Shakespeare and Tyranny : Regimes of Reading in Europe and Beyond [1 ed.] 9781443867702, 9781443860604

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Shakespeare and Tyranny

Shakespeare and Tyranny: Regimes of Reading in Europe and Beyond

Edited by

Keith Gregor

Shakespeare and Tyranny: Regimes of Reading in Europe and Beyond, Edited by Keith Gregor This book first published 2014 Cambridge Scholars Publishing 12 Back Chapman Street, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2XX, UK British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Copyright © 2014 by Keith Gregor and contributors All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner. ISBN (10): 1-4438-6060-3, ISBN (13): 978-1-4438-6060-4

CONTENTS

Introduction ................................................................................................. 1 Keith Gregor Chapter One ............................................................................................... 19 Tyranny in Shakespeare’s Romances with Special Reference to Coriolanus and Timor of Athens Mário Vítor Bastos Chapter Two .............................................................................................. 37 Cymbeline and the Display of Empire Hywel Dix Chapter Three ............................................................................................ 57 When the Tyrant is a Despot: Jean-François Ducis’s Adaptations of Shakespeare Keith Gregor Chapter Four .............................................................................................. 77 The Merchant of Venice in Pest and Cluj (Kolozsvár) during the Habsburg Neo-absolutism Katalin Ágnes Bartha Chapter Five ............................................................................................ 105 Crossing the Rubicon in Fascist Italy: Mussolini and Theatrical Caesarism from Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar Michele De Benedictis Chapter Six .............................................................................................. 127 From the Snares of Watchful Tyranny to Post-human Dictators: Macbeth under the Portuguese Dictatorship and in Democracy Francesca Rayner Chapter Seven.......................................................................................... 145 (Do) What You Will in Late Francoist Spain Elena Bandín

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Chapter Eight ........................................................................................... 165 Writing between the Lines: Reviewing Shakespeare Productions in Socialist Hungary Veronika Schandl Chapter Nine............................................................................................ 181 Analyzing Shakespearean Models of Tyranny in a Communist Regime: Some Examples from the Slovene Theatre in the Period 1945-1983 Denis Poniž Chapter Ten ............................................................................................. 203 Wajda’s Hamlet IV: A Post-political Production? Jacek Fabiszak Chapter Eleven ........................................................................................ 223 Hamlet or the Skeletons in the Cupboard Nicoleta Cinpoeú Chapter Twelve ....................................................................................... 241 Shakespeare and the Political Awakening in the Arab World: An Analysis of Some Arab Adaptations of the English Bard Rafik Darragi Chapter Thirteen ...................................................................................... 259 Transcontinental Shakespeare: Macbeth and Tyranny in Glauber Rocha’s Severed Heads Francisco Fuentes and Noemí Vera Notes on Contributors.............................................................................. 277

INTRODUCTION KEITH GREGOR

Shakespeare on... Tyranny is not an issue with which, until of late, Shakespeare scholars have been overly concerned. For decades the prevailing doxa on the issue is best represented by L. C. Knights’s assertion in his 1957 Shakespeare Lecture to the British Academy: “Shakespeare, like the great majority of his fellow-countrymen, ‘had no politics’” (Knights 1979, 152). In the place of a predetermined, fully worked-out political philosophy, his work at most expresses a general preference for what Knights calls those “wholesome political order[s]” that are the spontaneous expression of “relationships between particular persons within an organic society” (1623). In the case of tyranny, and the equally pernicious effects of anarchy, both extremes painted in the tragedy Macbeth, the “‘concord’ that Shakespeare invokes as the alternative [...] has this depth of meaning behind it”. We shall return to Macbeth below. For the moment, it is worth pointing out that, whether or not Shakespeare had fully thought through the implications of tyranny and did indeed have a “wholesome” alternative to it, the term recurs almost obsessively in his work. A basic concordance search for “tyranny” and its various grammatical variants (“tyrant”, “tyrannous”, “tyrannize”) produces over 130 occurrences; and though a number of these are purely figurative (“the tyranny of her sorrows” in All’s Well that Ends Well; “time’s tyranny” in Sonnet 115; “there is…an eyrie of children, little eyases, that cry out on the top of question and are most tyrannically clapp’d for’t” in Hamlet), the immense majority are used in their literal, political sense. It was the Indian critic V. Aravindakshan who was one of the first to reflect on an abiding and, at times, implacably realistic concern in Shakespeare with the nature and consequences of tyranny: From the beginning to the end there is the same preoccupation with the nightmarish doings in the “cunning passages and contrived corridors” in high places: the same story of dethronements, usurpations, banishments

