Lear inevitably bring to their experience a set of culturally and educationally determined responses which cannot be absolutely predicated and which vary greatly from time to time and from place to place. Its reception by pupils at a primary school, for example, would be very different from that of the inhabitants of an old people’s home. The performed dramatic text is peculiarly unpredictable because of its openness to a variety of interpretations on the part of its performers, and even, on a more basic level, to variations in the performers’ ability to convey to the audience their interpretation of their roles. Shakespeare himself illustrated his profound awareness of this aspect of his art in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, where a play regarded by its performers as a tragedy affects its viewers as a comedy, both because of its fictional author’s and its performers’ incompetence and its audience’s limitations of response. Over the centuries King Lear, in production after production, has demonstrated its power to provide audiences with a profound emotional as well as intellectual experience. On this basis I want to try to analyse some of the technical means by which Shakespeare represents and generates emotion in this play. I shall concentrate on the figure of Lear himself – the role which, described by Laurence Kitchin in his review of Paul Scofield’s historic 1962 performance, directed by Peter Brook, as ‘the most exacting role in English drama,’1 has more or less defeated some great actors, such as Edmund Kean, Henry Irving, Charles Laughton, and Laurence Olivier, but has provided others, such as David Garrick, Donald Wolfit, John Gielgud, Paul Scofield, and Ian McKellen, with one of their greatest triumphs. The opening scene of King Lear is especially relevant to my theme because in it the King places his daughters in exactly the situation of the dramatist: he requires them to express emotion irrespective of whether they feel it, just as Shakespeare himself, projecting his own imagination into the minds of fictitious people, has to write words for them to speak which appear to the audience to be expressive of the emotions the characters can be expected to feel. But what is peculiarly challenging about this scene is that during the course of it the dramatist has to write

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speeches which not merely cover a wide emotional range but are also expressive, some of emotional truth, others of emotional falsity. Goneril and Regan both make formal speeches declaring love for their father which he accepts at face value but which, by a sleight of the dramatist’s art, convey to the audience an impression of insincerity. Shakespeare achieves this partly by writing in a self-conscious, hyperbolical style, creating set speeches that give the impression of having been thought out in advance and that are delivered as onstage performances – as may be emphasized by the manner of their speaking and even by formality of staging – and also by directing the audience’s attention to their falsity through Cordelia’s asides – ‘I am sure my love’s / More ponderous than my tongue’ (1.1.77–8) – and, later, by her criticism, both implicit and explicit, of her sisters’ ‘glib and oily art’ (1.2.224). But during the course of the scene Shakespeare also has to write, especially for Lear himself, speeches that permit the actor to create the impression of a profound intensity of totally sincere, indeed utterly involuntary, emotion provoked initially by his youngest daughter’s emotional inarticulacy. The scene as a whole is an object lesson in the art of dramatic construction, witnessed by the deliberately low-key but colloquially plausible opening dialogue among Gloucester, Kent, and Edmond, which by stylistic contrast heightens the impressive but at first ritualistic formality of the King’s entrance and subsequent love test, into which the intrusion of true emotion lights a fuse which smoulders with ever-increasing intensity until it explodes into the ferocity of the speeches in which Lear banishes first Cordelia, then Kent. Shakespeare helps the actor by preparing the ground for Lear’s first passionate utterance, creating suspense – how, we ask ourselves, is the king going to react to Cordelia’s apparent intransigence? – and allowing the actor to give a sense at first of incredulity – ‘How, how, Cordelia? mend your speech a little / Lest you may mar your fortunes’ (1.1.94–5) – words which could be threatening, but which Olivier, in his Granada Television version (1983) spoke with teasing indulgence, as if hoping to believe that Cordelia could not possibly mean what she said – then of mounting anger held under restraint with increasing difficulty until Lear embarks upon his solemn speech of banishment. I say ‘embarks’ upon it because this speech, like those of Goneril and Regan, also has something of the appearance of a set piece. Lear comes across here as a figure of great authority, because his passion, though palpable, is held under firm linguistic control. His sentence of banishment, prefaced by a solemn oath, is couched in an eight-line verse paragraph which, though unrhymed, resembles the octave of a sonnet; each

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measured line adds weight to the force of his utterance so that when the banishment comes, it has all the power of a judicial sentence: Let it be so. Thy truth then be thy dower; For by the sacred radiance of the sun, The mysteries of Hecate and the night, By all the operation of the orbs From whom we do exist and cease to be, Here I disclaim all my paternal care, Propinquity, and property of blood, And as a stranger to my heart and me Hold thee from this for ever.

(1.1.108–26)

This is formal eloquence, reinforced by appeals to the supernatural, by internal rhyme, rhythmic regularity, and alliteration, and the unmistakable strength of feeling underlying it is made the more apparent by Lear’s admission of personal emotion in response to Kent’s protest, when the king and father admits, ‘I loved her most, and thought to set my rest / On her kind nursery.’ But anger still prevails, as he bursts out with ‘Hence, and avoid my sight!,’ and anger is the keynote of Lear’s utterances for the rest of the scene, erupting into physical violence as he threatens to strike Kent, and climaxing again in impassioned and formal eloquence in his sentence of banishment on Kent. The first scene establishes Lear as the play’s emotional centre. His dominant emotion here is anger, and anger is to be a dominant passion in Lear throughout the play – anger directed against people, against the elements, and against the gods. Anger is an outward expression of inner passion implying a degree of confidence in the validity of the speaker’s own judgment. It is not an emotion that in itself easily draws sympathy from an audience. But in the underlying cause of Lear’s anger with Cordelia and Kent we have been given a hint of the root meaning of the word ‘passion’ – suffering. Lear’s anger is sparked by disappointment – ‘I loved her most’ – and as the play progresses we are made increasingly aware of the inwardness of suffering that impels and, for the audience, palliates his fury, driving him to question not only his own behaviour but also the bases of his own, and humanity’s, existence, and tempering his anger with humility. No less importantly, the opening scene establishes a set of dramatic, theatrical, and linguistic conventions for the play and for its central character. The controlled, passionate, formal eloquence of the speeches

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in which Lear banishes Cordelia and Kent will recur in, for example, Lear’s devastating curse on Goneril and in his misplaced expressions of confidence in Regan’s kindness. But during the course of the play this eloquence will also take on the function of a stylistic norm against which later utterances will be measured. These speeches, we might almost say, show Lear as his own scriptwriter. In them, Shakespeare’s writing comes closest to a style he might have adopted for non-dramatic verse. In the passage I have quoted, for example, the verse flows uninterruptedly from line to line, there are no self-interruptions, the tone is self-consciously rhetorical, and Lear’s curse has a quality of premeditated formality, almost as if he were reading from a script. But during the course of the play Shakespeare varies this style in ways that increasingly create an impression of Lear as a man with an interior life, deepening our sense of him as a human being capable of inwardness of feeling, and in the process enabling the actor to work potently upon the audience’s feelings. I shall not attempt to chart Lear’s journey in full. But I want to suggest that it is possible to identify at least four additional ways in which Shakespeare causes Lear to speak feelingly, ways which I shall label, however clumsily, stylistic disjunction, stylistic disruption, stylistic dissociation, and stylistic submission, and I shall try to analyse examples of each method in the order in which they occur in the play. The technique that I describe as stylistic disjunction is apparent at its most effective in the first scene in which we see Lear alone with his Fool. It follows on the high passion of Lear’s anger with Goneril, and although the first printing of the play marks no division into acts or scenes, it is hard not to feel that Shakespeare had five-act form in mind as he wrote a consciously low-key episode to round off the play’s turbulent first movement. Lear had left the stage in fury, threatening Goneril that ‘Thou shalt find / That I’ll resume the shape which thou dost think / I have cast off for ever’ (1.4.288–9). He returns to give instructions to a gentleman and to Kent, who soon depart; alone with his Fool he no longer needs to put on a public front, and his extrovert passion gives way to a sense of exhaustion in a passage that is almost entirely meditative and reflective. As in the previous scene, the Fool tells riddles that have double meanings, nominally entertaining the King but offering him illumination into his plight under the cover of wit. But not merely, as earlier, can the King not profit from what the Fool says, he scarcely seems even to hear it, so obsessed is he with his sense of his grievances. Fool. Thou canst tell why one’s nose stands i’ th’ middle on ’s face?

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Lear. No. Fool. Why, to keep one’s eyes of either side ’s nose, that what a man cannot smell out, a may spy into. Lear. I did her wrong. Fool. Canst tell how an oyster makes his shell? Lear. No. Fool. Nor I neither; but I can tell why a snail has a house. Lear. Why? Fool. Why, to put’s head in, not to give it away to his daughters and leave his horns without a case. Lear. I will forget my nature. So kind a father! (1.5.20–32)

In the speeches of banishment and wrath that we have already heard from Lear his feelings were fully articulated in language, so that much of the actor’s work was done for him. Here, however, the emotion exists between rather than in the lines, and silences are as expressive as speech. This is fully dramatic writing, semi-naturalistic, mainly in prose, not verse. Departing from the standard conventions of poetic drama, Shakespeare creates a dialogue of non-communication curiously anticipative of the methods of Beckett or Pinter in its approach to psychological realism, a dialogue as concerned with failure of communication as with the direct expression of meaning or emotion. This episode’s emotional impact derives in part from the Fool’s failure to engage and hold his master’s attention because of Lear’s obsessive preoccupation with what has been happening – his feelings of resentment towards Goneril and Regan combined with a dawning sense of the injustice with which he has treated Cordelia. These feelings, repressed until now, rise up through his subconscious mind, demanding expression and breaking the bounds of conscious control so that he cannot listen to the Fool. It is, as he realizes, a state of mind likely to lead to mental disintegration – and the prayer on which he departs – ‘let me not be mad, not mad, sweet heaven!’ – is a poignant moment of selfrecognition. For an example of what I have called stylistic disruption I turn to the climax of the wonderfully demanding and long-sustained scene in which Lear expresses his intention of making his home with Regan. There has been much anger in the scene. Lear has cursed Goneril afresh, this time in her absence: You nimble lightnings, dart your blinding flames

Extremes of Passion Into her scornful eyes. Infect her beauty, You fen-sucked fogs drawn by the pow’rful sun To fall and blister.

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(2.2.338–41)

This is powerful, literary rhetoric. When Goneril enters and Regan asks Lear to resume his stay with her, Lear reacts with the same kind of sustained eloquence that we had heard in the opening scene: Return to her, and fifty men dismissed? No, rather I abjure all roofs, and choose To be a comrade with the wolf and owl, To wage against the enmity o’th’ air Necessity’s sharp pinch.

(2.2.380–4)

Lear is still the extrovert, fully in command. Shakespeare prepares for his climactic speech with great skill, modulating into it as an opera composer might modulate from a recitative into an aria. Both Goneril and Regan press their advantage home. ‘I’ll go with thee,’ says Lear to Goneril: Thy fifty yet doth double five-and-twenty, And thou art twice her love.

(2.2.433–5)

‘Hear me, my lord,’ replies Goneril, What need you five-and-twenty, ten, or five, To follow in a house where twice so many Have a command to tend you?

And Regan rubs the point home with ‘What need one?’ The scene might seem to be set for another sustained piece of rhetorical fury from Lear. He starts, however, not with an outburst of anger but with an attempt at self-controlled, abstract reasoning: O, reason not the need! Our basest beggars Are in the poorest thing superfluous.

This is a philosophical proposition: ‘if we’re talking about need, all we need in an absolute sense is the basic necessities of life.’ Lear then tries to ram the point home by varying it:

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Allow not nature more than nature needs, Man’s life is cheap as beast’s.

Then, still using a rational method, he applies the proposition to Regan: Thou art a lady. If only to go warm were gorgeous, Why, nature needs not what thou, gorgeous, wear’st, Which scarcely keeps thee warm.

But as he proceeds, the effort to sustain a purely intellectual argument becomes too much for him as pitiful consciousness of his own situation overwhelms him: But for true need –

and the syntax is disrupted as he breaks off into a prayer to the heavens on his own behalf: You heavens, give me that patience, patience I need.

As often, Lear has veered from addressing onstage characters to invoking the gods, and the shift serves as a measure of the emotional pressure that afflicts him. There is inwardness here, and the repetition of the word ‘patience,’ not required by the sense alone, adds weight to Lear’s prayer. He is examining himself, showing awareness of weakness. There is also self- pity: You see me here, you gods, a poor old man, As full of grief as age, wretched in both.

Does the audience accept this as a pointer to its own reactions to Lear, as if Shakespeare himself were describing him as ‘a poor old man,’ or does Lear’s self-pity repel? Reactions vary. As Lear contemplates the cause of his grief, a rise in emotional temperature is signalled by the increasing fluidity of rhythm as the units of sense break across the line endings: If it be you that stirs these daughters’ hearts Against their father, fool me not so much

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To bear it tamely.

Passion is supplanting reason, and he actually asks to feel anger, dignifying it with the quality of nobility: Touch me with noble anger, And let not women’s weapons, water-drops, Stain my man’s cheeks.

Whether the anger comes from the gods or he is lashing it out of himself, it emerges in invective and a threat which collapses into emptiness and anticlimax as the syntax is again disrupted by the pressure of emotion: No, you unnatural hags, I will have such revenges on you both That all the world shall – I will do such things – What they are, yet I know not; but they shall be The terrors of the earth.

Imagining his daughter’s reactions, Lear returns to the thought of the tears he had prayed to be spared: You think I’ll weep. No, I’ll not weep. I have full cause of weeping, But this my heart shall break into a hundred thousand flaws Or ere I’ll weep.

The frustration of his anger is enough to induce tears, and actors, encouraged perhaps by the fourfold repetition of ‘weep,’ have sometimes taken his determination not to weep as a cue for him to do so, as Ian McKellen did at Stratford-upon-Avon in 2008. On Shakespeare’s stage, it would seem, as often later, the emotional power of these lines was reinforced by sound effects: the Folio directs ‘Storm and tempest’ as Lear speaks them. His sanity is disintegrating, as he realizes, and the disrupted syntax may be a symptom of this, suggesting a failure of mental control. At the end of the dialogue with the Fool he had prayed not to go mad; now, as he leaves, he states, with another abrupt shift in direction, his conviction that he will: ‘O Fool, I shall go mad!’ Some actors, including Garrick, Kean, and Macready, have increased the climactic quality of Lear’s exit

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by bringing the act to an end at this point. Garrick, playing in a version of Tate’s adaptation, we are told, made both this and the earlier curse on Goneril ‘such enthusiastic scenes of human exertion, that they caused a kind of momentary petrefaction through the house, which he soon dissolved as universally into tears.’ And, bizarrely, ‘Even the unfeeling Regan and Goneril, forgetful of their characteristic cruelty, played through the whole of their parts with aching bosoms and streaming eyes.’2 Admittedly, the emotional effect of the performance was enhanced by the fact that this was Garrick’s farewell appearance in the role. To consider the lines alone of this speech is to ignore the fact that other characters, some sympathetic to Lear, some not, are present as he speaks. Shakespeare gives no indications as to how, or to what extent, they might be involved in the action. They say nothing either as Lear speaks or in reaction to his exit. But their silent reactions must do something to direct the audience’s response, and directors may create stage business to involve them. My third category, stylistic dissociation, takes both disjunction and disruption to an extreme. Shakespeare sometimes uses a moderate version of this kind of writing for comic effect, as in the stream-of-conscious reminiscences of the Nurse in Romeo and Juliet and the senile ramblings of Justice Shallow in Henry the Fourth, Part Two. He uses it, too, in more extreme form, to portray the near-madness of Lady Macbeth’s sleepwalking and the actual madness of Ophelia in Hamlet. In King Lear, two characters display the device, one deliberately, the other involuntarily. Edgar, improvising his own script as Tom o’ Bedlam, uses stylistic dissociation to create the impression of madness: Keep thy foot out of brothels, thy hand out of plackets, thy pen from lenders’ books, and defy the foul fiend. Still through the hawthorn blows the cold wind, says suum, mun, nonny. Dauphin, my boy! Boy, cessez; let him trot by. (3.4.90–4)

Edgar’s artifice is apparent to the audience partly because he has declared his intention of adopting a false persona, and also because of his shifts from one identity to another. But with Lear, when what he had most feared and anticipated comes upon him, as with Ophelia, the artifice belongs to the dramatist, not the character. Dissociation of speech suggests not feigned but true madness, a failure of the mind resulting in a breakdown of linguistic control. This is writing in which speech seems involuntary rather than willed, in which any eloquence is accidental. It

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is writing in which emotional effect depends largely on situation and, at least in tragedy, on the contrast between our previous experience of the character portrayed and the way the character speaks and behaves now. The most conspicuous use of this technique comes in Lear’s Dover Cliff dialogue with the blind Gloucester. We have not seen Lear since his descent into madness in the hovel scene, at the end of which he has fallen into an exhausted sleep, to be carried by Kent to a litter which will take him to Dover. Now he enters, ‘crowned with weeds and flowers,’ a parody of royalty, declaring ‘they cannot touch me for crying. I am the King himself’ (4.5.83–4). It is a pitiful sight, but also an absurd one. Absurdity and incongruity are hallmarks of the dissociated style, which is why it can be comic in effect. Shakespeare is treading a knife-edge between the comic and the tragic, and the actor has difficult decisions to make as to how far he can allow – or try to forestall – a comic reaction. Here – as in Ophelia’s mad scenes in Hamlet – the spectator’s reactions are guided towards the pitiful by (in this case) Edgar, the onstage commentator who, as soon as Lear has spoken, says ‘O thou side-piercing sight!’ (4.5.85) , and, at a later point, ‘I would not take this from report; / It is, and my heart breaks at it’ (4.5.200–1); so also, after Lear’s exit, running, a gentleman comments ‘A sight most pitiful in the meanest wretch, / Past speaking of in a king.’ The emotional impact of the scene gains in intensity, too, from the presence of the recently, and horrifically, blinded Gloucester and of Gloucester’s disguised and unrecognized son, Edgar, who form a frame of unmitigated seriousness for the potential comedy of Lear’s mad utterances. Lear does most of the talking, and at times his speeches in themselves veer strongly towards the comic, in for instance the incongruity of his fantasy: ‘Look, look, a mouse! Peace, peace, this piece of toasted cheese will do’t. There’s my gauntlet. I’ll prove it on a giant. Bring up the brown bills. O, well flown, bird, i’th’ clout, i’th’ clout! Whew! Give the word’ (4.5.88–92). This is almost complete nonsense, the despair of commentators trying to make sense of it as well, I suppose, as of actors trying to perform it. Shakespeare is not causing the character to express emotion here, though emotion may be induced in the audience as a pitiful response to the extremity of Lear’s plight. Yet Shakespeare does, in the midst of all the non sequiturs, cause Lear to say, inconsequentially and almost accidentally, some wonderfully poignant things suggestive of a vestigial sanity, a subconscious memory of suffering that has survived the damage done to his mind: ‘When the rain came to wet me once, and the wind to make me chatter; when the

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thunder would not peace at my bidding, there I found ’em, there I smelt ’em out. Go to, they are not men of their word. They told me I was everything; ’tis a lie, I am not ague-proof’ (4.5.100–5). And as the scene develops Lear fluctuates between verse and prose to express hallucinatory fantasies of frightening intensity, satirical, yet passionate too: 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, consumption. Fie, fie, fie; pah, pah! Give me an ounce of civet, good apothecary, sweeten my imagination. There’s money for thee. (4.5.123–8)

Again the reactions of onstage characters can help to guide the audience. The ever-loyal Gloucester speaks with unimpaired respect to his king: ‘O, let me kiss that hand!’ To which Lear replies ‘Let me wipe it first. It smells of mortality.’ Marvin Rosenberg calls this ‘A great, a dangerous line’ which ‘spectators screwed up to an unrelenting tension may want to laugh at … and will unless it is powerfully controlled.’3 Certainly in my experience the line has often raised laughter, I suppose because of the contrast between the formality of Gloucester’s request and the lack of dignity in Lear’s response – which strikes the audience almost as a rebuke – and in the action of wiping his hand, however it is carried out. Yet to me it seems terribly poignant as an earthy acknowledgment of human frailty. And again Shakespeare builds in an onstage reaction likely to quell laughter: ‘O ruined piece of nature!,’ says Gloucester. ‘This great world shall so wear out to naught.’ As often in this play, we shift instantly from microcosm to macrocosm, from that ‘piece of nature’ which is Lear to the ‘great world’ which also is vulnerable to decay. In the later part of the episode Gloucester increases in prominence as Lear reflects crazily but, as Edgar comments – in case we have failed to understand the underlying significance of Lear’s remarks – with ‘Reason in madness,’ on how ‘A man may see how this world goes with no eyes’ (4.5.146–7). Lear’s faulty internal vision clears enough for him to be able to say ‘I know thee well enough: thy name is Gloucester,’ and, in the midst of his fantasies, to enjoin Gloucester to cultivate the patience of which he himself had expressed the need – ‘Thou must be patient’ – and to speak searingly of man’s entrance into the world: ‘We came crying hither. / Thou know’st the first time that we smell the air / We waul and cry … When we are born, we cry that we are come / To this great stage

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of fools’ (44.5.174–9). Here, in the midst of madness, Lear has regained his eloquence. I labelled, rather clumsily, the last of my attempts to categorize Shakespeare’s methods of causing Lear to speak feelingly ‘stylistic submission.’ I use this to refer to passages where the speaker seems receptive rather than assertive, humble rather than angry. The episode in which this style is most in evidence is the scene of reunion (4.6) between Lear and Cordelia. Exhausted by madness, Lear has ‘slept long.’ Now, freshly arrayed, he is to be awoken by one of his retainers. First, though, Shakespeare gives Cordelia a speech of pity for Lear which, highly expressive of emotion in itself, is clearly likely not merely to provoke emotion in the spectators on her behalf but also to freshen their sympathy for the old king whom they had last seen, in his madness, teasing a gentleman by running away from him in a mock chase. Cordelia addresses him as he sleeps, stressing the familial relationship in her repetition of the word ‘father’: Had you not been their father, these white flakes Did challenge pity of them. Was this a face To be opposed against the warring winds? Mine enemy’s dog, though he had bit me, should have stood That night against my fire. And wast thou fain, poor father, To hovel thee with swine and rogues forlorn In short and musty straw? Alack, alack, ’Tis wonder that thy life and wits at once Had not concluded all!

(4.6. 27–34)

As often in Shakespeare, the speech is multi-functional, and one of its purposes is to serve as a convenient encapsulation of what has happened to Lear, and of who is responsible. In this it resembles Edgar’s speech about his own ‘pilgrimage’ which I quoted at the beginning of this essay. When Lear wakes, he thinks he has died. The forthcoming reunion and reconciliation between father and daughter links this most tragic of plays to the tradition of romantic comedy, to the reunion of the living with the supposedly dead – fathers and sons, fathers and daughters, husbands and wives, brothers and sisters – in plays from every stage of Shakespeare’s career, ranging from The Comedy of Errors to The Tempest. In all those plays one of the relatives is moved to find that the other appears to have returned from the dead. The extraordinary thing about King Lear is that the King believes this of himself – and regrets it:

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You do me wrong to take me out o’th’ grave. Thou art a soul in bliss, but I am bound Upon a wheel of fire, that mine own tears Do scald like molten lead.

(4.6.38–41)

This cosmic image linking earth, heaven, and hell, fusing the Christian tradition with classical mythology (in its recollection of Ixion) re-establishes Lear’s dignity in the audience’s eyes after the grotesquery of his preceding exit and prefaces an episode whose legendary power to evoke feeling in those who experience it derives both from the situation portrayed and the language in which it is written. It is extraordinarily simple language. Even the three and a half lines that I have quoted, vast in imaginative scope and elevated in poetic tone though they are, are plain in diction and contain only two words – ‘upon’ and ‘molten’ – of more than one syllable. This simplicity is sustained throughout the episode that follows. There is little overt expression of feeling. It is written in verse, but many of the phrases that have proved most moving in performance are so far from being consciously ‘poetic’ that we ourselves might use them in everyday conversation with no feeling that we were speaking poetry: phrases such as ‘I feel this pin prick,’ ‘You must not kneel,’ ‘Do not laugh at me,’ ‘And so I am, I am,’ ‘I know you do not love me,’ ‘You must bear with me.’ Though Lear declares that he has been ‘mightily abused,’ he does so not in anger but with recognition of how others might feel in the same situation. ‘I should ev’n die with pity / To see another thus.’ His utterances are questioning, even childlike, the very opposite of assertive; he acknowledges his folly and weakness: I am a very foolish, fond old man, Fourscore and upward; Not an hour more nor less; and to deal plainly, I fear I am not in my perfect mind.

He acknowledges, too, his ill treatment of Cordelia, and offers the ultimate reparation for it: If you have poison for me, I will drink it.

This is a broken man, and the contrast with the imperious king of the opening scene is in itself pitiful. Though Cordelia says little during the episode, she shares the audience’s attention with Lear, and her actions and reactions, as she kneels

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to her father, begs his blessing, weeps, and denies that she has had any cause to do Lear wrong, demand from the performer an eloquent if often silent depiction of a highly emotional state, and do much to direct the feelings of the audience. If Shakespeare, like Nahum Tate, whose adaptation, first performed in 1681, held the stage, with modifications, for 150 years, had wished to give the play a happy ending, he might have rounded it off after the reunion scene. But he did not. In the tragedy’s final scene Lear, roused out of his trancelike state by the death of Cordelia, regains some of his passionate eloquence. His cry as he enters carrying his daughter’s body is both a violent expression of emotion and a demand for an equally fierce expression of emotion from others: Howl, howl, howl, howl! O, you are men of stones. Had I your tongues and eyes, I’d use them so That heaven’s vault should crack.

(5.3. 232–4)

Again the shift from microcosm to macrocosm in the unspoken suggestion that ‘tongues and eyes’ will produce thunder and lightning powerful enough to crack the vault of heaven. As before, cosmic imagery gives way to simple statement: This feather stirs. If it be so, It is a chance which does redeem all sorrows That ever I have felt.

Anger returns, too: A plague upon you, murderers, traitors all.

But there is also courtesy, as Lear welcomes Kent and later asks, ‘Pray you, undo this button’ (5.3.285). The ‘extremes of passion’ that Gloucester had experienced at his death were ‘grief and joy.’ There is abundance of grief in Lear’s dying moments: Why should a dog, a horse, a rat have life And thou no breath at all?

Whether there is also joy is much debated. Shortly after carrying Cordelia on stage, Lear had thought she might yet live. Even after declaring

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‘she’s gone for ever,’ he speaks to her as if she were alive: ‘Ha? / What is’t thou sayst?’ In his last speech he mourns ‘Thou’lt come no more,’ but his final words (present only in the Folio) are: Do you see this? Look on her. Look, her lips. Look there, look there.

(5.3.286–7)

It has been argued that Lear’s heart, like Gloucester’s, bursts smilingly, also torn between two extremes of passion: grief at the knowledge that Cordelia is dead and joy in a final, illusory belief that she is after all alive. Yet not all actors even address these words to the body of Cordelia. When Adrian Noble asked me to write a program note for his production with Robert Stephens as Lear, I wrote initially that Lear addresses the words ‘Look there, look there’ to Cordelia’s lips, but I was asked to change my script because Lear at this point was to have ‘a kind of vision.’ So he did, gesturing away from the body into the heavens, as if waving farewell to her spirit. And of course there is no way of determining precisely what Lear is supposed to be feeling. He is not a real person. All we know of him and his feelings is the words that Shakespeare gave him to speak, and these words are capable of divergent interpretations by both critics and actors. What is clear is that throughout the scene Lear’s overriding emotion, that which provokes his grief and any joy that he may feel, is love for Cordelia. At the start of the play, when he had demanded expression of her love, she could not give it. Now the same is true, but for a different reason. But Lear himself can, and does, express his love for his daughter, and as a result he dies not as a king but as a fully realized human being, one who can speak what he feels, not simply what he ought to say. This is the positive emotion which, for an audience, may lighten the darkness of this deeply tragic ending to a play in which Shakespeare displays a unique capacity to portray and evoke feeling. Notes 1 Reprinted in Shakespeare in the Theatre: An Anthology of Criticism, ed. Stanley Wells (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1997), 267–9; quoted from 267. 2 Henry Bate, quoted in ibid., 29. 3 Marvin Rosenberg, The Masks of King Lear (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1972), 274.

10 Shakespeare and the Indifference of Nature alexander leggatt

The opening lines of Robert Henryson’s The Testament of Cresseid declare a simple, familiar principle: ‘Ane doolie sessoun to ane cairfull dyte / Shuld correspond, and be equivalent.’1 A doleful season suits a woeful tale: the winter setting the poem goes on to establish fits the tragic story of Cresseid. But nature and human feeling do not always correspond. In Paradise Lost, when Adam eats the fruit, Sky low’r’d, and muttering Thunder, some sad drops Wept at completing of the mortal Sin Original.

(9.1002–4)2

This is what we expect. But on the morning of their expulsion from Eden Eve notes that the Morn, All unconcern’d with our unrest, begins Her rosy progress smiling.

(11.173–5)

For the most part nature in Paradise Lost reflects the Fall with its own disorder; but here for a moment we glimpse a nature that goes its own way, indifferent to the human drama unfolding within it. Time and again, Shakespeare follows the first method. Lear loses his kingdom and his sanity, and a storm breaks out. A sunless dawn marks the ending of Romeo and Juliet. The imminent fall of Richard II is preceded by signs in nature: ‘The bay trees in our country are all withered, / And meteors fright the fixèd stars of heaven’ (2.4.8–9). A violent tempest precedes the murder of Julius Caesar; unnatural darkness follows the

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murder of Duncan. And so on. So closely is nature bound with humanity that different characters seem to carry different weather systems with them. On the eve of the battle of Bosworth Richmond is cheered by the sunset: The weary sun hath made a golden set, And by the bright track of his fiery car Gives token of a goodly day tomorrow.

(5.4.1–3)

But no goodly day dawns for Richard: ‘The sun will not be seen today. / The sky doth frown and lour upon our army’ (5.6.12–13). He goes on to insist that the omen must apply equally to Richmond, ‘For the selfsame heaven / That frowns on me looks sadly upon him’ (5.6.16–17). But there is no mention of unnatural darkness in Richmond’s camp; the sunless dawn is Richard’s alone. Nature also has a sense of irony, putting itself deliberately at odds with the human drama. In Titus Andronicus Titus gives the weather report for the morning of the emperor’s hunt: ‘The hunt is up, the morn is bright and grey, / The fields are fragrant and the woods are green’ (2.2.1–2). In those woods Lavinia will be raped and mutilated, Bassianus murdered, and two of Titus’s sons, falsely accused of the murder, dragged away to execution. The irony is as deliberate as the dark skies and thunderstorms that accompany human disaster elsewhere. A similar irony affects Romeo and Juliet on the morning of their parting, and Romeo is consciously aware of it: Look, love, what envious streaks Do lace the severing clouds in yonder east. Night’s candles are burnt out, and jocund day Stands tiptoe on the misty mountain tops.

(3.5.7–10)

This is not quite Eve’s indifferent dawn, ‘unconcern’d with our unrest.’ In the words ‘envious’ and ‘severing,’ dawn seems to be deliberately parting them, and ‘jocund’ is a cruel mockery. The early scenes of Macbeth are enveloped in darkness; towards the end daylight returns, triggering Macbeth’s complaint, ‘I ’gin to be aweary of the sun’ (5.4.47). While Richard at Bosworth complained of darkness, for Macbeth as for Romeo and Juliet it is daylight that is cruel. The sheer fact of daylight means that Macbeth has lost the control over nature that he seemed to have earlier. Preparing for the murder of Banquo he calls for night, and it seems to come at his command:

Shakespeare and the Indifference of Nature Come, seeling night, Scarf up the tender eye of pitiful day, And with thy bloody and invisible hand Cancel and tear to pieces that great bond Which keeps me pale. Light thickens, and the crow Makes wing to th’ rooky wood.

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(3.2.47–52)

Nature will eventually seem to turn against Macbeth; but in this moment it appears to cooperate with him. Other characters try to coerce nature, at the cost of making it work against itself. Lear does this when he calls on nature to make Goneril barren: ‘Suspend thy purpose if thou didst intend / To make this creature fruitful’ (1.4.255–6). Timon calls on the sun to work against its own normal benevolence: O blessèd breeding sun, draw from the earth Rotten humidity; below thy sister’s orb Infect the air.

(4.3.1–3)

His later invocation, ‘Thou sun that comforts, burn!’ (5.2.16), puts the same effect in compressed form. The presumably natural dawn that greets Richmond, and the unnatural darkness that greets Richard, are effects over which the characters have no conscious control. But elsewhere characters describe the natural setting in ways that suit their own purposes, and the setting can change as the purposes change. In Titus Andronicus Tamora describes the wood outside Rome in one way when she is persuading Aaron to make love to her – The birds chant melody on every bush, The snake lies rollèd in the cheerful sun, The green leaves quiver with the cooling wind And make a chequered shadow on the ground.

(2.3.12–15)

– and in a very different way when she tells her sons how Lavinia and Bassianus have threatened her: These two have ’ticed me hither to this place. A barren detested vale you see it is; The trees, though summer, yet forlorn and lean, Overcome with moss and baleful mistletoe. Here never shines the sun, here nothing breeds Unless the nightly owl or fatal raven.

(2.3.92–7)

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On a stage without scenery Tamora can have it both ways. And so can the audience, choosing to imagine the atrocities that follow as taking place in an appropriately grim setting or an ironically beautiful one. But our awareness that Tamora is describing the settings she needs, and that these settings are contradictory, alerts us to the element of contrivance and opens the possibility that the actual setting answers to neither description: it is simply itself, neither a place of pleasure nor a place of horror, but neutral. The difficulty of course is that we never see that setting. Watching a bare stage we see only what Tamora describes, and if we choose to disbelieve her description we have nothing to put in its place. In The Taming of the Shrew, however, when Petruccio insists that that thing up there is the moon if he says it’s the moon or the sun if he says it’s the sun, we can be guided not just by Katherine’s initial insistence that it’s the sun (between these two, we know whom to believe) but by a theatrical fact as inescapable as the bare stage. No matter what Petruccio says, in an afternoon performance in a roofless theatre it’s the sun. When Glendower in the face of Hotspur’s scepticism recounts the legends of his birth, we have a choice between a nature that responds to human events – the nature that generates the omens of Julius Caesar and Macbeth and the storm in King Lear – and a nature that couldn’t care less. According to Glendower, At my nativity The front of heaven was full of fiery shapes, Of burning cressets; and at my birth The frame and huge foundation of the earth Shaked like a coward.

According to Hotspur, Why, so it would have done At the same season if your mother’s cat Had but kittened, though yourself had never been born.

(3.1.12–18)

He goes on to describe earthquakes not as a response to human events, but as a sign that the earth is having an attack of indigestion. Earthquakes happen not because some great man is born, or dies; they just happen. There are contrasting passages in As You Like It and Timon of Athens that show Shakespeare’s growing openness to the idea of the indifference of nature.3 Feeling the hostility of winter in Arden, Duke Senior

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interprets it as having a conscious purpose, a role in his education. He goes so far as to imagine nature speaking to him: Here feel we not the penalty of Adam, The seasons’ difference, as the icy fang And churlish chiding of the winter’s wind, Which when it bites and blows upon my body Even till I shrink with cold, I smile, and say ‘This is no flattery. These are counsellors That feelingly persuade me what I am.’ … And this our life, exempt from public haunt, Finds tongues in trees, books in the running brooks, Sermons in stones, and good in everything.

(2.1.5–17)

Like Tamora he imagines the nature he wants to imagine: even as he talks of it as rebuking him, he is coercing it to serve his purpose, helping him accept his exile. Apemantus sees Timon’s exile in similar terms, a confrontation with inhospitable nature. But he sees nature not as speaking to Timon but as ignoring him: What, think’st That the bleak air, thy boisterous chamberlain, Will put thy shirt on warm? Will these mossed trees That have outlived the eagle page thy heels And skip when thou point’st out? Will the cold brook, Candied with ice, caudle thy morning taste To cure thy o’ernight’s surfeit?

(4.3.222–8)

Older than we are, and colder, nature by this account does nothing for us, makes no response when we give it orders, and has nothing to say to us. There are no books in the running brooks, just ice-cold water. Timon of Athens, if it is not itself a late play (its date is notoriously uncertain) anticipates an experiment that takes place in the three late plays in which nature figures most prominently: Pericles, The Winter’s Tale, and The Tempest. That experiment is an interplay between a view of nature as subject to human interpretation and responsive to human affairs, and a view of nature as simply itself, resisting interpretation. Timon, like Pericles and The Tempest, is haunted by the sea. As Timon’s household breaks up and the play moves towards the wilderness, one of his servants declares,

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Leaked is our barque, And we, poor mates, stand on the dying deck Hearing the surges’ threat. We must all part Into this sea of air.

(4.2.19–22)

Timon’s bankruptcy is a shipwreck, anticipating the literal shipwrecks of later plays that force characters to begin life anew; and with it the servants, their old life gone, move into a new life as open and featureless as the sea. When Timon (we ask not how) buries himself by the seashore in a grave that will be washed daily by the tide, Alcibiades is ready with an interpretation: rich conceit Taught thee to make vast Neptune weep for aye On thy low grave, on faults forgiven.

(5.5.82–4)

He attributes this benevolent reading of Timon’s burial to Timon himself; and elsewhere Timon’s own voice humanizes nature – though not so benevolently – in his meditation on cosmic thievery: The sun’s a thief, and with his great attraction Robs the vast sea. The moon’s an arrant thief, And her pale fire she snatches from the sun.

(4.3.438–40)

When he plans his burial he hints at an interpretation very different from the one Alcibiades will give: Then, Timon, presently prepare thy grave. Lie where the light foam of the sea may beat Thy gravestone daily. Make thine epitaph, That death in me at others’ lives may laugh.

(4.3.380–3)

Is it just a coincidence that sea foam is the final image Henri Bergson uses in his classic essay on laughter? Laughter, he writes, is ‘a froth with a saline base. Like froth, it sparkles. It is gaiety itself. But the philosopher who gathers a handful to taste may find that the substance is scanty, and the aftertaste bitter.’4 There is just the hint of a connection between the light foam of the sea and Timon’s bitter laughter at humanity. But in Timon’s final speech, even that hint is withdrawn:

Shakespeare and the Indifference of Nature Come not to me again, but say to Athens, Timon hath made his everlasting mansion Upon the beachèd verge of the salt flood, Who once a day with his embossèd froth The turbulent surge shall cover.

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(5.2.99–103)

Impersonal, with no purpose and no emotion, the sea will simply do what the sea does. If it figures anything, it figures Timon’s final detachment from humanity. In his last act of image-making, he is still using nature; but he is using it not for its benevolence or its cruelty but for its indifference. The early (and probably non-Shakespearean) scenes of Pericles include an engaging but conventional use of the sea as an allegory of human society. The fishermen do not just catch fish, they imagine them living ‘as men do a-land – the great ones eat up the little ones’ (5.69– 70). Pericles, overhearing, comments, ‘How from the finny subject of the sea / These fishers tell th’infirmities of men’ (5.89–90). In the later scenes Shakespeare takes over, and the relation of nature to humanity becomes much less neat. Cerimon, the healer who restores Thaisa to life, works with the blest infusions That dwells in vegetives, in metals, stones, And so can speak of the disturbances That nature works, and of her cures.

(12.32–5)

But at the beginning of the scene he admits failure, telling a servant who comes to consult him, Your master will be dead ere you return. There’s nothing can be ministered in nature That can recover him.

(12.6–8)

He can use nature only up to a point; beyond that point nature has nothing to offer. This is the context for Thaisa’s return to life, making it anything but a foregone conclusion. The storm in which Marina is born and Thaisa apparently dies is one of Shakespeare’s most powerful images of humanity at odds with nature. Cradling his newborn daughter, Pericles wishes for her a life opposed to the violent circumstances of her birth:

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Now mild may be thy life! For a more blust’rous birth had never babe; Quiet and gentle thy conditions, for Thou art the rudeliest welcome to this world That e’er was prince’s child; happy what follows. Thou hadst as chiding a nativity As fire, air, water, earth, and heav’n can make To herald thee from th’womb.

(11.27–34)

Yet having placed her at odds with the violence of the sea he names her Marina, and in the turbulence of her later life the name seems a curse that counters the blessing Pericles gives here. She carries the storm within her: as a grown woman she recounts her nurse’s memories of it, but as she speaks she seems to be remembering it herself (15.103–15), and for her the storm has never ended: ‘This world to me is but a ceaseless storm / Whirring me from my friends’ (15.71–2). The storm ends only when, during Neptune’s festival at Mytilene, on a barge on a now-calm sea, she is reunited with her father. The storm figures the trouble of Marina’s life; she is linked with the sea through its antagonism. But in his farewell to Thaisa before he casts her overboard Pericles strikes a different note: A terrible childbed hast thou had, my dear, No light, no fire. Th’unfriendly elements Forgot thee utterly, nor have I time To give thee hallowed to thy grave, but straight Must cast thee, scarcely coffined, in the ooze, Where, for a monument upon thy bones And aye-remaining lamps, the belching whale And humming water must o’erwhelm thy corpse, Lying with simple shells.

(11.55–63)

The light and fire that could have comforted Thaisa have not turned against her; they have simply forgotten her. Like the indifferent nature Apemantus imagines in Timon’s woods, they say nothing and offer nothing. They are the uncaring nature that lets Cerimon’s patient die. And there will be no monument for her in the sea. The tide will cover Timon’s grave once a day, in a predictable rhythm; the water will simply overwhelm Thaisa. The creatures of the sea are not allegorized as the fishermen allegorize them. They simply are what they are, and the con-

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trast of the whale and the shells gives them a scale beyond the human: they are too large, and too small, to have any relationship with us. There is no music in the sea, simply a steady hum, as meaningless as the sound from the caves in A Passage to India. It is worth pausing here to see what Shakespeare is doing, first of all in contrast to what Milton does with the death by drowning of Edward King in Lycidas. Early in the poem the sea has something of the impersonality, and nature something of the uselessness, that we see in Pericles: ‘Where were ye Nymphs when the remorseless deep / Clos’d o’er the head of your lov’d Lycidas?’ (50–1). But the poem moves from the inhumanity of the underwater world to familiar geographical settings (Land’s End mythologized as the giant Bellerus, then St Michael’s Mount) and finally to the myth of Palaemon, whose body was brought ashore by a dolphin: Where thou perhaps under the whelming tide Visit’st the bottom of the monstrous world; Or whether thou to our moist vows denied, Sleep’st by the fable of Bellerus old, Where the great vision of the guarded Mount Looks toward Namancos and Bayona’s hold; Look homeward Angel now, and melt with ruth: And, O ye Dolphins, waft the hapless youth.

(157–64)

The image of the dolphins carrying the body leads to the assertion that ‘Lycidas your sorrow is not dead’ (166) and to the vision of him in heaven with the saints. Thaisa is not dead either; but while Milton’s mourning speaker can humanize and mythologize nature, invoking its sympathy with his grief, its restorative power, and finally ‘the dear might of him that walk’d the waves’ (173), Pericles as he says farewell to his wife has no such consolation. He casts Thaisa into a sea in which there is no mythology, no hope of immortality, simply whales, shells, and water. For a closer analogy with Shakespeare we have to leap almost three centuries, to Anton Chekhov’s short story Gusev. Gusev is a sailor who dies on shipboard, and when at the end of the funeral his body is dropped into the sea we might expect the story to finish; he has passed beyond human knowledge. But the story goes on: ‘He went rapidly towards the bottom. Did he reach it? It was said to be three miles to the bottom. After sinking sixty or seventy feet, he began moving more and more slowly, swaying rhythmically, as though he were hesitating and, carried along by the current, moved more rapidly sideways than downwards.’ Sinking through

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the water, Gusev scatters a shoal of fish called harbour pilots, who then return and begin ‘zig-zagging round him in the water.’ He then encounters a shark, who at first swims around Gusev ‘with dignity and no show of interest, as though it did not notice him,’ then ‘nonchalantly’ tears at the sailcloth that enfolds the body, so that one of the weights falls out and drops to the sea floor. That is the last we know of Gusev; but the narrator, by attributing feelings to the harbour pilots (frightened, then curious) and the shark (uninterested, nonchalant), and by the sheer activity of the underwater scene, makes us realize by contrast just how dead Gusev is. He has no relation to the underwater world, any more than Thaisa does; and there are certainly no dolphins to waft the hapless youth. The story ends with a beautiful sunset, to which the narrator again attributes feelings: ‘Looking at this gorgeous, enchanted sky, at first the ocean scowls, but soon it, too, takes tender, joyous, passionate colours for which it is hard to find a name in human speech.’5 In other hands this beauty might be a consolation for Gusev’s death, a hope for immortality; but that is not how Chekhov works. The beauty is not just ironically opposed to the story of Gusev’s death; it is irrelevant to it. The narrator ends by stressing that he is trying, and failing, to describe a scene that lies beyond human language. With Pericles Shakespeare is entering the last phase of his work, and seemingly turning back to old-fashioned romance material; Ben Jonson would call Pericles a mouldy tale. But there is at least one speech in this old-fashioned play, with ‘ancient Gower’ singing for us ‘a song that old was sung’ (1.1–2), that looks forward in its separation of nature from humanity to one of the founding writers of modernism. The Winter’s Tale may seem to close up that separation. When in the midst of a storm Antigonus abandons Perdita on the seacoast of Bohemia, the Mariner comments, ‘The heavens with that we have in hand are angry, / And frown upon’s’ (3.3.5–6). We seem to be back to business as usual: nature is aware of the human drama and has something to say about it. When Mamillius declares, ‘A sad tale’s best for winter’ (2.1.27), we might expect the tragi-comic action of the play to go from winter in Leontes’ court to springtime in Bohemia, the way the songs in As You Like It, following the progress of the comedy, go from ‘Blow, blow, thou winter wind’ to ‘spring-time, the only pretty ring-time’ (2.7.175, 5.3.18). But As You Like It is an outdoor play. There is no weather in Leontes’ court, and Mamillius’s line is the only hint of a season. The first half of the play, dominated by Leontes’ obsession, takes place in an indoor, almost claustrophobic world. Autolycus’s first song, ‘When daffodils begin to

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peer’ (4.3.1), seems to move us outdoors and into spring. So, taken out of context, does Perdita’s evocation of daffodils, That come before the swallow dares, and take The winds of March with beauty; violets, dim, But sweeter than the lids of Juno’s eyes Or Cytherea’s breath; pale primroses, That die unmarried ere they can behold Bright Phoebus in his strength.

(4.4.118–24)

But the context is Perdita’s complaint that these, the flowers she most wants, reflecting her own youth and the youth of her friends and her lover, are just the flowers she lacks (4.4.127–9). She can invoke spring, but cannot create it. She describes the actual season as ‘middle summer’ (4.4.107), looking not back to spring but forward to winter: the year growing ancient, Not yet on summer’s death, nor on the birth Of trembling winter.

(4.4.79–81)

The fairest flowers of that season are hybrids, and she wants nothing to do with them (4.4.81–5). The eloquence with which she invokes the flowers of spring makes us think of that as the season of the Bohemia scenes; but in fact the season is what it is, not what Perdita wants it to be, and she knows it. Nature works on its own time, not ours. There is a more violent disparity between nature as we want it to be and nature as it is when Antigonus, ordered to abandon the infant Perdita in ‘some remote and desert place’ (2.3.176), invokes the benevolence of the animal world: Come on, poor babe, Some powerful spirit instruct the kites and ravens To be thy nurses. Wolves and bears, they say, Casting their savageness aside, have done Like offices of pity.

(2.3.185–9)

In the event Perdita is rescued not by forest creatures but by a pair of shepherds, and Antigonus himself is eaten by a bear, doing what bears do when they are hungry.

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In The Winter’s Tale the fertility of nature and its violence are both outside human control. The Tempest seems to move in the opposite direction. As the witches in Macbeth are able to command the winds (1.3.10–24), Prospero calls up a storm. Or does he? Miranda, protesting, watches a ship sink; it doesn’t sink. She watches the passengers drown; they turn up alive on the island, not even wet. Does Prospero command the elements, or does he simply create illusions? The wedding show he creates for Ferdinand and Miranda is a vision of nature in harmony, water nymphs dancing with harvesters, and its blessing on the lovers imagines a year without a winter: ‘Spring come to you at the farthest, / In the very end of harvest’ (4.1.114–15). As unreal as the court masques to which it is frequently compared, the show invokes not nature as it is but nature as we want it to be. Prospero admits as much: the actors are all Spirits, which by mine art I have from their confines called to enact My present fancies.

(4.1.120–2)

My present fancies: the show is a reflection of Prospero’s own imagination, its vision, in his own words, a ‘baseless fabric’ (4.1.151). Subjected to another one of Prospero’s illusions, a banquet that vanishes amid thunder and lightning, Alonso feels that the storm, like the storm in The Winter’s Tale or the winter weather of As You Like It, is speaking to him: Methought the billows spoke and told me of it, The winds did sing it to me, and the thunder, That deep and dreadful organ-pipe, pronounced The name of Prosper.

(3.3.96–9)

In fact he has heard not just Prospero’s name but Prospero’s voice speaking through Ariel, and the storm that seems to be speaking to him has no voice of its own; it is not even a real storm but a creation of Prospero’s art. In their smaller way, the shipwrecked courtiers create their own island as Prospero creates his own storm. Like the wood in Titus Andronicus, the island shifts its nature, this time as it is described by different speakers. For Gonzalo and Adrian the air is sweet, the grass is ‘lush and lusty,’ and ‘Here is everything advantageous to life.’ For Antonio and Sebastian the air is foul, the ground is tawny, and the island has everything ‘save means to live’ (2.1.49–60). Gonzalo imagines that if this were his island he could recreate the Golden Age, with no need of labour, no need even

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of society, because ‘nature should bring forth / Of it own kind all foison, all abundance’ (2.1.168–9). Caliban knows the island better. Nature brings forth nothing on its own; it has to be coerced: I with my long nails will dig thee pig-nuts, Show thee a jay’s nest, and instruct thee how To snare the nimble marmoset.

(2.2.167–9)

Prospero and the courtiers in their different ways re-create nature, through magic and through their own imaginations. Only Caliban deals with it on its own terms. Does the play offer other images of a nature that is not under human control? At the opening of 2.2 another storm breaks out, alarming Caliban and Trinculo. There is no indication that this, like the storm of 1.1, is Prospero’s creation. It may be; but that is more than we know, and the play’s silence on the matter, contrasted with its explicitness about the first storm, is suggestive. When Prospero speaks of surrendering his magic he begins by imagining what the spirits of the island do when they are not working for him: Ye elves of hills, brooks, standing lakes and groves, And ye that on the sands with printless foot Do chase the ebbing Neptune, and do fly him When he comes back; you demi-puppets that By moonshine do the green sour ringlets make Whereof the ewe not bites; and you whose pastime Is to make midnight mushrooms.

(5.1.33–9)

He imagines a world at play, contrasted with the work he has made the spirits do when he conjures storms, eclipses, and earthquakes (5.1.40–8). But play is a human concept, and we may wonder if we are seeing nature as it is without Prospero’s control, or if we are still seeing nature as he imagines it. Ariel, too, imagines himself at play once his work for Prospero is done: Where the bee sucks, there suck I: In a cowslip’s bell I lie; There I couch when owls do cry. On the bat’s back I do fly After summer merrily.

(5.1.88–92)

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He puts it in the present tense, but it is something that hasn’t happened yet, and that we will never see. For the rest of the play Prospero, still promising Ariel his freedom, continues to give him orders, and Ariel still retains the life-sized shape of the actor who plays him, the shape in which he couldn’t lie in a cowslip’s bell or fly on a bat’s back. Ariel may seem to be a spirit of free nature, but his desire for freedom is something we recognize as human. Like us he can long for it, imagine it, but never, so long as we can see him, achieve it. And when at the end of the play we can no longer see him, it is because we have replaced him. Prospero’s last command to Ariel, in the last speech of the play, is to provide ‘calm seas, auspicious gales’ (5.1.318) and then he can be free. But in the Epilogue Ariel’s assignment has become ours: ‘Gentle breath of yours my sails / Must fill’ (11–12). We are now under Prospero’s command, as we have been all through the play, seeing the visions he created for us. He has talked of surrendering his magic, burying his staff, drowning his book – in effect, surrendering to nature the power that once coerced it. But when we try to visualize free nature, we find we are looking at it through human eyes, since freedom is a human concept. And Prospero is still asking us to create in our imaginations the benevolent nature that suits his purpose. Can we imagine a nature that we can’t imagine? Evidently (even selfevidently) we can’t. But in one of Ariel’s other songs nature remakes humanity as humanity for most of the play remakes or re-imagines nature: Full fathom five thy father lies. Of his bones are coral made; Those are pearls that were his eyes; Nothing of him that doth fade But doth suffer a sea-change Into something rich and strange.

(1.2.400–5)

Another sea burial, and another encounter with the impersonality of the sea, its indifference to humanity. And another illusion: Alonso is alive, and none of this has happened. But what the song asks us to imagine is what it is like when nature turns the tables on us, remaking humanity in its own terms as we remake nature in ours; and the key word is ‘strange.’ When in King Lear Gloucester has his eyes put out the effect is straightforward horror, in purely human terms. When Alonso’s eyes become pearls the effect is of an unsettling encounter with something other, uncanny, inhuman. It is nature’s revenge on us for the way we turn

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it into poetry. We try to turn nature into something familiar; in Alonso’s transformation nature turns us into something strange. Notes 1 Robert Henryson, The Testament of Cresseid, ed. Bruce Dickins (London: Faber and Faber, repr. 1951). 2 All references to Milton are to John Milton, Complete Poems and Major Prose, ed. Merritt Y. Hughes (Indianapolis and New York: The Odyssey Press, 1957). 3 The source of this idea remains a matter of speculation. The editors of this volume have suggested two possibilities: Shakespeare’s life experience and his reading of Montaigne. It may even be that writing the Hotspur-Glendower debate planted the idea in his mind, and it grew from there. 4 Henri Bergson, ‘Laughter,’ in Comedy, ed. Wylie Sypher (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1955), 190. 5 Anton Chekhov, The Witch and Other Stories, trans. Constance Garnett, vol. 6 of The Tales of Chekhov (repr. New York: The Ecco Press, 1983), 164–5.

11 Pauline Cartography, Missionary Nationalism, and The Tempest randall martin

In what may be a defining exchange at the end of The Tempest, Caliban agrees to follow Prospero’s orders to ‘trim’ his cell. ‘Ill be wise hereafter / And seek for grace,’ Caliban adds, responding with unwonted cooperation to Prospero’s equally unwonted gestures of forgiveness (5.1.295–6).1 ‘Grace’ could signify a range of possible desires – mercy, kindness, material benefits. But the word’s religious overtones in contemporary plays such as Pericles and The Winter’s Tale point to ‘divine grace’ as the most obvious sense. In which case, Shakespeare’s Blackfriars Theatre audience would have understood Caliban’s pledge as a desire to be converted to the religion of Prospero’s deity, away from his native god Setebos. Many Jacobean spectators would have related this outcome to the theme of New World religious conversion which ran through publications of the Virginia Company then circulating in London. The Virginia Company was a joint-stock venture chartered by James I in 1606 to establish English colonies on the east coast of North America. Investors were touted with the prospect of finding riches, and religious conversion of Native Americans was a way of burnishing this ambition. But riches were not forthcoming, and within two years the Jamestown settlement seemed to be headed for the same disaster that had befallen Sir Walter Raleigh’s failed Roanoke colony (in what is now North Carolina) twenty years earlier. In 1609 a supply ship named the Sea Venture was dispatched to aid the beleaguered colonizers, but it was wrecked off Bermuda. Commentators have long recognized that reports of this latest misfortune informed Shakespeare’s writing of The Tempest in 1610–11, and Ariel’s reference to the ‘still-vexed Bermudas’ in particular (1.2.239).2 In the light of the play’s topical and fictional shipwrecks, Caliban’s possible pledge of conversion might have seemed to fulfil a Virginia Company fantasy.

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Since the nineteenth century, the implausibility of this scenario has come to dominate the play’s reception history. Any kind of spiritual rapprochement between Caliban and his master now seems unlikely when considered in the light of New World missionary conversion, whose many tragic effects included the erasure of indigenous spirituality. Postcolonial criticism has normalized this perspective in assuming that the presence of religion in the discourse of colonialism was simply windowdressing for territorial conquest and cultural genocide. While there is no denying religion’s mystifying complicity with imperialism, the postcolonial orthodoxy that now defines the play obscures a proportional sense of the original disputed power of the conversion fantasy. On the one hand it was able to persuade growing segments of the English public of the prophetic destiny of militant nationalism in its new colonialist guise.3 On the other hand there were plenty of sceptics about the Virginia Company’s motives in the early seventeenth century. And in practice policies of Christianization quickly generated ferocious resistance from indigenous cultures. In Jamestown this backlash led eventually to the Native massacre of a quarter of the English settlement in 1622. Pauline discourses provide a historical framework for illuminating early modern debates about the supposed merits or demerits of colonial conversion. In this essay I’d like to situate Caliban’s putative turn to grace within such a framework, initially by connecting it to Renaissance maps of biblical history and early modern geography’s construction of a new spatialized ideology of missionary conversion. My focus will be on one cartographic genre with particular relevance to early English colonialism and The Tempest: the Mediterranean setting of the first-century ‘peregrinations,’ or travels, of St Paul. Maps of this subject drew attention to two emblematically linked events in Paul’s life as recorded in the New Testament: spiritual conversion, and shipwreck and deliverance. The latter event occurred off Malta on Paul’s final sea journey to Rome, and is described in strikingly realistic detail in the New Testament Acts of the Apostles 27–8. Drawing on Renaissance maps of Paul’s journeys and some neglected biblical references in The Tempest, I shall broaden the basis of Frank Kermode’s virtually forgotten observation of more than fifty years ago that Paul’s shipwreck was a dramatic intertext for the play. I’ll then connect this Pauline association to contextually related debates about the potential convertibility of New World peoples and Shakespeare’s ambiguous representation of that possibility in Caliban. In these respects the play’s original horizons of reception are related to a broader cultural development: Paul’s shift in status during the six-

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teenth century from being a sacred author with stable unified authority to becoming a field of discourse open to textual (re)invention and political controversy. During this period Paul and his writings underwent a ‘big bang,’ acquiring what Michel Foucault, in his writings on discursivity, called a ‘generative grammar,’ or meta-discursive power, to proliferate transgressive and contradictory disciplines of knowledge.4 Early modern readers of Paul spawned opposing languages of Reformation and Counter-Reformation theology, as well as ideologically inflected debates about gender relations, peace and war, and religious conversion – to name just a few. Shakespeare recognized the theatrical potential of this protean discursivity and experimented with its distinctive voices over a range of plays including The Tempest, relocating Pauline language, values, and identities within fictional characters enmeshed in various ethical and emotional conflicts. These situations test characters’ motives and responses in imaginative collaboration with Shakespeare’s scripturally literate audiences, who were implicitly invited to evaluate them from their varied conceptual and experiential perspectives. This essay focuses on one such neo-Pauline discourse: the early modern ideology of missionary conversion reflected in Renaissance Bible maps. Printed maps of scriptural lands such as Palestine or the eastern Mediterranean functioned on at least two levels: (1) as accessible tools of geographic knowledge for vernacular Bible readers; and (2) as an emerging Pauline discourse in the Foucauldian sense mentioned above that reflected and produced intertextual and intervisual dialogues. In both ways, I shall argue, early modern cartography mediated imaginative connections between Paul and Prospero as would-be civilizers of pagan peoples. From a critical perspective, my paper joins the work of recent scholars who seek to rebalance dominant postcolonial readings of The Tempest. Postcolonial criticism has concentrated geopolitically on The Tempest’s relationships to the New World and later developments in Western imperialism to the detriment of historical complexities and debate. Jerry Brotton’s article ‘“This Tunis, sir, was Carthage”: Contesting Colonialism in The Tempest’ is representative of a search for complementary frames of cultural reference. Brotton redirects attention to the play’s North African and classical allusions, arguing that these create a ‘bifurcated’ play which negotiates Mediterranean and Atlantic contexts.5 For many Jacobean spectators a Mediterranean perspective would have included a biblical one. Either could have suggested an obvious homology between The Tempest’s story of shipwreck, survival, and contested forgiveness and conversion and St Paul’s archetypal career as a Christian convert, traveller

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around the eastern Mediterranean, and controversial proselytizer. When this Mediterranean perspective was aligned with The Tempest’s contemporary links to the Virginia Company, the play’s neo-Pauline associations of spiritual and social control were arguably reconstituted through the colonizing imaginations of English spectators. The resulting theatrical experience was less a bifurcation of Atlantic and Mediterranean perspectives and more an integrated layering of Old and New World spaces and epistemologies. The irreducible tension between syncretism on the one hand and historicity on the other in The Tempest’s multi-temporal contexts of conversion suggests that its dramatic fictions always exceeded the discursive boundaries of allegorical fantasy or mystifying propaganda. 1 Since the 1990s scholars have shown how developments in early modern map making gave English playwrights and spectators a new awareness of cultural otherness, with a corresponding imaginative power to shape national and racial identities. Maps of scriptural subjects in Protestant Bibles, however, as well as those categorized as ‘sacred geography’ in secular atlases, have been under-examined despite their wide dissemination and arguably transformative impact on literate and semi-literate readers.6 One possible reason for this obscurity was that John Gillies’s 1994 foundational study, Shakespeare and the Geography of Difference7 – a work to which my paper remains much indebted – put forward a classical epistemology in which Mediterranean properties were defined in relation to the exotic inversions of barbarian cultures. Biblical cartography does not fit this model. Its immediate objects – the Holy Land, for example, or eastern Mediterranean cities – were scriptural lands and histories long domesticated within European narrative and pictorial traditions. Their identities were not co-dependent on the threat of Otherness or the ethnogeographic unknown. Rather, the object of sixteenth-century sacred geography was a familiar and immanent world being rediscovered through new navigational and mercantile advances, and re-imagined by Reformation, Counter-Reformation, and national ideologies. Thus, beyond providing readers with historical knowledge of scriptural geography, early modern Bible maps were culturally productive by virtue of their paragraphic, or externally networked, social relationships. These gave readers an imaginative capacity to validate cultural projects such as Virginia Company colonization, fictionally represented by The Tempest’s encounters between island natives and Italian voyagers.8

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In England the first Bible map of Paul’s travels appeared in Miles Coverdale’s New Testament, printed by Reynolde Wolfe in 1549. It was reissued in the government-authorized republications of Henry VIII’s Great Bible (1539), and in the Bishops’ Bible (1568), read by Shakespeare and his audiences. We do not know who made Wolfe’s map, but its careful draughtsmanship improved on an earlier prototype, dating from the 1520s, by the humanist geographer and later Protestant convert, Jacob Ziegler (1470/1–1549).9 The second version of Paul’s map appeared in the Geneva Bible (1560), another translation Shakespeare used often.10 Again we do not know who drew this map, but its origins were French;11 and despite being more crudely made than Wolfe’s map, it too was based on Ziegler and included his cartographically advanced coordinates of latitude and longitude. The material and intellectual origins of both maps in the two Bibles most familiar to Shakespeare and his contemporaries thus lie in the cultural foment of continental humanism and Reformation theology, whose key doctrines were based on revisionist interpretations of Romans and other Pauline letters. One notable representative of this milieu was the humanist mathematician and map-maker Peter Apian (Petrus Apianus, 1495–1552). Like Jacob Ziegler, Apian attended the University of Ingolstadt, an early centre of Lutheranism, and he published a book on Paul’s journeys, unfortunately now lost. But his splendidly detailed map, Peregrinationem D. Pauli, & Typum vniuersialem (ca 1528), survives.12 It includes a woodcut of Paul’s road-to-Damascus conversion, and Erasmian texts describing his journeys.13 Apian’s work stands out for one other reason: as far as I know, it is the only map before the late seventeenth century that inscribes the routes of Paul’s land and sea journeys with dotted or continuous lines.14 Most prominent among these is the route of Paul’s final sea voyage from Jerusalem to Rome, narrated visually at the centre of the map. Off the southern coast of Crete the journey’s line thickens into a turbulent current labelled ‘S. Paulo.’ On it a ship, depicted in four increasingly desperate states, heads towards Malta. Unfortunately the island itself and Paul’s shipwreck are on sections of the map which have not survived. But the evidence of later maps derived from Apian’s indicates almost certainly that they were there originally. Apian’s early map thus established shipwreck and conversion as the main interpretive topoi of this cartographic genre.15 His most famous successor was the Flemish cartographer Abraham Ortelius, whose Parergon, or ‘additional ornament,’ consisted of a major gathering of maps of the classical and biblical worlds appended to editions of Theatrum

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Orbis Terrarum from 1579 onwards and later sold separately.16 Ortelius’s map of Paul’s journeys built on a long line of widely circulated predecessors. Besides Ziegler and Apian, Ortelius cited six other humanist geographers who had drawn maps of this subject.17 Collectively their work demonstrated that the boundaries between sacred geography and early modern maps and voyaging were imaginatively fluid and culturally integrating.18 The image in the upper-left corner of Ortelius’s map repeats Apian’s depiction of Paul’s conversion on the road to Damascus, and functions visually as one of the map’s two interpretive ‘legends.’19 The second legend, in the top right-hand corner, is an original image that is suggestive in relation to The Tempest (see figure 11.1). It is a composite illustration of Paul’s shipwreck, survival, and first encounter with the island’s ‘barbarians’ (as the Geneva Bible version of Acts 28 calls the native Maltese). The image shows a ship foundering on rocks and splitting up at the stern. Passengers are in distress, some going overboard, some clinging to wreckage. A man and a woman stagger onto the beach in front of a blazing fire, above which Paul holds his left hand extended with a viper rising up towards it. The ‘barbarians’ stand behind him in wonder, one holding palms outward to express the story’s conclusion that, rather than being a murderer and the object of divine vengeance, as they first assumed when the viper bit, Paul in fact ‘must be a god.’ We cannot be absolutely certain that Shakespeare knew Ortelius’s map, although research by Gillies and other scholars suggests that he did. Many spectators of The Tempest 20 would have seen it, as well as its scriptural and humanist predecessors. We can be fairly confident, however, that Shakespeare was thinking of Paul’s shipwreck story when he wrote the play. First of all, although Shakespeare’s source story of the Virginia Company’s Sea Venture was eventually troped in terms of the Pauline archetype, the story was not initially presented this way, and the discrepancy is revealing. When Londoners first heard about the Sea Venture’s misfortunes through the circulation of William Strachey’s manuscript account, A True Reportory of the wracke [dated] … July 15. 1610, as well as word-ofmouth reports, its preoccupation with treachery and discord on Bermuda did not immediately suggest any idea of providential deliverance. The Virginia Company in fact avoided having Strachey’s pessimistic account of the adventure printed.21 But the survival of the Sea Venture’s entire company, their rebuilding of two vessels on Bermuda and eventual journey to James River, Virginia, and the ultimate safe return to England of

Figure 11.1 From Abraham Ortelius’s Peregrinationis Divi Pavli Typvs Corographicvs in his Parergon, Theatrum Orbis Terrarum (1579)

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their commander, Sir Thomas Gates, gave more imaginative supporters of the Virginia Company an opportunity to reconstruct the Sea Venture story, not as the latest disaster to plague the colony but as a sign of divine favour meant to encourage London investors. Richard Rich’s pamphlet The lost Flocke Triumphant, With the happy Arriuall of that famous and worthy Knight, Sr. Thomas Gates (late 1610), set the tone for the spin that followed in several Virginia Company publications.22 Shakespeare seems to have noticed this reframing of Sea Venture reports and to have underlined the event’s analogies with Paul’s shipwreck when he came to write The Tempest. The play’s first scene has long been admired for the precision of its navigational terminology, including the vocabulary of ship architecture and signalling, and the Boatswain’s efforts to keep the ship from splitting up while being blown towards inshore rocks. In this it resembles both the technical accuracy and perilous situation of the shipwreck narrative in Acts 27, one of the most vividly realistic scenes in the New Testament. Narrated with unusual immediacy in the first-person-plural voice of Luke, the traditional author of Acts, the story relates how Paul’s ship was driven by a violent north-east storm headlong across the Mediterranean. Paul reassured the company of 276 passengers that they would survive and be cast ashore on an island. After fourteen days the sailors felt land approaching, took readings at twenty and fifteen fathoms, and dropped four anchors. Initially they tried to abandon ship using a boat, but were prevented by Paul through orders of the Roman centurion on board. Paul encouraged the whole company to eat to keep up their strength. Sighting a bay, the sailors decided to run the ship ashore, but it got caught in cross-currents, ran aground, and began to split up. The centurion gave the order to abandon ship: ‘those who could swim [jumped] overboard … the rest [followed], some on planks, some on parts of the ship. And thus it was that all came safe to land’ (27.33–4). Several passages in The Tempest related to the Geneva Bible version of this story confirm Shakespeare’s dramatic interest in alluding to Paul’s shipwreck. In Act One, scene two, Prospero reassures Miranda about the ‘direful spectacle of the wreck’ she has witnessed: I have with the provision in mine art So safely ordered that there is no soul, No, not so much perdition as an hair Betid to any creature in the vessel Which thou heard’st cry, which thou saw’st sink.

(1.2.28–32)

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The Geneva Bible text of Acts 27 and its marginal note (indicated by the asterisk) read, respectively: Wherefor I exhorte you to take meate: for this is for your safegarde: for there shal not* an heare fal from the head of any of you. *By this Hebrew phrase is ment that they shoulde be in al points safe and sound23

The specific phrase ‘perdition of an hair’ does not actually appear in the Geneva or the Bishops’ versions of this passage. On this basis, perhaps, the recent Oxford and Arden 3 editions delete Frank Kermode’s comment on Prospero’s speech in his 1954 Arden 2 edition that ‘In the account of St. Paul’s shipwreck on Malta … we read: “there shal not an heare of the head perish of any of you”’ in the Rheims translation of the New Testament,24 which we know from evidence elsewhere that Shakespeare read. Another indication that Shakespeare wanted spectators to make a connection with Paul is that Miranda’s account of the play’s shipwreck earlier in the scene anticipates Prospero’s wording (‘poor souls, they perished,’ she says at line 10 of this scene), while Ariel’s response to Prospero later in the scene repeats it: Prospero. But are they, Ariel, safe? Ariel. Not a hair perished.

(1.2.217)

Together these unusual repetitions within the space of 200 lines must have functioned as auditory cues, alerting both scripturally literate and cartographically knowledgeable spectators to the Pauline archetype of shipwreck, survival, and implicit Christianization of island ‘barbarians.’25 2 The Tempest’s allusions to Paul’s shipwreck off Malta suggest that Prospero’s efforts to civilize Caliban would have set up corresponding expectations of conversion. But Caliban, we quickly learn, has strenuously resisted Prospero’s efforts: ‘A devil,’ Prospero complains, ‘on whose nature / Nurture can never stick; on whom my pains, / Humanely taken, all, all lost, quite lost’ (4.1.188–90). The word ‘Pains’ here carries topical connotations that indicate conversion is part of Prospero’s cultural program. As the OED and countless early modern religious tracts indicate, ‘taking pain(s)’ and ‘painful’ became religious buzzwords associated

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with the reformist agenda of public preaching and New World conversion. Bible maps also encouraged readers to make connections between these endeavours and Paul’s first-century missions. For instance in the Preface to Readers of Coverdale’s New Testament, Reynolde Wolfe observed of his eastern Mediterranean Bible map that In this table, by the distance of the myles, thou maiest easyly perceaue what peynfull travayle saynt Paule toke in preachyng the woorde of God through the Regions of Asia, Affrica, and Europa, and the names also of the cities, wherein and vnto the whiche he wrote his epistles, &c. (A1v)26

The early modern spelling ‘travayle’ could signify either travel or labour – such as that of childbirth – or both (as Shakespeare often hints in his use of the word). Map and Bible readers could therefore have understood Wolfe’s ‘travayle’ in a multi-temporal way, in so far as it might refer to the practical engendering of Pauline spirituality in early modern colonizing missions. ‘Painful’ could likewise refer to the physical hardships Paul experienced, or his providential labour of spreading the Christian faith. Both meanings are present, for example, in geographer and clergyman Richard Hakluyt’s Virginia Richly Valued (printed 1609, A4v), which praises the contribution of ‘painfull preachers’ to the hoped-for success of the American colony.27 Jacobean spectators who picked up on these associations might have brought a similar understanding to Prospero’s bitter exclamations at the ‘pains’ he has taken to try to convert the ‘born devil’ Caliban. At the same time Prospero’s outburst implicitly contrasts the positive effects his ‘pains,’ and continual threats of pain, have had on his more biddable servant-spirit, Ariel. Prospero’s failure with Caliban means that the analogy with Pauline conversion turns negative or more complicated. And yet I think it does so in critically productive ways that are related to new scriptural epistemologies which gave readers the ability to question the idealizing associations of Renaissance sacred geography.28 The Pauline maps I have been surveying set up a triumphalist icon, translating into visual terms the core idea that Paul’s eastern Mediterranean missions to the gentiles were divinely mandated and historically irresistible. It was this suggestion of unstoppable Christian belief 29 spreading globally outward that made Bible and atlas maps of Paul’s missionary journeys attractive to the universalist ideals of Renaissance humanists, and later to the reforming aspirations of militant Protestants and supporters of New World colonization. A representative instance of this synchronizing mentality appears

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in the official seal of the 1628 charter of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. It depicts a virtually naked aboriginal in a wilderness setting saying ‘come over and help us.’ This alludes to a dream Paul had in Troy as reported in Acts 16.9, in which a Macedonian appeared to him and entreated, ‘Cross over to Macedonia and help us.’ The vision prompted Paul to arrange a journey to Macedonia, ‘convinced that God had called [him] to take the good news there.’30 Yet this Christian teleology erased a key aspect of the original biblical narratives: local resistance to both Paul’s public preaching and his attempted imposition of Jewish Christianity on long-established Hellenistic cultures. Conflicts between these forces are a prominent feature of Paul’s New Testament letters. Ironically, this was an aspect that humanist scholars had made newly visible in popularizing works of biblical criticism, such as Erasmus’s prefaces to his Paraphrases upon the New Testament (1551–2), copies of which were officially placed in every parish church in England. Such publications mobilized knowledge of the historical contingencies of Paul’s letters and redrew the apostle’s image as a Jewish Roman citizen with irascible tendencies and occluded or mixed motives (a character profile reminiscent of Prospero).31 Earlier, in The Comedy of Errors, Shakespeare had taken note of one of these moments of local resistance to Paul in allusions to Acts 19. Perhaps not incidentally, it is a story comparable to Paul’s shipwreck off Malta in terms of its dramatic realism. Acts 19 describes a city-wide riot in Ephesus caused by Paul’s attempt to displace the local worship of the ‘great goddess’ Diana with his new monotheistic religion. The Ephesians’ fury drove Paul from the city and haunted him for years after (e.g., 1 Cor. 15.32, alluded to in Comedy of Errors, 3.2.84–9)32. The clash at Ephesus essentially pitted loyalty to an indigenous female-centred religion against a transplanted patriarchal one, a stand-off reflected in Luciana and Adriana’s debate over the authority of wives and husbands in The Comedy of Errors 2.1–2. This scenario of competing religions within the context of Paul’s Mediterranean journeys is illuminating in relation to Caliban as Prospero’s resistant New World subject. Caliban refers twice to his mother’s god, the Patagonian Setebos (1.2.372, 5.1.261), indicating that he remains unconverted from his native belief system. How untroubled this attitude remains as a site of internal resistance is a little less certain, however, because of Caliban’s dream. This he recalls in the second half of his wellknown ‘The isle is full of noises’ speech at 3.2.135–43: … and then in dreaming, The clouds, methought, would open and show riches

Pauline Cartography, Missionary Nationalism, and The Tempest 209 Ready to drop upon me, that when I waked I cried to dream again.

The allusion to Isaiah 45.833 behind this passage may suggest a suppressed recollection of Prospero and Miranda’s attempts at conversion. In which case, Caliban’s wish to recall the dream may indicate conflicted desires that anticipate his ultimate turn to grace in the final moments of the play. Or, if this represents the outcry of an enslaved subject dreaming of justice (or ‘righteousness,’ as in Isaiah), it may be a related instance of Caliban’s ‘learning to curse’: using acquired language defiantly against the imposed subjectivity of his European captors. Whether Caliban’s dream is related to some memory of attempted conversion, or – another possibility – to what might be construed as the animist spirituality of the rest of his speech and wider aboriginal knowledge of island ecology, advocates of New World colonization would have understood his metaphysical sensibilities as signs of his receptivity to English religion. In early modern English news pamphlets, symbolically coherent and ritually organized religious beliefs passed as anthropological evidence of the inherent humanity and potential convertibility of North American Natives.34 Among writers such as Thomas Hariot who had spent substantial time with Virginian Natives, the evident, though barely understood, sophistication of their rituals and spiritual piety left a hopeful impression.35 In his influential A briefe and true report of the new found land of Virginia (1588), Hariot explained: Some religion [Native Virginians] haue alreadie, which although it be farre from the truth, yet beyng as it is, there is hope it may bee the easier and sooner reformed. (E2v)

From this viewpoint, de-conversion was a better position to start from than no religion at all because it implied errors of belief and doctrine that could be corrected. For Protestants such as Hariot, this put Native Americans into a position similar to that of Jews, Turks, or Roman Catholics. The difference was that aboriginal reform was to be effected by an allegedly kinder, gentler mode of daily living and trade, by which English colonizers believed they could distinguish themselves from the ‘Black Legend’ of the Spanish conquistadores: And by howe much they vpon due consideration shall finde our manner of knowledge and craftes to exceede theirs in perfection, and speed for doing or execution, by so much the more is it probable that they shoulde desire

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our friendships & loue, and haue the greater respect for pleasing and obeying vs. Whereby may bee hoped if meanes of good gouernment bee used, that they may in short time be brought to ciuilitie, and the imbracing of true religion. (E2v)

Although Prospero, Miranda, and Stephano register Caliban’s physical deformity as moral depravity (in ways that Shakespeare’s Richard III, for example, taught contemporary audiences to recognize as unreliable), Caliban’s loyalty to his household god and matrilineal heritage (Sycorax) places him in a position comparable to that of worshippers of Diana at Ephesus and her widespread Hellenistic religion, and therefore supposedly susceptible to neo-Pauline conversion. Like many later missionaries, however, Prospero takes a harsh line towards pagan gods, trying to dethrone Setebos by renaming him a devil and devaluing his status within an exclusively Christian taxonomy. Prospero’s attitudes echo popular European assumptions that New World Natives lacked any legitimate or intelligible system of religion at all. If not in fact worshiping devils, they simply idolized natural objects such as the sun in an instinctive manner, thereby confirming their subrational, naturally slavish status. Helena alludes to such thinking in All’s Well That Ends Well: ‘Thus Indian-like, / Religious in mine error, I adore / The sun that looks upon his worshipper / But knows of him no more’ (1.3.199– 202). In Love’s Labour’s Lost, Berowne likewise asserts that the ‘rude and savage man of Ind, / At the first opening of the east, / Bows … his vassal head and, strucken blind, / Kisses the base ground with obedient breast’ (4.3.218–21), and he later entreats the masked Rosaline, ‘Vouchsafe to show the sunshine of your face, / That we like savages might worship it’ (5.2.201–2). These statements anticipate Stephanos’s parodies of Prospero’s attitude: ‘Have we devils here? Do you put tricks upon’s with savages and men of Ind?’ (2.2.56–7).36 It would be hazardous to assert from references across his plays that Shakespeare’s image of non-Christian or New World spirituality evolved. But the presence of Setebos, and perhaps Caliban’s eco-spirituality as well, point to a measure of cultural differentiation that is absent in casual remarks about Indian sun worship in Shakespeare’s earlier plays. This change may reflect the presence and defence of local Mediterranean religions he read about in Paul’s travels, or the imaginative horizons opened up by early modern maps, revisionist essays such as Montaigne’s ‘On the Cannibals,’ and New World travel narratives such as Hakluyt’s and Hariot’s – or some combination of these. But I think we can say that

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the invocations of Setebos may have hinted to contemporary audiences why Caliban ultimately makes a rationally worked-out, though still-provisional, gesture towards ‘grace’ in the closing moments of The Tempest. How uniformly spectators originally interpreted that gesture remains uncertain. When Shakespeare decided in 1611 to surprise Blackfriars Theatre audiences with a realistically staged storm, shipwreck, and miraculous survival in The Tempest’s opening scenes, the contemporary framing of the Sea Venture’s story in terms of a familiar Pauline archetype connected the play’s outcome with shipwreck’s cartographic twin, conversion. Discursively networked in these ways, The Tempest set up expectations of a synchronic Pauline-Virginian scenario ostensibly concluded by Caliban’s seeking for grace. In the context of the play’s final transformations, the usurping Alonso’s confession and request for pardon from Prospero support this theme, but Sebastian’s churlishness and Antonio’s mulish silence challenge it. These ambiguous resolutions align The Tempest with other Shakespeare comedies in which redemptive conversion is structurally present but uncertainly or controversially secured (e.g., The Merchant of Venice). Lingering tensions may therefore cast Caliban’s cooperative gesture in a sceptical light. Or, from an emerging New World perspective, they may differentiate it from the behaviour of the play’s Old World unregenerates. Early modern Pauline discourses and ideologies remind us that religious conversion and colonial exploitation were contested not only from later postcolonial viewpoints but also from early modern ones constituted by diversely positioned readers and spectators, who would have judged Prospero’s authority and Caliban’s subjectivity accordingly. With historicizing knowledge derived from Renaissance maps of Paul’s travels and humanist critical awareness of local reactions against Paul’s first-century evangelism, performances of The Tempest might have generated attitudes of ambivalence, sympathy, or resistance among spectators who had no stake in the Virginia Company’s financial or religious dreams. Notes 1 The Tempest, ed. Stephen Orgel (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987). Quotations from the play are from this edition. 2 Relationships between the play and reports of Sea Venture as well as related publications of the Virginia Company are discussed in Geoffrey Bullough, ed., Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare, vol. 8 (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1975), 237–45; Virginian Mason Vaughan and Alden T.