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Introduction and assassinations. In comedies, tragedies and histories, and in all the phases or stages of his career, Shakespeare points his finger at the struggle for power. In some of the more important works he strips this struggle of all mythology and shows it in its pure state. (1976, 39)

Behind this finger-pointing is what, more recently, Mary Ann McGrail suggests was Shakespeare’s assimilation of the ideas of thinkers like Aristotle for whom “tyranny is the worst of all possible regimes”, but also, contradictorily, like Machiavelli who claimed that “a disguised tyranny [is] potentially the best possible regime” (2002, 1). In plays such as Macbeth, Richard III, The Winter’s Tale and The Tempest, she argues, the author seems to be deliberately dramatizing these ideas to produce (his chief concern) a psychological photofit of their tyrannical protagonists. “What tyranny does to the state qua state is not important,” Shakespeare seems to say, “but is best understood by looking within the disordered mind and passions of the tyrant himself” (13). According to this account, which equates Shakespeare more, say, with the García Márquez of The Autumn of the Patriarch than with the novelists McGrail actually cites, Orwell and Solzhenitsyn, being steeped in the discourses then circulating the playwright purposefully used the drama to gauge their validity as explanations of human conduct. With the political “turn” to early modern studies in the UK and US in the early 1980s, one of the consequences with regard to our perception of Shakespeare was a greater attention to the material circumstances concurring in the production and reception of his work, work seen now as not merely reflecting existing political dogmas but as a form of political intervention in its own right. The staging of a version of Richard II to whip up support for the Earl of Essex-orchestrated rising of 1601 is often cited as an extreme instance, though as Jonathan Dollimore points out in his introduction to Political Shakespeare, such “appropriations” were natural to audiences whose conception of literature was tainted by none of the “mythologies” mentioned by Aravindakshan and so vigorously defended by Knights: “This,” Dollimore argues, applies especially to tragedy, that genre traditionally thought to be most capable of transcending the historical moment of inception and of representing universal truths. Contemporary formulations of the tragic certainly made reference to universals but they were also resolutely political, especially those which defined it as a representation of tyranny. Such accounts, and of course the plays themselves, were appropriated as both defences of and challenges to authority. (1985, 9)

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“Where and when did Shakespeare hear the tyrant’s cruel laugh? And if he did not hear it, how did he have a presentiment of it?,” Jan Kott famously asked in Shakespeare Our Contemporary (1983, 21). From the perspective of cultural materialism and its mainly US-based version, new historicism, these questions are ultimately unanswerable, not just because of the mist which doggedly enshrouds Shakespeare’s biography but, more importantly, because texts such as Shakespeare’s are inevitably permeated by the highly “pragmatic” view that literature is inseparable from the context in which it is written and received. In the case of tragedy, that “context” is, ineludibly, the discourses on dramatic poesy (Dollimore cites poeticians like Elyot, Sidney, Puttenham, etc.) then circulating, discourses which stressed tyranny as the chief concern of the tragic and which plays like Richard II were interpreted as applying to present political structures, challenging at the same time as they appeared to confirm the principles on which those structures were based. Now, although the (at times) outspokenly robust approach of new historicists and materialists to early modern drama has tended to alienate critics with a more generalizing, universalist perception of the plays’ potential for meaning,1 the attribution to the plays of some form of political motivation, either for or against the ruling Tudor or Stuart myths, or subtly enacting both positions at once, has become an increasingly conspicuous strategy of turn-of-the-century critical practice. In terms of tyranny and its contemporary manifestations (absolutism, despotism, autarchy, etc.), it is now largely taken for granted that the plays do indeed position themselves critically with respect to the historical material they dramatize and that, while they may well have been under 1

See, notably, Alexander Leggatt’s reservations in Shakespeare’s Political Drama. Defending the continuing relevance of the “mythical” approach of Knights and others to Shakespeare’s more “political” plays, Leggatt is wary of the “current tendency” to see “society as a structure of oppression and exploitation, and to read Shakespeare accordingly”. Shakespeare, he argues, “examines power and its implications realistically, and beside the official view that order is a good thing and that God is watching over England there are always minority reports”. That said, the author of the history and Roman plays (the tragedies are not even classed as “political”), “allows us to feel the excitement, even the longing, that the dream of good order produces, for that too is part of our political life: no fully realistic view can leave it out of account, and no fully responsible view can dismiss it as mere illusion. We may not agree that the good life can be made, Tudor-fashion, by a strong central power. But if we stop believing that it can be made at all we are lost” (1988, x; my emphasis). The exclusion of subversion as a “minority report” and the nostalgia or “dream of good order” as an antidote to becoming “lost” are, arguably, themselves expressions of a power structure Leggatt finds lacking in the plays he discusses.

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Introduction

some kind of “obligation” to “naturalize” or to “mythologize”, say, Tudor claims to divine rule, there are many instances in which they seem designed to expose those same claims as untenable and ultimately bogus.2 As well as tyranny in and around Shakespeare (i.e. as the concept was understood and deployed by him and/or the effect this had on contemporary audiences), what the political turn in Shakespeare studies has also promoted is an attention to the circumstances in which his work is received in formations other than those for which it was initially intended. John Frow (2002) uses the term “regimes of reading” to refer to the shared competencies, norms, and values that govern how we read and the kinds of value we attach to texts such as Shakespeare’s. Taking “reading” to imply not just interpretation in the strict literary-critical sense (equivalent to Stanley Fish’s “interpretative communities”), but reproduction in translation, adaptation and the theatre, it goes without saying that such “regimes”, like the definition of who “we” are, will vary greatly from one historical moment to another, as well as from one cultural formation to another. At the same time, and despite the existence of movements or “schools” such as neoclassicism, which pressed the merits of the same compositional “rules” over a remarkably extended time-frame and across various national and even continental boundaries, the Gramscian model of society as divided into the vying forces of dominant, residual and emergent can be seen to apply equally to contemporaneous and intra-cultural communities competing, at times violently, over conflicting versions of who “unser Shakespeare” is. As Hugh Grady and Terence Hawkes have argued in a recent volume, a certain “presentism” (Shakespeare here and now) lurks behind all post-Renaissance engagements with the Bard: Facts…do not speak for themselves. Nor do texts. This doesn’t mean that facts or texts don’t exist. It does mean that all of them are capable of genuinely contradictory meanings, none of which has any independent, “given”, undeniable, or self-evident status. Indeed, they don’t speak at all unless and until they are inserted into and perceived as part of specific discourses which impose on them their own shaping requirements and agendas. We choose the facts. We choose the texts. We do the inserting. We do the perceiving. We order the priorities which govern everything. Facts and texts, that is to say, don’t simply speak, don’t merely mean. We speak, we mean, by them. (Grady & Hawkes 2009, 3) 2

Explaining, for example, how A. D. Nuttall in Shakespeare the Thinker can present Richard II as simultaneously a “spin” on the newly adopted Tudor concept of the divine authority of kings and, in the light of Elizabeth I’s own response to the drama (“I am Richard II, know ye not that?”), a play that shows “a monarch can be deposed, predictably used by subversives” (2007, 143).

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It is the acknowledgement of the necessity of such mediations and of the contingency or “situatedness” of different “requirements and agendas”, in short of different regimes of reading, that has distinguished recent Shakespeare criticism from previous interventions. This is very much the focus of the present volume which, as well as addressing what Shakespeare has to say about or on tyranny, provides a glimpse of how his work has been received under regimes themselves considered tyrannical. In a paper for the American Philosophical Society Roland Mushat Frye confessed that if a lifetime devoted to the study of Shakespeare had convinced him of anything, it was that “if the Bard has seriously considered a problem that is of interest to us (in this instance the mystery of tyrannical evil), we should avail ourselves of what he has had to say” (1998, 84). The “interest” in “our” case is, according to Frye, an explanation for how tyrants in 20th-century Germany and Russia were allowed to rise in the first place and, especially in the case of Stalin, to remain in power for so long. A possible answer, he offers, is to be found in Macbeth, a play which reveals how by playacting and deceit on the one hand, and the infliction or mere threat of genocidal terror on the other, a whole nation can be subjugated to the tyrant’s will. There are, of course, problems with this view. On the one hand, there is the awkward exchange between Malcolm and Macduff in the last scene of Act 4, where Malcolm pretends to reject the “king-becoming graces” of justice, verity, temperance, etc., only to admit that he has been lying in order to put the other’s loyalty to the test. As Andrew Hadfield argues (2004, 80-85), Macduff’s dumbfounded response (“Such welcome and unwelcome things at once/’Tis hard to reconcile”), coming as it does just before the Doctor’s report of the “sundry blessings [that] hang about” the English throne as a result of its occupier’s ability to cure his subjects of the “king’s evil”, scrofula, suggests a far more equivocal attitude to kingship in a play where neither absolute tyranny nor misguided benignity are presented as viable forms of government. On the other hand, though the play can in certain respects be said to espouse James I’s own views on tyranny as put forward in the Basilikon Doron and The True Law of Free Monarchies, where the kind of violent coercion engaged in by the superstitious, paranoid Macbeth would be the negative of the “legitimate” state violence which later removes him from office, Shakespeare might reasonably be argued to present a different case: following the Scotsman George Buchanan in De jure regni or History of Scotland, Macduff’s “legitimate” assassination of Macbeth alerts us to what Alan Sinfield calls “the fundamental instability of power relations during the [Jacobean] transition to Absolutism, and consequently to the uncertain validity of the claim of the State to the