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Vaughan’s Arden 3 edition of the play (London: Thomas Nelson and Sons, 1999), 39–44, and Orgel, xx. For discussion of contemporary debates about the legal implications and legitimacy of North American colonization, see B.J. Sokol and Mary Sokol, ‘The Tempest and Legal Justification of Plantation in Virginia,’ Shakespeare and Hungary, Shakespeare Yearbook 7, ed. Holgar Klein and Péter Dávidházi (Lewiston and Queenston: Edwin Mellen Press, 1996), 353–80. For instance, Foucault’s seminal ‘What Is an Author?,’ in Textual Strategies: Perspectives in Post-Structuralist Criticism, ed. Josué V. Harari (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1979), 141–60. Jerry Brotton, ‘“This Tunis, sir, was Carthage”: Contesting colonialism in the Tempest,’ in Post-Colonial Shakespeare, ed. Ania Loomba and Martin Orkin (Florence, KY: Routledge, 1998), 36–55. F.F. Bruce, History of the Bible in English (1961; Guildford and London: Lutterworth Press, 3rd ed., 1979), does not mention maps in Reformation Bibles, and David Daniell’s The Bible in English: Its History and Influence (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003) notes their presence in several translations (e.g., Bishops’, 343) but does not discuss them. John Gillies, Shakespeare and the Geography of Difference (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994). Maps did not appear in Catholic Bibles. In Protestant ones in England and on the Continent they became partly a commercial selling feature for their publishers (see, e.g., Geneva Bible title page). Luther requested a map to accompany his Wittenburg New Testament of 1522, and an Exodus map first appeared in Luther’s Old Testament translations from 1525 onwards. The Mediterranean map of Paul’s journeys was usually placed between the end of the Acts of the Apostles and the beginning of Romans. It was preceded by maps of the Holy Land at the beginning of the Gospels and by cartographic illustrations of Old Testament events which had become theological and political emblems of Reformation Protestantism. Disseminated in this context, these were often the first maps ordinary English readers ever encountered, and for some possibly the only ones. See Catherine Delano-Smith and Elizabeth Morley Ingram, Maps in Bibles 1500–1600: An Illustrated Catalogue (Genève: Librairie Droz, 1991), xxiv–vii. The Evangelicae historiae atque actuum apostolorum itinerarium (Delano-Smith and Ingram, Maps in Bibles, 99). The Evangelicae historiae formed part of Ziegler’s descriptive atlas Palaestinae, Scondie published in 1532 (and related to extant manuscript depictions by him dating from several years before). Wolfe’s map reflected a later stage of technical knowledge by adding, for example, a compass rose showing true and magnetic north.

Pauline Cartography, Missionary Nationalism, and The Tempest 213 10 Delano-Smith and Ingram, Maps in Bibles, 99. 11 It was first issued in 1559 with French names that were later Englished in Geneva Bibles of 1560, 1576, etc. 12 It was engraved by Hans Sebald Beham and published around 1528 (Robert W. Karrow, Mapmakers of the Sixteenth Century and their Maps: Bio-Biographies of the Cartographers of Abraham Ortelius, 1570. Based on Leo Bagrow’s A. Ortelii Catalogus Cartographorum [Chicago: Speculum Orbis Press for The Newberry Library, 1993], entry 7/7, 55–6. Reproduced 624–5). 13 The chorographic texts derived ultimately from Erasmus’s Peregrinatio Pauli, appended to his 1527 Froben Polyglott New Testament. It was also published separately, and incorporated into other descriptive geographies such as Joachim Vadianus [Joachim von Watt], Epitome Topographica Totivs Orbis … Accessit peregrinatio Petri et Pauli Apostolorum, cum rationem temporum Per Erasmum Roterod[am] (Antwerp, 1535), as well as map-collections such as Gerhard Mercator’s Europa (Duisburg, 1554), now lost but reproduced in Drei Karten von Gerhard Mercator: Europa – Britische Inseln – Weltkarte FacsimileLichtdruck nach den originalen der Stadtbibliothek zu Breslau (Berlin: W.H. Kühl, 1891). 14 One Dutch map of 1591 shows the route of Paul’s final sea journey to Rome and his ship foundering off Malta (Delano-Smith and Ingram, Maps in Bibles 107). Compare with eighteenth- to twentieth-century Bible maps of Paul’s journeys, in which the zig-zagging route lines become the most prominent feature. 15 In other words, shipwreck and conversion become what Denis Wood calls the map’s ‘iconic code’: ‘Iconicity is the indispensable quality of the map. It is the source and principle of the map’s analogy to objects, places, relations and events’ (Denis Wood with John Fels, The Power of Maps [New York: The Guilford Press, 1992], 117–19). 16 The Parergon grew from three maps in 1579 to 49 maps in 1624 and was eventually printed and sold separately, partly because it represented the most original part of Ortelius’s otherwise largely editorial project. Ortelius drew the Parergon maps based on his own research. The ‘Perigrinations of St Paul’ was part of the original three, along with maps of the Roman Empire and ancient Greece (Karrow, Mapmakers of the Sixteenth Century, 16). 17 Joachim von Watt, Epitome Topographica Totivs Orbis [Antwerp, 1535]; Mark Jorden Typum Corographicum Itinerum D. Paul, Abrahami Patriarchae, &. Wittenbergae (1562); Christian Sgrooten (ca 1525–1603), Tabulam quam inscripsit Peregrinationem filiorum Dei nd [1572]; Oronce Fine or Finé (1494–1555), Palaestinam (1590), and Europam marinam (nd); Benedictus Arias Montanus, Peregrinations of Saint Paul, ‘Terrae Canaan descriptiones duas … in suo Ap-

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paratu Biblico’; and Gerhard Mercator, Europa (Duisburg, 1554). Mercator’s ‘extraordinarily popular and widely diffused map’ (Karrow, Mapmakers of the Sixteenth Century, 16) was discussed by Thomas Blundeville in his Exercises (first published 1594 and later expanded; Dd2r). See also Gillies’s discussion of Jodocus Hondius’s Christian Knight Map of the World (Shakespeare and the Geography of Difference, 178–82, 227, n44). Other modern maps of Mediterranean islands and regions drawn by Ortelius and his named predecessors labelled sites with historical, Pauline-related captions. Conversely, Ortelius’s Parergon map of Paul’s travels incorporated many cartographic details derived from secular maps. For example, Ephesus was marked on most modern maps of Anatolia even though by the sixteenth century this Hellenistic city of Asia Minor had disappeared. Ortelius’s map of modern Malta in the Theatrum depicted the ‘Cala di S. Paulo’ with a sinking two-masted ship off the coast (fol. 82). The popular small format (octavo) Epitome of the Theater of the Worlde based on Ortelius and published in London in 1603 by James Shaw (and reissued several times) identified the ‘Cale di S. Paulo’ with a slightly more substantial three-masted sinking ship. Like other secular maps it labelled the island of Gozo off Crete as ‘olim Claudia ad quam D. Paulus appulit Actorum 27.’ Similarly, Mercator’s Europa (Drei Karten, plate 14) identified the Cretan harbour ‘Phoenix Portus’ (Acts 27.8), and east of it ‘Pulchri portus [Fair Havens], dequo Act: 27.’ Legends are another encoding device which mediate the ideological interests of the map maker with the intended contextual interpretation of the map reader. See Wood, The Power of Maps, 96–101. Other plays with prominent shipwreck and Pauline associations include The Comedy of Errors, Twelfth Night, and Pericles. Louis B. Wright, ed., Introduction to William Strachey, The Historie of Travell into Virginia Britania (1612) (London: The Hakluyt Society, 1953), xxii–xxiv. Sokol and Sokol also suggest that the negativity of Strachey’s letter may account for the obscurity of direct topical allusions to the 1609 Virginia expedition in The Tempest (‘The Tempest and Legal Justification,’ 354). Also contrast the defensive A True and Sincere Declaration of the Purpose and Ends of the Plantation Begun in Virginia, entered in the SR 14 December1609 and officially issued by the Company while the Sea Venture was still missing (Bullough, Narrative and Dramatic Sources, 8: 238) with Sylvester Jourdain’s favourably providentialist account, A Discovery of the Bermudas, Otherwise Called the Ile of Divels, dated 13 October 1610. Bishops follows Geneva (‘Wherefore I pray you to take meate, for this no doubt is for your health: for there shall not an heere fall the head of any of

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you’) and reproduces its note. One other indication of Shakespeare’s use of the Geneva version in The Tempest occurs at 1.2.336, where, as both Kermode and Orgel note (following Richmond Noble, Shakespeare and the Bible), Caliban’s recollection of being taught by Prospero ‘To name the bigger and lesser lights’ echoes the Geneva version of Genesis 1.16: ‘God then made two great lights: the greater light to rule the day, and the less light to rule the night.’ First noted (as Kermode observes) by Holt White, and Noble, Shakespeare and the Bible. The phrase probably derives ultimately from Coverdale’s 1548 translation of Erasmus’s Paraphrase on Acts, part of his Paraphrases upon the New Testament (1547). There, Coverdale renders Erasmus’s passage: ‘For this will I promyse you, that not so muche as an heere of any of your heades shall perishe’ (O1r). See Hilmar M. Pabel and Mark Vessey, eds, Holy Scripture Speaks: The Production and Reception of Erasmus’ Paraphrases on the New Testament (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2002), 19–21. In the same volume, John Craig documents copies of the Paraphrases in three parishes associated with Shakespeare’s London residences: St Michael Wood Street (Nathan Field); St Olave’s Silver Street (Mountjoys); and St Saviour’s Southwark (‘Forming a Protestant Consciousness? Erasmus’ Paraphrases in English Parishes 1547–1666,’ 350–2). Shakespeare could have read or remembered the phrase from either, as well as from the Rheims New Testament. The Pauline archetype of shipwreck has since been obscured in Shakespeare studies by the modern critical construction of The Tempest and other late tragicomedies as romances, in which the tendency has been to trace narrative topoi such as shipwreck to classical and ultimately Homeric traditions rather than biblical ones. See also note 27. Quoted in Delano-Smith and Ingram, Maps in Bibles, xxv. References to early modern books are by signature number. These literal and figurative meanings were present in the titles of the two versions of the Apollonius of Tyre story that framed Pericles. The title of Lawrence Twine’s The Patterne of Painful Adventures is unique to his 1594 translation of the 153rd story of the Gesta Romanorum based on an earlier French translation. When George Wilkins wrote his version based on both Twine and the play he had co-authored with Shakespeare, he recycled Twine’s title: The Painful Adventures of Pericles, Prince of Tyre (1608). The play itself was described differently on its 1609 title page as ‘The Late, and Much Admired Play, Called Pericles, Prince of Tyre.’ Twine’s and Wilkins’s shared epithet not only flagged their more moralizing versions of the story but also indicated the way they imagined readers might interpret Pericles’ tragicomic narrative. As

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editors and commentators have long noted, Pericles traces a conspicuously Pauline itinerary around the eastern Mediterranean. Twine’s and Wilkins’s use of ‘painful adventures’ suggests that they wanted to call attention to Pericles’ mirroring of Paul’s outward tests of patient endurance as well as his inner journey of personal and spiritual redemption. (Pericles, ed. Hoeniger [London: Macmillan, 1963], lxxxvi–viii). For a discussion of the wider failure of Prospero’s Erasmian Christian humanism, see Jonathan Bate, ‘The Humanist Tempest,’ in Shakespeare: La tempête: Études critiques, ed. Claude Peltrault (Besançon: Université de Franche-Comté, Faculté des Lettres, 1994), 5–20. John Gillies argues that early modern readers could have connected the Old World and New World situations using what he calls ‘typogeography,’ in which the spiritual and/or historical significance of classical or scriptural events is imaginatively transposed onto present-day spaces that were deemed to be physically and/or phenomenologically compatible (Shakespeare and the Geography of Difference, 177–8). Reynolde Wolfe anticipated such intertexual possibilities in the Preface to Readers of his Coverdale New Testament (1546): ‘the knowledge of Cosmographie is very necessary, so that he that lacketh the same, can neither wel rede the Byble, nor yet prophane Historiographers, nor the New Testament …’ (A1v). For a reproduction of the seal image, see http://algonkianchurchhistory .blogspot.com/2009/12/seal-of-massachusetts-bay-colony-come.html. I am grateful to Jodey Castricano for drawing my attention to this image. Also compare Christopher Marlowe’s description of Paul as a ‘juggler,’ according to Richard Baines and Thomas Kyd’s notorious account of the playwright. See Millar Maclure, Marlowe: The Critical Inheritance (London: Macmillan, 1979), 35, 37. Prospero’s angry ‘distempers,’ his inner conflicts marked by suppression and recollection, his characteristic mode of retrospective narration, and his tendency to deploy the Erasmian epistolary rhetoric of ‘rebuke and repair’ are all features reminiscent of Paul the itinerant letter writer. See Gregory Kneidel, Rethinking the Turn to Religion in Early Modern English Literature: The Poetics of All Believers (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 20–4; Lynn Magnusson, Shakespeare and Social Dialogue: Dramatic Language and Elizabethan Letters (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 68–74; Huston Diehl, Staging Reform, Reforming the Stage (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1997). Patricia Parker discusses the allusion in ‘The Bible and the Marketplace: The Comedy of Errors,’ Shakespeare from the Margins (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 67, and passim 56–82. See also R. Martin, ‘Rediscovering Artemis in The Comedy of Errors,’ in Shakespeare and the Mediterranean: The Selected

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Proceedings of the International Shakespeare Association World Congress, Valencia, 2001, ed. Tom Clayton, Susan Brock, and Vicente Forés (Newark: University of Delaware Press 2004), 370–3. ‘Drop down you heavens from above, And let the skies pour down righteousness.’ The Catholic and Anglican Advent Prose also begins with these lines (Latin: Rorate coeli desuper …). As it did among other non-European ‘gentiles’: e.g., Francis Xavier in Goa (1541) and Japan (1549), and Matteo Ricci in China (1582). See also Hariot’s descriptions of native rituals, priests, creation myth, and receptivity to the Bible readings, prayer, and psalm singing (E2v–E4v). Also B.J. Sokol, A Brave New World of Knowledge: Shakespeare’s The Tempest and Early Modern Epistemology (Madison, WI: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2003), 75–6. The expression ‘men of Ind’ derives from the Great Bible and Bishops versions of Jeremiah 13.23, not the Geneva (which reads ‘black More’) or King James (‘Ethiopian’) versions. In the light of the Geneva allusions discussed above, this derivation and the phrase’s earlier occurrence in Love’s Labour’s Lost suggest it was a real allusion.

12 Lear’s Conversation with the Philosopher hanna scolnicov

Lear is arguably the least intellectual of Shakespeare’s protagonists. He is often perceived as the diametrical opposite of the intellectual Hamlet. But in the storm scene at the climax of the play, when he has reached the moment of truth and is about to lose his wits, Lear seeks the company of a philosopher. In the grand gallery of Shakespearean protagonists, Lear is the only one who actively seeks philosophical counselling at the moment of crisis.1 A number of scholars have already pursued the textual clues and ascertained the identity of the philosopher whose aid Lear is seeking.2 But even they have largely overlooked the nature of the philosophical advice and comfort that his teaching might be able to offer to the physically and mentally distressed king. As the philosopher Lear appeals to is Poor Tom, his words are usually taken as no more than the delusions of a diseased mind. The textual references are clearly pointed and easily recapitulated. Lear expresses his desire to converse with the philosopher immediately following his newly gained understanding, suitably formulated in philosophical language, that mad Tom is ‘the thing itself.’ To Gloucester’s generous offer of shelter, fire, and food, all basic needs of mankind, Lear responds with the unexpected: ‘First let me talk with this philosopher’ (3.4.154).3 Kent encourages Lear to accept Gloucester’s offer, but Lear is adamant that first, ‘I’ll talk a word with this same learned Theban’ (157). Even when he finally agrees to accept Gloucester’s invitation, Lear still stands his ground, insisting that ‘my philosopher’ (176), the ‘noble philosopher’ (172) and ‘good Athenian’ (180) must accompany him. But, as we know, despite all these protestations and procrastinations, no such promised conversation ever takes place, and the characters

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exit the scene, walking presumably into the protected hovel, without exchanging a single word of philosophical wisdom. This is a puzzling outcome, especially in view of the structurally central position given to Lear’s desire for philosophical enlightenment, in the middle of the third act, at the very turning point of the play. No less puzzling is the dissonance between the pitiful and bedraggled figure of Poor Tom, as he appears to Lear’s faithful followers and to us the audience, and the great show of respect accorded to him by Lear. This dissonance surely points to the clash of values between our own conventional and materialistic attitude and a deeper, hidden, spiritual worth, which needs to be sought out behind facile appearances. What brings Lear to imagine that the suffering figure of Poor Tom is an Athenian philosopher and a learned Theban? And why is it that at the very climax of the play, when he has been enlightened about the nature of man, the abdicating king feels the urge to talk to the philosopher? In this paper, I argue that Lear’s conversation with the philosopher serves as an emblem and functions as a Brechtian Gestus that expresses the central humanist idea of the play in a direct visual and theatrical manner. I shall also show that, within this Gestus, the philosophical illumination is juxtaposed with Christian values and images, and that the tension between the two remains unresolved. The Athenian philosopher with whom Lear wishes to converse has been identified as Diogenes of Sinope,4 who was active in Athens in the fourth century BCE (see figure 12.1). He was nicknamed Diogenes the Cynic because he lived outdoors and ate, drank, and had sexual relations in full public view, like a dog (kyon in Greek).5 The ‘learned Theban’ refers to Crates, who came to Athens from Thebes and became a follower of Diogenes, assuming the life of poverty practised by the cynics. He lived a peripatetic life and preached the deliberate choice of poverty and freedom, consoling the suffering and arbitrating between enemies.6 Like his teacher Diogenes, Crates was one of the better-known cynic philosophers, and both are widely cited in art and literature, especially since the Renaissance. In mixing together the Athenian and the Theban – that is, Diogenes and Crates – Lear creates a composite figure of a cynic philosopher. It is the nature of cynic philosophy, not the identity of the particular philosopher in question, which is brought to the fore. Stories from antiquity about Diogenes and Crates were well known in Shakespeare’s time.7 Their familiar sayings appeared in English translation in collections of aphorisms by, for example, Erasmus (1542) and William Bald-

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Figure 12.1 Ugo da Carpi, Diogenes (c. 1525), after Parmigianino

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win (1547).8 The popularity of the two cynic philosophers is attested to by the fact that their figures even served, among others, as dramatis personae in John Lyly’s Campaspe, performed before the Queen in 1591.9 Shakespeare’s allusion to the cynic philosophers is much more circumspect, never even mentioning their names.10 He is interested rather in their ideas as a counterweight to the materialism, ambition, and blind pursuit of power that drive the society depicted in the play. Diogenes left behind him no written doctrine of any kind.11 For him, truth was not theory, but practice. His philosophy is essentially a way of life, and it is expressed in the various stories and anecdotes told about his life. Diogenes did not teach the truth but exhibited it.12 His persona was his only means of teaching. He was definitely a historical character, but, already in antiquity, his life became legend. His biography became an accretion of more and more anecdotes, and his figure developed into that of a philosophical hero.13 Recounted and used by many hands, these stories were attributed different and changing meanings from classical times onwards, and through the Church Fathers, the Middle Ages, humanism, Luther, Montaigne, and up to philosophers such as Hegel and Foucault.14 All found the stories enchanting and instructive and a source of good exempla with which they could further their own ideologies. The figure of Diogenes symbolizes a subversive force that is present inside institutionalized society and culture and that tries to undermine them from within. His way of life and social conduct are perceived as constant provocations to the conventional and customary. If most people aspire to a life of ease and luxury, Diogenes chose to sleep in a tub and to be homeless and penniless, so as not to be dependent on anyone. Diogenes picked out a single motif from the figure of Socrates, the theme of the philosophical life, and made it into his own leitmotiv. The Socratic idea of philosophy as a critical lifestyle became for Diogenes the single content of his philosophy. This idea is forcefully conveyed by one of the anecdotes recounted about him. Asked by somebody ‘What sort of a man do you consider Diogenes to be?’ Plato replied: ‘A Socrates gone mad.’15 He did not offer any system of thought and no new ideas that could replace those that he criticized and pulverized. He enchanted his many followers, who saw in him a guide to a radical, rigorous, and uncompromising critique of the existing norms and values. In The Lives of Eminent Philosophers, written around the second century by another Diogenes, Diogenes Laertius, there appear a number of the

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more famous stories about Diogenes the Cynic. Two of them can be directly related to King Lear: 1. One day, observing a child drinking out of his hands, he cast away the cup from his wallet with the words, ‘A child has beaten me in plainness of living.’16 (See figure 12.2.) 2. When he was sunning himself in the Craneum, Alexander came and stood over him and said, ‘Ask of me any boon you like.’ To which he replied, ‘Stand out of my light.’17 (See figure 12.3.)

The story of the child and the bowl exemplifies the wilful avoidance of anything that might be perceived as luxurious, while the story about the Emperor exhibits the sense of superior freedom gained by one who needs no material favours. Taken together, the two stories illustrate the practical rather than abstract nature of Diogenes’ philosophical life. Tales of the life and deeds of Diogenes consist of highly expressionistic critical gestures. Their aim is to shake the spectator, listener, or reader out of his complacency and conventionality. These gestures are essentially performances. In other words, the gestures are only meaningful when performed in a particular, given context, and they are intended for the listener and spectator. Their preservation as narrative may ensure their continuing influence, but in the process they lose the immediate impact of the enacted action and gesture. Each of the gestures performed by Diogenes may be seen as a Brechtian Gestus, a highly expressive gesture or action laden with social meaning. Each forms a compact little theatrical scene signifying defiance of social conventions. In order to be meaningful, the cynic gesture must be performed within a social context. It must be performed publicly and is therefore essentially theatrical. Shakespeare must have realized the theatrical potential inherent in the cynic gesture, and he exploited it in the central scene of the play, in Lear’s encounter with the naked Bedlam beggar, which prompts him to strip himself of his clothing in the midst of the storm. Lear’s meeting with Poor Tom bears the imprint of its anecdotal origins. It is clearly indebted to the many stories that developed around the figure of Diogenes. Although functioning as the climax of the play, the meeting contributes nothing to the development of the plot. Instead, the gesture of stripping serves as a direct expression of the meaning of the entire play. The cynic gesture provides Shakespeare with the means

Figure 12.2 Nicolas Poussin, Diogenes casting away his bowl (1648)

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Figure 12.3 Salvator Rosa, Diogenes and Alexander (1642)

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of exhibiting the central theme of the play in a radical theatrical moment that is extricated from the flow of events. Poor Tom is not only associated with the cynic philosopher whose appearance spells a moral lesson. In addition, Edgar’s figure also functions as a Renaissance emblem, the hidden meaning of which Lear fathoms and reacts to. Except for a loincloth that covers his private parts, Edgar is naked. Earlier on, he had announced his intention to disguise himself: ‘My face I’ll grime with filth, / Blanket my loins, elf all my hairs in knots’ (2.3.9–10). The Fool points to this ‘blanket,’ as he calls it, without which ‘we had been all sham’d’ (3.4.66).18 The concept of shame derives from the Judaeo-Christian tradition, from Adam and Eve’s awareness after the Fall of their nudity, which they cover up with fig leaves. But shamelessness is an inherent component of the ideology of the cynics. As pointed out by the Fool, the presence of the ‘blanket’ is a sure sign that, in this instance, shame has had the upper hand. In the sorrowful image of Poor Tom, as in Lear’s gesture of stripping, the Christian and the pagan are pitted against each other. In the absence of stage directions, the sketch provided by the Fool makes us aware that Edgar’s figure evokes that of the crucified Christ, his body bare except for the loincloth draped around his private parts. The art-historical religious allusion to the suffering body of Christ is clearly there, but, at the same time, the figure of Poor Tom also points to the familiar demonstrative figure of the pagan philosopher Diogenes, he who is naked and homeless by choice. Thus Edgar’s suffering body is an emblem that can be read simultaneously as a Christian icon and a cynic exemplum. The Christian reading provides the emotional content of the scene, while the cynic reading gives it its intellectual dimension. The uneasy tension between the Christian and pagan contexts within which the emblem may be read is characteristic of humanist thinking, which attempted, not always successfully, to syncretize the two alien traditions. On the one hand, no redemption or salvation can be glimpsed beyond the acute suffering of the present moment, and none will be forthcoming in the play. On the other hand, Lear’s arrested gesture of stripping, and also the loincloth that covers Edgar’s private parts, both reassert the Christian Fathers’ opposition to the scandalous behaviour attributed to Diogenes.19 The double nature of the emblem is perhaps responsible for its enormous impact both on us, the theatre audience, and on Lear, the privileged onstage spectator. Teasing out the meaning Poor Tom assumes for Lear is especially interesting when one remembers the popular source of

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that figure. After all, Edgar disguises himself as a Bedlam beggar, a familiar character of penury, and it is only Lear’s emblematic reading of the figure combined with the Fool’s remark about Edgar’s reserved blanket that elevates the stereotyped mad beggar into a universal icon, investing his figure with humanist values that outreach the actual person of Edgar. The sight of Poor Tom forces Lear to engage in the philosophical quest for the essential man, stripped of the clothes made of materials borrowed from the animal world. He reaches the insight that ‘Unaccommodated man is no more but such a poor, bare, forked animal as thou art’ (3.4.106–8). This minimalist characterization may recall one of the anecdotes that appear in Diogenes Laertius’s collection: Plato had defined Man as an animal, biped and featherless, and was applauded. Diogenes plucked a fowl and brought it into the lecture-room with the words, ‘Here is Plato’s man.’20

This anecdote exemplifies the ‘practical’ or concrete critique practised by Diogenes. (The plucked hen can be seen in Ugo da Carpi’s print: figure 12.1.) The insight he has gained into the nature of man galvanizes Lear into action. Like Diogenes, who threw away the redundant bowl as a superfluous luxury, Lear now tries to rid himself of the remaining vestiges of his possessions. He tears off his clothes crying, ‘Off, off, you lendings!’ (108), attempting to imitate Poor Tom, still poorer than himself, and through him both Diogenes and Christ. The tearing of the clothes forms the central Gestus of the scene and of the play as a whole. Lear is able to see the mad beggar as a philosopher because he reads his appearance and behaviour as a traditional cynic exemplum, and not because he has heard from him any philosophical disquisition. In fact, the promised conversation with the philosopher never takes place, and all that remains of it is Lear’s insistence that he remain in his philosopher’s company. As it turns out, the promised conversation cannot take place because the particular kind of philosophy in question finds its expression only as a way of life. Lear cannot hope to hear any words of wisdom from the crazed Tom, but is driven to an emblematic reading of his figure, and through it to a new understanding of common humanity. There is no transcendent truth to be learned from a cynic philosopher, as this philosophy can only be learned by example. Edgar’s appearance as the image of the dispossessed conveys to Lear the meaning of what it is to be a human being, finding his own reflection in the poor tormented beggar. This discovery is so powerfully moving

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that Lear actually tears off his own clothes in an attempt to resemble him completely. It is reported of Alexander the Great that he said: ‘Had I not been Alexander, I should have liked to be Diogenes.’21 Alexander merely expressed the paradoxical and subversive wish, but Lear actively undertakes the move, joining the ranks of both Edgar and Diogenes. The discarded clothes stand for civilization and convention, and represent an awareness of shame. From a realistic point of view, undressing in the storm contradicts common sense. But, from the point of view of the inner logic of cynic thinking, the act of undressing deliberately defies propriety, expressing a protest against the norms of society. It represents a renunciation of any and every luxury offered by society. Clothing is the most basic behavioural convention, and fashionable clothing is an unnecessary luxury. Looking backwards, one might say that from the very beginning, Lear had practised a gradual renunciation of his power and position. At first, it was a grand gesture of self-willed retirement, followed by the stations of his downfall, inflicted by his evil daughters, expropriating his position and possessions; but now, he has regained control of the situation, wilfully surrendering his last remaining possession, the very shirt on his back, which distinguishes him from Poor Tom and separates him from the poor, bare, forked animal that he has discovered himself to be. He is now eager to uncover his own essential humanity that has long been hidden beneath layers of sumptuous clothing. In imitating Poor Tom, Lear is also following the example of the Athenian philosopher, discarding everything that he feels is not essential or necessary. Like Diogenes, he, too, is now homeless and naked, having renounced the sophisticated comforts offered by civilized society, and he no longer owes anything to man or beast. In the Christian context, as distinguished from the cynic context, the choice of poverty is not aimed at achieving intellectual freedom but is performed as an imitatio Christi, as a means of identifying with him. Although Edgar’s appearance suggests this reading, yet it seems that such identification is limited to the cultural and humanist associations of the figure, and does not extend to the religious dimension. The apocalyptic encounter of the old king whose pain and sorrow drive him to madness and the young man pretending to be mad so as to save his own life is a contrived and exemplary event that harks back to the anecdotes recounted by Diogenes Laertius about Diogenes the Cynic. This may seem at first to be a belaboured academic curiosity that is no longer of direct interest to the play. In fact, the opposite is the case. The more one continues to investigate the humanist context of the play, the more

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one finds further links with the stories about Diogenes, as recounted, developed, and explained in the literature and thought of the period. The figure of Diogenes turns out to underlie the central themes of the play. In other words, the link with philosophy as a way of life appears to be relevant to the play as a whole, not just to Lear’s wish to talk to his philosopher, serving as the ideological focus of the entire play. Lear’s saying ‘a dog’s obeyed in office’ may sound like nothing more than a conventional aphorism, but, in conjunction with some twenty other references to dogs in the play, may be related to the fact that Diogenes was called a ‘cynic.’ Against the backdrop of cynic teaching, the comparison of a man’s life to a dog’s life becomes charged with historical, philosophical, and cultural significance. Although the cynics had no set doctrine, their demonstrative behaviour was accompanied by blunt speech, as in the various anecdotes about Diogenes and Crates. Their speech, like their scandalous and provocative public acts, was intended to be faithful to the truth, with no attempt to make it more palatable. The speaking of unpleasant truths in public, cynic parrhesia, requires the courage to speak out one’s mind in the face of personal danger, to take a serious risk in the name of truth. This kind of behaviour is exemplified in the play by Cordelia, Kent, and the Fool. When Cordelia faces her father unflinchingly in the opening scene, rejecting his request for her expression of love, she is demonstrating parrhesia, as is also Kent when he tries to intercede on her behalf. The Fool, who traditionally has the liberty of parrhesia, is threatened by Lear with the whip, a clear sign that he has stretched this liberty to a point that is no longer acceptable to the King. In his series of lectures on parrhesia, Michel Foucault contrasted parrhesia to rhetoric.22 He who practices parrhesia is interested in proclaiming the truth and therefore discloses what he believes in, while the rhetorician attempts to convince his audience without necessarily believing in what he says. As opposed to Cordelia, Goneril and Regan clearly practise rhetoric. Many other cynic topoi are scattered throughout the play. Lear’s exit from civilization into nature can be seen as echoing Diogenes’ act of turning his back on society. The dramatic moment of the rejection of warm shelter and food offered by Gloucester can be interpreted as a wilful rejection of worldly comforts and a conscious choice of philosophical freedom – another cynic theme. Homelessness ceases to be a socio-economic topic, becoming a meaningful philosophical choice made by an individual who no longer wishes to live a life based on lies and hypocrisy, the life Lear had lived while still king.

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In choosing homelessness, Lear achieves the two main cynic goals: self-sufficiency (autarkeia) and freedom (eleutheria). The ideal of selfsufficiency comes to him as an illumination at the sight of Poor Tom: ‘Thou ow’st the worm no silk, the beast no hide, the sheep no wool, the cat no perfume’ (3.4.103–5). He achieves freedom, paradoxically, when he is led to prison. When Lear declares to Cordelia his preference for life in prison to life in the corrupt court (5.3.8–19), he inverts incarceration into a celebratory state of inner freedom. No longer raging against the new reversal of fortune that has brought them so low, Lear now accepts his loss of external freedom and is content with the philosophical renunciation of the good life desired by most men. However, having reached this state of philosophical tranquillity does not make Lear immune to the final reversal of fortune which still awaits him.23 Earlier in the play, Edgar had believed that To be worst, The lowest and most dejected thing of fortune, Stands still in esperance, lives not in fear.

(4.1.2–4)

Then he saw his blinded and humiliated father led in by the Old Man and realized that ‘the worst is not / So long as we can say “This is the worst”’ (4.1.27–8). Analogously, Lear’s newly attained philosophical peace of mind is shattered by the death of Cordelia. The use of visual Christian imagery is poignant: the earlier figure of Poor Tom as the crucified Christ, wearing only a loincloth, is now followed by a reverse pietà, of the father carrying the body of his dead daughter.24 Throughout the play, Lear has been learning the lessons offered by cynic examples, himself acquiring the traits of a cynic philosopher. But although he succeeds in achieving momentary philosophical freedom and tranquillity, he cannot ultimately achieve immunity from human suffering. This suffering is articulated in traditional Christian terms, but any reference to future redemption is missing. The powerful tension between the pagan and Christian views of life that underlies the entire play never lets up, even at the very end. Notes 1 Most modern editors of the play explain away ‘philosopher’ as ‘student of natural philosophy, scientist,’ referring presumably to the follow-up question: ‘What is the cause of thunder?’ (3.4.139. See, e.g., The Tragedy of King Lear, ed. J. Halio [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992], note at

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190). But the question about causes is not necessarily a scientific one. Of the traditional three parts of philosophy – physic, ethic, and dialectic – Lear is surely concerned with the second. See John Dover Wilson’s note in his edition of King Lear, ‘The New Shakespeare’ (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1960), 217; and, following his lead, Jane Donawerth, ‘Diogenes the Cynic and Lear’s Definition of Man, King Lear 3.4.101–9,’ English Language Notes (1977): 10–14; F.G. Butler, ‘Who Are King Lear’s Philosophers? An Answer, with Some Help from Erasmus,’ English Studies 67 (1986): 511– 24; Steven Doloff, ‘“Let me talk with this philosopher”: The Alexander/Diogenes Paradigm in King Lear,’ The Huntington Library Quarterly 54 (1991): 253–5. I reviewed these materials briefly in ‘“Who is it that can tell me who I am?”: Individual, Subject and Self in King Lear,’ Shakespeare Jahrbuch 142 (2006): 154–5. William Shakespeare, King Lear, in The Riverside Shakespeare, ed. G. Blakemore Evans and J.J.M. Tobin (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2nd ed., 1997). See note 2. On Diogenes, see Oxford Classical Dictionary, 2nd ed., ‘Diogenes (2)’; Britannica Concise Encyclopedia, ‘Diogenes of Sinope’; Niklaus Largier, Diogenes der Kyniker: Exempel, Erzählung, Geschichte in Mittelalter und Früher Neuzeit, mit einem Essay zur Figur des Diogenes zwischen Kynismus, Narrentum und postmoderner Kritik (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag, 1997). Diogenes Laertius, Lives of Eminent Philosophers, with English translation by R.D. Hicks, Loeb Classical Library (London: William Heinemann, 1965), vol. 2, 6.5.85–93; Oxford Classical Dictionary, 2nd ed., ‘Crates.’ Butler, ‘King Lear’s Philosophers,’ provides an impressive and comprehensive discussion of Shakespeare’s many allusions to contemporary references to cynic philosophers and philosophy. Desiderius Erasmus, Apophthegmes: That is to saie, prompte, quicke, wittie and sentencious saiynges, of certain emperours, kynges, capitaines, phlosophiers and oratours …, tr. Nicolas Udall (London: Excusum typis Ricardi Grafton, 1542); William Baldwin, A Treatise of Morall Philosophie, wherein Is contained the Worthy Sayings of Philosophers, Emperours, Kings, and Orators: Their Lives and Answers (1547). Enlarged by Thomas Palfreyman. Facsimile reproduction of the 1620 edition, with an introduction by Robert Hood Bowers (Gainesville, FL: Scholars’ Facsimiles and Reprints, 1967), Cap. XIX: ‘Of Crates Thebanus,’ 38–41; Cap. XX: ‘Of Diogenes,’ 42–5. John Lyly, Campaspe, played beefore the Queenes maiestie on twelfe day at night, by her Maiesties Children, and the Children of Paules. Imprinted at London: By Thomas Orwin, for William Broome, 1591. Photostat of original from Henry E. Huntington Library.

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10 I am grateful to Randall Martin for suggesting that Shakespeare’s characterization of the philosopher in Lear as a cynic anticipates the figure of Apemantus in Timon of Athens, who lives the life of a cynic and is described by Timon as a dog. 11 Diogenes Laertius produces an impressive list of writings attributed to Diogenes the Cynic, but also quotes other authors who assert that there were no such writings, and this is the accepted view today. See Diogenes Laertius, Lives, 6.2.80. 12 Cf Seneca, Letter XX.9 (of another of the cynics). 13 Michel Foucault, Discourse and Truth: The Problematization of Parrhesia. Six lectures given at the University of California at Berkeley, October–November 1983, Lecture 4: ‘The Practice of Parrhesia’; http://foucault.info/ documents/parrhesia. 14 Largier, Diogenes, throughout. 15 Diogenes Laertius, Lives, 6.2.54 16 Ibid., 6.2.37. 17 Ibid., 6.2.38. 18 But Butler visualizes the ‘blanket’ as a cloak in which Edgar is enveloped against the cold, overlooking the Fool’s very pointed words and missing the iconographic allusion to the figure of Christ. See Butler, ‘King Lear’s Philosophers,’ 511, 516. 19 For more on the views of Hieronymus and Augustine, see Largier, Diogenes, 10–12. 20 Diogenes Laertius, Lives, 6.2.40. Cf Jane Donawerth’s discussion, in ‘Diogenes …,’ of the anecdote as it appears in Erasmus’s Apophthegmes, no. 65. 21 Diogenes Laertius, Lives, 6.2.32. 22 Foucault, Discourse, Lecture 1: ‘The Meaning and Evolution of the Word “Parrhesia.”’ 23 For a fuller discussion of Fortune in King Lear, see my ‘“The Mystery of Things”: The Role of Fortune in King Lear,’ Literatur in Wissenschaft und Unterricht 14 (1981): 191–205. 24 Among others, Peter Milward has drawn attention to the pietà-like scene in: ‘The Religious Dimension of King Lear,’ in Roy Battenhouse, ed., Shakespeare’s Christian Dimension: An Anthology of Commentary (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994), 452.