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legitimate use of violence”. From this perspective, Macbeth may indeed be regarded as a murderer and an oppressive prince, “but he is one version of the Absolutist ruler, not the polar opposite” (1984, 70). But there is also, crucially for this volume, the question of Macbeth’s reception in post-Jacobean and mainly non-English cultures. If, as now seems clear, the play is a not an unambiguous reflection on contemporary notions of tyranny and their relation to James’s own conception of absolute rule, what might its significance be for subsequent tyrannies in other parts of the globe? Would it have the same impact? Could it be performed at all under such regimes? The case of Francoist Spain may prove illustrative here. In 1941 the newly “nationalized” Teatro Español in Madrid (Spain) staged a spectacular production of Macbeth. Directed by Cayetano Luca de Tena, the production took as its play text a specially commissioned rendering by Nicolás González Ruiz, a writer known and trusted for his sympathies towards the new pro-fascist regime headed by generalísimo Francisco Franco. Contemporary praise for the translation, which matched that for the performance, conveniently occluded the fact that certain passages of Shakespeare’s text had simply not been translated, while others had been re-written to strike a more congenial note with Franco’s ever-vigilant censorship boards. Amongst the more problematic passages was the new king Malcolm’s last speech to the assembled armies of Scotland and England. Most critics now assume the speech to be one of many Shakespearean nods in the direction of the new monarch James, whose accession to the English throne in 1603 is (not very subtly perhaps) being celebrated as an end to age-old divisions and as providing a splendid opportunity for Anglo-Scottish political and religious unity.3 In the copy of the Cambridge edition the translator was using as his source-text,4 certain lines of the Malcolm speech are, like other key passages in the play, the object of some pointed underlining: What’s more to do, Which would be planted newly with the time, As calling home our exil’d Friends abroad, That fled the Snares of watchfull Tyranny, Producing forth the cruell Ministers Of this dead Butcher, and his Fiend-like Queene… 3

To the reading of Macbeth as very much “King James’s play”, to cite the subtitle of an essay by George Walton Williams (1982), considerable historicist muscle has been added in Kinney (1991) and, more recently, Alker & Nelson (2007). 4 I am indebted to the Centro de Documentación Teatral in Madrid for allowing me to peruse this most valuable document.

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Coming just two years after the end of a civil war which had caused some 500,000 deaths and an indeterminate number of injuries, forced migrations and exiles; which had introduced mechanisms of surveillance and restriction of freedom not seen since the days of the Inquisition, the references to “exil’d Friends”, “watchfull Tyranny”, “cruell Ministers” and “dead Butcher[s]” were, it was felt, safer removed. “Exil’d Friends” would seem innocuous enough, were it not for the fact that exile (as well as execution) was generally the fate of Franco’s enemies, and so the translator settled for the less offensive “nuestros soldados fugativos” (“our fleeing soldiers”), preferring the hint of cowardice to an evocation of mass expatriation. The self-censorship in this passage thus retains the “allegorical” sense of the Shakespeare original (Malcolm’s enthronement re-presenting the Jamesian/Francoist restoration of order and national unity), while defusing the threat of accidental or subliminal identifications between Franco’s Spain and Macbeth’s Scotland.

...and under Tyranny The majority of the essays in this volume grew out of papers presented at a symposium on the topic of Shakespeare and Tyranny held at the University of Murcia (Spain) in January 2012. What inspired the original symposium was the perception that work on the reception of Shakespeare under different types of tyrannical government (absolutist, dictatorial, etc.) seemed to be drawing remarkably similar conclusions as to the nature of that reception. Carefully regulated attitudes to, and practices in, Shakespeare criticism, performance, translation and adaptation, and of course the aesthetico-ideological structures of centralized, all-seeing state apparatuses, appeared to follow analogous patterns and to pursue similar, if frequently unattainable, ends. Amongst the aspects the organizers of the symposium asked participants to reflect upon were the institutional controls on the dissemination and publication of Shakespeare’s work; the assumptions and techniques applied to the staging of Shakespeare’s plays; state intervention in the elaboration of a Shakespeare “canon”; the role of Shakespeare in the construction of national identities under tyranny, and the various means by which the subversion/containment paradigm had or might be practically resolved in such conditions. Inevitably, other key issues, unforeseen by the organizers, also emerged, not least the fact that the heavily reader-oriented focus of these questions (Shakespeare under tyranny) tended to occlude the potential of the plays themselves to anticipate the problems confronting successive reading regimes and so to necessitate the kind of interpretative mechanisms alluded to above.