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PART III

Modern Drama

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13 An Experiment in Teaching: Pygmalion, My Fair Lady, and the Pursuit of Happiness alan ackerman

What a fool I was! What a dominated fool! To think you were the earth and sky. What a fool I was! What an addle-pated fool! What a mutton-headed dolt was I! No, my reverberating friend, You are not the beginning and the end! Alan Jay Lerner, My Fair Lady

The history of Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion, it is often observed, has come down to a struggle over endings.1 And no wonder. The legend of the work come to life has proved endlessly adaptable, from Ovid to W.S. Gilbert to Lerner and Loewe. It has been an opera (Rameau), a melodrama or scène lyrique (Rousseau), a series of oil paintings (Burne-Jones), a ballet, a film, and a Broadway musical, among other things. Its subject is both the creative life of art – independent of an ‘original’ creator – and the ability, or failure, of the artist to accommodate to change.2 Shaw provokingly subtitled his play a ‘romance,’ not because it is about love (he claimed) but because it is about transformation. Central to the history of Shaw’s play is the relationship between those who make transformations and those who are transformed. The latter rarely behave as the former desire, because they, too, turn out to have desires. The forty-nine-year-old actress Mrs Patrick Campbell, with whom Shaw became infatuated and for whom he wrote the part of the eighteen-year-old flower girl, subverted his wishes for an anti-romantic conclusion when on the opening night in London she added her own line before the curtain fell. After Eliza Doolittle bids Henry Higgins farewell, Higgins orders her to stop off and buy some Stilton cheese and a pair of gloves. She retorts, ‘Buy them yourself’ and sweeps out, as he

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remarks to his mother, ‘She’ll buy em right enough. Good-bye.’ To Eric Bentley, Eliza’s ambiguous exit is ‘the true naturalistic ending – not an arbitrary break, but a conclusion which is also a beginning.’3 But in one account, on the opening night in 1914, ‘Mrs. Campbell returned to the stage and asked, “What size?” And the curtain fell, along with Shaw’s jaw.’4 Mrs Campbell herself had encouraged and then rejected Shaw’s love. She married another man days before the play opened. As the run of the popular production continued, the embellishment of feeling between Eliza and Higgins intensified, prompting Shaw to denounce the ‘ragshop in which Romance keeps its stock of “happy endings” to misfit all stories.’5 Some have attributed his insistence that his play conclude contrary to the legendary marriage of Pygmalion and Galatea to his own sexual frustration. But Shaw blamed the vulgar appetites of the public, as well as the performers and directors who pandered to them.6 In 1916, for the publication of Pygmalion as a book, Shaw wrote an epilogue, which insisted that Eliza married Freddy, not Higgins, though she continued to meddle in the housekeeping at 27A Wimpole Street. ‘That is all,’ he writes. ‘That is how it turned out.’ He concludes that ‘when it comes to business, to the life that she really leads as distinguished from the life of dreams and fancies, she likes Freddy and she likes the Colonel; and she does not like Higgins and Mr. Doolittle.’7 Shaw’s insistence on whom and what Eliza likes, as well as on a limited, analytical, and almost inhuman realism can seem peculiar, even perverse, given the story’s subject and provenance. To privilege the ‘business’ of life over that of ‘dreams and fancies’ – even to make such a distinction – is to ignore the shaping power of fantasies and to deny or repress the imaginative sources of personal and social revitalization. It is, moreover, to disparage the work that culture (especially popular culture) does, which is to organize and incorporate highly fluid states of mind or feeling in our present experience. As Freud was teaching at the same time, fantasy and dreams, rather than springing from reality, are substantially what the real is. Whether or not the life that any of us ‘really’ leads can be distinguished from the life of dreams and fancies is a subject of the play, and it has been particularly vital to its twentieth-century, and especially American, commercial interpretations. When it was adapted by Alan Jay Lerner and Frederick Loewe as My Fair Lady, in a postwar American context marked by a widespread shift from domestic to international political concerns, the enormous expansion of the middle class, and the business of business, the rhetoric of the drama also shifted subtly from an emphasis on reform to one on freedom.8

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Recently, in the new Norton Anthology of Drama, J. Ellen Gainor comments in a preface to Pygmalion that the ‘critical and theatrical controversy that erupted over the play’s lack of narrative closure has perennially overshadowed explorations of other social and political issues raised in the play.’9 To the contrary, I argue that the controversy over the play’s lack of closure is precisely what is most socially and politically interesting about it. This play remains, particularly in its musical form (My Fair Lady largely retains the text of the 1941 edition of Pygmalion), Shaw’s most popular work, and his insistence on ‘how it turned out’ is idiosyncratic. Shaw’s dislike of stock endings is implicit in his dramatic theory, which favours discussion over the quick unravelling of the well-made play, but the inconclusiveness of his other dramas has provoked no such controversy. When he deployed the figure of Pygmalion again in 1921, at the end of Back to Methuselah, with automata he imagines as ‘Unalterable’ and ‘Inevitable,’ the scientist stupidly attempts to control his ‘Female Figure,’ who bites his hand and kills him. As the Serpent, who prompts Eve’s imagination and inflames her desires, tells her and Adam earlier in that play (‘In the Beginning’), ‘nothing is certain but uncertainty. If I bind the future I bind my will. If I bind my will I strangle creation.’10 Uncertainty means hope and happiness – both of which Adam, coining a new term, calls ‘wicked.’ He invents the marriage vow to ensure certainty, but Eve, the creative partner, refuses to be bound. The play concludes with a long speech by the first woman, Lilith, who declares, ‘Of Life only is there no end … It is enough that there is a beyond.’11 Why then insist that Eliza marry Freddy, or no one, or anyone but Higgins? In becoming a tale about the desire of a young woman, Pygmalion – and then, even more, My Fair Lady – is about the pursuit of happiness, as shaped both by a tradition of Old Comedy, with its emphasis on female transformation, and by the modern, liberal notion of being true to oneself. Eliza Doolittle, though comparable to Ibsen’s Nora Helmer, is a much different kind of heroine. Her search for comfort proves, paradoxically, a more feminist gesture than Nora’s ultimate door slam and departure from domestic security, and it is certainly more pragmatic. Unlike Nora she has not only experienced but also inhabited other worlds. She has already lived in the gutter. She speaks more than one language; so when it comes time to discuss potential outcomes, Eliza plays not for her life but for the good life. The question is how to define ‘good.’ Debates about the ending indicate that equality and freedom, desire and reason, body and mind, the outer and the inner, the good and the right are not the terms of an either/or choice. In this story, the relationship between

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these terms represents not tragic irreconcilability but a comic, progressive, and redemptive historical consciousness.12 My Fair Lady is a product of the Cold War and of what became the American Century. Lerner remarked in the early 1950s, ‘The times had changed. What we felt a musical should be had changed.’13 Among many changes, I want to focus on Lerner and Loewe’s reworking of the integrated book musical along the path charted most famously by Oklahoma! (1943) not only to combine Shaw’s discussion play (which Rodgers and Hammerstein wouldn’t touch) and a balanced score, but also to integrate Shaw’s arch-individualist, Henry Higgins, into at least the hint of a pluralistic community, the formation of which structures the plots of most American musicals. As Lerner explained, ‘Higgins goes through as much of a transformation as Eliza, the only difference being that Shaw would never allow the transformation to run its natural course.’14 This is a strong insight that indicates the pressures of history and culture, and it is manifested most brilliantly in the famous tango that Loewe wrote for ‘The Rain in Spain,’ the culmination of the instruction scene that does not appear in Shaw’s original play. It appears first in the 1938 film that Shaw co-authored but with nothing like the musical celebration that caps it.15 The tango is a musical form that emerged from the melting-pot culture of Argentina and spread like wildfire in the 1920s. A convergence of diverse, immigrant musical styles with explicit sexual overtones, it represents a particular blend of what Bentley calls, in comments on Pygmalion, ‘the standard conflict of vitality and system’ in the combination of strong beats that contain syncopated rhythms and the conclusion of bars with a New World, jazz element that the old bachelor Higgins himself takes up (‘By George, she’s got it! By George, she’s got it!’). It signifies what Scott McMillan calls the ‘voice of the musical’: ‘It is not so much that characters learn from one another’s musical motifs as that they sing their way into the “voice of the musical” – a voice that is not exactly their own but in which their voices can join.’16 Similarly, in the second half of the twentieth century nations had to recognize their own internal multiplicity, as minority groups asserted rights to local forms of language and culture of precisely the kind that Professor Higgins sought to overcome with his universalizing assumptions about language. The solo number ‘Why Can’t the English Teach Their Children How to Speak?’ reflects Higgins’s imperious dislike of pluralism (‘One common language I’m afraid we’ll never get’). The evolution of Pygmalion through My Fair Lady involves the translation not only of a flower girl into a duchess but also,

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as Higgins puts it, of the language of Shakespeare and Milton into the idiom of a modern, popular form of art, and of the Miltonic reformer into a liberal subject. In his classic work of Cold War social analysis, The End of Ideology, Daniel Bell describes the transformation of his generation (he was an exact contemporary of Lerner) from ends-driven ideologues of the 1930s, shaped by teleological systems of thought and visions of healing the world, into critics who resist being submerged in any one cause or accepting any particular embodiment of community as final. The postwar period was characterized by a profound reassessment of systems of thought that dictated rationalistic solutions to all social questions. Bell argues for constant social self-criticism based on a desire for consensus and adapting oneself to all sorts of people and situations. In their adaptation of Pygmalion, Lerner and Loewe dramatize this moral urge to achieve consensus in the midst of diversity through conversation and self-criticism. Eliza’s pursuit of happiness is made possible by her language lessons, and it is inseparable from and even defined by Higgins’s repugnant misogyny, moral complacency, and repressiveness, all of which are part and parcel of his (now dated) scientific passion for reform. When Mrs Higgins calls him selfish, he retorts, ‘Have it your own way. I have devoted my life to the regeneration of the human race through the most difficult science in the world.’ After the profound disillusionment with such language, expressed most famously by former communists such as Arthur Koestler and Ignazio Silone in the 1949 collection of essays The God That Failed, cold war Americans had little patience for such messianic fervour. Eliza, as opposed to Higgins, learns to internalize the critic and corrects her own language repeatedly (e.g., ‘What I done – [Correcting herself ] What I did …’) and in the final scene mimics her old self (‘I washed my face and hands before I come, I did’). In this respect she becomes a model of the enlightened, modern self-critical mind. When she says, ‘I’ll talk as I like. You’re not my teacher now,’ her self-conscious multilingualism and her dissent from his bullying paradoxically affirm their relationship. For Shaw it meant she had to leave what had become her home. She was a figure for the alienated petite bourgeoisie, never to be fully equal to Higgins’s aristocratic intelligence. For Lerner and for American audiences, it meant that she was finally at home, where she could be both a subject and an object with an inner and an outer life. This new vision of self that wants to know ‘what belongs to me and what doesn’t’17 had been articulated in Eliza’s first song, ‘Wouldn’t It Be Loverly,’ a soliloquy (unlike Higgins’s harangue, ‘Why Can’t the English?’) inspired by the wind-

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fall of money dropped in her flower basket. This scene does not occur in the play, in which she simply uses the money to take a cab home. Here we watch and listen to Eliza’s conventional dreams through not only a conventional musical form but also a language game Lerner describes as ‘the Cockney rhyme language in action,’18 a kind of language with complex rules of verbal substitution, internal splicing (‘absobloominlutely’), and rhyme. This richly materialistic and playful way of speaking a language is part of an activity, a form of life with its own local and distinctive world view, shared in this case by the denizens of London’s East End. We see, contrary to Higgins’s philosophy of phonemes, that ordinary habits of perception and ways of using language permit small patterns of feeling to coalesce in new directions and thereby enable a larger transformative power. There is a dynamic relationship between words and worlds. Through ‘Wouldn’t It Be Loverly?’ My Fair Lady shows that Eliza is fluent in an idiom which she shares with the choral ensemble but not with Higgins. Through this song Eliza dreams; she reveals an inner life, fancies that literally merge with her outer life. In fact, her dreams are prompted by her surroundings and by friends who ask ‘Where’re ya bound for this spring, Eliza?’ and then take up the tune. The Broadway audience is meant to sympathize with the people on the street in this scene (not with Higgins, who does not sing with anyone), as Americans all sing in a vernacular that both affirms the self (as Walt Whitman does in ‘Song of Myself’) and simultaneously enacts a performance of socialization. Becoming a consumer is essential to the development of Eliza’s subjectivity, as signified by the fact that she will later return to Covent Garden to buy the flowers she once sold. It also undercuts the opposition between desire and reason that Shaw posits in his Preface to Pygmalion where he delights that the play is so ‘intensely and deliberately didactic’ and ‘dry,’ and urges that the change wrought in the flower girl must be ‘done scientifically.’19 Lerner and Loewe show that desire and emotion make learning possible and contribute to the way we make sense of the world. Who, after all, will criticize the modest ‘All I want is a room somewhere’? The early placement of this lyrical reverie and its reprise later when she returns with Freddy to Covent Garden, neither flower girl nor at home, is essential to the structure of My Fair Lady, anticipating its contentious conclusion. What Lerner and Loewe envision is not a society with any particular end or model of the good (i.e., a teleological or utilitarian moral vision) but rather a social arrangement that can secure the means whereby every individual can pursue her own ends. They offer a liberal interpreta-

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tion of Eliza’s rebuttal to Higgins’s elitist reformist impulses: ‘I never thought of us making anything of each other; and you never think of anything else.’ To a large extent, the invidious comparisons of Lerner and Loewe’s musical to Shaw’s vision for the play have reflected a distrust of the optimism, energy, and confidence of an American culture that in the postwar years had begun to work as a kind of world culture that could make any place seem ‘like home.’ Higgins himself expresses ‘righteous contempt for Commercialism,’ and he refuses to ‘trade in affection.’20 In an otherwise laudatory review of the musical (‘A Directly Sensuous Pleasure’), Bentley complains that Lerner and Loewe did not give Julie Andrews the opportunity to achieve independence in the end. ‘There is only one change I seriously jibe at,’ he writes, ‘the utter sentimentalizing of the end.’21 But sentiment has a long, important, and political history on the American stage. Lerner reflected openly on the role of sentiment in mapping the ideological terrain of a new world: ‘America inherited from Mother England the concept that a civilized nation means a nation of laws. Unfortunately, as Judge Learned Hand once observed: “You cannot legislate the human heart.”’22 Like the German intellectual left with whom his work was popular (Pygmalion was first performed in German, in 1913), Shaw aimed to show that the bourgeois social order is not natural but is merely the latest in a succession of social orders. This flower girl is a product of the marketplace. He critiques society by confronting myth with fact, emulating his great anti-theatrical precursor Ibsen, who, in his view, told truth to power. In The Quintessence of Ibsenism, Shaw complains that the ideals or masks of romance merely conceal the brutalities of the sexual instinct, confine women to the domestic sphere, and, by conventionalizing behaviour, force individuals to act on the assumption that ideals are real. ‘The realist,’ he writes, ‘at last loses patience with ideals altogether, and sees in them only something to blind us, something to numb us, something to murder self in us.’23 This approach to art is unavoidably invidious to popular culture understood in terms of the predictable formulas and faked sensations of kitsch.24 Many American critics of the 1940s and 1950s, who were both hostile to the materialism of their own culture and aggrieved by their marginality to a national life dominated by business, politics, and commercialized popular culture, adopted this view. But the application of European ideologies – deterministic theories of functional rationality, mass culture, alienation, and exploitation – to the American scene has tended to mask the richness, creativity, and complexity of cold war commercial culture and audiences.

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To start with, critics of My Fair Lady disparaged Lerner’s prefatory note on Shaw’s ending: ‘Shaw explains how Eliza ends not with Higgins but with Freddy and – Shaw and heaven forgive me! – I am not certain he is right.’25 In the first issue of the journal Modern Drama, one critic lamented that Shaw’s ‘most successful adapter’ had dismissed the epilogue, and goes on to complain of Lerner’s irreverence: ‘The recurrent arousing of inappropriate audience expectations and the apparent inability of the play to arouse the appropriate expectations (or those which Shaw considered appropriate) raise a question about Pygmalion’s success on the playwright’s terms. Perhaps even more important, they call for a reexamination of these terms; for I think that the ending is significant and dramatically inevitable.’26 This patronizing critical voice and the insistence on dramatic inevitability (and implicit scepticism that the masses can ever be truly educated) disregards not only Eliza’s happiness and the audience’s pleasure but also the specific, communal anticipations that the musical comedy is designed to arouse. More important, this comment mistakes Eliza’s provisional happiness for ultimate happiness. Curiously, it ignores Lerner’s statement of uncertainty and the possibility that anyone might choose to become the agent of her own domestication. Eliza’s return suggests only a transitory acceptance of Higgins’s society and, as she stands next to the recording machine by the door in the final tableau, underscores the sense of being on a threshold that flowered under the massive social changes of the postwar years. The drama’s primary philosopher of the pursuit of happiness is Alfred P. Doolittle, the common dustman turned middle-class moralist. Shaw was deeply hostile to income inequality and to poverty, but he was not particularly sympathetic to the common man or to the liberal ideal of individual freedom and the pursuit of happiness. Higgins says, ‘Independence? That’s middle class blasphemy,’ a view shared by Shaw, who also had notions of reforming mankind.27 One of the didactic points of the play is that rising in wealth and class makes one less free. Doolittle does not find middle-class morality liberating; on the contrary, he harks wistfully to his days of poverty, ‘I was happy. I was free. I touched pretty nigh everybody for money when I wanted it.’28 Far from an inalienable right, the pursuit of happiness for Doolittle means the amorality of the gutter. Although his circumstances change, his character does not develop. Freedom and happiness, in Doolittle’s terms, have little to do with the higher values Shaw sought to advocate through his drama. As Errol Durbach writes, happiness ‘is not one of Shaw’s primary values when its corollary is poverty and the moral savagery that it promotes.’29 Pov-

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erty encourages unhealthy impulses, such as alcoholism and sexual licentiousness, which Shaw eschewed. In the preface to Major Barbara, he writes that the phrase ‘drunken but amiable’ is intolerable and immoral and that viewing the poor as ‘undeserving’ is thoughtless wickedness.30 For Doolittle, however, to give up his poverty is to give up happiness. As he explains to Higgins and Pickering, ‘I’m undeserving; and I mean to go on being undeserving. I like it, and that’s the truth.’ When Higgins offers to give him more than five pounds (in exchange for his daughter), he refuses, saying, ‘it makes a man feel prudent like; and then goodbye to happiness.’31 Doolittle is a dark figure in the play (and he is played that way by the marvellously scary Wilfrid Lawson in the 1938 film). It is a sign of the transformation of the play’s politics that Stanley Holloway’s performance of the role in My Fair Lady is central to the musical’s most fully satisfying and community-oriented numbers, ‘With a Little Bit of Luck’ and the paradoxical homage to marriage, ‘Get Me to the Church on Time.’ It has been argued that Lerner and Loewe sentimentalize both Alfred Doolittle and the hardscrabble scenes in the working-class neighbourhoods. But of course Doolittle is the play’s most American character, a fact signified in Shaw by the fact that he is initially staked by an American millionaire, who finds him an ‘original moralist.’ Ultimately, the dustman becomes heir to the American’s fortune and, in an ironic inversion, brings it back to the Old World. In America, unlike England, nearly everyone has a father (or someone in the family) like Alfred Doolittle, a parvenu, the common man who has risen in class, often so fast it makes him uncomfortable even with his own children. He can’t get rid of his Welsh accent, unmistakable in his ‘native woodnotes wild.’ Whether or not the ethnic Doolittle is sentimentalized, the workingclass numbers that he sings and dances like a good old vaudevillian turn into the drama’s most full-fledged ensemble numbers. They involve the whole community and make him the drama’s epitome of democracy. Doolittle represents a vital aspect of postwar American liberalism that reflects on the ending of the play as well. His critique of middle-class morality from his new middle-class position is a characteristic feature of a culture that not only tolerates but elicits resistance as a staple of its own social revitalization.32 It is worth noting, for instance, that in 1958 the Reader’s Digest, with a circulation of twelve million, published an article entitled ‘The Danger of Being Too Well-Adjusted.’ American popular culture undermines any essential opposition between oppressive society and liberating art. ‘The curious fact,’ Daniel Bell writes, ‘is

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that no one in the United States defends conformity. Everyone is against it, and probably, everyone always was.’33 However one interprets or rewrites Shaw’s play, then, it is clear that it revolves around the question of what is to become of Eliza. In the 1941 Penguin edition, an amalgamated text with scenes added after the movie and, thus, elements of popular culture threaded into it, Higgins dismisses his mother’s comment that Eliza is attracted to Pickering with ‘Nonsense: she’s going to marry Freddy. Ha ha! Freddy! Freddy!! Ha ha ha ha ha!!!!! (He roars with laughter as the play ends.).’ What exactly is so funny? Shaw wrote the script for the 1938 film to remove any suggestion of a romantic ending, but the producer, Gabriel Pascal, hired other screenwriters to construct a saccharine conclusion that is the basis for, though even more romantically suggestive than, the end of My Fair Lady. The movie version and My Fair Lady end with a question: ‘Eliza? Where the devil are my slippers?’ Biographer Michael Holroyd comments that Shaw’s ‘attempts to clear up [the play’s] ambiguity, stimulated by the actors’ and public’s response to the sub-text, have blurred the outline of its elegant structure.’34 But the ending posed a problem for Shaw’s play and his systematic mode of thought before he started tinkering with it. The structural lynchpin of the plot, and the key to the negotiations of Lerner and Loewe with actor Rex Harrison, is the scene after the triumph of the ball. Higgins is taking all the credit, and Eliza demands, ‘What is to become of me?’ Interpreting the film, Lerner felt that Leslie Howard, who played Higgins, knew full well what was to become of her, but he convinced Harrison that Higgins is genuinely amazed at the question and only comes to grips with it later in the play.35 Many of the play’s characters ask this question explicitly from the earliest scenes, ‘And what is to become of her when you’ve finished with your teaching,’ inquires the housekeeper, Mrs Pearce, in the second act. What will Eliza finally do? Where will she go? She may marry Freddy and live miserably above a flower shop, as Shaw gleefully predicts. She may set up as a teacher of phonetics, as she proposes indignantly when Higgins challenges her at his mother’s house, to which she has fled. She may return to live with Higgins and Pickering in a spirit of collegial bachelorhood. Or she may submit to the sadomasochistic, and, as everyone from the British Home Office to Eliza’s own father has assumed, sexual bullying of her professor. But, really, even to name these possible ends, as Shaw insisted on doing in his epilogue, is to degrade the play and the characters in it. None of these ends sounds ‘decent’ in the language of the play, most of all because none accords Eliza the dignity that, drawing upon the language

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of rights, she insists upon from the beginning: ‘He’s no right to take away my character. My character is the same to me as any lady’s.’ The problem, of course, is that Higgins, Shaw himself, and many other interpreters of Eliza’s character regard her not as an end in herself but as a means to an end. They have, moreover, confused happiness (or particular forms of happiness) with the pursuit of happiness. Eliza’s literal removal from the marketplace is a precondition for turning her into first an aesthetic object and then a subject. To their minds, Eliza is an instance of the injustice of the British class system, and, like the horse Dover in My Fair Lady, the vehicle for winning Higgins’s bet and proving the efficacy of his system. He will ‘pass her off as anything.’36 She serves what the two old bachelors describe as ‘an experiment in teaching.’37 Pygmalion allows no space for natural rights. Higgins uses Eliza’s own language of rights against her (‘You’ve no right to be anywhere – no right to live’), when he first meets her in Covent Garden selling flowers with a dirty face. Eliza does not, in this view, have innate or inalienable rights. Of course, Doolittle’s assertion of his ‘rights as a father’ is totally cynical, a veneer for the prostitution of his daughter. Only after Eliza has undergone the second part of her transformation, not from flower girl to duchess but, as Bentley describes it, from ‘a mechanical doll in the role of a duchess’ to a woman,38 does Higgins condescend to announce, ‘Now you are free and can do what you like.’ Eliza herself recognizes that Higgins’s notion of her freedom is painfully circumscribed. As Pothinus remarks ironically in Shaw’s Caesar and Cleopatra, which anticipates Pygmalion in many of its themes, ‘You are turning us out of our own palace into the streets; and you tell us that we are free to go!’39 For Pothinus, as for the Pygmalion and Galatea-like Adam and Eve in Back to Methuselah, the final exit will mean both freedom and death. Following the same logic, Eliza can never return to the garden – in her case, as a flower girl in Covent Garden – for she is irreversibly transformed. But that does not mean that she can’t return to 27A Wimpole Street. The inadequacies of the three bachelors (Higgins, Pickering, and Freddy) reflect her growing role as a desiring subject. It is impossible to imagine any of them ultimately satisfying her. Yet she resembles Hermione in The Winter’s Tale, when she finally steps down from her pedestal and returns to Leontes, who, it need hardly be said, does not deserve her. Like Hermione, Eliza stands for the idea of performance itself. Lerner and Loewe give her a final song, ‘[There’ll be spring ev’ry year] Without You’ (recalling the reference to spring in the cue to her first song, ‘Wouldn’t It Be Loverly?’), which hints at a power of creation beyond

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Higgins and leaves him ‘thunderstruck.’40 Like Hermione, Eliza embodies the power of theatricality to be a mode of self-generation and, therefore, of uncertainty.41 Edward Dowden’s 1877 classification of The Winter’s Tale as romance rather than comedy is what Shaw had in mind when he subtitled his own play. But ultimately his didacticism could not accommodate a pupil or a public that might choose an end less satisfying (in his opinion) than his own. Resembling Hermione as much as her daughter, the flower girl Perdita, Eliza is a figure for not just natural but also social rejuvenation, and she, too, becomes an instrument of social cohesion. In this, she also resembles Hester Prynne in Hawthorne’s Scarlet Letter, who voluntarily returns home to take up her ‘A’ in a selfconscious acceptance of limitation and social order. Like Hester’s value as a dissenter within Puritan New England, Eliza’s return to Higgins at the end of My Fair Lady can best be understood in the context of the richness and ambiguity of American liberalism. In calling the play My Fair Lady, rather than Pygmalion, Lerner and Loewe focused on Eliza, Shaw’s figure of transformation, and, in the tradition of the Broadway musical, on theatricality itself. In the musical adaptation, Eliza, who has been birthed by two fathers (the Apollonian Higgins and the Dionysian Doolittle), is a model of what Andrea Most has called ‘theatrical liberalism,’ a quasi-religious mode of performing the self that both celebrates individual freedom and articulates a range of social obligations. Contrary to the estrangement or alienation effect that was supposed to characterize dramatic art (for example, by Brecht, who also regarded Shaw as an important precursor, or Kurt Weill, who hoped Lerner would work on an American Threepenny Opera), the cultural work of American popular culture is a process of making familiar, epitomized by the recognition scene in Lerner’s adaptation, when Higgins sings, ‘I’ve Grown Accustomed to Her Face.’42 Most suggests that rather than creating the alienation effect Brecht describes, the separation of elements in the Broadway musical contributes to an assimilation effect, which ‘combines the self-consciousness provoked by the separation of elements on the musical stage with emotional response and communal celebration.’43 Dissolving difference, the major theme of My Fair Lady, is not the same as rejecting the foreign (satirized by the oily Hungarian linguist who both performs and exposes foreignness), but it pointedly aims to diffuse cold war anxiety about the foreigner in the midst. European émigrés flooded and reshaped the postwar American landscape, learning and teaching new forms of the American idiom.44 In My Fair Lady, after

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the hairy hound from Budapest ridiculously asserts at the Embassy Ball that Eliza is foreign because her English is too good, there is a musical number back at Higgins’s home, literally shifting the action from the space of foreign affairs to the domestic, where Higgins actually thanks heaven for Zoltan Karpathy and mimics him in his ‘best dramatic manner.’ He sings: That blackguard who uses the science of speech More to blackmail and swindle than teach; He made it the devilish business of his ‘To find out who this Miss Doolittle is.’45

Rather than worrying that the pest from Budapest would undo everything, Higgins decided it was foolish not to let him have a chance to unmask Eliza, which results in the affirmation of his entire strategy. ‘Congratulations, Professor Higgins, / For your glorious victory!’ sing his servants. ‘You’ll be mentioned in history.’ The popularity of Shaw’s play in its various forms (and audiences’ wistfulness for a happy ending) is inseparable from the historical events that overtook it, specifically, the fragmentation of an old world order and a heightened sense of multiplicity in the languages and cultures of the new. A paean to Edwardian style and the authority of the British Empire, Pygmalion is also a tale of rapid personal, social, and technological change. It premiered in Vienna on 16 October 1913 before the Archduke Franz Ferdinand, whose assassination a year later would bring on the First World War and the end of the thousand-year-old Habsburg Empire (the Eastern European figures in the play, such as the Hungarian linguist, all would have been its subjects). It was made into a film in 1938 on the eve of the Second World War, which led to the end not only of the German, Japanese, and Italian but also the British, French, Dutch, and Belgian empires. Although the Hungarian character appears in Shaw as well, the 1956 Revolution and subsequent Soviet suppression of Hungary, contemporary with My Fair Lady, means that this figure performs a different kind of work in the later context. In the 1964 Academy Award-winning film, Karpathy was played by the multilingual Theodore Bikel, who specialized in foreign types, as second-in-command of the German U-boat in The Enemy Below (1957), later as the Soviet captain in The Russians Are Coming, the Russians Are Coming (1966), and, repeatedly in his signature role as Tevye in Fiddler on the Roof. Karpathy is Doolittle’s dark double, the ethnic other who employs his theatrical skill with

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language not to assimilate and celebrate the community but to work surreptitiously for the rich and powerful and to undermine those who have assimilated. Eliza’s most successful jab at Higgins, to suggest that she will offer herself as an assistant to the ‘brilliant Hungarian,’ thus had an added weight during the Cold War. To this suggestion Higgins responds furiously: ‘What! That imposter! That Humbug! … Teach him my methods! My discoveries? [He strides toward her] You take one step in that direction and I’ll wring your neck.’46 Far from a genuine alternative to the maestro, the blackguard Karpathy is anti-pluralistic. The power of a moral language to persuade, to seem not ‘foreign’ but transparently ‘true,’ obtained a heightened urgency after 1947 with the articulation and implementation of the Truman Doctrine and the Marshall Plan, both framed in the rhetoric of freedom versus totalitarianism. American artists were caught up in the postwar rise of a Western cultural front designed to combat Soviet propaganda, an international battle for minds. Like Professor Higgins and Colonel Pickering, these writers and artists wittingly and unwittingly enlisted in a battle to claim the Eliza Doolittles of the world. ‘A woman who utters such depressing and disgusting sounds,’ comments Higgins, ‘has no right to be anywhere – no right to live.’47 Shaw’s play represents the imperial reach of the ‘language of Shakespeare and Milton and the Bible.’ In focusing on Eliza’s education, however, Lerner’s book and lyrics represent the attempt to devise a universal language (Professor Higgins is author of Higgins’ Universal Alphabet) in which differences can be stated and resolved. Higgins insists on treating everyone the same; through her language lessons, Eliza learns to recognize difference. In 1956, the year My Fair Lady premiered, the New York Metropolitan Opera was launched in Europe as part of a State Department initiative to ‘project the correct image of the U.S. abroad.’ As Charles Douglas Jackson, who was an ardent Cold Warrior and Eisenhower campaigner, trustee of the Boston Symphony, and sponsor of many musical programs of the 1950s, explained, ‘The one area which is as sure fire as any that have been tried, is the cultural projection of America – provided of course that the selection of what constitutes American culture is intelligently made and that nothing is sent over except highest quality.’48 Shaw’s works, too, were produced as part of a massive theatre program launched by the American government in postwar Europe under the heading ‘Liberty and Democracy.’49 Lerner and Loewe openly challenge not only Higgins’s god’s-eye view but also the highbrow critical impulse of the state-supported cultural Cold War – as in Lerner’s prefatory note to Shaw and Heaven – to judge their own

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adaptation’s merits from such a lofty perspective; but their cultural aims are no less ambitious. Eliza’s foreignness of class or ethnicity may be erased, but one form of otherness remains. She is irreducibly a woman. In the 1950s when Lerner and Loewe wrote My Fair Lady, female college attendance had dropped below what it had been in the 1920s. More than ever, the work world became men’s domain. This is not to say that Lerner and Loewe were feminists (certainly not). Lerner married eight times and Loewe’s sex life was even more complicated; together they later wrote ‘Thank Heaven for Little Girls.’ But the form they chose, the musical comedy, gave pride of place not only to the female performer but also to the pleasures of femininity. Pickering, the play notes, is oddly interested in ladies’ gowns, and he and Higgins tell Higgins’s mother they derive great pleasure from dressing her and playing with Eliza.50 The title and musical style of My Fair Lady, specifically the contrast between Eliza’s ballads (written for Julie Andrews) and the ‘musical talking’ composed for Higgins (Rex Harrison, who could not sing), plus the hiring of the flamboyant Cecil Beaton as costume designer, all indicate a shift of emphasis from Pygmalion to Galatea. As a woman, Eliza, while provoking Bentley’s ambivalence about sensuous pleasure, actually models the liberal subject more effectively than Higgins ever could. In My Fair Lady, he only wonders ‘Why Can’t a Woman Be More Like a Man?’ – a song inspired when Harrison (who married six times himself and, according to Lerner’s then-wife Nancy Olson, knew nothing about women) remarked to Lerner one day, ‘Alan! Wouldn’t it be marvellous if we were homosexuals?’51 In fact, the answer to why a woman can’t be more like a man is in the musical form itself, the pleasure Higgins and Pickering take in playing with their ‘live doll,’ the tension between song and book, and the importance of the female star to the musical number. The distinctiveness of the Broadway musical in postwar American culture, writes D.A. Miller, ‘is not that it leads a woman to inhabit the socially given idea of her gender … but that it seduces a man to inhabit the same idea.’52 The relation of My Fair Lady to Pygmalion embodies these formal tensions in a way that illuminates their diverse symbolic meanings. Shaw’s resistance to sentimentalizing the ending of his play was second only (if it was second) to his insistence that the play not be made into a musical; this in spite of the fact that the story had been successfully and ‘seriously’ dramatized with music before. ‘I absolutely forbid any such outrage,’ he wrote at the end of his long life. Pygmalion was good enough ‘with its own verbal music.’53 Shaw,

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of course, was a perceptive music critic and a Wagnerite; his mother was a music teacher and his sister a singer of light opera. But, in spite of the view that his plays are rooted in nineteenth-century ‘music-drama’ and that he thought of his language as ‘word-music,’ Shaw’s preference for ‘dry’ didactic realism indicates his assumption that music is at best superfluous to rational-critical discourse.54 ‘The action of such plays,’ he writes, ‘consists of a case to be argued.’55 Shaw’s discussion plays are dramas of ideas, but the Broadway musical centres on the expression of feelings. The American musical play required, as Lerner put it, ‘conventions involving the balance of the score, the proper distribution of solos, ensemble singing and choreography.’56 This particular dramatic form – arguably America’s most important contribution to the world stage – had evolved with the aim of increasingly integrating the narrative naturalism of the book and the sensuous exuberance of the musical numbers. My Fair Lady comes at the end of the golden age of the American musical and represents its triumph and its limitations. Beaton’s spectacular costumes, which first render Eliza virtually a mannequin, hark back to the spectacles of Florence Ziegfeld and Busby Berkeley, though neither of those impresarios allowed for the individuality that Eliza displays. As Beaton later wrote, ‘Who is there better to dress than the impeccable Audrey Hepburn?’57 The answer is certainly not Rex Harrison. This heritage of spectacle is the source of one of Bentley’s complaints: ‘I believe that clothes exist to show off women, and not vice versa.’58 However, the musical drama had come a long way from the spectacle of indistinguishable women’s bodies, and although Eliza, like the statue Galatea, taps into the idea that women in musicals exist to be on display, the central dramatic conflict arises from her refusal to remain in that role. D.A. Miller goes so far as to suggest of the Broadway musical that the showpieces are the spaces, within the play’s otherwise ‘unremitting dramatic consistency,’ that offer a prospect of liberation.59 These numbers license a spectacular femininity, which has an enthralling, seductive power that rationalist, scientific (Shavian) realism is unable to master. The brouhaha surrounding the casting and dubbing of Audrey Hepburn for the film of My Fair Lady, after the triumph of Julie Andrews on Broadway, is balanced by the fact that no dubbing was needed for Rex Harrison because he couldn’t sing and didn’t need to, a limitation inseparable from the judgmental misogyny of the character and the actor. The previous decade marked an unusual moment in the history of the American musical. Although most male leads had important sing-

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ing roles, starting with South Pacific (1947), in which the operatic style of Emile de Becque contrasts with the popular singing style of Nellie Forbush, a tension had developed between vocal styles which was often figured as a difference in languages. This is clearly the case in South Pacific, in which Nellie has to learn French and in The King and I, which pits the schoolteacher Anna Leonowens against the King of Siam, and for which Rex Harrison was first offered the role of the king but turned it down. The point is less that Rex Harrison or Professor Higgins can’t sing, because he does in his fashion, but that a different mode of singing is figured as a linguistic difference that must be overcome to establish a new (often international) social reality. Ironically, it may seem that not singing places the star in a position of greater power, but in each play that position of (male) power is exposed, and the non-singer has to meet the popular ‘knucklehead’ figure halfway. There is, in short, a basic reason why a woman can’t be more like a man in a musical: she is its central figure for performance. Thus, the logic of the Broadway play demanded a different style for Higgins’s musical performances, which Loewe called sprechtgesang (basically, talking on pitch) and wrote specifically for Harrison, who insisted on fidelity to Shaw’s play, a weird logocentrism that reflected the musical adaptation’s formal tensions on an extradiegetic level. The distinct musical languages of My Fair Lady represent an irreducible moral diversity, yet they also imply the need for some common ground, both musically and verbally, within which characters can agree to disagree without pretending to false unity or transcendence. Like Nellie who wishes to marry the French planter Emile in South Pacific, Eliza needs to learn a language. But to form a newly global community, as both Nellie and Anna in The King and I do, she will also need to become a teacher. In short, she is not the drama’s only subject of an ‘experiment in teaching.’ Higgins hints at whom and what she might teach when he confesses humbly in the end that he has ‘learned something from [her] idiotic notions,’ and musicologists have pointed out that he picks up some of Eliza’s musical motifs even in his sprechtgesang.60 My Fair Lady illuminates the condition of democracy and education in 1950s New York, specifically, the problem of forging a shared moral language in a postwar cosmopolitan culture. Philosophical concerns about the relations between ordinary and metaphysical language trickled into the realms of popular culture and politics. America’s foremost educator, John Dewey, sought to transform the kind of rigid method of teaching by recitation employed by Higgins into ‘a social clearing house, where ideas and experiences

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are exchanged and subjected to criticism, where misconceptions are corrected, and new lines of inquiry are set up.’61 Linguists Benjamin Lee Whorf and Edward Sapir posited a systematic relationship between the grammatical categories of the language a person speaks and how that person both understands the world and behaves in it. Public discourse in the 1940s and 1950s is characterized by ‘meta-language,’ a term coined by linguist Roman Jacobson in 1956, the year in which My Fair Lady won the Tony Award on Broadway. The problem of thinking about language in the abstract led increasingly in the postwar years to a more functional approach to the act of communication. New ways of thinking about languages discouraged the isolation of particular words or utterances from what Jacobson called a larger ‘speech event.’ ‘The question of relations between the word and the world,’ he wrote, ‘concerns not only verbal art but actually all kinds of discourse.’62 Jacobson is interested in the split between what he calls the emotive and the conative aspects of language, which had previously been classified as non-linguistic elements of the ‘real world.’ But these fluctuating and protean aspects of the ‘speech event’ are vital to the act of communication. Jacobson, a linguist from Prague rather than (Karpathy’s) Budapest, represents the turn to a wider appreciation of the function of language during the cold war and a desire to bring together poetics and grammar. The peculiar happiness of Eliza, Higgins, and the audience in the end is a political emotion. Bentley’s jibes at sentiment are not only undemocratic but also blind to the vital role that desire plays in the workings of moral choice. The language lessons represented on Broadway in the 1950s did not aim simply to produce the complacent and materialistic response for which many blame both Eliza and American middle-class audiences. It will be useful, therefore, to move beyond the trivial debate to which the history of the play has been reduced: Should Eliza return to Higgins or not? More important is what the play can teach us about the pursuit of happiness. What, it forces us to ask, are the dominant life stories in the culture that enable individuals to develop new narratives, and what happens when people run out of stories to tell about themselves? In the musical My Fair Lady, Eliza embodies the youth and creative potential for which romance represents the possibility of a consensual union. But there is nothing to suggest that that union is permanent or perfect. On the contrary, tested against the lyrical dreaming of ‘Wouldn’t It Be Loverly,’ Higgins’s imperial rhetoric and the tonal limitations of his sprechtgesang force questions about the contrasting world views the two styles and vocabularies constitute. American liberalism does not pre-

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scribe any single end (including Eliza’s choice of Higgins). Rather, her lessons secure the means by which she can pursue her own ends. The play ends with a question. Notes 1 Michael Holroyd, Bernard Shaw, 3 vols (New York: Vintage, 1989), 2: 332. The author thanks Lawrence Switzky and Andrea Most for reading and commenting on earlier drafts of this essay. 2 See Linda Hutcheon, A Theory of Adaptation (New York: Routledge, 2006), xii–xiv. 3 Eric Bentley, Bernard Shaw, 1856–1950 (Norfolk, CT; New Directions, 1947), 124. 4 Alan Jay Lerner, The Street Where I Live: The Story of My Fair Lady, Gigi, and Camelot (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1978), 37. 5 Bernard Shaw, Pygmalion, in Complete Plays with Prefaces, 6 vols (New York: Dodd, Mead and Company, 1963), 1: 281. 6 The first production of My Fair Lady was as much about director Moss Hart’s education of Julie Andrews as a star of the musical stage as it was about the education of Eliza Doolittle. 7 Shaw, Pygmalion, 294–5. 8 Shaw had envisaged Higgins as a scientific reformer of mankind, but, as Protestant theologian Reinhold Niebuhr wrote in The Self and the Dramas of History (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1955), ‘The radical freedom of the self and the consequent dramatic realities of history are naturally embarrassing to any scientific effort, either to understand or to master history’ (49). 9 J. Ellen Gainor, ‘George Bernard Shaw,’ in The Norton Anthology of Drama, 2 vols (New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 2009), 2: 406. 10 Bernard Shaw, Back to Methuselah. A Metabiological Pentateuch (London: Constable and Company Ltd, 1921), 16–17 11 Bernard Shaw, Back to Methuselah, 266–7. Major Barbara also concludes inconclusively after Lady Britomart asks simply, ‘What do you want, Barbara?’ No one asks Eliza this kind of question in Shaw, though they do in Lerner’s adaptation (cf ‘Wouldn’t It Be Loverly?’). 12 See James Livingston, Pragmatism, Feminism and Democracy: Rethinking the Politics of American History (New York: Routledge, 2001), 12–14. 13 Quoted in Gene Lees, The Musical Worlds of Lerner and Loewe (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2005), 93. 14 Alan Jay Lerner, ‘Shavian Musical Notes,’ New York Times, 11 March 1956.

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15 On relations between the book and the musical see Geoffrey Block, Enchanted Evenings: The Broadway Musical from Show Boat to Sondheim (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 232 ff; Scott McMillan, The Musical as Drama (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006), 47–9; and Joseph P. Swain, The Broadway Musical: A Critical and Musical Survey (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990; rpt 2002), 195–6. 16 Scott McMillan, The Musical as Drama, 68. 17 Alan Jay Lerner, My Fair Lady; A Musical Play in Two Acts, Based on Pygmalion by Bernard Shaw (London: Max Reinhardt Ltd and Constable and Co. Ltd, 1958), 146, 155, 146, 112. 18 Alan Jay Lerner, The Street Where I Live, 59–60. 19 Bernard Shaw, Preface, Pygmalion, 194. 20 Bernard Shaw, Pygmalion, 276. 21 Eric Bentley, ‘A Directly Sensuous Pleasure,’ in What Is Theatre? (New York: Limelight Editions, 1984), 284. Louis Crompton comments that it is the ‘refusal to sentimentalize that gives the play its distinction,’ a remark that is best answered by noting that few would read the play today if not for the tendency to sentimentalize it. Louis Crompton, ‘Improving Pygmalion,’ in Shaw the Dramatist (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1969). 22 Alan Jay Lerner, The Street Where I Live, 46. 23 Bernard Shaw, The Quintessence of Ibsenism (New York: Hill and Wang, 1913), 44. 24 Clement Greenberg, ‘Avant-Garde and Kitsch,’ Partisan Review 6.5 (Fall 1939): 34–49, at 34. 25 Alan Jay Lerner, My Fair Lady, 111. 26 Myron Matlaw, ‘The Denouement of Pygmalion,’ Modern Drama 1.1 (May 1958): 29. 27 Shaw, Pygmalion, 279. 28 Ibid., 264. 29 Errol Durbach, ‘Myth and Anti-Myth in the Plays of Ibsen and Shaw,’ in George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion, ed. Harold Bloom (New York: Chelsea House Publishers, 1988), 97. 30 Bernard Shaw, Preface to Major Barbara. Complete Plays with Prefaces, 6 vols (New York: Dodd, Mead and Company, 1963), 2: 305–7. 31 Bernard Shaw, Pygmalion, 229–31. 32 See Sacvan Bercovitch, The Rites of Assent: Transformation in the Symbolic Construction of America (New York: Routledge, 1993), 17. 33 Daniel Bell, The End of Ideology: On Exhaustion of Political Ideas in the Fifties (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1960), 35. See also Bercovitch, The Rites of Assent, 17.

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Holroyd, Bernard Shaw, 2: 331 Lerner, The Street Where I Live, 58. Shaw, Pygmalion, 215. Ibid., 220. Bentley, Bernard Shaw, 121. Bernard Shaw, Caesar and Cleopatra (1901; rpt New York: The Bobbs-Merrill Company, Inc., 1931), 56. Lerner, My Fair Lady, 150. See Stanley Cavell, ‘The Winter’s Tale,’ in Disowning Knowledge in Six Plays of Shakespeare (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 20. I draw here on the argument about ‘making familiar’ from Philip Fisher, Hard Facts: Setting and Form in the American Novel (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), 19, and Andrea Most, Making Americans: Jews and the Broadway Musical (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004), 8–10. Most shows that Brecht’s theories of theatre had a complex relation to American theatrical forms and that the concept of ‘alienation effect’ in particular never took off in American popular theatre. The same issue of Modern Drama in which Matlaw’s critique of My Fair Lady appears also contains a review of Francis Fergusson’s The Human Image in Dramatic Literature, which treats ‘serious and important dramatists’ such as Brecht, Wilder, Eliot, Joyce, and Lorca. See Kenneth Inniss, Review of The Human Image in Dramatic Literature by Francis Fergusson. Modern Drama 1.1 (May 1958): 60–1. Most, Making Americans, 9. Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita (New York: Vintage, 1989), 312. The linguistic virtuosity of Vladimir Nabokov’s 1955 novel, Lolita, represented Nabokov’s way of ‘inventing America’ in a love affair not between two people so much as between himself and the English language, but also signified dangers implicit in an affair between the elderly male European and his young female protégée. Lerner, My Fair Lady, 104. Ibid., 147. Ibid., 7. C.D. Jackson to Theodore Streibert, Director, USIA, 28 July 1955); quoted in Frances Stonor Saunders, The Cultural Cold War: The CIA and the World of Arts and Letters (New York: The New Press, 1999), 117, 225. The Devil’s Disciple, in particular, was singled out for propagandistic purposes. See Saunders, The Cultural Cold War, 21. See My Fair Lady, 76, 67. On the postwar musical’s indulging of the pleasures of femininity, see D.A. Miller, A Place for Us: Essay on the Broadway Musical (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998), 90.

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51 Keith Garebian, The Making of My Fair Lady, 53. Nancy Olson said, ‘Alan’s relationship with Rex was much closer than with Julie. I don’t think Rex was truly interested in women the way many men are. I felt that he did not feel comfortable with women.’ See Lees, The Musical Worlds of Lerner and Loewe, 123. 52 Miller, A Place for Us, 89 53 Holroyd, Bernard Shaw, 333. 54 Shaw himself had occasionally encouraged the view that his plays were rooted in a tradition of music-drama. J.L. Wisenthal, ‘Please Remember, This Is Italian Opera: Shaw’s Plays as Music-drama,’ in The Cambridge Companion to Bernard Shaw, ed. Christopher Innes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 287. For a discussion of how Shaw ‘scored’ his plays, see Martin Meisel, Shaw and the Nineteenth-Century Theater (Santa Barbara, CA: Greenwood Press, 1976), 38–64; also Harry White, Music and the Irish Literary Imagination (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), 133–52. Insofar as he worried in the case of Pygmalion that music would actually have a deleterious effect on the discourse, he may have been thinking of Oscar Straus’s bastardization of Arms and the Man into The Chocolate Soldier in 1909/1910. 55 Shaw, Quintessence of Ibsenism, 176. 56 Lerner, The Street Where I Live, 65. 57 Cecil Beaton, Cecil Beaton’s My Fair Lady (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1964), 127–8. 58 Bentley, ‘A Directly Sensuous Pleasure,’ 285. 59 Miller, A Place for Us, 7. 60 Lerner, My Fair Lady, 145. Scott McMillan, for instance, comments that the first four notes of Higgins’s ‘I’ve Grown Accustomed to Her Face’ are identical to the first four notes of the bridge (the B section) in Eliza’s ‘I Could Have Danced All Night.’ See McMillan, The Musical as Drama, 67. 61 John Dewey, The Middle Works, 1899–1924, ed. Jo Ann Boydston, 5 vols (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1967–72), 1: 34. 62 Roman Jacobson, ‘The Speech Event and the Functions of Language,’ in On Language, ed. Linda R. Waugh and Monique Monville-Burston (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990), 69–79, at 70.

14 ‘The Going to Pieces of T. Lawrence Shannon’: Notes on Tennessee Williams’s Drafts of The Night of the Iguana (1961) brian parker

I Although Tennessee Williams continued to produce important work for another twenty years, The Night of the Iguana was his last great popular and critical success and, arguably, also the most profound of all his writings, raising basic philosophic and religious questions. The day it opened on Broadway, Williams’s brother Dakin, himself a convert to Roman Catholicism, introduced the playwright to a young priest to whom Williams tried to explain that, though he believed in a power in the universe that he could call ‘God’ and in the value, indeed necessity, of prayer in times of stress, he could not accept the church’s doctrine of original sin nor its belief in an afterlife.1 It is this paradoxical and very personal position that Iguana explores, drawing on concepts from Christianity, Buddhism, Nietzsche, psychoanalysis, and the existentialism that dominated Western thought in the years after the Second World War. Williams himself described Iguana as ‘a kind of summation of what I’ve derived finally from [my] mixed feelings and attitudes’;2 and the difficulty of effecting such a summary is revealed in the extraordinary amount of rewriting the material was put through over a period of thirty-one years – extraordinary even for Tennessee Williams, who was a maniacal reviser who put every work through many drafts, pieced final texts together like mosaics, and claimed no play of his should ever be considered finished.3 The play is based on Williams’s own experience in Acapulco in 1940, as recorded in his Memoirs, his essay ‘A Summer of Discovery,’ and the first volume of his Selected Letters. Its first literary manifestation was the original draft of Nonno’s poem in Act Three, which provides the thematic spine of the play. This original is dated ‘Acapulco, Mexico, August

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1940,’ with the annotation, ‘Written on the verandah of the hotel Costa Verde, over the Pacific Ocean, as I watched the daylight fading on a tree of big golden lemons.’4 In the play ‘lemon’ is changed to ‘orange’ to agree better with the adjective ‘golden,’ the lines are rearranged into quatrains, and ‘expression’ in line 4 is changed to ‘betrayal’ but incorporated into Nonno’s struggles with composition at the end of Act One. In 1945 Williams drafted a short story with the same title as the play, and after revision in Rome three years later, this was published in the collection One Arm and Other Stories of 1948.5 As published, the story version differs considerably from the play. Edith (not Hannah) Jelkes, a lonely spinster recovering from a nervous breakdown, spies on two gay writers at a Mexican resort and during a climactic thunderstorm is sexually assaulted by the older writer while his partner frees a captive iguana. The 1945 first draft is much closer to the play, however. Instead of the assault, Edith and the older writer exchange confidences like Hannah and Shannon in Act Three of the play. Reflecting Williams’s own experience, the writer explains how modern society deforms ‘homolectuals’ and provokes them to a ‘preposterous’ ideal of absolute truth telling, a ‘romantic excess of candour’ that he fears may ultimately do little good – as Shannon comes to question his own compulsion to force tourists to confront the misery of the tropics. Artists, the writer says, are distorted in a society ‘led only by economic tycoons,’ so that, abandoning their ‘sceptical reason,’ they take refuge in some ‘antique form of religion,’ as Shannon’s disillusion with complacent parishioners in the play reduces him to worshipping the ‘oblivious majesty’ of God seen merely as amoral cosmic energy. And when Edith complains that the writer’s partner is not a fit companion for him, he realizes that she herself must be looking for someone to live with, and advises her that her kindest fate will be to find a companion she can drown with – foreshadowing the HannahNonno co-dependency of the play and Hannah’s terrible isolation after her grandfather has died. After their discussion it is the older writer who then frees the iguana. Much of the deepest level of the play was thus implicit in the original draft of the short story but was lost in the published revision. In 1947 the short story was turned into a long one-act play for the Spoleto Festival in Italy,6 the final text for which has disappeared7 because Williams immediately began cannibalizing it to produce a full-length, three-act play that went through five or six major rewritings. An early version of the full-length text was tried out at the Coconut Grove Theatre of Coral Gables, Miami, in August 1960.8 Then the process of revision

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continued for over a year, to culminate painfully in a horrendous eightweek try-out tour, when everything conceivable went wrong. Bette Davis, making her stage comeback from Hollywood, feuded with her co-star, Margaret Leighton, and the director, Frank Corsaro (whom she managed to get fired), and constantly demanded that Williams expand her role as Maxine. Tennessee himself was in a bad way from the mixture of alcohol, speed, and sleeping pills that would soon disable him completely, and this was exacerbated in Chicago by blood poisoning from bites by the big black sheepdog Anna Magnani had given him (appropriately named Satan) and a catastrophic quarrel with his long-time partner Frank Merlo.9 Yet despite this trauma, Williams brought in rewrites for literally every performance, so that Margaret Leighton, playing Hannah, claimed that she had accumulated enough discarded drafts to make a whole new script: Tennessee rewrote something every day. He started very early in the morning and the new pages were usually given to us at a kind of preluncheon meeting, perhaps eleven-thirty, twelve o’clock …We used to go to the theatre in the afternoon and work on it, and it went in at that night’s performance. And this went on for eight weeks and he was there every minute of the day. All the time.10

Yet, miraculously, when the production finally staggered to its Broadway opening at the end of December 1961, against all the odds it was an immediate, runaway success. It played for 316 performances, was voted ‘best play of the year’ in both New York and London, and gained for Williams a lifetime fellowship in the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a cover illustration and rave review from his old antagonist Time magazine – now recognizing him as ‘the greatest living playwright of the English language’ and Iguana as ‘the wisest play he has ever written’ – and a lucrative deal with MGM, which released a successful film version in 1964, directed by John Huston and starring Richard Burton, Ava Gardner, and Deborah Kerr – all playing at their very best but in Gardner’s case miscast in the light of Williams’s intentions. Iguana reached print in two versions: a three-act script based mainly on Williams’s rehearsal text that New Directions published in 1962, which was adopted in editions by Secker and Warburg (1963), Signet (1963), and Penguin (1964), and is reprinted in volume 4 of The Theatre of Tennessee Williams (1972); and a two-act script based on the text as finally produced on Broadway, which was published in 1964 by Dramatists Play

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Service with elaborate production appendices. References in this paper are to the text of The Theatre of Tennessee Williams. II The time of the action is September 1940, and the place a third-rate hotel called the Costa Verde on a hilltop in the rainforests outside Acapulco in Mexico. To this shabby haven a miserable busload of women teachers from a small Baptist college in Texas is brought by T. Lawrence Shannon, a disgraced Episcopalian minister turned tour guide. Shannon has had to leave his church because he seduced and rejected a young Sunday school teacher who attempted suicide, then alienated his outraged congregation by denouncing their idea of God as a ‘senile delinquent’ who has given instincts to humanity merely, it seems, in order to punish them. Since then, Shannon has been fired from a succession of tour companies because he always insists that his clients see the miserable underside of the exotic places they visit and invariably ends up by seducing the youngest female among them. The aptly named ‘Blake Tours’ (where innocence is converted bitterly into experience) is positively Shannon’s last chance – ‘There’s nothing lower than Blake Tours,’ he tells Maxine (259) – but he has already repeated his usual behaviour. He has horrified the Baptist teachers by showing them the seamy side of Mexico – including indigents eating undigested excreta – and has enraged their leader, a lesbian music teacher called Miss Fellowes, by seducing Charlotte Goodall, her sixteen-yearold protégée. Close to breakdown, with a temperature of 103 degrees, Shannon has come to the Costa Verde for help from its saintly owner, the fisherman Fred Faulk, who has saved him in the past; but he discovers that Fred has died, his widow, Maxine, now has designs on Shannon himself, and the quiet sanctuary he was seeking has been taken over by the obnoxious family of a Nazi arms manufacturer exulting over the German blitz on London. Critics usually relate Shannon’s obsession with young girls to Williams’s actual homosexuality, as in the short story versions, but a different possibility surfaces in early drafts of the play. Explaining his seduction of Charlotte, Shannon in one fragment says, ‘I liked her small breasts, that’s all I wanted to do, just to touch the small breasts, just to hold one of them in the cup of my hand while I kissed her … They say that I liked my sister.’ In another, longer draft he talks of roughly cupping the breast of a girl whose condition has just been ‘defined as early madness,’ the

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exact phrase he uses about his sister Rose’s breakdown in the poem ‘Recuerdo.’11 And the Charlotte character is described in Ophelia-like terms (that are very different from the character depicted by Sue Lyon in the movie) as fragilely pretty but short-sighted with a weak chin, which also recalls Rose.12 Williams specifically denies incest in his Memoirs (119), insisting that he and his sister were physically rather shy of each other, and there is no reason to doubt the factual truth of this. Incestuous imaginings do crop up quite frequently, however, throughout Williams’s work.13 It seems likely that such traces of psychoanalysis in Iguana derive from Williams’s therapy with Dr Lawrence Kubie in New York from June 1958 to June 1959, when he was struggling to turn his one-act into a full-length play.14 Kubie’s influence could certainly account for one of Iguana’s main difficulties, when Maxine claims (a little improbably), I know your psychological history. I remember one of your conversations on this verandah with Fred. You were explaining to him how your problems first started. You told him that Mama, your Mama, used to send you to bed before you was [sic] ready to sleep – so you practised the little boy’s vice, you amused yourself with your self. And once she caught you at it and whaled your backside with the back side of a hairbrush because she said she had to punish you for it because it made God mad as much as it did Mama … And so you got back at God by preaching atheistical sermons and you got back at Mama by starting to lay young girls. (329)15

If Maxine’s suggestion is taken seriously, as it has been,16 it reduces Shannon’s anguish before mortality, human pain and cruelty, and the apparent meaninglessness of suffering to a neurosis that can be cured if only Shannon will accept a sexual relationship with a mature woman, as in the John Huston movie. Williams repudiated Kubie’s diagnosis, however, and even discussed his destructive advice on television (after which the doctor retired). So what seems most likely to have happened is that during revision Williams took this Freudianism seriously in early stages of composition but questioned it later, after the break-up with Kubie. In the first full draft for the Coconut Grove production, for instance, he is still uncertain enough to annotate the title page as follows: Shannon’s account of his ‘little boy’s vice’ appears in three places in this version. It will be used only once in the production but I have kept it all three times in this draft so that the best place for it can be selected in early rehearsals.17

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What he seems eventually to have decided was to de-emphasize the explanation by giving it to the uneducated Maxine, instead of to Shannon himself, so it becomes hearsay from a dubious source with motives of her own. When Shannon reverts to it after drunkenly urinating on the Baptists’ luggage later, he treats it as a ferocious joke, not as a serious explanation or excuse: Regression to infantilism, ha, ha, regression to infantilism … The infantile protest, ha, ha, ha, the infantile expression of rage at Mama and rage at God and rage at the goddam crib, and rage at the everything … (343)18

III Into this volatile situation wander a penniless New England spinster, Hannah Jelkes, and her exhausted ninety-seven-year-old grandfather, Jonathan Coffin (known as ‘Nonno’), hoping to earn their keep by Hannah sketching portraits and Nonno reciting his poems. Inevitably, like the tropical storm that builds up throughout Act Two (replicating the storm earlier when Shannon lost his church), the antagonisms between Hannah and Maxine, Shannon and Miss Fellowes, exacerbate each other into an explosion. Hannah and Nonno are given shelter for one night only, and when a telegram from Blake Tours arrives to sack the distraught Shannon, Maxine has to rope him into a hammock to prevent him committing suicide by ‘the long swim to China.’ In the literal ‘dark night’ of the soul that follows, it is Hannah Jelkes who gradually soothes Shannon back to sanity (in a wonderfully eloquent scene); but when he tries to establish a more permanent relationship between them, she gently but adamantly refuses. Left with no option, he agrees to step into Fred’s shoes (and bed) and help Maxine run the hotel, while old Nonno passes peacefully away in his sleep, having completed his beautiful last poem about accepting death with courage: How calmly does the orange branch Observe the sky begin to blanch Without a cry, without a prayer, With no betrayal of despair. Sometime while night obscures the tree The zenith of its life will be Gone past forever, and from thence

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A second history will commence. A chronicle no longer gold, A bargaining with mist and mould, And finally the broken stem The plummeting to earth; and then An intercourse not well designed For beings of a golden kind Whose native green must arch above The earth’s obscene, corrupting love. And still the ripe fruit and the branch Observe the sky begin to blanch Without a cry, without a prayer, With no betrayal of despair. O Courage, could you not as well Select a second place to dwell, Not only in that golden tree But in the frightened heart of me?

(371–2)

These conclusions provide an almost religious sense of closure and spiritual acceptance that makes Iguana unique in Williams’s canon. However, Hannah herself is left to carry on alone, so there is a final twist back towards existentialism that throws both ‘happy’ solutions into ironic perspective. An earlier title for the play, Three Acts of Grace, emphasizes the positives of this ending; another, Southern Cross, suggests rather that human suffering will continue.19 One reason this material may have been hard to control is that, as so often in Williams, much of it is autobiographical. Besides the possible influence of Rose, already discussed, the compassion that makes Iguana special in Williams’s work stems from the fact that two of its main characters are based closely on his grandparents. The old poet is a very accurate description of his loved grandfather, the Reverend Walter Dakin, in whose care Williams spent the first seven years of his life, and to whom he dedicated Iguana. (‘Coffin’ was, in fact, a surname in his father’s family, and ‘Nonno’ was Frank Merlo’s affectionate Italian equivalent for ‘Gramps.’) When he was seventeen, Williams accompanied a church women’s tour that his grandfather conducted around Europe, during which he had

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two intense spiritual experiences that he considered ‘miracles.’20 A panic attack was calmed in Cologne cathedral by what seemed to him divine intervention, and a recurrence of it in Amsterdam was lifted when he accepted, for the first time fully, the independent reality of other people. It may have been this experience that gave him the idea for Shannon’s second avocation as a tour guide. Like Nonno, Walter Dakin lived into his late nineties, and Williams frequently took him journeying abroad, with many of the same embarrassing contretemps as Hannah copes with for Nonno. Moreover, growing up a ‘preacher’s boy,’ as his grandfather’s parishioners invariably called him,21 made Christian symbolism almost automatic for Williams (even when he used it for heterodox effects), and also left him with a deep spirituality that, like Shannon, he had difficulty reconciling to organized religion or to established sexual mores; though, again like Shannon, he could never manage to escape from it.22 Hannah (whose name means ‘heavenly grace’) is described as looking ‘androgynous,’ like Rose, but her strong, compassionate character is based upon his grandmother, Rose Dakin, who Tennessee said was the closest he ever came to understanding divine goodness.23 And, lastly, the predatory aspects of Maxine Faulk may derive from a sexually voracious landlady Williams encountered in Santa Monica during his early stint in Hollywood and immortalized in a funny short story called ‘The Mattress in the Tomato Patch’24 – though the differences between them caution that Maxine’s character should not be oversimplified. As with people, so with places.25 The ramshackle Costa Verde was a real hotel overlooking a sheltered bay of the Pacific Ocean where Williams took refuge in September 1940 after his Provincetown lover, Kip Kiernan, abandoned him; and its separate sleeping cubicles with mosquito-net doors, long southern verandah cluttered with hammocks and rattan furniture, rum-cocos, rainforest, still-water beach, cataclysmic evening thunderstorms, captive iguana (which the Mexicans consider a delicacy), lovers discussing suicide by the ‘long swim to China,’ and Nazi tourists listening gleefully to broadcasts about the blitz on London are all exact reporting.26 The play, therefore, is basically realistic; but details are heightened to reflect the characters’ moods symbolically, as Shannon’s fever also distorts events expressionistically (like the scenes of Blanche Du Bois’s hysteria in Streetcar Named Desire). One of Shannon’s constant exclamations is ‘fantastic,’ because, as he explains to Hannah, ‘we … live on two levels, Miss Jelkes, the realistic level and the fantastic level – [and] when you live on the fantastic level as I have lately but have got to operate on the real-

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istic level, that’s when you’re spooked, that’s the spook’ (317) – hence also his other favourite exclamation, ‘Great Caesar’s ghost.’ Hannah is able to sympathize with him because she, too, is familiar with what she calls the ‘subterranean’ journey through the ‘unlighted side’ of human nature; but, as an artist, she has disciplined herself to observe without judging, whereas Shannon, with his habit of preaching and sharp sense of guilt, is far too ready to condemn both others and himself. This double level of objective and subjective, the realistic and the symbolic (or expressionistic), is a key to how the play operates imaginatively27 – particularly if one bears in mind that Shannon is reacting to events with 103 degrees of fever. A mountain top, for instance, is the traditional site for human confrontations with the infinite;28 and thunder and lightning are a sign of divine power in many religions. The cubicles emphasize the existential isolation of every consciousness, which Williams considered humanity’s main problem – like the separate graves in the stanza from Emily Dickinson that gives Iguana its epigraph: And so, as kinsmen met at night, We talked between the rooms, Until the moss had reached our lips, And covered up our names.

The sheltered beach is easily equated by Hannah with the ‘still waters’ of the Twenty-third Psalm (305). And the iguana of the title, struggling desperately at the end of its tether, emblematizes the conditions of all four main characters. Williams chose the names of Shannon, Hannah, and Nonno quite late in his revisions to emphasize their close relationship, and said that each of them represented part of his own character. Appropriately, therefore, they are also linked by a certain self-conscious ‘theatrical’ tendency in all of them, a penchant for dressing up in costume and performing that is emphasized by the inner-stage effect of their lighted cubicles. A stage direction says Shannon and Hannah look ‘like actors in a play which is about to fold on the road, preparing gravely for a performance that may be the last one’ (300), interestingly anticipating a later Williams play called Out Cry. Shannon is at the end of his tether because he is on the brink of yet another breakdown and, by seducing the underage Charlotte, has forfeited his last job as a tour guide and any chance of returning to the United States. Hannah and her grandfather know they are on their last trip together, and having reached the sea – which is both source and end

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of life – they can go no farther. And also, as is sometimes not sufficiently recognized, Maxine is desperate, too: not only because Fred’s death has left her deeply in debt, but also because she needs more from companionship than the easy sensuality that is all her beach boys have to offer. She knows the difference between sex and love, she tells Shannon; she wishes to escape loneliness; and she explains pragmatically, ‘We’ve both reached a point where we’ve got to settle for something that works for us in our lives – even if it isn’t on the highest kind of level’ (329). When she realizes that he will stay with her, the stage directions tell us her habitual aggressiveness gives place to the same look of Eastern calm that is usually associated with Hannah (373). This softens and complicates the abrasive, more sexually predatory aspects of her personality, which have been associated earlier with her attraction to the physically arrogant Nazis, who, like the teachers, go in for group singing, insensitively torment the old and helpless, and provide a human equivalent for the ‘Wagnerian’ savagery of the storm that concludes Act Two. This storm has very complex significance, however. Its comparison to ‘a giant white bird attacking the hill-top of Costa Verde’ (325) relates it to the carnivorous birds of the Encantadas in Suddenly Last Summer who eviscerate baby turtles trying to reach the sea, and are specifically associated by Sebastian, that play’s antagonist, with a pitiless God.29 And in one draft of Iguana Williams also gives Shannon an elaborate account of the ‘Towers of Silence,’ where scavenging vultures devour Parsi corpses, to counterbalance, he says, Hannah’s benign account of Shanghai’s ‘House of the Dying,’ with Shannon claiming that it was this experience that caused his final crack-up.30 Shannon’s hands at the act’s conclusion ‘reaching out’ through the silvery curtain of rain are usually interpreted as a gesture of helplessness and appeal,31 but Williams’s intention was quite contrary. In drafts he says he wanted the storm to represent an ecstatic moment of spiritual relief, ‘as if [Shannon] were almost about to break through the light and sound barrier of man’s confusion to the clear space above it, which is at least acceptance if not comprehension, as a plane climbs over a storm into an ecstatic calm … he has briefly entered his heaven.’32 And to this he adds two notes (in different drafts): ‘This is put in the form of a virtual paraphrase of [Antoine de] Saint Exupery’s masterpiece “Night Flight.” I am only putting it in [here] to clarify the effect that I want to get from this curtain and of course will remove it from the published text.’33 And elsewhere: ‘Note: The scene above contains the play’s major statement. It is possibly overwritten – too

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rhetorical – and it is likely to give considerable offense on other grounds than artistic, but since the last act of the play is really a poem on human compassion, or is meant to be so, I think we should not retreat from the boldness of Shannon’s statements made here.’34 Similarly, in ‘A Summer of Discovery,’ Williams says of the real-life equinoctial storm, ‘we were thrilled by it, it would completely eclipse our melancholy.’35 IV In most drafts of Iguana the stage direction for Shannon’s first appearance in Act One says that he ‘appears dividing the foliage that masks the jungle path with spread arms so that he looks momentarily like a crucifixion in a crumpled linen suit.’ This overt symbolism continued right to the text that Williams submitted for publication by New Directions, to whose editor, Robert MacGregor, he wrote asking that it be deleted because ‘there are too many Christ figures in my plays.’36 He had come to realize by then that Shannon is only a pretender to that role, and that it is Hannah who will suffer the true Gethsemane experience. In Shannon’s dark night when he is roped into the hammock in Act Three after lacerating his neck with the chain of his pectoral cross and threatening to ‘swim to China,’ Hannah criticizes the self-dramatizing element in what she calls his ‘Passion Play performance’ (345): Who wouldn’t like to suffer and atone for the sins of himself and the world if it could be done in a hammock with ropes instead of nails, on a hill that’s so much lovelier than Golgotha, the Place of the Skull, Mr. Shannon? There’s something almost voluptuous in the way that you twist and groan in that hammock – no nails, no blood, no death. Isn’t that a comparatively comfortable, almost voluptuous kind of crucifixion to suffer the guilt of the world, Mr. Shannon? (344)

And, in effect, Shannon proves perfectly able to release himself from his bonds without her aid, as soon as he decides to. Hannah Jelkes herself is quite a different matter. Williams told an interviewer that he intended her ‘almost as a definition of what I think is most spiritually beautiful and still believable’37 – but notice that ‘believable,’ because Hannah has ambivalences too, limitations that are the obverse of her strengths. She is twice described as looking like a medieval saint (266, 339), and in Act Three she teaches Shannon that God is neither

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the Old Testament senile delinquent nor the amoral Nietzschean energies of nature, but, rather, an ‘unfinished sentence’ – meaning a spiritual ideal that requires human charity to complete it (as in King Lear or Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner). Nothing living should be alien to us, she says, not an ugly doomed lizard that after all is one of God’s creatures, nor the Australian salesman with a fetish for underwear about whom she tells a mildly racy story: ‘Nothing human disgusts me unless it’s unkind, violent’ (363), she says about the latter, echoing a frequent Williams principle. So, as in the epigraph, belief for Hannah depends on ‘Broken gates between people, so they can reach each other, even if it’s just for one night only’ (352), and as a stage direction commented earlier on Shannon’s tenderness to Nonno, ‘The old man touches something in him which is outside of his concern for himself’ (313).38 Hannah has learned this lesson by enduring a nervous breakdown herself and confronting the ‘blue devils’ that are her equivalent for Shannon’s ‘spook’ (and were also Tennessee’s name for his own bouts of depression). And wearing a Japanese kabuki robe and offering a soothing poppy-seed tea ceremony, she associates this hard-won wisdom with the Buddhist acceptance of all things (a religion Williams had begun to study at this time – probably under the influence of Christopher Isherwood):39 ‘The moral,’ she tells Shannon, ‘is oriental. Accept whatever situation you cannot improve’ (363). Shannon, however, mocks her as ‘Miss Thin-Standing-Up-FemaleBuddha,’ and there is, in truth, a dangerous closeness between Hannah’s Buddhist quietism and Maxine’s pragmatic acceptance of the ‘no sweat’ laissez-faire of her Chinese cook (330) – not to speak of the ‘cool, impersonal, all-comprehending’ Eastern serenity that Maxine’s face takes on once she realizes Shannon has given in and will now stay with her which resembles Hannah’s assumption of a kabuki role (373). No character is without ambiguity in Iguana, not even Hannah. Under Hannah’s influence Shannon releases the iguana as ‘a little act of grace’ (like Fred putting his game fish back into the sea), ‘playing God,’ he says, because God will not do so independently (370). And immediately after he has done this, Nonno, shouting three times ‘it is finished’ (thus echoing Christ’s ‘consummatum est’), completes his final poem, which encapsulates the same lesson: that human beings must learn to accept the inevitability of their death with the same courage as an ‘orange tree’ in the natural world – or the old people whom Hannah saw in the Shanghai ‘House for the Dying.’ Then, resolutely refusing Shannon’s offers of sex and companionship, Hannah persuades him to

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stay at the hotel; and a stage direction (added in performance after the first publication of the play) says he ‘chuckles happily’ (374) as he goes off with Maxine to swim at the beach. This is one of the most positive resolutions in any Williams play, and it was on this note that John Huston ended the film version. Williams, however, was enraged by the film’s conclusion and rewrote the end five times to try to get Huston to change his mind.40 ‘Human relationships,’ Williams argued, ‘are terrifyingly ambiguous. If you write a character that isn’t ambiguous you are writing a false character, not a true one’;41 and he insisted that Iguana ends as tragedy, not as romantic fulfilment. After all, the match between Maxine and Shannon is far from perfect. Maxine is ten years older, and herself dismissed Fred earlier because of a similar gap in age; in the first stage direction she is described as stout and swarthy, a ‘beat up old dame’ who is not at all like the glamorous Ava Gardner; and Shannon says he accepts the arrangement between them merely because he expects her to die soon anyway (369). His final chuckle, moreover, is prompted by Maxine’s suggestion that he can pleasure women guests at the hotel, as she intends to pleasure the men, which is scarcely romantic. And in the original production the actor playing Shannon put the iguana’s tether around his own neck and took his curtain call still wearing it42 – an effect toned down in the movie to Maxine domestically straightening Shannon’s necktie. Moreover, and most importantly, it is not with Maxine and Shannon that the play concludes but with Hannah, who does not leave the stage. In the Gospels, Christ’s ‘It is finished’ comes after his plea to ‘take this cup from me,’ but in Iguana the order is reversed. Having prayed ‘Oh, God, can’t we stop now?’ (375), Hannah finds Nonno is already dead. Earlier she told Shannon, ‘We all wind up with something or with someone, and if it’s a someone instead of just something … we’re unusually lucky’ (365); but now she has lost the one relationship that made the world a ‘home’ for her (356). And the final stage direction emphasizes that finally, when she looks around for help, ‘There’s no one’ (375). She will have to go on alone, taking only Shannon’s cross with her.43 His selfindulgent pretence of martyrdom in the hammock has been replaced by Hannah’s genuine passion, and this is the result, it is suggested, not only of her strengths but also of her limitations. One of the play’s main acting motifs is the constant destructive refusal of human touch:44 by Miss Fellowes of Shannon, Charlotte of Miss Fellowes, and Shannon of Charlotte and Maxine; now it is by Hannah of

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Shannon. Just as she hesitated to take cigarettes from his pants pocket because, the stage direction tells us, she ‘has always had a sort of fastidiousness, a reluctance, towards intimate physical contact’ (348), so now she repudiates his gentle touch on her neck,45 telling him to ‘Save it for the widow.’ Despite her compassion, Hannah will never surrender to what Nonno’s poem calls ‘The earth’s obscene, corrupting love,’ that sexuality on which continuity of the natural cycle depends. As an interesting analogue of this, one late draft of the play includes fragments of an unpublished Williams poem called ‘SPINSTER’: They said of her that she was cold and given to piety and childish fears, the supercilious mocked her, thought her old and frugal-hearted even in her youth … If this were true, then she is changed much within these latter years, Her longing is a storm that never clears, her flesh a metal that no steel can scratch, but love could crumble like a burnt-out match.46

On the other hand, in ‘Some Random Notes on the Play and Production,’ Williams says more positively, ‘I think [Hannah] is close to what the Zen Buddhists call a state of “satori” – a state of being that combines living sentience with the peace of non-sentient nature, if I understand it rightly.’47 And he defends ambiguity in the ends of all three of his main characters, Nonno, Shannon, and Hannah, by arguing: Of course there are shadowy areas, ambiguities, in all these ‘resolutions’ of fate, or the play would be false, it wouldn’t have what it aims to present, the deeper than realistic truth of a dream, which is the real truth of life – which is always somewhat unfathomable.48

Hannah said that, left alone, she will ‘Stop, or go on … probably go on’ (358), and Williams has explained that ‘The Night of the Iguana is a play whose theme, as closely as I can put it, is how to live beyond despair and still live.’49 For all its frequent hilarity and its positive emphasis on compassion and spiritual acceptance, the play concludes as existential tragedy: funny, moving, wise, but also painful – one of Williams’s best.

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appendix Some Random Notes on the Play and Production (as conceived by T.W.) The cubicles on the verandah are like the numbered cells in a prison, or a poetically softened dream of a prison: they are symbols of each individual’s separation from others: but this alleghorical [sic] meaning should be treated romantically, with a visual beauty. The cells are too narrow for comfort: the occupants of them come out on the verandah to look down at the sea which is limited only by the horizon and the sky, but is oblivious of their own living human conditions. Shannon and Hannah’s Grandfather, and probably Hannah, too, were all drawn here, consciously or unconsciously, by a sense of returning from their world-travels which have suddenly become too difficult to continue: the sea (the long swim to China) is death in the cradle of life, return to oblivion which is both lovely and fearful. Hart Crane at the end of his travels, also must have conceived it as this when he leapt off the stern of a ship in tropical waters. – That’s why I mention Sequira’s portrait of Crane (eyes closed) in Act Two. The trio, and the Iguana, are all captives: rope-enders. The Iguana is set free, and in a sense, the human captives are liberated, too, in the end, when they have cut loose the Iguana: Nonno – the Grandfather – by the completion of his poem, Shannon by facing and accepting the truth of his nature and Hannah by her unwanted, unsought release from her hopeless attachment to the old poet whose life is all spent. Of course there are shadowy areas, ambiguities in all these ‘resolutions’ of fate, or the play would be false, it wouldn’t have what it aims to present, the deeper than realistic truth of a dream, which is the real truth of life – which is always somewhat unfathomable. The truth of life is dream-like: and that is the over-all concept and aim of this play. It must be poetically allusive: that is the key-note to the style of performance; and yet the style of performance should not be ‘stylized,’ in the common sense of the term, with the possible exception of the Germans: even they should serve their plastic function without disrupting the overall quality of ‘poetic realism.’ The Germans and Widow Faulk are citizens of the world, the surface reality of it, that sets laws and makes conventions and operates on a usually operable level: physically and nervously robust, hearty creatures, a sort of group Kowalski: which may sound like a return to the theme of ‘Streetcar’ but there are important differences. The ‘Streetcar’ theme is echoed in the play, but I hope and believe a fresh note is struck, espe-

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cially in Hannah: she is not just a ‘cool’ Blanche. I think she is close to what Zen Buddhists call a state of ‘satori’ – a state of being that combines living sentience with the peace of non-sentient nature, if I understand it rightly.50 Notes I should like to thank the SSHRC for a fellowship covering the research for this essay, and Lenore Morra for coping yet again with crabbed handwriting. The Appendix is courtesy of Columbia University and the Williams estate; Nono’s poem is copyright © 1963 by the University of the South, and is reprinted by permission from New Directions Publishing Corp. and Borchardt, Inc. for the Estate of Tennessee Williams. 1 Dakin Williams and Shepherd Mead, Tennessee Williams: An Intimate Biography (New York, Arbor House, 1983), 223. 2 Albert J. Devlin, ed., Conversations with Tennessee Williams (Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 1986), 100. 3 See Brian Parker, ‘A Provisional Stemma for Drafts and Revisions of Tennessee Williams’ The Night of the Iguana,’ Publications of the Bibliographical Society of America 98.1 (2004): 54–89. 4 Lyle Leverich, Tom: The Unknown Tennessee Williams (New York: Crown, 1995), 379–80; Tennessee Williams, Selected Poems, ed. David Roessel and Nicholas Moschovakis (New York: New Directions, 2002), 171, 259. 5 Tennessee Williams, Collected Stories, ed. Gore Vidal (New York: New Directions, 1985), 229–45; Parker, ‘Stemma,’ 59–60. 6 Parker, ‘Stemma,’ 60–4. 7 The first rehearsal text of this one-act is published in Tennessee Williams Annual Review 4 (2001): iii–xxxv. Before its performance, however, this was much changed and almost doubled in size. 8 Parker, ‘Stemma,’ 68–71. 9 See Tennessee Williams, ‘Tennessee Williams: The Wolf and I,’ in Tennessee Williams: An Illustrated Chronicle, ed. Margaret A. Van Antwerp and Sally Johns, Dictionary of Literary Biography, Documentary Series 4 (Detroit: Gale Research Co., 1984), 240–2. 10 Dakin Williams and Shepherd Mead, Tennessee Williams, 238. 11 Williams, Poems, 50. 12 Parker, ‘Stemma,’ 68. 13 Cf John Strother Clayton, ‘The Sister Figure in the Plays of Tennessee Williams,’ Carolina Quarterly 12 (1960): 47–60, rpt in Twentieth Century Interpreta-

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16

17 18

19

20 21 22

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tions of the Glass Menagerie (New York: Prentice-Hall, 1963) 109–20; Brian Parker, ‘The Circle Closed: A Psychological Reading of The Glass Menagerie,’ Modern Drama 28 (1985): 517–32; Daniel A. Dervin, ‘The Spook in the Rainforest: The Incestuous Structure of Tennessee Williams’ Plays,’ Psychocultural Review 3 (1979): 153–83; Michael Paller, ‘The Escape That Failed: Tennessee and Rose Williams,’ in Magical Muse: Millennial Essays on Tennessee Williams, ed. Ralph F. Voss (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2002), 70–90. Michael Paller, ‘The Couch and Tennessee,’ Tennessee Williams Annual Review 3 (2000): 37–55. Freudianism also crops up in other MS fragments in which Maxine, cradling Shannon, promises overexplicitly, ‘I can give you Mama the way you want her: in love with Larry Shannon’; and Hannah, too, says she and Shannon both cracked up on a ‘love need’ that for most people is ‘the breast of the mother,’ and startlingly in one fragment even bids him farewell as ‘my son!’ (Parker, ‘Stemma,’ 68, 74). See also note 18. For example, see Glenn Embry, ‘The Subterranean World of The Night of the Iguana,’ in Tennessee Williams: A Tribute, ed. Jac Tharpe (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1977), 65–80. Parker, ‘Stemma,’ 69. Another possible trace of psychoanalysis is Maxine’s quotation from the R.L. Stevenson poem ‘I Have a Little Shadow’ (263). It is very improbable that a character like Maxine would know, let alone quote, such a poem. And a similar indecorum surfaces in Shannon’s childish brag of having smashed the ‘spook’s’ teeth (354) which stands out awkwardly from his surrounding rhetoric (and is usually cut in performance). The first title Williams thought of when he began to write the one-act was Quebrada, The Cliff (Tennessee Williams, Selected Letters, vols 1 and 2, ed. Albert J. Devlin and Nancy Tischler [New York: New Directions, 2000, 2004), 2:114), which is mentioned in the final text as the hotel where Maxine found her beach boys (270). Later, he also considered Two Acts of Grace, referring to Hannah and Shannon’s care for each other. Tennessee Williams, Memoirs (New York: Doubleday, 1975), 21. Allean Hale, ‘Tennessee Williams: The Preacher’s Boy,’ Southern Quarterly 38.1 (1999): 10–20. His later ‘conversion’ to Roman Catholicism by his brother was not taken very seriously by either (Dakin Williams and Shepherd Mead, Tennessee Williams, 285; Devlin, Conversations, 333–4). Gore Vidal has a characteristically sardonic account of Williams trying to impress the Jesuit Superior in Rome with a recital of his mystical experiences (Van Antwerp and Johns, Tennessee Williams, 312).