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This, as Mário Vítor Bastos’s opening essay argues, would seem especially to be the case of the later plays in which the theme of tyranny is quite obviously being foregrounded. Great Shakespearean characters are themselves dictators or deal directly with the problem of political tyranny. Though the world has changed substantially since Shakespeare’s time, it is nonetheless true that many of his political insights remain alive and continue to make sense, not only in dramatic terms. It is thus easy to conclude that Shakespeare’s handling of tyranny is not a thing of the past, and that his notions of “good government” are as essential and important to the impact of his plays today as they were in his own times. In Shakespeare we find examples of “good” and “bad” tyrants. But are there “good tyrants” today? Or does this concept make any sense? Is Kant’s notion of the “enlightened aristocratic ruler”, the bastion of freedom, close to Shakespeare’s “good” kings? Shakespeare’s life and works may seem light years from any modern notion of democracy, yet the Americanization of culture and the rise of modern media have helped to adapt the Bard’s use of “tyranny” (amongst other issues) to our own “horizontal”, democratic, if at times chaotic, times. Bastos’s essay addresses various aspects of this complex question. Taking Shakespeare’s late plays and the use they make of “tyrants” as points of departure, and with special reference to adaptations of his work (on stage, in film, dance, music and the plastic arts) in countries with political traditions as diverse as England, America, Japan and Russia, the essay ultimately aims to provide an answer to the question of Shakespeare’s distance from, or proximity to, modern theories of democracy. Two of the major developments in British cultural theory over the last twenty-five years have, as suggested above, been the advent of new historicism and of cultural materialism. Each approach focuses analytic attention on the historical, cultural and political contexts in which literary works were produced, especially during the Renaissance. These kinds of analysis have, as Hywel Dix argues in his contribution, directed attention towards different subject positions, notably those of race, gender, class, dissident sexuality and alternative nationalisms in Scotland and Wales, which placed the imagined unity of the British state in symbolic jeopardy. It is no coincidence that these approaches have coincided with the period since the publication of Tom Nairn’s The Break-up of Britain in 1974, a period which has been characterized by the break-up of consensus in Britain’s public cultural and political affairs. That contemporary environment inevitably impacts on the nature of work produced within the literary academy, so that questions of state, nationhood and citizenship have been retroactively applied to readings of canonical texts such as

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Shakespeare’s Henry V, King Lear and Macbeth. Less successfully analyzed in critical work of this kind is, Dix suggests, Cymbeline, a play in which Celtic difference poses a symbolic threat to the ideal unity of the British monarchic state. Cymbeline is composed in the form of a tableau, where the drama overcomes the threat posed by Celtic otherness to an idealized British whole and drives towards the final presentation, where the flags of Rome are displayed conspicuously alongside those of the nascent British Empire. In other words, the play cultivates a strong imaginative association between imperial Rome and the new British Empire at the historical moment of the latter’s inception. It does this specifically by subsuming Welsh difference. To read alterity back into this display of power is to refuse the appeal to emotional loyalty and unity demanded by the play’s conclusion and hence to open up the very questions of empire, state and citizenship that appear to be foreclosed by the play’s conclusion. In this sense, Dix’s analysis of Cymbeline could be said to add to current new historicist and cultural materialist scholarship by exploring how questions of burgeoning imperial ideology impact upon our understanding of how the nation state interpolates between the individual subject and society. From early imperial England the collection moves to Bonapartian France where, as Keith Gregor shows, the adaptation of a selection of Shakespeare’s plays by Jean-François Ducis gave rise to a series of texts considered to be amongst the landmarks of Shakespeare’s acculturation to the tenets of European taste. Initially destined to be consumed by a bourgeois French theatre public seeking “classical” tragic confirmation of some of its own most cherished values, the adaptations soon spread to various continental locations, becoming for a time Europe’s chief mode of access to the Shakespearean “originals” from which they sprang. The essay examines the reasons for that spread and especially the political circumstances in which Ducis’s work was produced and consumed. In this respect, there is a noticeable shift in the overt ideology of the adaptations, the condemnation of tyranny and concern with political “legitimacy” intensifying in the period immediately after the French Revolution of 1789 and, even more so, with Napoleon’s coronation as emperor in 1804. Gregor’s essay charts the development of that ideology in Ducis’s own multiple revisions of his adaptation of Hamlet. To the stage-worthiness of this admittedly minor piece can be added an explicit political agenda which evidently struck a chord with audiences in other countries that fell under the French sway—especially neighbouring Spain, where not only did the theatrical influence of France continue to be strong but the