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23 Tennessee Williams, Notebooks, ed. Margaret Bradham Thornton (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006), 43. 24 Williams, Collected Stories, 559–67. 25 See Tennessee Williams, ‘A Summer of Discovery,’ in Where I Live: Selected Essays, ed. Christine R. Day and Bob Woods (New York: New Directions, 1978), 137–47. 26 Williams’s letters from that trip also talk about the ‘fantastic’ life forced on artists and their need for ‘endurance,’ and even extol the soothing effects for a writer of a nice ‘cup of warm tea’ (Letters I, 274, 279). 27 Williams described Iguana as ‘a dramatic-poem of the most intensely personal nature’ in Cheryl Crawford, ‘Four by Tenn,’ in One Naked Individual: My Forty Years in the Theatre (New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1977), 199; cf Devlin, Conversations, 86. 28 Mircea Eliade talks about this in The Myth of the Eternal Return: Cosmos and History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1971), 12–17. 29 Tennessee Williams, Suddenly Last Summer, in The Theatre of Tennessee Williams, vol. 3 (New York: New Directions, 1972), 357. 30 Parker, ‘Stemma,’ 66. 31 For example, see Mary Ann Corrigan, ‘Memory, Dream and Myth in the Plays of Tennessee Williams,’ Renascence 28.3 (1976): 155–67. 32 Parker, ‘Stemma,’ 70. 33 Ibid. 34 Ibid., 71. 35 Williams, ‘A Summer of Discovery,’ 143. 36 Parker, ‘Stemma,’ 69. This self-dramatizing streak in Shannon comes out most nastily when he offers to consecrate poisoned tea if Hannah will serve it to old Nonno (346). 37 Devlin, Conversations, 83. 38 Cf Williams: ‘The only truly satisfying moments in life are those in which you are in contact, and I don’t just mean physical contact, I mean in deep, a deeper contact than physical, with some human being’ (Devlin, Conversations, 86). 39 He toured the East in 1960 while revising Iguana, and reported to Jean Fayard later, ‘I have travelled in the Orient and spoken with Buddhist monks. I was in Singapore one day and I visited the House of the Dead where they were having a great ceremony … someone had just died. It was a liberation from body and suffering … I believe all adult life is a preparation for that’ (Devlin, Conversations, 210). In Suddenly Last Summer Sebastian seeks refuge in a Buddhist monastery after his experience of the Encantadas’ merciless ‘God.’

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40 Peter Evans, ‘Tennessee Wants to Unsweeten Ava,’ New York World Telegram and Sun, 24 October 1963, 12, rpt in Van Antwerp and Johns, Tennessee Williams, 233. 41 Devlin, Conversations, 98. 42 Jacob Adler, ‘The Night of the Iguana: A New Tennessee Williams,’ Ramparts 1.3 (1962): 59–68, at 63. 43 The cross itself, with its rather showy amethyst, is like the one worn by Williams’s grandfather. Edwina Williams and Lucy Freeman, Remember Me to Tom (New York: Putnam, 1963), 231. 44 Three recurrent acting tropes in Iguana are: the avoidance of ‘touch,’ both physical and emotional; panting towards the audience to indicate panic; and the frequent use of unfinished sentences (a device Williams would take further in his later plays). 45 In some drafts he is far rougher, almost like the published version of the short story; and in one fragment when Hannah stops him actually masturbating, he explains: ‘I found out how it started through some sessions with an orthodox Freudian analyst the last time I cracked up’ (Parker, ‘Stemma,’ 63, 68) – an obvious reference to Williams’s own sessions with Dr Kubie. 46 Parker, ‘Stemma,’ 70. 47 Ibid., 84. 48 Ibid. 49 Devlin, Conversations, 104. 50 Parker, ‘Stemma,’ 83–4.

15 ‘How do you play this game?’: Nonsensical Language Games in Shaw, Coward, and Pinter rebecca s. cameron

Judith. … Be Victor a minute, Sorel – Sorel. Do you mean when he comes in at the end of the act? Judith. Yes, you know – ‘Is this a game?’ Sorel [with feeling]. ‘Is this a game?’ Judith [with spirit]. ‘Yes – and a game that must be played to the finish.’1

Three modern British plays – Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion (1914), Noel Coward’s Hay Fever (1925), and Harold Pinter’s The Birthday Party (1958) – include episodes in which (to use the words of a character in Hay Fever) language becomes ‘artificial to the point of lunacy’ (58) as the action shifts to a new social setting in which the linguistic rules and conventions are not fully understood by all the characters. The nonsensical verbal exchanges that result from Eliza’s first foray into ‘polite’ middle-class society in Pygmalion, the chaotic game of adverbs in Hay Fever, and the bizarre interrogation and brainwashing scenes in The Birthday Party call attention to the absurd, artificial, and potentially harmful codes and conventions that regulate social relations in Britain. In line with the roughly contemporary language theories of Saussure and Wittgenstein, these episodes draw attention to the ways in which language resembles a game through their emphasis on social and relational aspects of language and their recognition of the importance of context in producing meaning. These playwrights further exploit the game analogy to critique the competitive, exclusionary, or coercive functions of language in modern British society. These plays’ dates, which span from the 1910s to the 1950s, fall within a period that saw increased standardization and institutional control of the English language within Britain and its colonies. This movement was

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already well underway in the later nineteenth century, but it intensified and expanded in the twentieth. The notion of ‘received pronunciation’ – the effect of which was to hold up as a standard an upper-class, public school dialect which concealed regional and lower-class markers – gained widespread acceptance with the publication of Daniel Jones’s English Pronunciation Dictionary in 1917 and the BBC’s adoption of this standard for its broadcasting in 1922.2 Several influential books promoting the regularization of English were also published in this period, including for example the Fowlers’ guides to English usage, The King’s English (1906) and Dictionary of Modern English Usage (1926); Eric Partridge’s Usage and Abusage: A Guide to Good English (1947); and Sir Ernest Gowers’s guide to clear writing in the civil service, The Complete Plain Words (1954). Britain sought to regulate the use of English both inside and outside its national boundaries. In 1921, for example, the government published The Teaching of English in England (the Newbolt Report), which advocated the teaching of ‘standard English’ in all subjects as a means of promoting a ‘unifying tendency’ in England and erasing class divisions that would differentiate between ‘educated and uneducated speech, which at present causes so much prejudice and difficulty of intercourse on both sides.’3 As a result of the 1870 Education Act, the teaching of English had become compulsory in all schools in the United Kingdom. In 1934, the British Council was founded to promote British English overseas; this organization continues to advocate the use of English for political and economic purposes.4 As Pierre Bourdieu argues in Language and Symbolic Power, such movements towards the legitimization of a particular form of a language and the attempt to integrate speakers into a ‘single “linguistic community”’ are ‘a product of the political domination that is endlessly reproduced by institutions capable of imposing universal recognition of the dominant language.’5 These measures to legitimate a particular form of English associated with the educated upper classes across the United Kingdom and the British colonies have been largely destabilized since the 1970s as a result of a variety of factors, including internal social unrest, decolonization, and the shift in global power from Britain to the United States.6 In the theatre, this destabilization began considerably earlier, most notably in the 1950s when playwrights such as John Osborne and Shelagh Delaney presented a direct challenge to middle-class values in plays focused on working-class characters and environments. The modern British plays discussed in this essay take a more oblique yet still subversive approach, using nonsensical language games to interrogate and to disrupt attempts to control or to dominate through language.7

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The plays’ use of language games also corresponds with what Roy Harris identifies as a ‘revolution in linguistic thought’8 brought about by Saussure and Wittgenstein, whereby a synchronic, relational conception of language came to replace earlier surrogationalist or nomenclaturalist theories. From their different vantage points of linguistics and philosophy, Saussure and Wittgenstein came to understand words not as labels for a given ‘order of things’ but as ‘collective products of social interaction, essential instruments through which human beings constitute and articulate their world.’9 Harris argues that one of the most important points of connection between Saussure and Wittgenstein is their use of an ‘analogy between a language and a rule-governed game.’10 In his Course in General Linguistics, Saussure uses chess as an ‘artificial realization of what language offers in a natural form,’ and in the Philosophical Investigations, Wittgenstein makes extensive use of the concept of language games ‘to bring into prominence the fact that the speaking of a language is part of an activity, a form of life.’11 The game analogy represents a radical shift in the understanding of language in that it presents language as a self-contained system whose explanation does not require an appeal to something outside of the game. It also serves to emphasize that words, like pieces in a chess game, operate within a system of relations governed by rules or conventions.12 These conventions, as Harris observes, ‘are compulsory but at the same time quite arbitrary.’13 This modern shift in language theory was important for recognizing language as a social phenomenon, subject to social conventions and systems, as Jonathan Culler has noted in relation to Saussure.14 Culler situates Saussure alongside other modernist theorists such as Durkheim and Freud, who see ‘[s]ocial facts as part of a system of conventions and values,’ for his belief that linguistics should not analyse ‘large collections of sound sequences but a system of social conventions’ or the ‘distinctions and relations that have been endowed with meaning by society.’15 Saussure’s well-known distinction between langue and parole effectively distinguishes ‘what is social from what is individual,’ defining langue as ‘the social side of speech … it exists only by virtue of a sort of contract signed by members of the community.’16 Likewise, Wittgenstein places words within the context of social activities through his diverse examples of language games, which include ‘Giving orders, and obeying them … Forming and testing a hypothesis … Making up a story; and reading it … Play-acting … Guessing riddles … Making a joke; telling it … Asking, thanking, cursing, greeting, praying.’17 These multifarious examples foreground ‘practices [that] integrate the use of words and action within

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particular situational contexts,’18 supporting Wittgenstein’s notion that ‘the meaning of a word is its use in the language.’19 Wittgenstein’s conception of language through the ‘actions into which it is woven’ has a particular affinity with drama. As David Blair has observed, Wittgenstein subscribes to a ‘dramatic theory of meaning’: ‘if we want to demonstrate the meaning of a particular word or phrase we can best do this by describing how those words might be used in a play.’20 Marjorie Perloff has further noted that ‘Wittgensteinian “thought” is charged with drama,’ remarking that his questions in Philosophical Investigations ‘have more in common with a Pinter or Beckett dialogue than with a critical essay.’21 Although Wittgenstein resists ‘draw[ing] a boundary’22 around the word ‘game’ and, as Perloff suggests, his ‘concept of the “language game” … is ultimately undefinable,’23 this very open-endedness gives the term an elasticity that makes it a valuable tool for analysing literary language, whether it be Shakespearean dialogue (as in Keir Elam’s Shakespeare’s Universe of Discourse) or avant-garde poetics (as in Marjorie Perloff’s Wittgenstein’s Ladder). As Elam argues, Wittgenstein’s flexible conception of language games ‘to indicate any distinct form of language-use subject to its own rules and defined within a given behavioural context’24 has wide applicability to drama.25 The history of drama is replete with examples of language games, and Shakespeare in particular makes brilliant use of them in his plays. Tom Stoppard ingeniously transposes Shakespeare’s linguistic play to language games of his own, as Jill L. Levenson shows in her insightful essays on Stoppard’s use of Shakespeare.26 Samuel Beckett’s characters use language games to pass the time or to offer solace as they and the world around them slowly deteriorate. While modern dramatists have deployed language games for a variety of purposes, the plays I discuss in this paper feature games that foreground the nonsensical, absurd, or arbitrary qualities of language. The nonsensical aspect of these games helps to create comedy, but it also functions as social critique. Shaw’s Pygmalion, Coward’s Hay Fever, and Pinter’s The Birthday Party all include episodes that might be described as nonsensical language games. In these scenes, the action shifts to a new social context that introduces a new set of rules and conventions, explicit or concealed, that draws attention to the arbitrary or contingent relationship between words and things through highly stilted, strange, seemingly nonsensical verbal exchanges. These scenes make use of a method that Elam has identified in Shakespeare’s drama as ‘heightening,’ in which ‘[v]erbal activities that would normally be more or less “transparent”’ are pre-

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sented ‘in an exaggerated, or insistent or burlesque or otherwise de-automatizing fashion.’27 In these modern plays, this heightened awareness of the operations of language comes about through the articulation of rules – or the conspicuous failure to articulate them – and through the comically stilted and bizarre verbal and social interactions that result. In line with contemporary language theories, these episodes call attention to the contextual and relational operations of language, not only to show how language works but also to expose and critique the nonsensical, arbitrary, yet insidious rules and conventions that serve to construct and to protect the more powerful ranks of British society. Bernard Shaw, Pygmalion: ‘If I was doing it proper, what was you laughing at?’ Shaw’s presentation of language in Pygmalion comes closer to Saussure’s and Wittgenstein’s views on the contextual and relational functions of language than Shaw’s various manifestos on language, which tend to focus on rational spelling and grammar reform.28 In fact, the ‘energetic phonetic enthusiast’ who served as his inspiration for Pygmalion, Henry Sweet, belonged to the linguistic camp that Saussure ‘wished to expose and undermine [as] tacit nomenclaturism’ for their tendency to ‘divorce … form and meaning.’29 Shaw’s play, however, illustrates the inseparability of phonetics from the semantic and the social aspects of language; as his preface acknowledges, ‘it is impossible for an Englishman to open his mouth without making some other Englishman despise him’ (2). Shaw, an Irishman who made a conscious choice to retain his Dublin accent when he moved to England, was both politically and personally aware of the socio-political aspects of language.30 Indeed, his emphasis on the social function of language in Pygmalion in many ways anticipates more recent sociolinguistic theory, as Hugo Baetens Beardsmore and Lynda Mugglestone have shown. Recognizing ‘language as both a cause and consequence of class divisions and class distinctions,’31 Shaw demonstrates that Eliza’s linguistic training must extend beyond pronunciation to a ‘complete set of social habits which are primarily mediated through linguistic convention’ including ‘habits of dress and deportment, the conventions of small talk, social airs and graces.’32 In Pygmalion, Shaw satirizes the nonsensical, arbitrary linguistic and social conventions that serve to reinforce class boundaries in Britain, most notably in Eliza’s first attempts to pass as a lady in an episode that presents language as a rulegoverned game in which players’ differential skills and training determine their rank.

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As early as the opening scene of Pygmalion, Shaw draws attention to the gamelike aspects of language when Higgins makes a sport of identifying the geographic origins of the crowd that has gathered around his first altercation with Eliza. In fact, the whole play can be seen as a sustained language game in which Higgins seeks to win his bet with Pickering that he can ‘pass [Eliza] off as a duchess in six months’ (66). The episode that draws the most attention to the gamelike rules and conventions governing language, however, is Eliza’s amusing transgression into ‘polite’ society in Act Three. In setting up this scene, Shaw delineates the rules of the game, which Higgins explains to his mother: ‘Ive taught her to speak properly; and she has strict orders as to her behaviour. She’s to keep to two subjects: the weather and everybody’s health – Fine day and How do you do, you know – and not let herself go on things in general. That will be safe’ (66). Higgins greets his mother’s guests, the Eynsford Hills, as players in his game: ‘Yes, by George! We want two or three people. Youll do as well as anybody else’ (68). Once Eliza arrives, her defensive responses to Freddy’s amusement at her unorthodox small talk – ‘What is wrong with that, young man? I bet I got it right’ and ‘If I was doing it proper, what was you laughing at?’ (72, 73) – suggest that she, too, sees herself as playing a game in which she must defend her skill. Shaw further presents language as a rule-governed game by having Eliza violate the more subtle codes and conventions of upper-middle-class small talk as she delivers a meteorological forecast (‘the shallow depression in the west of these islands is likely to move slowly in an easterly direction’) and speculates on the untimely demise of her aunt (‘what I say is, them as pinched it done her in’) in an impeccable upper-class accent (72). Through such harmless yet shocking violations, Shaw ridicules the absurd social and linguistic conventions that serve to draw distinctions between the classes in British society. While Shaw’s humour in this scene rests largely on Eliza’s comic mixture of elevated pronunciation with ‘vulgar’ content, his satire is directed against the vacuousness and artificiality of upper-middle-class discourse that Eliza’s errors unwittingly expose. When Eliza succeeds in her new social milieu, she becomes an automaton – a ‘live doll,’ as Mrs Higgins puts it when she reprimands her son (78). When Eliza first enters, ‘speaking with pedantic correctness,’ she repeats the phrase ‘How do you do’ five times, followed by ‘a long and painful pause’ (70–2). Her conversation, like Higgins’s and even Clara’s, becomes far more lively and interesting when it departs from middle-class norms, not just because of the comic incongruity between pronunciation and diction but also because of the stifling limitations of society ‘small talk,’ which remove all vitality, and in-

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deed all emotional and intellectual content, from social discourse. Like Eliza, Higgins – whose language ‘would be quite proper – say on a canal barge’ (77) – has trouble following the linguistic and social conventions of his own class; his mother tries unsuccessfully to ban him from visiting days since his language offends her friends: ‘Small talk indeed! What about your large talk? Really, dear, you mustnt stay’ (64). Higgins’s and Eliza’s departures from the norms of middle-class polite discourse make them both socially unacceptable, yet the consequences of their exclusions differ significantly because of their disparate social positions. Mrs Higgins’s at-home-day gathering demonstrates the extent to which the rules and conventions of language are controlled by those with both cultural and financial capital. Because of the Eynsford Hills’ social and financial vulnerability, Higgins is able to manipulate the rules of the language game to Eliza’s and his own advantage. When it looks as though Eliza’s class origins will be exposed through her scandalous explanation of her aunt’s death, Higgins intervenes, explaining her baffling diction as an example of ‘the new small talk’ (73). Higgins’s higher social status allows him to create rules that dupe the more vulnerable Eynsford Hills, to the point where they assume Eliza’s infamous parting lines, ‘Not bloody likely,’ to be cutting-edge social discourse, which Clara eagerly emulates (74). The gamelike episode, for all its humour, shows how those with the highest social standing control the rules of discourse, while those with less power must obey them, no matter how ridiculous or vacuous they may be, if they seek to enter that social milieu. Although Higgins disrupts and even mocks class distinctions as he assists Eliza in crossing linguistic barriers, he nonetheless seeks to protect his status as rule giver and arbiter of linguistic codes. Highly critical of Eliza’s ‘kerbstone English,’ Higgins deems her ‘disgusting sounds’ to be an ‘incarnate insult to the English language’ (20). He later seeks to take credit for all her progress, insisting that ‘[s]he will relapse into the gutter in three weeks without me at her elbow’ (116). Near the end of the play, Eliza provokes his anger most effectively when she threatens to encroach on his status as rule giver: Liza. … I’ll go and be a teacher. Higgins. Whatll you teach, in heaven’s name? Liza. What you taught me. I’ll teach phonetics. Higgins. Ha! Ha! Ha! Liza. I’ll offer myself as an assistant to that hairyfaced Hungarian. Higgins. [rising in a fury] What! That impostor! that humbug! that toadying

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ignoramus! Teach him my methods! my discoveries! You take one step in his direction and I’ll wring your neck. [He lays hands on her.] Do you hear? (126)

Higgins recognizes that his status as a linguistic expert who is able not only to identify but also to change people’s class by shaping their language gives him great power in British society, a power he does not wish to share.33 Higgins may be willing to bring Eliza into his household and into his class, but he wants to protect his status as the sole expert capable of redrawing class boundaries through language. Noel Coward, Hay Fever: ‘Is this a game?’ Noel Coward’s highly meta-theatrical play, Hay Fever, places great emphasis on game playing, particularly as it overlaps with role playing. Set in the Bliss family’s country house, the play centres on the chaotic interactions between this eccentric, bohemian family and an assortment of weekend guests who find themselves drawn into the family’s high jinks until they escape from their home en masse, put off by their hosts’ unorthodox behaviour. The two sets of characters are not differentiated through wealth or class status but rather through their adherence to social norms. As Sorel Bliss complains to her brother early in the play, ‘Abnormal, Simon – that’s what we are. Abnormal. People stare in astonishment when we say what we consider perfectly ordinary things.’34 In the play, this family ‘abnormality’ manifests itself through an enthusiasm for, and adeptness at, games of all sorts – language games, role playing, and even flirtations. All three types of game playing come together when the Blisses, at a moment’s notice, jump into roles from their thespian mother’s ‘greatest success’ in the theatre, an ‘appalling,’ ‘fearful’ melodrama entitled Love’s Whirlwind cited at the opening of this paper. The connection established between role playing and game playing runs throughout the play, including the scene most explicitly set apart as a language game: the chaotic and contentious game of adverbs at the start of Act Two. Like Shaw, Coward uses his language game to ridicule the codes and conventions that serve to create and to reinforce social boundaries, but unlike Shaw, Coward’s rule givers, the Blisses, do not represent dominant culture; their guests, who include a diplomat and a socialite, hold more conventional forms of power. Within the topsy-turvy world of the play, however, the ‘abnormal’ Blisses occupy a privileged position that allows them to dictate the rules:

284 Rebecca S. Cameron Jackie. What do we have to do? Judith. Choose an adverb, and then – Simon. Someone goes out, you see, and comes in, and you’ve chosen a word among yourselves, and she or he or whoever it is asks you some sort of question and you have to – Sorel. Not an ordinary question, Simon; they have to ask them to do something in the manner of the word, and then – Simon. Then, you see, you act whatever it is – Sorel. The answer to the question, you see? (143)

The Blisses’ chaotic and confusing instructions, delivered ‘with great speed,’ make a mockery of the rule-giving process (143). As the characters fumble and fight their way through the language game, Coward mocks all manner of regulatory codes and conventions as arbitrary, haphazard, and nonsensical. Coward’s game of ‘adverbs’ draws particular attention to the tenuous connection between words and external things or events. The non-referential aspects of language noted by Saussure and Wittgenstein become an amusing yet vaguely unsettling feature of Coward’s language game. As the players grope for a suitable adverb, Coward highlights the absence of any external reality to ground the proposed words: Richard. We don’t seem to be getting on with the game. Judith. We haven’t thought of a word yet. Myra. ‘Brightly.’ Simon. Too obvious. Myra. Very well – don’t snap at me! Judith. ‘Saucily.’ I’ve got a lovely idea for ‘saucily.’ Myra [at Simon]. I should think ‘rudely’ would be the easiest.

(145)

Once the players finally settle on an adverb, ‘winsomely,’ the game further emphasizes the slippery relationship between words and the things they are supposed to name, as none of the players is able to enact the word convincingly. Even Judith Bliss, an experienced actress, is unable to act in such a way as to inspire the correct response, and Coward’s stage directions playfully propose two alternative adverbs, ‘archly’ and ‘lightly,’ to describe her actions: ‘She trips lightly over to the vase, gurgling with coy laughter, selects a flower, then goes over to RICHARD; pursing her lips into a mock smile, she gives him the flower, with a little girlish gasp at her own daring, and wags her finger archly at him’ (146). In the end, Sorel stumbles

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on the right adverb entirely by accident, as she sarcastically gives a name to Jackie’s self-depreciating resistance to participating in the game: Jackie. It’s all my fault – I know I’m awfully silly, but it embarrasses me so terribly doing anything in front of people. Sorel [with acidity]. I should think the word was ‘winsomely.’ Simon. You must have been listening outside the door, then. Sorel. Not at all – Miss Coryton gave it away. (148)

Sorel’s ability to put a name to Jackie’s behaviour becomes ground for suspicion. Coward goes further than Saussure in suggesting an arbitrary connection between words and the things or concepts they designate. In his Course in General Linguistics, Saussure observes that ‘the bond between the signifier and the signified is arbitrary,’ that is, the signifier ‘has no natural connection with the signified.’35 However, as Roy Harris explains, Saussure does not subscribe to a position of complete arbitrariness in language; linguistic structure depends upon limitations on arbitrariness: ‘[u]nlimited arbitrariness equals linguistic chaos: and this must inevitably be so if languages, like games, have nothing in the world “outside” to secure and shore up their internal organization.’36 Coward, on the other hand, pushes towards a sense of ‘unlimited arbitrariness’ in his language game, revelling in the resulting linguistic and social chaos. Coward’s language game, like Shaw’s, emphasizes the role of language in creating and reinforcing social distinctions. Despite its haphazard, whimsical rules, the game of adverbs serves to separate the unconventional Blisses, who are skilled game and role players, from their conventional guests, who decidedly are not. Whereas the Blisses play the game with gusto, their guests are baffled and resistant. Myra, an acerbic socialite, refuses to continue playing after Judith criticizes her first halfhearted attempt to enact the word; Richard, a dull diplomat, accidentally enacts the wrong word; Jackie, a simple-minded flapper, rejects the game altogether: ‘It’s a hateful game, anyhow, and I don’t want to play it again ever’ (147). Throughout, the Blisses remain in control of the game, not only giving the rules but also judging their guests’ proposals for adverbs (‘not definite enough,’ ‘too obvious,’ or ‘that’s not an adverb’) and their performances (‘It’s so frightfully easy, and nobody can do it right,’ 144–6). Despite various forms of resistance among their guests, the Blisses force them to continue playing until their internal bickering puts an end to the game once and for all. However ridiculous, the Blisses’ language games, along with their gamelike flirtations, make their

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guests feel increasingly uncomfortable and excluded, to the point where they all conspire to ‘go away – quietly’ (172). The last scene shows the Blisses sitting down to breakfast, totally oblivious of their effect on their guests, accusing them of ‘behav[ing] in the most extraordinary manner’ (179). Inside their own home, the Blisses are the creators and enforcers of the rules of the game while the guests are ‘extraordinary,’ but outside their home, they are the ones judged ‘abnormal.’ Coward implies that such distinctions between ‘normal’ and ‘abnormal’ are arbitrary and dependent on context, and he uses his language game to emphasize the irrationality, haphazardness, and ridiculousness of the linguistic and social conventions that serve to enforce such distinctions. Other writers of comedy of manners such as Oscar Wilde and Joe Orton employ similar strategies, most notably in Lady Bracknell’s absurd interview of Jack as a prospective suitor for Gwendolyn in The Importance of Being Earnest – another scene that could be regarded as a subversive language game. Harold Pinter, The Birthday Party: ‘Enjoying the game?’ Writing in the wake of the Second World War, Pinter employs language games to explore the role of language in exerting and maintaining power. Through a more extreme form of linguistic dominance and submission, Pinter goes considerably further than Shaw or Coward in showing how language can be used to create and enforce power relations. Pinter’s darker, more violent presentation of the relationship between language and social control can be attributed in part to his heightened awareness of the state’s power to coerce and control its population through propaganda in wartime. Like several postwar playwrights, including particularly Beckett and Ionesco, Pinter is highly attuned to the ways in which language can function as a means of exerting control over others. Several critics have commented on the power dynamics inherent in Pinter’s dialogue, most notably Austin Quigley, whose influential reading of the ‘interrelational function’ of language in Pinter’s plays demonstrates how language ‘functions primarily as a means of dictating and reinforcing relationships.’37 In The Birthday Party, Pinter makes use of scenes that might be described as language games to show how this ‘interrelational function’ of language can take on an insidious or threatening aspect. In these scenes, dominant figures exploit the non-referential, arbitrary characteristics of language to their advantage, using it to overpower the weaker or more vulnerable members of society. Like Pygmalion and Hay Fever, The Birthday Party incorporates several

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types of game, including a disturbing adult party game of blind man’s buff.38 The episodes that might best be described as language games, however, are the two scenes in which two mysterious and vaguely menacing strangers, Goldberg and McCann, bombard a young pianist, Stanley, first with a series of accusatory questions (the interrogation scene) and then with coercive promises (the brainwashing scene). Whereas Shaw and Coward marked off their language games by articulating the rules that bound and regulate the social interchange, however inadequately, Pinter’s language games are characterized by a noticeable absence of such explicit regulations. Unlike Higgins or the Blisses, Goldberg and McCann do not express any rules, and their refusal to provide any parameters for their questioning seems to contribute to their power. Even between themselves, the men avoid articulating any boundaries or rules governing their interactions. When McCann expresses uncertainty about the expectations of their ‘job,’ Goldberg remains evasive: ‘The main issue is a singular issue and quite distinct from your previous work. Certain elements, however, might well approximate in points of procedure to some of your other activities. All is dependent on the attitude of our subject. At all events, McCann, I can assure you that the assignment will be carried out and the mission accomplished with no excessive aggravation to you or myself.’39 The absence of any defined regulations contributes to the sense of menace that pervades the ensuing interrogations. Yet in the final brainwashing scene, in which Goldberg and McCann alternate promises to have Stanley ‘adjusted’ and ‘re-orientated’ before they carry him off to an undisclosed location, McCann makes a mistake which implies that unstated rules do exist: Goldberg. You’ll be integrated. McCann. You’ll give orders. Goldberg. You’ll make decisions. McCann. You’ll be a magnate. Goldberg. A statesman. McCann. You’ll own yachts. Goldberg. Animals. McCann. Animals. GOLDBERG looks at McCANN. Goldberg. I said animals.

(88)

By repeating Goldman’s word verbatim instead of finding a synonym, McCann has evidently broken an unarticulated rule governing this game-

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like exchange. Through these scenes, Pinter suggests that deliberately concealing the rules of a language game that determines social relations can serve to maintain control even more effectively and insidiously than explicit rules or naturalized conventions. Like Coward, Pinter uses language games to draw attention to words’ arbitrary relationship to external things or events through bizarre, nonsensical verbal exchanges. While Coward’s game of adverbs playfully draws attention to the slippery relationship between words and things, Pinter presents lack of referentiality as a potentially dangerous feature of language. In the initial interrogation, Goldberg and McGann use arbitrariness to gain an advantage over Stanley by making several apparently random references to historical events – ‘the Albigensenist heresy,’ a ‘watered … wicket in Melbourne,’ ‘the blessed Oliver Plunkett,’ and Drogheda (54) – all of which become absurdly, yet disturbingly, part of their interrogation. Goldberg’s questions become increasingly nonsensical, divorced from external facts or events: Goldberg. Is the number 846 possible or necessary? Stanley. Neither. Goldberg. Wrong! Is the number 846 possible or necessary? Stanley. Both. Goldberg. Wrong! Why do you think the number 846 is necessarily possible? … Goldberg. Why did the chicken cross the road? Stanley. He wanted to – he wanted to … Goldberg. Why did the chicken cross the road? Stanley. He wanted … McCann. He doesn’t know. He doesn’t know which came first! Goldberg. Which came first? McCann. Chicken? Egg? Which came first? Goldberg and McCann. Which came first? Which came first? Which came first? STANLEY screams. (53–5)

Goldberg and McCann finally defeat Stanley through a paradoxical, selfreferential question. For Pinter, non-referentiality is not simply a challenge to nomenclaturism; it is an unsettling, potentially harmful aspect of language. The instability of the characters’ names in the play further contributes to the uncertainty resulting from this loss of connection between words and things.

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In the interrogation scene, Stanley at first attempts to counter Goldberg by providing equally obfuscating, non-referential responses: Goldberg. Where did you come from? Stanley. Somewhere else. … Goldberg. Webber! Why did you change your name? Stanley. I forget the other one. Goldberg. What’s your name now? Stanley. Joe Soap. … Goldberg. What’s your trade? Stanley. I play the piano. Goldberg. How many fingers do you use? Stanley. No hands! … Goldberg. What do you use for pyjamas? Stanley. Nothing.

(51–4)

As Stanley’s scream at the end of this exchange makes clear, however, his non-referentiality is largely defensive, whereas Goldberg’s is aggressive, and as a result Stanley’s obfuscating responses do not succeed in shifting the balance of power away from Goldberg. Stanley’s loss of power becomes more pronounced in the final brainwashing scene, in which he remains silent until he finally emits a series of unintelligible sounds: ‘STANLEY concentrates, his mouth opens, he attempts to speak, fails and emits sounds from his throat. STANLEY: Uh-gug … uh-gug … eehhh-gag … (On the breath.) Caahh … caahh …’ (88–9). Nonsensical language takes on two different forms here: Goldberg and McCann employ nonsensical questions and promises to reinforce their position of dominance, whereas Stanley’s loss of sense results from being verbally, and likely physically, overpowered. As Marc Silverstein has persuasively argued, McCann and Goldberg achieve this position of dominance because their nonsensical, cliché-ridden language is supported by ‘the codes that speak the various forms of cultural power,’ enabling them to ‘expropriate Stanley from “his” language, transforming him into an empty vessel waiting to be filled with cultural codes that will allow him to speak with the Other’s voice, embrace the Other’s values, desire the Other’s desire.’40 Through Goldberg and McCann’s nonsensical questions and clichéd promises, Pinter satirizes the cultural codes and linguistic conventions that serve

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dominant culture, as Shaw and Coward do, but he goes much further than these other playwrights in exposing their harmful, even violent potential. Because McCann and Goldberg already occupy a position of power, they are able to exploit the arbitrary, relational aspects of language to victimize Stanley in a game he is destined to lose because he has not been given the rules and he is completely overpowered, verbally and physically, two against one. Pinter’s emphasis on the menacing exertion of power through arbitrary, nonsensical language resonates with the Fascist dictatorships of the 1930s and 1940s. Pinter’s language games bring into prominence a significant aspect of games relevant to all three playwrights: games usually result in winners and losers. Whereas Wittgenstein and Saussure use the game analogy simply to describe how language works, these modern British dramatists pay more attention to the power dynamics embedded in language games. Each of these verbal contests shows, albeit in quite different ways, how linguistic codes and social conventions work together to create and maintain power differences in British society. Games have the potential to upset the existing balance of power, but they often end up supporting existing hierarchies, as those with better training or more familiarity with the rules and conventions tend to win. The plays in this essay can be seen as taking an increasingly bleak view of the odds of upsetting the balance of power as the century progresses, particularly in the aftermath of the Second World War. In Pygmalion, a disadvantaged player moves up in rank thanks to her exceptional natural abilities and considerable coaching from two highly skilled players. Hay Fever ends in a draw – or perhaps more accurately in a forfeit – as the weaker players quit the game but the stronger ones fail to maintain any semblance of order. Finally, The Birthday Party, with its darker view of the power of language haunted by the spectre of Nazi atrocities, shows the utter defeat of a player who is completely overpowered by his opponents in a lopsided game over which they have control from the start. Notes 1 Noel Coward, Hay Fever, in Three Plays (New York: Vintage Books, 1999), 128. 2 Tony Crowley, Standard English and the Politics of Language, 2nd ed. (Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave MacMillan, 2003), 113–15. Through the BBC’s World Service, the influence of ‘BBC English’ extended throughout the British Empire.

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3 Ibid., 170–1. 4 Thomas Burns McArthur, The English Languages (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 33–4. 5 Pierre Bourdieu, Language and Symbolic Power, ed. John B. Thompson, trans. Gino Raymond and Matthew Adamson (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991), 45–6. 6 McArthur, The English Languages, 34–5. 7 For an interesting discussion of how other American and British modernists resist this increased pressure for standardization, see Michael North’s The Dialect of Modernism: Race, Language, and Twentieth-Century Literature (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994). 8 Roy Harris, Language, Saussure and Wittgenstein: How to Play Games with Words (London and New York: Routledge, 1988), ix. 9 Ibid., ix. 10 Ibid., x. 11 Ferdinand de Saussure, Course in General Linguistics, ed. Charles Bally and Albert Sechehaye with Albert Riedlinger; trans. Wade Baskin (New York, Toronto, and London: McGraw-Hill Book Company, 1959), 88, and Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, trans. G.E.M. Anscombe (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986), no. 23. 12 Harris, Language, 24–5, 28; Roy Harris and Talbot J. Taylor, Landmarks in Linguistic Thought I: The Western Tradition from Socrates to Saussure (London and New York: Routledge, 1989), 180; Saussure, Course, 88. 13 Harris, Language, 47. 14 Jonathan Culler, Ferdinand de Saussure, rev. ed. (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1986), 87–8. 15 Ibid., 63, 16. 16 Saussure, Course, 14. 17 Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, no. 23. 18 John E. Joseph, Nigel Love, and Talbot J. Taylor, Landmarks in Linguistic Thought II: The Western Tradition in the Twentieth Century (London and New York: Routledge, 2001), 89. 19 Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, no. 43. 20 David Blair, Wittgenstein, Language and Information: ‘Back to the Rough Ground!’ (New York: Springer, 2006), 229. 21 Marjorie Perloff, Wittgenstein’s Ladder: Poetic Language and the Strangeness of the Ordinary (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 79–80. 22 Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, no. 69.