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continued threat of tyranny was, as the Bonaparte-aided Bourbon restoration was to prove, a very real one. A similar context, in this case neo-absolutist Hungary, is the focus of Katalin Ágnes Bartha’s contribution. In contrast to France, however, coercion and oppression led there to what she shows to have been an under-representation of classical drama in local theatre repertoires. The structure of Hungarian theatre would disintegrate and change substantially after the breakdown of the 1848-49 Revolution, while German acting gained territory once again. The so-called Theaterordnung (Decree on theatre) which came into force on 25 November 1850, was quite severe; accordingly, every theatrical performance or act was banned if it was construed as endangering public order or the monarchy itself, or if it was likely to cause a protest or set different nationalities, social classes or religions against each other. The plays which had already been put on stage in Vienna constituted an exception in this regard. Still, the Shakespeare canon survived the period. Drawing on the promptbooks, playbills, reviews and recollections of the Merchant of Venice productions in Budapest (1852) and Cluj-Napoca (1853), Bartha’s essay reveals the contradictory nature of censorship practices, the cultural politics of the Hungarian theatre management, which favoured plays about the Hungarian nation and history but signally disregarded the disruptive potentials of Shakespeare’s work A similar ambivalence affects stagings in 20th-century fascist states in countries like Italy, Portugal and Spain. In the first case, there was what Michele de Benedictis reveals to have been an unprecedented popularity for theatrical productions and new translations of the previously disregarded Shakespearean play, Julius Caesar. The rhetorical reinterpretation of Rome’s glorious past, once transposed—and revised— in media other than propagandistic historiography, seemed inevitably to empower even the Bard as instrumental co-partner for Mussolini’s ideological appropriation of the Caesar myth. The essay discusses the ways these new readings of Shakespeare’s Roman tragedy were not simply part of an extemporary dramatic agenda to be officially imposed by a totalitarian regime. Apart from contributing to an emphasis on the importance of national identity within an autarchic government, Mussolini himself appears to have found in Shakespeare’s solemn lines a means of re-articulating his personal figure before the “theatre” of national (and international) politics. Mussolini declaredly acknowledged Julius Caesar as offering “a great school for rulers”, an inspiring pre-textual pattern to rehearse or quote from, thus showing his mastery of the English language but, above all, providing an illustrious model of identification to legitimize

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his despotic heroism for the “benefit” of Italy’s citizens. How far did Shakespeare’s theatrical portrayal of the Roman consul affect Mussolini’s perception of the real, historical Caesar? Conversely, how far did Mussolini’s interpretation swerve from the original Elizabethan character, manipulated here to cope with his contingent exigencies? Was Caesar’s gory demise envisioned as a necessary—as well as prophetic—sacrifice for the sake of order? It is, as De Benedictis argues, no coincidence that, on the other side of the Atlantic, Orson Welles’ 1937 production of the play, subtitled The Death of a Dictator, seemed figuratively to satisfy Mussolini’s militant enthusiasm for self-identification, albeit with a view to counteracting it and so to prefiguring the collapse of the dictatorship through intestine subversion, by associating a decadent and tyrannical Caesar with the titanic historical ego of the Italian Duce. As in Mussolini’s Italy, staging a play about the rise and eventual destruction of a tyrant under a dictatorial regime might, as Fran Rayner suggests, seem something of a risky venture. Yet none of the three performances of Macbeth under the Portuguese dictatorship (1926-1974) appears to have incurred the wrath of the regime’s censors. Even the most radical of these, a somewhat shambolic version entitled Macbeth, What’s Going on in Your Head?, directed by the Argentinian exile Adolfo Gutkin for the Coimbra University Theatre Group (CITAC) only attracted the attention of the Secret Police (PIDE) when some of the students insulted pilgrims travelling to the religious shrine of Fátima on a train. Did, Rayner wonders, the regime simply misrecognize itself in the play or are other factors at work in explaining the apparent equanimity with which it regarded the play? Her essay explores how potentially inflammatory dramatic material intersected with notions of Shakespeare’s national and international cultural currency in these three performances. It also challenges what she shows to have been an absolute separation between the main national theatre, the D. Maria II, as a theatre of the regime, and the oppositional experimental theatres, by pointing to a degree of theatrical transit between them during this period. The actor João Guedes, for instance, played Macbeth in both the 1956 Teatro Experimental do Porto performances and the 1964 D. Maria performances. However, if this would seem to negate any radical charge in performances of the play, Rayner also illustrates how both theatrical contexts created an oppositional space where questions of the abuse of power and eventual regime change could be debated, and which led to an emphasis on the play as one of the most political of Shakespeare’s dramas in the post-revolutionary period. The focus of Elena Bandín’s contribution is 1960s Francoist Spain, a period reputedly of political and cultural openness that came to an end at

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the beginning of the seventies when, in view of the changes Spanish society was then experiencing, the old guard took charge of the government in an attempt to recover the values of the National Movement. In 1969 the Ministry of Information and Tourism, responsible for the Censorship Office, and which had previously been headed by the “moderate” Fraga Iribarne, was now in the hands of Alfredo Sánchez Bella, a veteran diplomat of ultra-right-wing Catholic leanings who was imposed personally by Franco. Bandín’s essay explores how this turn to repression becomes evident, by examining the censorship file of a new production of the Teatro Experimental Independiente (TEI) of Madrid directed by José Carlos Plaza: Haz lo que te dé la gana (Do What You Will), an adaptation of the rock-style musical comedy by Hal Hester and Danny Apolinar from the book adaptation by Donald Driver, loosely based on Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night. Although tolerance towards Shakespeare’s plays was a norm of behaviour on the part of the censors, the script submitted to the censorship office on 16 April 1971 was thoroughly examined. The censorship report authorized the performance for an audience of 18 or over, with suppressions and conditional on a viewing of the dress rehearsal. Citing the textual marks present on the theatre script regarding the main taboo topics of the period—sexual morals, religion, politics and improper language—, Bandín shows how, as in the period immediately after the Civil War, the repressive force of official censorship was exerted in a misguided attempt to protect the morals of Spaniards. At the other end of the ideological spectrum, socialist Hungary, Veronika Schandl turns her attention to different trends in contemporary reviewing, considering the question of what we can use as historical sources or data for possible performance reconstruction and how we can use it, or whether contemporary reviews only serve as an example when wishing to analyze the discourse, as well as the (self)censoring practices, of dictatorial regimes. Addressing and discussing Shakespeare productions from Stalinist, as well as from later Kádár-regime, Hungary, especially their changing representations throughout the past few decades, her essay offers certain strategies for discussing these reviews, as well as outlining further topics for debate. Besides investigating Shakespeare’s reception under socialism, the essay sheds valuable light on some lingering tendencies, still conspicuous in contemporary Hungarian theatre reviews. Socialist Shakespeare is taken up again in Denis Poniž’s account of productions in communist and also post-communist Slovenia. Although, as Poniž contends, Shakespeare was in spirit and body very much a man of the Renaissance, the echoes of the Middle Ages could still be heard

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throughout his creative life. Many sorts of cruelty and superstition, black magic and other kinds of repression had determined the collective medieval mind and its treatment of human life and integrity. A dark Middle Ages was in reality a period of abstract and practical collective tyranny against individuals, especially those who stepped outside the tolerated frames of the communal mind. Many of those ideas passed down to the more liberal Renaissance, and Shakespare used them to theatrically descibe the dichotomy between the open-minded thinking of his own era and contrary views, in which the state of tyranny was conceived not only in terms of political power but as a practical tool for the ruling ideologies. A great number of the tragedies and histories (but also the comedies) are full of supernatural phenomena (witches, ghosts, etc.), with one aim in mind: to show the insignificance of a single human life and how important it is to obey the dominant ideology. Resistance to the collective mind was always punished, and punishment was a constituent part of tyranny against rebels of all kinds. An identical social model was, Poniž suggests, adopted in communist-ruled states like Slovenia. The Renaissance model for the theatrical expression of tyranny is revealed to be behind a number of Shakespearean productions in Slovene theatres between 1945 and 1990, i.e. in the period of communist totalitarian rule. Certain of these productions use Shakespeare’s expressions of tyranny to allude to the contemporary situation in a number of different ways: from highly covert theatrical metaphors to more open and provocative ones, showing that there is no great difference between the tyranny of the Renaissance and that of the period in question. From the totalitarian period in Slovenia the volume moves forward slightly to the fall of communism in Poland and to a discussion of Andrzej Wajda’s Hamlet IV (1989), addressing significant issues of censorship at the time. The production, argues Jacek Fabiszak, was staged at a most sensitive moment in Poland’s history: June 1989, in the wake of the establishment of the first non-communist government after 1945, following the 4 June semi-democratic elections. Wajda worked on his fourth version of Hamlet, perhaps the most politically exploited play in the communist regime, aware of the significant political changes that were taking place in the first half of 1989, especially the so-called Round Table talks which eventually led to the elections. As one may suppose, censorship at that time was slacker than before; furthermore, it is generally assumed that of all the communist countries in Europe, Polish censorship could not be, and indeed was not, as strict as elsewhere, for a number of reasons the essay explores. The essay thus focuses on the image of censorship in 1989, as well as on the ways to get round it at a time when