292 Rebecca S. Cameron 23 Perloff, Wittgenstein’s Ladder, 20. 24 Keir Elam, Shakespeare’s Universe of Discourse: Language-Games in the Comedies (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 10–1. 25 Elam notes the usefulness of Wittgenstein’s concept of the language game beyond Shakespeare in ‘After Magritte, After Carroll, After Wittgenstein: What Tom Stoppard’s Tortoise Taught Us,’ Modern Drama 27 (1984): 469–85. 26 See Jill L. Levenson, ‘Hamlet Andante / Hamlet Allegro: Tom Stoppard’s Two Versions,’ Shakespeare Survey 36 (1983): 21–8, and Jill L. Levenson, ‘Stoppard’s Shakespeare: Textual Re-visions,’ Cambridge Companion to Tom Stoppard, ed. Katherine E. Kelly (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 154–70. These essays offer astute explorations of Stoppard’s language games and wordplay as they intersect with Shakespeare, Beckett, and Wittgenstein. 27 Elam, Shakespeare’s Universe, 18. Elam’s examples include the repeated use of anaphora in Two Gentlemen of Verona and Holofernes’ exaggerated alliteration in Love’s Labour’s Lost. 28 Abraham Tauber, ed., George Bernard Shaw on Language (New York: Philosophical Library, 1963). 29 Bernard Shaw, Pygmalion: A Romance in Five Acts, ed. L.W. Conolly (London: Methuen Drama, 2008), 3; Harris, Language, 14, 15. 30 Nicholas Grene, Introduction, Pygmalion (London and New York: Penguin Classics, 2000), xiii. As Grene notes, Shaw may have developed a more acceptably refined Irish accent over the course of his life in England. 31 Lynda Mugglestone, ‘Shaw, Subjective Inequality, and the Social Meanings of Language,’ Review of English Studies, New Series 44 (1993): 379. 32 Hugo Baetens Beardsmore, ‘A Sociolinguistic Interpretation of Pygmalion,’ English Studies 60 (1979): 712–13. 33 Higgins’s reluctance to share his power may stem in part from the xenophobia that Alan Ackerman observes in his essay in this volume. 34 Coward, Hay Fever, 119. 35 Saussure, Course, 67, 69. 36 Harris, Language, 60. 37 Austin Quigley, The Pinter Problem (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1975), 52. Quigley also draws on Wittgenstein’s theory of language, particularly his critique of reference theories and his refusal to separate meaning from use, but his analysis of Pinter’s language makes only limited use of Wittgenstein’s concept of the language game. 38 For a more detailed discussion of blind man’s buff and other references to games in The Birthday Party, see Lorraine Hall Burghardt, ‘Game Playing in Three by Pinter,’ Modern Drama 77 (1974): 377–88.

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39 Harold Pinter, The Birthday Party, in The Birthday Party and The Room: Two Plays by Harold Pinter (New York: Grove Press, 1961), 31, 32. 40 Marc Silverstein, Harold Pinter and the Language of Cultural Power (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 1993), 22, 20.

Afterword A Tapestry of Thanks: Reflections on the Work of Jill L. Levenson jane freeman

How does one measure the impact of a great teacher and scholar? Professor Jill Levenson has had such a long, prolific, and remarkable career that it is difficult to describe without hyperbole. Let’s begin with numbers. She has been a professor of English at Trinity College in the University of Toronto for four decades. During that time, she has served on more than 100 committees, given more than thirty distinguished public lectures, delivered more than forty conference papers, and published more than sixty peer-reviewed documents ranging in length from twopage book reviews to her magnificent 450-page Oxford edition of Romeo and Juliet. Since admiration can’t be counted and inspiration can’t be measured by the pound, let’s try another unit of measurement: scholarly awards. In 1986 the Conference of Editors of Learned Journals presented Jill Levenson with a Special Certificate of Merit for a career of distinguished service as an editor, and her extraordinary career has continued for an additional twenty-five years since then. When the University of Toronto’s Faculty of Arts and Science instituted an Outstanding Teaching Award, she was one of the first winners. Her peers have elected her to a range of prestigious positions of leadership – in the American Society for Theatre Research and the Modern Language Association, as President of the Shakespeare Association of America, and as Chair of the Executive of the International Shakespeare Association. In 2003, she received the highest academic accolade available to scholars in Canada: election to Fellowship in the Royal Society of Canada. Jill Levenson is an academic star, but the public record of her accomplishments tells only part of the story of her professional success. Much of her work as a teacher and scholar has occurred in the wings – unlist-

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ed in her curriculum vitae and unrecognized except by those who have benefited deeply from her diligence. The editors of this volume asked me to draw our collective attention to her contributions as a scholar and a teacher; I contacted some of her colleagues and former students for input and include excerpts from their warm and lengthy responses below. (Contributors are listed at the end.) As you will see from their reflections, her work has had an exponential impact on the scholarship of Shakespeare and of modern drama, for her scholarship has facilitated the teaching of others, and her teaching has facilitated the scholarship of others. Reflections on Her Scholarship Professor Levenson has published in top journals and anthologies on a wide range of topics: anonymous plays of the sixteenth century, comedy, the works of Shakespeare and his contemporaries, Tom Stoppard, and Shakespeare and modern drama. She is best known, however, for her work on one particular play: as one colleague put it, ‘Jill is the go-to girl for Romeo and Juliet.’ Jill Levenson is, quite simply, the world’s leading expert on Romeo and Juliet. She has written on strategies for teaching the play, versions of the story before Shakespeare, Shakespeare’s phrasing, and the play’s narratives and places of invention. She has also facilitated the scholarship of others through her unparalleled work on both the play in performance and its manuscript history. Her book on the performance history of Romeo and Juliet for Manchester University Press (1987), the searchable online databases she created of 170 prompt-books of productions of the play, the Malone Society edition of the 1597 Quarto that she co-edited with Barry Gaines (2000), and her Oxford University Press edition (2000) combine to allow readers to investigate Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet on page and stage from the seventeenth to the twenty-first century. Here’s what some of her colleagues had to say: [I met Jill thirty years ago when she] was about to take over as editor of Modern Drama, and I was immediately impressed by both her versatility and her lack of pretence. Jill has a forthright modesty (if that doesn’t sound too oxymoronic) that characterizes everything she does: in scholarship as in friendship, she is judicious, reliable, and without a trace of flash. As a new general editor of the Shakespeare in Performance Series in 1986, I was involved in the final stages of preparing Jill’s volume on Romeo and Juliet for

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MUP. Like her subsequent edition of the play for Oxford, this volume was meticulously researched, lucidly written, and full of fresh insights. Jill offers a model of good scholarship and good sense to her colleagues and students alike; and above all, she is humane, a rare virtue in today’s academy. I remember with delight and admiration the open mind with which Jill took on the intractable problem of the relation between the two quartos of Romeo and Juliet; we had some long and intense conversations about it over the phone when long-distance calling was still rare. Later with the same feelings I read her account of the play’s textual problems in her wonderful Oxford edition.

Her Oxford edition is regarded by many as ‘the best the play has ever had.’ ‘Since publication it has established itself as an essential edition, whose sales figures mirror its success.’ With this edition ‘she helped facilitate the rethinking of fundamental editorial processes. In dealing with multiple versions, she helped others rethink the nature of the text and the relationship of various sources.’ Reflections on Her Teaching Although her scholarship has brought her international renown, on the University of Toronto campus she is best known as a beloved teacher. Her former students describe her as their ‘biggest supporter and most exacting critic’: an ‘unstintingly generous’ professor who ‘gave us the necessary tools for forming our own understanding of Shakespeare,’ ‘encouraged independent thought in her students,’ and provided ‘the ne plus ultra example of what it means to excel as both an educator and a scholar.’ Here are some of their reflections: Jill has a way of opening spaces for people to do their own work. She has an amazing sense of when and how to intervene to send people in the right direction. She’s a great facilitator. She recognizes the skill set that students need to have and through her work with the Bibliography course, she has given them a grounding in physical bibliography. [In her Bibliography seminar] Jill was able to turn what most would consider a rather dry topic into a lively, invigorating, and entertaining exploration of the very basis of scholarship. I will never forget rediscovering Eliot’s poetry in fascinating new ways, learning the true importance of the OED as an

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academic resource, or exploring special collections in different libraries … [Her Shakespeare course] was much more than an education in texts like Richard II; it helped lay the groundwork for the development of my critical faculties and considerably strengthened my academic writing. To this day I remember and try to emulate the delicate mix of engagement and distance Jill practised in the everyday give-and-take of the graduate classroom: she allowed the students to lead and guide discussion, but not to the degree that intellectual productivity would decay into chaos. Knowing how to balance a firm hand and a light touch is the mark of a born teacher, and her mastery of that balance made her course an exceptional experience for all graduate students. The process of writing [essays for her course provided] opportunities for intensive learning both before and after I submitted them. She honed my close readings and taught me new strategies for interpretation. She handed my papers back so meticulously edited that they are reference books themselves in grammar and form. Jill demanded a lot of her students (I remember being SO frustrated by not managing to get above an A minus on a passage analysis assignment despite rewriting and resubmitting it!!), but equally rewarded her students with collegiality and the assumption that we were on a shared journey. There was never any question of familiarity – I didn’t stop calling her Professor Levenson until long after I’d completed my doctorate!! – but there was a crucial respect for what students brought to the class, and the (seeming??) confidence that she, too, would learn something new from us. Honestly, when I think about it now, I laugh! What could she possibly learn about R&J in the late 1980s from a bunch of undergrads?!?! But there was always a sense that these presentations would lead to new insights for us all. Jill Levenson's course was a pivotal experience for me as a graduate student: here, I discovered the scholarly delight and diligence of tracking sources in rare book libraries. Also in that course, Jill taught me how to scan poetry. Her scansion handout, for ten years now, has helped over 500 of my undergraduates. I had the honour of assisting her with the compilation of her Romeo and Juliet Prompt-Books Database. The many quiet hours of recording line cuts and stage directions in Jill’s office – Tovah curled up beside me and Matan, muzzle on desk, looking on – cultivated both my interest in performance

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history and my understanding of the value of detail. These gifts I also share with my students, as Jill’s Oxford edition of Romeo and Juliet explains to them the problem of playing Romeo and how the minute – the word, the line – illuminates the whole … I am deeply grateful to Jill for not just teaching me but showing me how to be a scholar and a teacher. And, yes, I correct the punctuation in students’ MLA citation entries just as Jill corrected mine.

I invited only a small portion of Prof. Levenson’s countless former students to share reminiscences of her teaching, and yet I received far more wonderful material than the length of this afterword allowed me to include. Students admire not only her masterful pedagogy but also her personal integrity and the generosity with which she helped them: ‘I went and talked with Professor Levenson during office hours more times than I went to talk with any professor in my years as an undergraduate student.’ ‘She submitted my name for an essay prize. She helped me write and revise statements of academic purpose and wrote letters of reference for my funding and PhD applications … She believed in me as a scholar when I didn’t.’ ‘Her frequent insistence on always “starting with the text” and producing “good, honest scholarship” has stayed with me and informs my own work habits.’ ‘Above all else, Professor Levenson is an icon of integrity and honesty.’ As her students’ vivid and heartfelt recollections reveal, she is not just the sort of teacher students hope to find – she is the sort of teacher many students hope to become: After every class and at every office hour, she was inundated by students with questions, requests, and an urgent need to express ideas that her lectures had sparked in them. Jill’s openness and her ability to illuminate the most difficult passages in everything from Shakespeare to Stoppard, while remaining utterly grounded and fair, draw students to her. I’ve not had an instructor so constantly willing to make time for her students, so prompt and thorough in her response to student queries, and so eager to encourage her students’ curiosity and aid their discovery. (On several occasions, I would arrive in class to discover she’d prepared handwritten notes with references she thought I might find interesting.) I attended a talk she delivered about being a woman in today’s workforce, and remember thinking I wanted to be Jill Levenson when I grew up … When I applied for graduate school, and after my PhD, when I entered the

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workforce, Jill was an incredibly generous and supportive mentor, and still is. I did my Master's degree at the Shakespeare Institute at her suggestion, and even the topic of my doctoral dissertation completed at Oxford came about as a result of her advice. I was writing my Special Fields exam in her office and suddenly noticed a small movement in my peripheral vision. It was the dilating nostrils of one of her two beloved standard poodles, poking through a small hole in the barrier she had built around her desk. The dogs had been so quiet for over an hour that I had forgotten they were there, ‘keeping me company’ as Prof. Levenson would say. She used to insist they were learned in Shakespeare. As I move on to do graduate work in Shakespeare studies, I sometimes dream about what it would be like to teach my own Shakespeare course; but this dreaming often ends in the realization that it would be very, very hard to improve on Professor Levenson's method. The texts she selected, the balance of lecturing and student participation, the interpretive tools she provided, the themes she helped us explore, and her individual guidance on papers and seminars, made for a course which was just about perfect – and very likely the reason I am still studying Shakespeare today.

Reflections on Her Service to Colleagues and Students The academic leaders to whom she has reported note that students frequently ask her for letters of reference because they feel known by her, and colleagues seek her ‘exemplary contributions’ on committees to which vital choices have been entrusted. A highly valued mentor and team member, she has a reputation for being generously available to students and colleagues alike: I was struck by her open-door policy. There was always someone in her office – a student or a colleague visiting. She discussed each class presentation and essay both before and after it was done. When I walked by her office she was usually listening. She must be a splendid listener. It’s a tremendous skill to get undergraduates to talk … She broke larger classes into tutorial groups for discussions in her office (with the important contribution of her two poodles). The poodles changed the feeling in her office. She is remarkably committed to her students and plans her courses and

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classes with great care. She is equally conscientious in the writing of references for students; letters of hers that I have seen have been models of their kind – admirably detailed and fair-minded, and certain to be helpful to the recipient … Every year, we organize an orientation program for prospective students including sessions led by faculty. Jill was an obvious person for me to ask to lead a session; I knew she would be good with the students – she would put them at ease, encourage them to ask questions, and give them useful information. She has that openness Jane Austen thought the ultimate mark of character. (So do I.) The result of this is, of course, that she can be trusted, the first quality for a friend, a teacher, and a scholar … She is interested in the achievement of her students and friends and generosity itself when she praises. I first came to know Jill when she joined the Harvard Graduate School’s Alumni Association Council in the fall 2000. During the past nine years, the deans of Harvard’s Graduate School have been enormously impressed with the amount of time, energy, and intellectual engagement Jill has brought to her various committee assignments for the council. As a faculty member at the University of Toronto and as a Harvard PhD, she brings a deep understanding of the workings of research universities in both the United States and Canada, and we are grateful for her insights … Jill has served as the Chair of the Committee on Careers since 2003. The committee is concerned with helping students investigate careers, both inside and outside academia, and has initiated a series of successful programs including an annual Career Options Day and an alumni advisory directory … Harvard graduate students have Jill and her colleagues to thank for the alumni commitment to this important initiative.

Reflections on Her Service to the Scholarly Community Her service to the profession extends far beyond extra-curricular work with students. Colleagues who have worked with her on Modern Drama and on conference planning for the Shakespeare Association of America and the International Shakespeare Association marvel not only at the significance of her impact but also at the enormous amount of time she invests in strengthening the scholarly communities to which she belongs: She is extremely hard-working and conscientious. During the ten to fifteen

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years she ran Modern Drama, she took a journal that was struggling and turned it into the chief journal in the field. She was the only editor and got things done all by herself without a course release or an extra stipend on top of her own scholarship and her full teaching load. She moved MD to the University of Toronto Press where it has stayed. I took over, with some trepidation, from Jill as editor of Modern Drama in 1986. The trepidation, apart from healthy fear of the unknown, was because of what I DID know: that Jill rescued the journal from broking pawn and literal disaster, caught up to a regular schedule, attracted top-class contributors, and ran a regular Modern Drama session at the MLA, all high-profile stuff I wasn’t sure I could maintain, even with the assistance of my distinguished co-editor, Christopher Innes, appointed on the principle that it takes at least two men to do the work of one woman. How right that was. When I discovered through hard experience how much work Jill had put into the preparation and copy editing of each issue, I was all the more in awe … Under my rule she continued to be a steady and supportive chair of the board, and has remained a wise voice in everything to do with the running of Modern Drama up to the present. Editing remains a rather under-appreciated academic pursuit. Jill did it selflessly and superbly, to the benefit of the field of drama studies and the reputation of the University of Toronto. The wonderful but daunting World Shakespeare Congress is held in different parts of the globe every five years under the auspices of the International Shakespeare Association, which Jill has chaired since 2002. When the late Professor Lloyd Davis and I agreed to convene the 2006 Congress in Brisbane, Australia … records were in disarray, and Lloyd and I had no idea who was or once had been an ISA member or how to contact those who had attended the last Congress. I went to Jill for help. She must, at some times in the privacy of her study, have considered the WSC a poisoned chalice she had inherited, but she sorted the problem, fast. She arranged with the ISA to relieve the ISA secretary from his other duties for a fortnight, cleared the same time out of her diary, and went to Stratford. Suddenly I had names and addresses, contact e-mails, fast-filling lists of participants for registrations, and registrations starting to flow in. If you read her generous foreword to the Congress Proceedings, Shakespeare’s World / World Shakespeares, published in 2008, you’d guess none of this. She thanks many and acknowledges all, except her own key contribution and wisdom. This is my chance to repay her. Thanks Jill.

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Jill worked countless hours in putting together the Brisbane Congress which took place in 2006 … During the planning stages, there were multiple obstacles threatening the success of the event – but thanks to Jill's clearminded determination, and passion for bringing Shakespeareans together, Brisbane proved a tremendous event. Over 90 countries were represented at the Congress, and it was the first ISA congress to be held in the Southern hemisphere. Jill has continued to chair the ISA, and is currently working towards the 2011 Congress to be held in Prague. Again, Jill has worked above and beyond the call of duty, and the Prague Congress will be a fitting celebration of Jill's devotion to this organization. Jill served as President [of the SAA] with great distinction and during her term made plans for the ISA's 1996 World Congress in Los Angeles. As Chair of the ISA at that time, I spent lots of time with her … Under her aegis, Jill has never considered any task beneath her if it would benefit the organization … While presiding over a meeting, she treats even the tedious and tendentious with courtesy. That good-natured approach wins over everyone who works with her. You will look in vain for colleagues who resent or dislike her. Quite aside from her leadership qualities, friends admire her courage and candour in coping with personal illness, as well as her loving devotion to her late mother. Seeing the two of them together in their travels or at home always revealed their rare, truly affectionate relationship. Such selfless generosity characterizes Jill’s approach to others. Because she expects to like people, she is seldom disappointed. Her consistent concern, whether for a single acquaintance or for a huge group of attendees at an ISA Congress, is that everyone should have an enjoyable, productive experience. Her smile, her humour, her attention to detail, her warm approach to others have won Jill friends around the globe. It is fitting that her life and her achievements should be honoured with this festschrift.

Fitting indeed. ‘Jill Levenson is that rare creature in academia: the brilliant scholar and the dedicated educator.’ As I collected reminiscences from her colleagues and students, I was struck by the consistency of the message I was receiving. She treats students, department chairs, and deans with equal respect and brings the same generosity of spirit to organizing an international conference as she does to providing feedback on an undergraduate student’s course paper. Although the contributors to this tapestry of thanks worked with her at different stages in their careers, on different projects, on different continents, and in differ-

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ent decades, their stories of Jill Levenson’s scholarship and teaching, transfigured so together, describe someone of great constancy: a gifted scholar, deeply committed to her profession, whose heart is as capacious as her mind.

Contributors: Derek Allen, John Astington, Patricia Brückmann, Thom Bryce, Jim Bulman, Rebecca Cameron, Philip Collington, Ann Jennalie Cook, Brian Corman, Kevin Ewert, Richard Fotheringham, David Galbraith, Margot Gill, Caitlin Hamilton, Linda Hutjens, M.J. Kidnie, Peter Latka, Hairee Lee, Alexander Leggatt, Judith Luna, Toby Malone, Margaret McGeachy, David McInnis, Robin Mount, Bernice Neal, Rob Ormsby, Brian Parker, Andy Scheil, Hanna Scolnicov, Philippa Sheppard, Misha Teramura, Nick Walton, Stanley Wells, Paul Werstine

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Jill L. Levenson’s Publications

Rev. of Philip Finkelpearl’s John Marston of the Middle Temple (Cambridge, MA, 1969). Modern Philology 68 (November 1970): 199–201. ‘Views from a Revolving Door: Tom Stoppard’s Canon to Date.’ Queen’s Quarterly 78 (Autumn 1971): 431–42. Rev. of Sylvia Feldman’s The Morality-Patterned Comedy of the Renaissance (The Hague and Paris, 1970). Renaissance Quarterly 25 (Autumn 1972): 362–4. ‘What the Silence Said: Still Points in “King Lear.”’ In Shakespeare 1971, ed. Clifford Leech and John M.R. Margeson. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1972. 215–29. Anne Lancashire and Jill Levenson. ‘Anonymous Plays.’ In The Predecessors of Shakespeare: A Survey and Bibliography of Recent Studies in English Renaissance Drama, ed. Terence P. Logan and Denzell S. Smith. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1973. 161–311. Rev. of Harold Fisch’s Hamlet and the Word (New York, 1971). Modern Philology 72 (August 1974): 84–7. Anne Lancashire and Jill Levenson. ‘Anonymous Plays.’ In The Popular School: A Survey and Bibliography of Recent Studies in English Renaissance Drama, ed. Terence P. Logan and Denzell S. Smith. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1975. 148–249. ‘Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida and the Monumental Tradition in Tapestries and Literature.’ Renaissance Drama 7 (1976): 43–84. Anne Lancashire and Jill Levenson. ‘Anonymous Plays.’ In The New Intellectuals: A Survey and Bibliography of Recent Studies in English Renaissance Drama, ed. Terence P. Logan and Denzell S. Smith. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1977. 302–22. ‘The Narrative Format of Benoit’s Roman de Troie.’ Romania 100, n1 (1979): 54–70.

306 Jill L. Levenson’s Publications Rev. of F.W. Brownlow’s Two Shakespearean Sequences: ‘Henry VI’ to ‘Richard II’ and ‘Pericles’ to ‘Timon of Athens’ (London and Basingstoke, 1977), and John Reibetanz, The ‘Lear’ World: A Study of ‘King Lear’ in Its Dramatic Context (Toronto and Buffalo, 1977). Canadian Theatre Review 26 (Spring 1980): 122–5. ‘The Weakest Goeth to the Wall’: A Critical Edition. New York: Garland Publishing, Inc., 1980. ‘Dramatists at (Meta)Play: Shakespeare’s Hamlet, II, ii, 11. 410–591, and Pirandello’s Henry IV.’ Modern Drama 24 (September 1981): 330–7. ‘The Definition of Love: Shakespeare’s Phrasing in Romeo and Juliet.’ Shakespeare Studies 15 (1982): 21–36. Rev. of Richard Levin’s New Readings vs. Old Plays: Recent Trends in the Reinterpretation of English Renaissance Drama (Chicago and London, 1979). Renaissance and Reformation ns 7 (August 1983): 2l6–18. ‘Tracking the Stratford Ontario Festival.’ Shakespeare on Film Newsletter 8 (December 1983): 1, 7. ‘“Hamlet” Andante / “Hamlet” Allegro: Tom Stoppard’s Two Versions.’ Shakespeare Survey 36 (1983): 21–8. ‘Romeo and Juliet before Shakespeare.’ Studies in Philology 81 (Summer 1984): 325–47. ‘Shakespeare in Canada: The Stratford Festival and a National Theatre.’ Shakespeare-Gesellschaft West Jahrbuch (Göttingen, 1984): 276–9. ‘Facing Editorial Problems.’ Editors’ Notes 4 (Fall 1985): 17–18. Rev. of Peter Davison’s Popular Appeal in English Drama to 1850 (Totowa, NJ: Barnes and Noble Books, 1982), and S. Gorley Putt’s The Golden Age of English Drama (Cambridge, Eng., and Totowa, NJ: D.S. Brewer and Rowman and Littlefield, 1981). Shakespeare Quarterly 36 (Autumn 1985): 380–4. ‘Aletheia: Oedipus, Hamlet.’ In Greek Tragedy and Its Legacy: Essays Presented to D.J. Conacher, ed. Martin Cropp, Elaine Fantham, and S.E. Scully. Calgary: University of Calgary Press, 1986. 281–93. ‘Tom Stoppard’s Jumpers: Comedy by Leaps and Bounders.’ Huntington Humanities Forum. Boston, MA, 1987. ‘The Recovery of the Elizabethan Stage.’ In Elizabethan Theatre IX, the Proceedings of the Ninth International Conference on Elizabethan Theatre. Toronto: P.D. Meany Co., 1987. 205–29. ‘Thomas Randolph.’ In the Dictionary of Literary Biography: Elizabethan and Jacobean Dramatists, ed. Fredson Bowers. Columbia, SC: BC Research, 1987. 231–40. Shakespeare in Performance: ‘Romeo and Juliet.’ Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1987. ‘“Working Words”: The Verbal Dynamic of Tamburlaine.’ In ‘A Poet & a filthy

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Play-maker’: New Essays on Christopher Marlowe, ed. Kenneth Friedenreich, Roma Gill, and Constance B. Kuriyama. New York: AMS Press, Inc., 1988. 99–115. ‘A Little Touch of Shakespeare in Our Time.’ University of Toronto Quarterly 57 (Winter 1987/88): 321–45. Rev. of Mirror up to Shakespeare: Essays in Honour of G.R. Hibbard, ed. J.C. Gray (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1984). Shakespeare Quarterly 39 (Spring 1988): 106–8. ‘Recent Studies in Elizabethan and Jacobean Drama.’ SEL: Studies in English Literature 28 (Spring 1988): 331–89. ‘Romeo and Juliet: Tragical-Comical-Lyrical History.’ In Proceedings of the PMR [Patristic, Mediaeval and Renaissance] Conference, vol. 12/13. Villanova, PA: Augustinian Historical Institute, 1990 for 1987–8. 31–46. Rev. of Joseph A. Porter, Shakespeare’s Mercutio: His History and Drama (Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, 1988). Shakespeare Bulletin 10 (Summer 1992): 45. ‘Changing Images of Romeo and Juliet.’ In Images of Shakespeare: Proceedings of the Third Congress of the International Shakespeare Association, 1986, ed. Werner Habicht, D.J. Palmer, and Roger Pringle. Newark, London, and Toronto: University of Delaware Press and Associated University Presses, 1988. 151– 62. Chapter 8, ‘Comedy.’ In The Cambridge Companion to English Renaissance Drama, ed. A.R. Braunmuller and Michael Hattaway. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990. 263–300. Revised for the second edition, 2003. 254–91. Rev. of Michael Scott, Shakespeare and the Modern Dramatist (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1989). Shakespeare Quarterly 43 (Fall 1992): 373–5. Rev. of Tom Patterson and Allan Gould, First Stage: The Making of the Stratford Festival (Markham, ON: McClelland and Stewart Inc., 1987). Theatre Research International 18 (Autumn 1993): 236–7. Rev. of Dennis Kennedy, Looking at Shakespeare: A Visual History of Twentieth-Century Performance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), and Dennis Kennedy, ed., Foreign Shakespeare: Contemporary Performance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993). Essays in Theatre 13 (1994): 87–91. Rev. of Gordon McMullan and Jonathan Hope, eds, The Politics of Tragicomedy: Shakespeare and After (London and New York: Routledge, 1992). Shakespeare Studies 23 (1996): 257–61. ‘“Alla stoccado carries it away”: Codes of Violence in Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet.’ In Shakespeare’s ‘Romeo and Juliet’: Texts, Contexts, and Interpretation, ed. Jay L. Halio. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1995. 83–96. ‘Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet: The Places of Invention.’ Shakespeare Survey 49

308 Jill L. Levenson’s Publications (1996): 45–55. Repr. in Shakespeare and Language, ed. Catherine Alexander. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. Rev. of Kathleen O. Irace, Reforming the ‘Bad’ Quartos: Performance and Provenance of Six Shakespearean First Editions (Newark: University of Delaware Press; London and Toronto: Associated University Presses, 1994). Medieval and Renaissance Drama in England 10 (1998): 310–14. Rev. of Brian Gibbons, Shakespeare and Multiplicity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993). Shakespeare Quarterly 48 (Fall 1997): 345–7. ‘“That booke in manies eyes doth share the glorie”: Editing Romeo and Juliet.’ Revised as ‘Editing Romeo and Juliet: “A Challenge [,] on my life.” ’ New Ways of Looking at Old Texts, II, Papers of the Renaissance English Text Society, 1992–6 (1998): 61–70. Jonathan Bate, Jill L. Levenson, and Dieter Mehl, eds. Shakespeare and the Twentieth Century: Selected Proceedings of the International Shakespeare Association World Congress, Los Angeles, 1996. Newark: University of Delaware Press; London: Associated University Presses, 1998. ‘Show Business: The Editor in the Theater.’ In Shakespeare: Text and Theater: Essays in Honor of Jay L. Halio, ed. Lois Potter and Arthur F. Kinney. Newark: University of Delaware Press and Associated University Presses, 1999. 248–65. ‘Romeo and Juliet on the Stage: “It is a kind of history.” ’ In Teaching Shakespeare through Performance, ed. Milla Cozart Riggio. New York: MLA, 1999. 114–26. The Oxford Shakespeare: ‘Romeo and Juliet.’ Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000. ‘Teaching the Books of the Play.’ In Approaches to Teaching Shakespeare’s ‘Romeo and Juliet,’ ed. Maurice Hunt. New York: MLA, 2000. 153–62. Jill L. Levenson and Barry Gaines, eds. ‘Romeo and Juliet’ 1597. Oxford: The Malone Society, 2000. xv + 91. ‘Arthur Brooke.’ In Tudor England: An Encyclopedia, ed. Eugene D. Hill, Arthur F. Kinney, and William B. Long. New York: Garland, 2000. 91. ‘Echoes Inhabit a Garden: The Narratives of Romeo and Juliet.’ Shakespeare Survey 53 (2000): 39–48. Chapter 9, ‘Stoppard’s Shakespeare: Textual Re-visions.’ In The Cambridge Companion to Tom Stoppard, ed. Katherine E. Kelly. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. 154–70. Rev. of Heather Dubrow, Echoes of Desire: English Petrarchism and Its Counterdiscourses (Ithaca and New York: Cornell University Press, 1995). Shakespeare Quarterly 53 (Spring 2002): 126–7. ‘Shakespeare’s Falstaff: “The cause that wit is in other men.”’ University of Toronto Quarterly 74 (2005): 722–8. ‘Shakespeare in Drama since 1990: Vanishing Act.’ Shakespeare Survey 58 (2005): 148–59.

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‘In Production: Romeo and Juliet through the Years.’ In ‘Romeo and Juliet’: The Sourcebooks Shakespeare. Naperville, IL: Sourcebooks, 2005. 1–9. ‘Love in a Naughty World: Modern Appropriations of The Merchant of Venice.’ In Shakespeare’s Comedies of Love: Essays in Honour of Alexander Leggatt, ed. Karen Bamford and Ric Knowles. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2008. 246–61. ‘Generational Conflict in Romeo and Juliet.’ In Around the Globe, magazine of the Globe Theatre. London, Spring 2009. Program notes for the Stratford Festival of Canada for The Taming of the Shrew (1981), Romeo and Juliet (1996), Chekhov’s Cherry Orchard (1998), and The Seagull (2001).

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Index

Ackerman, Alan, 5, 18, 235–56, 292n33 acting: acting in the world, 62; acting motifs of The Night of the Iguana, 269–70, 275n44; and action, 62, 63, 65–8, 74nn14, 16; actors and character identification, 88; female actors, 12, 84–8; method acting, 12, 64, 85–6; performative speech, 64–5, 74n15; stylized postures, 12, 84, 85; technique, 63–4, 84–5 adaptation (concept): ‘appropriation’ as term, 5; and Broadway, 56; cultural appropriation, 20n2; defined, 4–6, 9; and ideology, 11; literature on, 72n3; modern influences on, 19–20, 57–8; performance as, 8–9, 20n18; use of Shakespearean quotations, 99–100. See also memoir; musicals; score; television adaptation (of specific plays): Anthony and Cleopatra, 35; The Comedy of Errors, 56; Coriolanus, 10–11, 25–47; Hamlet, 48–9, 50–3, 54n4; Henry V, 44n22; King Lear, 50; Macbeth, 35, 94, 95–8, 99–107; Merchant of Venice, 125–42; Othello, 12, 83–9; Pericles,

215–16n27; Richard III, 12–13, 78, 79–83, 91n13; Romeo and Juliet, 11–12, 51–61, 63, 64–72, 72n3; The Taming of the Shrew, 56; The Tempest, 200–1, 205–6, 210, 214– 15n23 Adaptation and Appropriation (Sanders), 4 ‘The Adaptation of Juliet and Her Romeo’ (Levenson), 72n3 The Adventures of Pericles, 133–4 Alabama Shakespeare Festival, 127 alchemy, 158 Alexander, Bill, 140n24 Alexander the Great, 224, 227 alienation effect, 246, 255n42 All’s Well That Ends Well (Shakespeare), 210 ‘America’ (Bernstein and Sondheim), 59 American Express, 132 Anatomie of Abuses (Stubbes), 159 Anderson, Benedict, 9 Andrews, Julie, 241, 249, 250, 256n51 anger, 30, 170, 175 Anthony and Cleopatra (Shakespeare), 35, 45n29

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Index

anti-semitism, 62, 73n10, 131, 135–6, 137 Apian, Peter, 202 Appen, Karl von, 34 Apollonius of Tyre, 215–16n27 appropriation (term), 5 architecture, 81, 82 Arms and the Man (Shaw), 256n54 artists, 258, 264, 274n26 Ashcroft, Peggy, 27 Astington, John H., 5, 13, 93–109 As You Like It (Shakespeare), 73n8, 186–7, 192–3, 194 audiences: and adaption, 9; and The Adventures of Pericles, 133; in The Eyre Affair, 78–83; influence of, 8, 78, 90n8; and King Lear, 168, 174, 178; and Merchant of Venice, 137, 141–2n53; and A Midsummer Night’s Dream, 168; and My Fair Lady, 252; and The Night of the Iguana, 259; and Pygmalion, 242; and Stage Beauty, 88–9; and The Tempest, 198, 201, 211; and theatrical conventions, 81–2; and West Side Story, 65 Auslander, Philip, 12, 76–7 Austin, J.L., 64, 74n15 autarkeia, 229 authenticity, 63–4, 74n16 Back to Methuselah (Shaw), 237, 245 Baetens Beardsmore, Hugo, 280 Baines, Richard, 216n31 Baldwin, William, 219, 221 Balestrini, Nassim, 72n3 Barton, John, 100, 117 Batman, 69 bawdy word play: and class, 147, 150; cultural significance of, 145–6, 158–61; editing of, 150–3, 161–2;

and fashion, 159, 160; humorous sexual innuendo, 148, 153; Prince Hal’s language lessons, 145–6, 158–61, 163n4; prostitution, 149, 154–6, 157–8, 160–1; punctuation, 148, 150, 161; Quicklyism, 147–8; and recruiting, 156–8; and selfexposure, 147–50; ‘tailor’ as term, 157; and tennis, 159–60. See also language; women BBC English, 277, 290n2 Beatles, 95 Beaton, Cecil, 249, 250 Beckett, Samuel, 49–50, 52–3, 279 behavioural psychology, 74n18 Belasco, David, 63–4 Bell, Daniel, 239, 243–4 Bell, Steve, 107–8 Bennett, Susan, 81–2, 132 Bentley, Eric, 236, 238, 241, 245, 252 Berghaus, Ruth, 34 Bergson, Henri, 188 Berkeley, Busby, 250 Berliner Ensemble, 26, 32–9 Bernstein, Leonard, 56, 72n2 Betty Boop, 69 Bevington, David, 151 the Bible, 201–2, 205, 207, 212nn8–9, 213n13, 265 Bikel, Theodore, 247 The Birthday Party (Pinter), 276, 286–90 Bishops’ Bible, 202 ‘Blah Blah Blah’ (Gershwin and Gershwin), 73n6 Blair, David, 279 Blair, Tony, 107–8 Blau, Herbert, 83 Bloom, Harold, 122n3

Index boats. See ships Bodnar, John, 110, 112 Bogdanov, Michael, 95 ‘Bold, but Seemingly Marketable’ (Ormsby), 9, 14–15, 125–42 Bourdieu, Pierre, 277 The Boys from Syracuse (Rodgers and Hart), 56, 59. See also Hart, Lorenz; Rodgers, Richard Branagh, Kenneth, 121n2 Brecht, Bertolt: on Coriolanus, 25–6; The Days of the Commune, 32; Dialectics in the Theatre, 26; Galileo, 95; and Grass, 41–2; Messingkauf Dialogues, 36, 43n4; The Plebeians Rehearse the Uprising, 27; The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui, 33; and Shaw, 246; ‘Study of the First Scene of Shakespeare’s Coriolanus,’ 26, 43n3; theories on theatre, 246, 255n42; The Threepenny Opera, 32. See also Coriolan (Brecht) Brecht on Theatre (Willett), 43n3 Brenton, Howard, 94, 95–8 Brice, Fannie, 69 A briefe and true report of the new found land of Virginia (Hariot), 209 Broadway, and adaptations, 56 Brook, Peter, 77, 96, 123–4n27, 168 Brotton, Jerry, 200 Brustein, Robert, 26, 45n29 Bryden, Ronald, 36, 45n50 Büchner, Georg, 95 Buddhism, 268, 270, 272, 274n39 Bulman, James C., 8, 15, 125, 140n24, 141–2n53, 145–65 Burbage, Richard, 88 Burnett, Mark Thornton, 126 Burt, Richard, 89 Burton, Richard, 259

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Caesar and Cleopatra (Shaw), 245 CAIR-CAN (Council on AmericanIslamic Relations), 135, 136 Cameron, Rebecca S., 6, 19, 276–93 Campaspe (Lyly), 221 Campbell, Patrick, Mrs, 235–6 Canadian Jewish Congress (CJC), 135 Canadian politics, 93–4 Carpi, Ugo da, 220, 226 cartography: iconic code of, 213n15; legends, 214n19; maps of travels of St Paul, 199, 202, 213nn14, 16, 214n18; Protestant Bible maps, 201–2, 207, 212nn8–9, 213n13; typogeography, 216n29 cartoons, 94, 107–8 Cavell, Stanley, 90n2 Chaillet, Ned, 44n18 The Changeling (Middleton and Rowley), 100, 105 Charles II (king), 88 Chekhov, Anton, 191–2 children, 97 The Chocolate Spider, 256n54 choreography: and My Fair Lady, 238; and West Side Story, 56, 58, 72n2, 73n5 The Churchill Play (Brenton), 95 Churchill, Winston, 98 Cibber, Colley, 12, 81, 91n13 CJC (Canadian Jewish Congress), 135 class, 147, 150, 242–3, 245. See also social relations The Cliff (Williams), 273n19 Cohn, Ruby, 4, 32, 43n4 the Cold War, 238, 239, 248 colonialism, 198–9, 200–1, 206–7, 208–9 colour-blind casting, 126–8, 133, 135

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The Comedy of Errors (Shakespeare), 56, 100, 208 comic book characters, 69 La Compaña de Teatro, 125–6 Compleat Female Stage Beauty, 12–13, 83–9, 91n21 The Complete Plain Words (Gowers), 277 conformity, 243–4 consumerism, 240 conversion, 198–9, 200–1, 206–11 ‘Cool’ (Bernstein and Sondheim), 58, 66 Copeland, Roger, 12, 76 Coriolan, and Berlin Ensemble, 39–41 Coriolan (Brecht): Brecht on Coriolanus, 25–6; Coriolanus dialogue, 26, 43n4; production as ‘Coriolanus,’ 32–9; production of, 26; reviews of, 26, 33–4, 45n30. See also Brecht, Bertolt Coriolan, influence on Coriolanus (Shakespeare) production, 34–7 Coriolan (Lenz), 43 Coriolan: literature on, 39, 46n56; unfinished nature of, 37–8 Coriolanus (Shakespeare): adaptations of, 10, 25–47; Brecht on, 25–6; choice to produce, 116; production of, 34–7; reviews of, 36–7, 45n29 corporate sponsorships, 131–2 Corsaro, Frank, 259 costuming: and Henry V (Shakespeare), 44n22; and Merchant of Venice, 129–30; and My Fair Lady, 249, 250 Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR-CAN), 135, 136 Course in General Linguistics (Saussure), 278, 285

Coverdale, Miles, 202, 207, 215n24, 216n29 Coward, Noel, 276, 283–6 Craig, John, 215n24 Crates, 219, 221 credentials, 112, 114–16, 117–21 Crompton, Louis, 253n8 Crowley, Tony, 290n2 Crudup, Billy, 83 Culler, Jonathan, 278 culture: and adaptation, 9–10; cultural projection, 248; and Pygmalion and My Fair Lady, 236, 248; and theatrical liberalism, 61–3, 65, 68, 70–2, 74n14; transcultural model of adaptation, 5; and West Side Story, 56, 72n1 cynic philosophers, 219–29, 230n7, 231n10 Dakin, Rose, 264 Dakin, Walter, 263–4 ‘Damn You, England’ (Osborne), 30, 44n18. See also Osborne, John Danby, John F., 16 Danes, Claire, 83 Dante Alighieri, 52–3 Danton’s Death (Büchner), 95 Davies, Andrew, 99, 100 Davis, Bette, 259 Davison, P.H., 152 The Days of the Commune (Brecht), 32 death, 262–3, 268–9, 271 Death of a Salesman (Miller), 63, 64 de Botton, Alain, 122n4 Dekker, Thomas, 163n3 Delaney, Shelagh, 277 Dent, R.W., 165n22 Desmet, Christy, 5 de Somogyi, Nick, 163–4n6

Index determinism: and Ethica, 50; and Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead (R&GAD), 51, 52–3 Dewey, John, 251–2 Dialectics in the Theatre (Brecht), 26 Dickinson, Emily, 265 Dictionary of Modern English Usage (Fowler), 277 Diogenes (Carpi), 220, 226 Diogenes and Alexander (Rosa), 224 Diogenes casting away his bowl (Poussin), 223 Diogenes the Cynic, 219–29, 231n11 Diogenes Laertius, 221–2, 226, 231n11 Diogenes of Sinope, 219–29, 231n11 Dion, Stéphane, 93 divination, 124n30 Dobbs, Michael, 99 Dogg’s Hamlet (Stoppard), 54n4. See also Stoppard, Tom Douglas-Home, Alex, 95 Dowden, Edward, 246 dramatic structure, 167 dramatic theory of meaning, 279 Dramatists Play Service, 259–60 dreams, 208–9, 236, 240 Dromgoole, Dominic, 6, 13–14, 111– 16, 123n15 Durbach, Errol, 242 Durkheim, Emile, 278 Dylan, Bob, 53, 55n21 Eastern philosophy, 268, 270, 272, 274n39 Eden, Anthony, 94 editing, 150–3, 161–2 Elam, Keir, 82, 91n14, 279, 292n25 eleutheria, 229 Eliot, John, 163–4n6

315

Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 19 emotions: anger, 30, 170, 175; desire, 240; happiness, 237, 242–3, 245, 252; in King Lear, 166–82, 225; in The Night of the Iguana, 264–5; shame, 225; in The Tempest, 216n31; and tempo of plays, 167. See also love; suffering The End of Ideology (Bell), 239 English Pronunciation Dictionary (Jones), 277 Erasmus, 208, 213n13, 215n24, 219 Ethica (Geulincx), 50 Evangelicae historiae (Ziegler), 212n9 Evans, Gareth Lloyd, 100 An Existential View of John Osborne (Prater), 44n14 ‘An Experiment in Teaching’ (Ackerman), 5, 18, 235–56 ‘Extremes of Passion’ (Wells), 8, 15–16, 166–82 The Eyre Affair (Fforde), 12–13, 78–83, 91nn13–14 Eyre, Richard, 12–13, 83 faith, 63, 74n14 ‘Falling in Love with Love’ (Rodgers and Hart), 59 families: reunions of, 179–81; and Shakespeare, 111–12; and Tennessee Williams, 263–4; in Thirteenth Night, 97 The Famous Victories of Henry the Fifth, 165n26 fantasy, 236, 240, 264–5 Farber, Bernie, 135 fashion, 159, 160 Fayard, Jean, 274n39 feminism, 97, 98, 152–3, 237 Fernie, Ewan, 124n28

316

Index

Festa, Angelika, 77 Fforde, Jasper, 12–13, 78–83, 91nn13– 14 Fiennes, Ralph, 117 film: Merchant of Venice, 126, 129; The Rocky Horror Picture Show, 12, 82; Stage Beauty, 12, 83–9 Filthy Shakespeare (Kiernan), 153 The Final Cut (book by Dobbs), 99 The Final Cut (television series), 105–6 Fischlin, Daniel, 6–7, 8 flatness (term), 76, 90n2 Fleming, John, 50 Folger Shakespeare Library, 118 foreignness, 246–8 Fortier, Mark, 6–7, 8 Foucault, Michel, 200, 228 freedom and free will: and Ethica, 50; and King Lear, 229; and My Fair Lady, 236, 237, 243–5, 248, 253n8; and occasionalism, 7; and Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead (R&GAD), 51, 52–3 Freeman, Jane, 294–303 Freud, Sigmund, 236, 273n15, 278 Fried, Michael, 76 ‘Full Stoppard’ (Schiff), 55n21 Gaines, Barry, 295 Gainor, J. Ellen, 237 Galileo (Brecht), 95 games. See language games Garber, Marjorie, 122n3 Gardner, Ava, 259, 269 Garrick cut, 79, 91n13 Garrick, David, 175–6 Gates, Thomas, 205 ‘Gee, Officer Krupke’ (Bernstein and Sondheim), 58, 67–8

Genette, Gérard, 4 Geneva Bible, 202, 205–6, 214–15n23, 217n36 genre constraints, 11–12, 56, 60, 72n2 Gerhardt, Uta, 27, 44n7 Gershwin, George, 73n6 Gershwin, Ira, 73n6 Gesta Romanorum, 215–16n27 ‘Get Me to the Church on Time’ (Lerner and Loewe), 243 Geulincx, Arnold, 7, 49, 50, 51, 52 Gilbert, Helen, 125 Gilliat, Penelope, 45n29 Gillies, John, 201, 216n29 Gillis, John R., 122n7 globalization, 20n2, 125–7, 131–2 Globe and Mail, 93 Globe Theatre, 115, 118–19 glosses, 150–3, 161–2 The God that Failed (Koestler and Silone), 239 ‘The Going to Pieces of T. Lawrence Shannon’ (Parker), 8, 18–19, 257–75 Gollob, Herman, 111, 117–21 Gowers, Ernest, 277 Grass, Günter, 25, 27, 41–2 Great Bible, 202, 217n36 Greenblatt, Stephen, 74n19 Greene, Graham, 126, 128–9, 133 Grene, Nicholas, 292n30 Gusev (Chekhov), 191–2 Gussow, Mel, 52 Gwynn, Nell, 84 Gypsy (Styne and Sondheim), 63 Hakluyt, Richard, 207, 210 Hall, Peter, 28, 96 Hamlet (Shakespeare): adaptations of, 48–9, 50–3, 54n4; and colour-blind

Index casting, 127; and music, 54n4; productions of, 96, 117; stylistic dissociation in, 176, 177 Hammerstein, Oscar, II, 60, 238 Hampl, Patricia, 110, 121, 122n4 happiness, 237, 242–3, 245, 252 Harewood, David, 87 Hariot, Thomas, 209, 210 Harker, Susannah, 102 Harper, Stephen, 93 Harrison, Rex, 244, 249, 250, 251, 256n51 Harris, Roy, 278, 285 Hartley, Andrew J., 90n8 Hart, Lorenz, 56, 59, 62 Hatcher, Jeffrey, 83 Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 246 Hay Fever (Coward), 276, 283–6 Heath, Edward, 96 heightening, 279–80 Henry IV, Part One (Shakespeare), 145, 186 Henry IV, Part Two (Shakespeare), 145–62, 163n1, 164n18, 176 Henryson, Robert, 183 Henry V (Shakespeare), 44n22 Hepburn, Audrey, 250 heroic authority: and Coriolanus (Brecht), 33, 36–7, 38–9; and Coriolanus (Shakespeare), 11, 40; and A Place Calling Itself Rome, 28, 30–2 Heschel, Abraham Joshua, 63 Heseltine, Michael, 100 historical plays, 145, 163n1 Hodgdon, Barbara, 15, 78, 163n3, 164–5n20 Holland, Peter, 5, 10–11, 25–47 Holloway, Stanley, 243 Holroyd, Michael, 244 homelessness, 228–9

317

Hopkins, Anthony, 34, 36 horizons of expectations, competing, 81, 91n14 House of Cards (book by Dobbs), 99 House of Cards (television series), 99–106 Housman, A.E., 48 Howard, Jean, 150, 164n7 Howard, Leslie, 244 Howard, Tony, 95 ‘How do you play this game?’ (Cameron), 6, 19, 276–93 Howe, Geoffrey, 100 How It Is (Beckett), 53 How Proust Can Change Your Life (de Botton), 122n4 Hughes, Margaret, 83–8 humorous sexual innuendo, 148, 153 Humphreys, A.R., 152 Huston, John, 259, 269 Hutcheon, Linda, 4–6, 8, 9 hypertexts, 4 hypotexts, 4 Ibsen, Henrik, 241 iconic code, 213n15 ‘I Could Have Danced All Night’ (Lerner and Loewe), 256n60 identity: and adaptation, 9; and memory, 122nn7, 10; and Merchant of Venice, 132–3; mutability of, 69; race-based identity labels, 68, 74– 5n20; self-fashioning, 12, 62, 68–9, 70–1, 74n19; and stylistic dissociation, 176; and theatre, 74n20; and transformation, 235–40, 245–6 Ignatieff, Michael, 93, 94 ‘I Have a Little Shadow’ (Stevenson), 273n18 imitations, 69

318

Index

The Importance of Being Earnest (Wilde), 286 incest, 261 Inferno (Dante), 52–3 Innes, Christopher, 301 interculturalism, 133–5 The Invention of Love (Stoppard), 48. See also Stoppard, Tom Iraq, 108 Irons, Jeremy, 95 Irving, Henry, 125 Isherwood, Christopher, 268 ‘I’ve Grown Accustomed to Her Face’ (Lerner and Loewe), 246, 256n60 Jackson, Charles, 248 Jackson, Henry, 85 Jacobsen, Roman, 252 Jerome, Jerome K., 48 ‘The Jet Song’ (Bernstein and Sondheim), 58 Johnson, Fenton, 111 Jones, Daniel, 277 Jonson, Ben, 192 Judaism: anti-semitism, 62, 73n10, 131, 135–6, 137; Canadian Jewish Congress (CJC), 135; and Me & Shakespeare, 117, 118–19, 120; and Merchant of Venice, 125–38; theatrical liberalism, 12, 61–3, 65, 68, 70–2, 74n14. See also religion Julius Caesar, 114, 127, 183, 186 Kaplan, Alice, 115 Kean, Edmund, 140n24, 175 Kermode, Frank, 199, 206, 214– 15n23, 215n24 Kerr, Deborah, 259 Kidnie, Margaret Jane, 5, 8, 9, 12–13, 76–92, 133–4

Kiernan, Kip, 264 Kiernan, Pauline, 153 The King and I (Rodgers and Hammerstein), 63, 250 King Lear (Shakespeare): adaptations of, 50; and audiences, 168, 174, 178; emotions in, 166–82, 225; and Judaism, 118; language in, 169–82; and nature, 183, 185, 186; and philosophy, 218–19, 222–9, 229–30n1; recapitulatory passage in, 166–7; and religion, 118, 225, 227, 229, 231n18; reviews of, 168; stylistic disjunction in, 171–2; stylistic disruption in, 171, 172–6; stylistic dissociation in, 171, 176–9; stylistic submission in, 171, 179–81 The King’s English (Fowler), 277 Kiss Me, Kate (Porter), 56 Kitchen, Michael, 99 Kitchin, Laurence, 168 Knowles, Ric, 131 Koenig, Rhoda, 116 Koestler, Arthur, 239 Kubie, Lawrence, 261 Kyd, Thomas, 216n31 Kynaston, Ned, 83–8, 91–2nn23, 25 language: of conversion, 206–7; and cynic philosophers, 228; development of vernacular, 163n4; and education, 251–2; heightening, 279–80; in Henry V, 44n22; in King Lear, 169–82; linguistic theory, 251–2, 278–9, 292n37; in Lolita, 255n44; moral language, 248, 251; in A Place Calling Itself Rome, 28–31, 44nn14, 16; in Pygmalion and My Fair Lady, 237–40, 246–8; stand-

Index ardization of, 248, 276–7, 290n2, 291n7. See also bawdy word play; style (in Shakespeare) Language and Symbolic Power (Bourdieu), 277 language games: in The Birthday Party, 276, 286–90, 292n37; in Hay Fever, 276, 283–6; in Love’s Whirlwind, 276, 283; in My Fair Lady, 240; in Pygmalion, 280–3; significance of, 276–80 Lantern and Candlelight (Dekker), 163n3 The Late, and Much Admired Play, Called Pericles, Prince of Tyre (Wilkins), 215–16n27 Laurents, Arthur, 56, 72n2 Lawrence, Twine, 215–16n27 Lawson, Wilfrid, 243 Learned Hand, Billings, 241 ‘Lear’s Conversation with the Philosopher’ (Scolnicov), 7, 17–18, 218–31 legends (for maps), 214n19 Leggatt, Alexander, 8, 16, 183–97 Leighton, Margaret, 259 Lenz, J.M.R., 43 Lepage, Robert, 126 Lerner, Alan Jay, 236, 238, 241–2, 248–9, 256n51 Lester, Adrian, 127 Levenson, Jill: career accomplishments of, 294–5; example of, 19, 302–3; and the intersection of Shakespeare and modern drama, 3–4; on Merchant of Venice, 125; Modern Drama editorial position, 295–6, 300–1; on Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead (R&GAD), 48–9; scholarship of, 295–6; service to colleagues and students, 299–300;

319

service to scholarly community, 300–2; on Stoppard, 279; teaching of, 296–9, 302 Levenson, Jill (works of): ‘The Adaptation of Juliet and Her Romeo,’ 72n3; editing of Romeo and Juliet, 72n3, 153, 295–6, 297–8; publications list, 305–9; Shakespeare and Modern Drama, 72n3; Shakespeare’s World / World Shakespeares, 301 Levenson, Jill, and World Shakespeare Congress work, 301–2 Lever, J.W., 163–4n6 Lewis, Roy, 127 Liberal Party, 93–4 life as play (activity), 195–6 life as play (theatre), 51–2 ‘Like a Rolling Stone’ (Dylan), 53 Lings, Martin, 119 literary tourism. See pilgrimage Liveness (Auslander), 76–7 live performance: as adaptation, 8–9, 20n18; and cynic philosophers, 222, 226; as ephemeral, 77–8, 87; in The Eyre Affair, 78–83, 91n13; ideal of, 245; and life-changing experiences, 123–4n27; portrayal in other media, 78–9; recordings of, 78; The Rocky Horror Picture Show, 82; in Stage Beauty, 83–9; as unique to theatre, 12–13, 76–7, 79. See also Stratford Shakespeare Festival; theatre The Lives of Eminent Philosophers (Diogenes Laertius), 221–2, 226 Llewellyn, A. Bronwyn, 124n30 local (category), 20n2 Loewe, Frederick, 236, 238, 248–9 Lo, Jacqueline, 125 Lolita (Nabokov), 255n44

320

Index

Look Back in Anger (Osborne), 30. See also Osborne, John Looney Tunes, 69 The lost Flocke Triumphant (Rich), 205 Louis, Morris, 76 love: and Lolita, 255n44; and A Midsummer’s Night’s Dream, 59; and My Fair Lady, 244, 252; and The Night of the Iguana, 266, 273n15; and Pygmalion, 235–7, 244; and Shakespeare, 111–12; and Shaw, 236, 241; and Titus Andronicus, 185; and West Side Story, 11–12, 59–61, 69–71, 73n8. See also emotions Love’s Labour’s Lost (Shakespeare), 210, 217n36 Love’s Whirlwind, 276, 283 Luther, Martin, 212n8 Lycidas (Milton), 191 Lyly, John, 221 Macbeth (Shakespeare): and Canadian politics, 93–4; and Coriolanus, 35; House of Cards series, 99–106; and nature, 184–5, 186, 194; productions of, 126; quotations from, 103–4; stylistic dissociation in, 176; and Thirteenth Night, 94, 95–8 ‘Macbeth and Modern Politics’ (Astington), 5, 13, 93–109 MacDonald, Tim, 134 MacGregor, Robert, Jr, 267 Machiavelli, Niccolò, 100 Macmillan, Harold, 94, 95 Macready, William Charles, 175 madness, 176–80, 262 Magnani, Anna, 259 Major Barbara (Shaw), 243 Major, John, 100

‘Make Believe’ (Kern and Hammerstein), 63 maps. See cartography Marcus, Frank, 36 ‘Maria’ (Bernstein and Sondheim), 61 marketing, 131–2 Marlowe, Christopher, 216n31 Marowitz, Charles, 125 Martin, Randall, 3–21, 198–217, 229 Massai, Sonia, 20n2 mass media, 77 ‘The Mattress in the Tomato Patch’ (Williams), 264 May, Elaine Tyler, 110, 122n4 McDiarmid, Ian, 94 McKellen, Ian, 175 McMillan, Scott, 238, 256n60 Me & Shakespeare (Gollob), 111, 117–21 Mead, Shepherd, 273n22 Measure for Measure (Shakespeare), 164n17 Melchiori, Giorgio, 152 memoir: and influential figures, 122n4, 123n15; and life-changing experiences, 123–4n27, 263–4, 274n39; Me & Shakespeare, 111, 117–21; Memoirs (Williams), 257, 261; significance of, 110–11, 121–2n2, 122n7, 122–3n13; Sweet William, 121–2n2; and travel narratives, 121; Will & Me, 111–16, 123n15. See also adaptation Memoirs (Williams), 257, 261 memory, 122nn7, 10, 177–8 Mendes, Sam, 87 The Merchant of Santa Fe, 125–6 Merchant of Venice (Shakespeare): ad-

Index aptations of, 125–42; and audiences, 137, 141–2n53; and costuming, 129–30; film versions of, 126, 129; Jill Levenson on, 125; productions of, 125–42; and racism, 125–7, 128– 31, 133–6; and religion, 125–38, 140n24; reviews of, 136–7; and sets, 129–30 Merlo, Frank, 259 Messingkauf Dialogues (Brecht), 36, 43n4 method acting, 12, 64 Middleton, Thomas, 100, 105 A Midsummer’s Night’s Dream (Shakespeare): and audiences, 168; bawdy word play in, 158; characters of, 70; and love, 59; productions of, 96, 123–4n27 Miller, Arthur, 63 Miller, D.A., 249, 250 Milton, John, 183, 191 Modern Shakespeare Offshoots (Cohn), 4 Modern Tragedy (Williams), 71 Molloy (Beckett), 49–50, 52 Monette, Richard, 126, 132, 140– 1n34 Montaigne, Michel de, 210 Moodie, Andrew, 127–8 Morgan, Anna, 137 Most, Andrea, 5, 11–12, 56–75, 246 Mugglestone, Lynda, 280 Mullaney, Steven, 163n4 multimedia effects, 77, 90n6 multinationalist movement, 131–2 musicals: as adaptations, 11–12; Gypsy, 63; The King and I, 63, 250; male leads, 250–1; Oklahoma!, 238; Shaw on, 249–50; Show Boat, 63; South Pacific, 60, 250. See also adaptation

321

(concept); My Fair Lady (Lerner and Loewe); score; West Side Story My Fair Lady (Lerner and Loewe), 236–56; and audiences, 252; criticism of, 242; ending of, 241, 244, 252; as musical, 238–9, 242, 249; theme of, 246–7. See also Pygmalion (Shaw); score Nabokov, Vladimir, 255n44 Nashe, Thomas, 165n22 national identity, 9 Native Canadians, 128–9, 133, 136 nature, 16, 183–97, 265, 266–7, 271 Never So Good (Brenton), 94–5 Niebuhr, Reinhold, 253n8 Night and Day (Stoppard), 52. See also Stoppard, Tom Night Flight (Saint Exupery), 266 Nightingale, Benedict, 116 The Night of the Iguana (Williams): acting motifs of, 269–70, 275n44; and audiences, 259; history of work, 257–60, 261, 272n7, 273n19, 274n39; influence of autobiographical material, 263–4; and love, 266, 273n15; and nature, 265, 266–7, 271; plot of, 260–3; and religion, 257, 258, 260, 264–70, 272, 275n44; sexuality in, 260–2, 275n45; ‘Some Random Notes on the Play and Production,’ 270, 271–2; and truth, 258, 271; Williams on, 274n27. See also Williams, Tennessee Noble, Adrian, 182 Noble, Richard, 214–15n23, 215n24 Norton Anthology of Drama, 237 novels, 12, 78–83, 89 Now Magazine, 127–8 Nunn, Trevor, 28

322

Index

Nuttall, A.D., 113, 122–3n13 obligation, 62, 63 occasionalism, 7, 50 Oh, Sandra, 128 Oklahoma! (Rodgers and Hammerstein), 238 Olivier, Laurence, 33, 52, 169 Olsen, Nancy, 249, 256n51 One Arm and Other Stories (Williams), 258 ‘One Hand, One Heart’ (Bernstein and Sondheim), 64–5 ‘On the Cannibals’ (Montaigne), 210 opera, 72n1 Orgel, Stephen, 7, 20n7, 214–15n23 Ormsby, Robert, 9, 14, 125–42 Ortelius, Abraham, 202–4, 213n16, 214n18 Ortho-epia Gallica, Eliots Fruits for the French (Eliot), 163–4n6 Orton, Joe, 286 Osborne, John, 25, 28–32, 44nn14, 18, 277 Osborne, Laurie E., 78 Othello (Shakespeare), 12, 83–9 O’Toole, Peter, 111 Out Cry (Williams), 265 Oxford, UK, 118 Pacino, Al, 126 The Painful Adventures of Pericles, Prince of Tyre (Twine), 215–16n27 Palaestinae, Scondie (Ziegler), 212n9 Paradise Lost (Milton), 183 Paraphrase on Acts (Erasmus), 215n24 Paraphrases upon the New Testament (Erasmus), 208, 215n24 Parergon (Ortelius), 202–4, 213n16, 214n18

Parker, Brian, 8, 18–19, 257–75 parrhesia, 228 Partridge, Eric, 148, 277 Pascal, Gabriel, 244 Pasco, Richard, 100 Path-Way to Military Practice (Riche), 165n22 The Patterne of Painful Adventures (Twine), 215–16n27 Paul (saint): allusions to, 208; and bible maps, 199, 202, 207, 212n8, 213nn14, 16, 214n18; Marlowe on, 216n31; and Pericles, 215–16n27; status of, 199–200, 208; and The Tempest, 200–1, 205–6, 210, 215n25 ‘Pauline Cartography, Missionary Nationalism, and The Tempest’ (Martin), 7, 17, 198–217 Pennington, Michael, 96, 121–2n2 Pepys, Samuel, 84 Peregrinationem D. Pauli, & Typum vniuersialem (Apian), 202 Peregrinatio Pauli (Erasmus), 213n13 performance. See live performance performative speech, 64–5, 74n15 Pericles (Shakespeare), 187, 189–91, 192, 215–16n27 Perloff, Marjorie, 279 Phelan, Peggy, 77, 90n6 Philosophical Investigations (Wittgenstein), 278, 279 philosophy: cynic philosophers, 219–29, 230n7, 231n10; and King Lear, 218–19, 222–9, 229–30n1; occasionalism, 7, 50 Pierce Pennilesse (Nashe), 165n22 pilgrimage: in Me & Shakespeare, 118–19, 121; in Shakespeare’s Lives, 113; in Shakespeare the Thinker, 113; in Will & Me, 112, 113–16, 121

Index Pinter, Harold, 276, 286–90, 292n37 A Place Calling Itself Rome (Osborne), 25, 28–32. See also Osborne, John The Place of the Stage (Mulaney), 163n4 play (life as pleasurable activity), 195–6 play (life as theatre), 51–2 Playing Shakespeare series, 117 To Play the King (book by Dobbs), 99 To Play the King (television series), 99, 104–5 The Plebeians Rehearse the Uprising (Grass), 25, 27, 41–2 Plummer, Christopher, 34 politics: British politics, 94–107; Canadian politics, 93–4; the Cold War, 238, 239, 248; and Coriolanus (Brecht), 33–4, 39–41; and Coriolanus (Shakespeare), 36–8; and A Place Calling Itself Rome, 28, 29–32; and Pygmalion and My Fair Lady, 236–7, 239, 241, 242, 247–8; and standardization of English, 276–7, 290n2 Porter, Cole, 56 Porter, Jimmy, 30 postcolonialism, 200–1 Potter, Beatrix, 100 Poussin, Nicolas, 223 Prater, Eugene Greeley, 44n14 ‘The Prehistory and Posthistory of The Tragedy of Coriolanus from Livy and Plutarch via Shakespeare down to Brecht and Myself’ (Grass), 27, 44n7 The Prince (Machiavelli), 100 prostitution, 149, 154–6, 157–8, 160– 1, 164n17 psychoanalysis, 261, 273nn15, 18, 275n45

323

punctuation, 148, 150, 161 Pygmalion (Shaw): and audiences, 242; book version, 236; comments on, 238, 253n8; ending of, 235–7, 241–2, 244, 249; and language games, 276, 280–3; social commentary in, 241; transformation in, 235–40, 247. See also My Fair Lady (Lerner and Loewe); Shaw, Bernard Quebrada (Williams), 273n19 Quicklyism, 147–8 Quigley, Austin, 286 The Quintessence of Ibsenism (Shaw), 241 racism: and anti-semitism, 62, 73n10, 131, 135–6, 137; and colour-blind casting, 126–8, 133, 135; and Merchant of Venice, 125–7, 128–31, 133–6; and A Place Calling Itself Rome, 31; race-based identity labels, 68, 74–5n20; and South Pacific, 60; and Stage Beauty, 89; and theatrical liberalism, 62; and West Side Story, 57–8, 69 Rackin, Phyllis, 150, 164nn7, 18 Radford, Michael, 126 Rae, Bob, 93–4 ‘The Rain in Spain’ (Lerner and Loewe), 238 Raleigh, Walter, 198 Rawson, Christopher, 136 reading, 91n14 The Real Thing (Stoppard), 50. See also Stoppard, Tom recapitulatory passages, 166–7 recontextualization, 6 recruiting, 156–8 ‘Recuerdo’ (William), 261

324

Index

‘The Red Flag,’ 29–30, 31 Register, Cheri, 110 religion: and All’s Well That Ends Well, 210; conversion, 198–9, 200–1, 206–11; and King Lear, 118, 225, 227, 229, 231n18; and Love’s Labour Lost, 210; and Me & Shakespeare, 111, 117–21; and Merchant of Venice, 125–38, 140n24; and The Night of the Iguana, 257, 258, 260, 264–70, 272, 275n44; and Shakespeare, 119–20, 124nn28, 30; and St Paul, 199; and The Tempest, 198–9, 200–1, 205–11; and Tennessee Williams, 263–4, 273n22, 274n39; Twentythird Psalm, 265. See also Judaism; spirituality The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui (Brecht), 33 The Revenger’s Tragedy (Kyd), 100 reviews: of Coriolan (Brecht), 26, 33–4, 45n30; of Coriolanus (Shakespeare), 36–7, 45n29; of early female actors, 84; of King Lear, 168; of Me & Shakespeare, 119; of Merchant of Venice, 136–7; of Osborne, 30, 44n18; of Pygmalion, 238; of transvestite actors, 85; of Will & Me, 116 rhetoric, 216n31, 228 Rich, Adrienne, 5 Richard History Stage Show, 81 Richard II (Shakespeare), 100, 183, 184 Richard III (Shakespeare), 12, 78, 79–83, 91n13, 100, 210 Richardson, Ian, 99, 100–1 Riche, Barnaby, 165n22 Rich, Richard, 205 Ring of the Nibelung (Wagner), 100

Robbins, Jerome, 56, 72n2 Robinson, Jamie, 134 The Rocky Horror Picture Show, 12, 82 Rodgers, Richard, 56, 59, 60, 238 The Romans in Britain (Brenton), 95 Romeo and Juliet (Shakespeare): adaptation of, 11–12, 51–61, 63, 64–72, 72n3; editing of, 72n3, 152–3, 295–6, 297–8; Levenson on, 72n3; and nature, 183, 184; and personal milestones, 110, 112, 114, 121n1; recapitulatory passage in, 166; stylistic dissociation in, 176 Roosevelt, Franklin D., 100 Rosa, Salvator, 224 Rosenbaum, Ron, 123–4n27 Rosenberg, Marvin, 178 Rosenblatt, Mark, 113 Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead (R&GAD) (Stoppard), 11, 48–9, 51–3. See also Stoppard, Tom Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Meet King Lear (Stoppard), 50. See also Stoppard, Tom Rose, Phyllis, 122n4 Rose, Richard, 127, 128, 129, 133 Ross, Sandi, 127 Rowley, William, 100, 105 Rozett, Martha Tuck, 5 Rudolph, Valerie, 41–2 Russell-Beale, Simon, 87 Saint Exupery, Antoine de, 266 Sanders, Julie, 4–5, 6 Sapir, Edward, 252 Saussure, Ferdinand, 276, 278, 280, 284, 285 Sawyer, Robert, 5 Scarlet Letter (Hawthorne), 246 Schall, Ekkehard, 33

Index Scheil, Katherine, 3–21, 110–24 Schiff, Stephen, 55n21 Schoenbaum, Samuel, 113 Scofield, Paul, 100, 168 Scolnicov, Hanna, 7, 17–18, 218–31 score: of Merchant of Venice, 134; of My Fair Lady, 238, 239–40, 243, 249, 256n60; of West Side Story, 72n2. See also adaptation (concept); musicals; soundtracks Scotiabank Group, 132 Sea Venture (shipwreck of), 198, 203, 205, 210 Seed, Paul, 100 Selected Letters (Williams), 257 The Self and the Dramas of History (Niebur), 253n8 self-fashioning, 62, 68–9, 70–1, 74n19, 112 self-sufficiency, 229 Sellers, Peter, 129 A Sense of Detachment (Osborne), 30 sets: and Coriolanus, 34–5; and House of Cards series, 100; and Merchant of Venice, 129–30 sexual innuendo, 148, 153 ‘Sexuality and Textuality in the Editing of Shakespeare’ (Thompson), 152 Shakespeare, William: changing nature of his original texts, 7–8; historical plays, 145, 163n1; and personal commemoration, 110, 121n1, 121–2n2, 122n3, 122–3n13; personal knowledge of, 115, 120–1; and Stoppard, 54n4; working conditions of, 7. See also names of specific plays Shakespeare (Bloom), 122n3 Shakespeare after All (Garber), 122n3

325

Shakespeare and Appropriation (Desmet and Sawyer), 5 Shakespeare and Modern Drama (Levenson), 72n3 Shakespeare and the Bible, 214–15n23, 215n24 Shakespeare and the Geography of Difference (Gillies), 201 ‘Shakespeare and the Indifference of Nature’ (Leggatt), 8, 16, 183–97 Shakespeare and the Problem of Adaptation (Kidnie), 8 ‘Shakespeare as Memoir’ (Scheil), 6, 13–14, 110–24 Shakespeare Cycle and Elsinore (Lepage), 126 Shakespeare on Spirituality (Stephans), 119–20 The Shakespeare Oracle Kit (Llewellyn), 124n30 ‘Shakespeare, or the Poet’ (Emerson), 19 Shakespeare’s Doctrine of Nature (Danby), 16 Shakespeare’s Lives (Schoenbaum), 113 Shakespeare’s Theatre of War (de Somogyi), 163–4n6 Shakespeare’s Universe of Discourse (Elam), 279 Shakespeare’s Window into the Soul (Lings), 119 Shakespeare’s World / World Shakespeares (Levenson), 301 Shakespeare the Thinker (Nuttall), 113, 122–3n13 The Shakespeare Wars (Rosenbaum), 123–4n27 Shaw, Bernard: Back to Methuselah, 237, 245; Caesar and Cleopatra, 245;

326

Index

Irish accent of, 280, 292n30; Major Barbara, 243; and Mrs Patrick Campbell, 235–6; on musicals, 249–50, 256n54; on poverty, 242–3; The Quintessence of Ibsenism, 241. See also Pygmalion (Shaw) Shaw, Fiona, 116 Sher, Antony, 140n24, 141–2n53 ships, 7, 48–52 shipwrecks: and nature, 16–17; of Sea Venture, 198, 203, 205; and St Paul, 17, 199, 202, 205, 215n25; in The Tempest, 194, 200, 210; in Timon of Athens, 187 A Short Sharp Shock! (Brenton and Howard), 95 Show Boat (Kern and Hammerstein), 63 Silone, Ignazio, 239 Silverstein, Marc, 289 Simpson, Jeffrey, 93 Skinner, B.F., 74n18 Skinner, Claire, 87 social relations: and The Birthday Party, 276, 286–90; and Hay Fever, 276, 283–6; and language, 276–80; and My Fair Lady, 239–43, 245–6, 251; and Pygmalion, 241–2, 247, 280–3, 292n33. See also class Socrates, 221 Sokol, B.J., 214n21 Sokol, Mary, 214n21 Soles, Paul, 135 ‘Some Random Notes on the Play and Production’ (Williams), 270, 271–2 Sondheim, Stephen, 56 soundtracks: and House of Cards series, 100; and Stage Beauty, 89. See also score

Southern Cross (Williams), 263 South Pacific (Rodgers and Hammerstein), 60, 250. See also Rodgers, Richard spectators. See audiences ‘SPINSTER’ (Williams), 270 spirituality: and Me & Shakespeare, 111, 117–21; and Shakespeare, 119–20, 124nn28, 30; theatrical liberalism, 61. See also religion Spiritual Shakespeares (Fernie), 124n28 Spitting Image series, 99 sprechtgesang, 251 Stage Beauty, 12–13, 83–9, 91n21 ‘Staging Shakespeare for “Live” Performance in The Eyre Affair and Stage Beauty’ (Kidnie), 5, 8, 12–13, 76–92 Standard English and the Politics of Language (Crowley), 290n2 Stella, Frank, 76 Stephans, Craig, 119–20 Stephens, Robert, 182 Stern, Tiffany, 84 Stevenson, R.L., 273n18 Stoppard, Tom, 11, 48–9, 50–3, 54n4, 55n21, 279 Strachey, William, 203, 214n20 Stratford Shakespeare Festival: and The Adventures of Pericles, 133; importance of, 140–1n34; and Merchant of Venice, 126–42; and Michael Ignatieff, 94. See also live performance Stratford-upon-Avon (UK), 112–14, 116, 118 Straus, Oscar, 256n54 A Streetcar Named Desire (Williams), 64, 74n16, 264, 271. See also Williams, Tennessee

Index Stubbes, Philip, 159 ‘Study of the First Scene of Shakespeare’s Coriolanus’ (Brecht), 26, 43n3 style (in Shakespeare): stylistic disjunction, 171–2; stylistic disruption, 171, 172–6; stylistic dissociation, 171, 176–9; stylized postures, 12, 84, 85. See also language ‘Subterranean Homesick Blues’ (Dylan), 4, 55n21 Suddenly Last Summer (Williams), 266, 274n39 suffering: in King Lear, 170; and Will & Me, 113–18. See also emotions ‘A Summer of Discovery’ (Williams), 257 Superman, 69 Suvin, Darko, 39, 41 Sweet, Henry, 280 Sweet William (Pennington), 121–2n2 Tabori, Georg, 125 Talking Back to Shakespeare (Rozett), 5 The Taming of the Shrew (Shakespeare), 56, 186 tango, 238 ‘A Tapestry of Thanks’ (Freeman), 294–303 Tate, Nahum, 181 taverns, 146–7 ‘Taxman’ (Beatles), 95 Taylor, Gary, 127 Taylor, Neil, 153 teaching, 117, 119, 121, 251–2, 277, 282–3 Teaching Adaptations (Balestrini, ed.), 72n3 The Teaching of English in England (Newbolt Report), 277

327

television, 99–105. See also adaptation (concept) Tell Me True (Hampl and May), 122n4 The Tempest (Shakespeare): and audiences, 198, 201, 211; cultural allusions in, 200; emotion in, 216n31; and nature, 187, 194–7; and religion, 198–9, 200–1, 205–11, 214– 15n23; and the shipwreck of the Sea Venture, 203, 205; and Virginia Company colonization, 201 tennis, 159–60 Tenschert, Joachim, 26, 34–9 The Testament of Cresseid (Henryson), 183 ‘Thank Heaven for Little Girls’ (Lerner and Loewe), 249 Thatcher, Margaret, 94–9, 100, 106 theatre: architecture of, 81, 82; and identity, 74n20; and mass media, 77; and multimedia effects, 77; and The Night of the Iguana, 265; theatrical liberalism, 12, 61–3, 65, 68, 70–2, 74n14, 246; transvestite theatre, 84–5, 91–2n23. See also live performance The Theatre of Tennessee Williams (Williams), 259, 260 Theatrum Orbis Terrarum (Ortelius), 203 A Theory of Adaptation (Hutcheon), 4 ‘There’ll be spring ev’ry year’ (Lerner and Loewe), 245 Thirteenth Night (Brenton), 94, 95–8 ‘This Can’t be Love’ (Rodgers and Hart), 59 ‘This Tunis, sir, was Carthage’ (Brotton), 200 Thompson, Ann, 152–3 Thompson, Severn, 127

328

Index

Three Acts of Grace (Williams), 263 Three Men in a Boat (To Say Nothing of the Dog!) (Jerome), 48 ‘Three Men in a Boat’ (Zeifman), 7, 48–55 The Threepenny Opera (Brecht), 32 Tieck, Dorothea, 37 Timon of Athens (Shakespeare), 186–9, 231n10 Titus Andronicus (Shakespeare), 116, 184, 185–6, 194 ‘To gain the language, ’tis needful that the most immodest word be looked upon and learnt’ (Bulman), 8, 15, 145–65 ‘Tonight’ (Bernstein and Sondheim), 56–7 Topham, Sarah, 130 tragedy: models of, 71; and West Side Story, 71 transformation, 235–40, 245–6 transvestite theatre, 84–5, 91–2n23 travel narratives. See pilgrimage A True Reportory of the wrack (Strachey), 203 trust, 102–3 truth: and cynic philosophers, 221, 228; and memoir, 115; and The Night of the Iguana, 258, 271 The Tutor (Lenz), 43 Twenty-third Psalm, 265 Two Acts of Grace (Williams), 273n19 Tynan, Kenneth, 26, 33 typogeography, 216n29 Unfitted (Festa), 77 Unmarked (Phelan), 77 ‘Unwinding Coriolanus’ (Holland), 5, 10–11, 25–47 Usage and Abusage (Partridge), 277

vaudeville, 69 Vickers, Brian, 146 Vidal, Gore, 273n22 Virginia Company, 198–9, 201, 203, 205 Virginia Richly Valued (Hakluyt), 207 Wagner, Richard, 100 Waiting for Godot (Beckett), 49 Waller, David, 96 Watson, Nicola, 121 Weigel, Helene, 27 Weill, Kurt, 246 Weis, René, 152 Wekwerth, Manfred, 26, 34–9 Wells, Stanley, 8, 15–16, 166–82 Wentworth, Scott, 129–30 Wesker, Arnold, 125 West of Suez (Osborne), 30. See also Osborne, John West Side Story: and audiences, 65; and choreography, 56, 58, 72n2, 73n5; and genre constraints, 11–12, 56, 60, 72n2; and love, 11, 59–61, 69– 71, 73n8; and musical comedies, 56, 60; and racism, 57–8, 69; and theatrical liberalism, 61, 63, 65, 68, 70–2; and tragedy, 71 ‘West Side Story and the Vestiges of Theatrical Liberalism’ (Most), 5, 11–12, 56–75 ‘What Is a Text?’ (Orgel), 7 Whitehouse, Mary, 95 Whorf, Benjamin, 252 ‘Why Can’t a Woman Be More Like a Man?’ (Lerner and Loewe), 249 ‘Why Can’t the English Teach Their Children How to Speak?’ (Lerner and Loewe), 238, 239 Wilde, Oscar, 286

Index Wilkins, George, 215–16n27 Will & Me (Dromgoole), 111–16, 123n15 Willett, John, 43n3 Williams, Clifford, 100 Williams, Dakin, 257, 273n22 Williams, Gordon, 148 Williams, Raymond, 71 Williams, Tennessee: on human contact, 274n38; ‘The Mattress in the Tomato Patch,’ 264; Memoirs, 257, 261; One Arm and Other Stories, 258; Out Cry, 265; ‘Recuerdo,’ 261; and religion, 257, 263–4, 273n22, 274n39; Selected Letters, 257; ‘Some Random Notes on the Play and Production,’ 270, 271–2; ‘SPINSTER,’ 270; Suddenly Last Summer, 266, 274n39; ‘A Summer of Discovery,’ 257; writing process of, 257, 259. See also The Night of the Iguana (Williams); A Streetcar Named Desire (Williams) The Winter’s Tale (Shakespeare), 187, 192, 194, 245, 246 ‘With a Little Bit of Luck’ (Lerner and Loewe), 243

329

Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 276, 278–9, 284, 292nn25, 37 Wittgenstein’s Ladder (Perloff), 279 Wolfe, Reynolde, 202, 207, 212n9, 216n29 women: in My Fair Lady, 249; in Thirteenth Night, 97, 98. See also bawdy word play The World Viewed (Cavell), 90n2 Worthen, W.B., 137 ‘Wouldn’t It Be Loverly?’ (Lerner and Loewe), 239, 240, 245, 252 writing: and coincidences, 54n4; and music, 53; thoughts on artists, 258, 264, 274n26; writing process, 115–16 The Year of Reading Proust (Rose), 122n4 Zeifman, Hersh, 7, 48–55 Zeigfeld, Florence, 250 Zeigfeld Follies, 69 Ziegler, Jacob, 202, 212n9