14

Introduction

power was allegedly slipping out of the hands of a regime which—at the same time— needed to secure a future for itself. The question whether the director compromised with the old system (having been one of the most celebrated Polish film artists since the 1950s) or boldly revealed the system’s evil and wrongdoing, albeit in a veiled manner, is thus of the utmost importance. The post-communist time-frame for Fabiszak’s essay is expanded in Nicoleta Cinpoeƕ’s, which takes as its starting-point the London National Theatre production of Hamlet directed by Nicholas Hyntner (2010) and its striking allusions to former Eastern bloc Romania: the communist hymn theme-tune, playing up the difficulties of leaving the country, the persecution of the actors for critiquing the regime. These productive references clash with what Cinpoeƕ presents as a dearth of stagings of Hamlet in post-Ceauƕescu Romania, the few exceptions (Gabor Tompa’s in 1997, Ioan Sapdaru’s in 1998, Liviu Ciulei’s in 2000, Vlad Mugur’s in 2001, Radu Alexandru Nica’s in 2008 and László Bocsárdi’s in 2009) tending to stress either the play’s global implications, its freedom from associations with the pre-1989 state of affairs, its repositioning in an earlier pre-communist era (Bismarckian Germany), a delocalized site under construction, a critique of the tyranny of the text or, most recently, an exercise in post-drama. Rather than as a victim of political conspiracy, what these post-1989 productions dramatize is Hamlet’s status as a victim of societal indifference, as well as the tyranny of a text which continues to hinder any meaningful engagements with Romania’s troubled past. If continental Europe is the focus of all of these contributions, the last two essays in the volume provide a space for assessing Shakespeare’s reception in other parts of the globe, in particular the still largely uncharted target cultures of North Africa and South America. Theatrical tradition in the Arab countries is, as Rafik Darragi explains, generally considered a foreign artefact, with no relation whatsoever to their past. By the end of the 19th century, the appearance of this type of Western art in the Arab world was a simple form of entertainment for an elitist fraction of the population, with very little reflection on/of the social and popular preoccupations of the period. With the First World War and the English mandate over Egypt, however, the Arab intelligentsia as a whole came to realize the powerful role of the theatre in the political awakening of the people. The best example of this political awakening is, Darragi contends, Ahmed Shawky’s Masra’ Cleopatra (The Death of Cleopatra). Appearing in 1927, at a crucial period in Egyptian history, this play carried numerous barbs against the British occupation of Egypt. In addition to this important work in Arab literature, Darragi examines some modern

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adaptations of Shakespeare by outstanding Arab producers who, each in his own way, marked a determination not to follow the English Bard literally but rather to appropriate him for clear-cut, well-defined political or religious aims. Focusing particularly on two works, Richard III by the Tunisian Mohamed Kouka and Richard III: an Arab Tragedy by the English-Kuweiti Soulayman Al-Bassam, Darragi shows how these two contemporary Arab theatrical figures have forged a new model of what to expect from a great Shakespearean classic on tyranny, one that includes high-profile interpretations and provocative speeches. Their respective works are remarkable, powerful signs that they are intent on speaking their minds on off-limits issues. They both show clearly that the stage may be viewed as an indirect critique of this period, from which valuable conclusions can be drawn. The Arab directors who dared to adapt Shakespeare, that iconic Western literary figure, are, he suggests, certainly endowed with a highly original sense of creativity and emancipation. Their respective works did not appear by chance; rather, they were the bubbling up of an open-minded, liberal undercurrent which is, in fact, increasingly evident in Arab societies, as witnessed in the recent democratic upsurge. Though Shakespeare may be regarded as moderate or prudent in politics, his different afterlives are far from being neutral. The playwright has been used in favour of different kinds of tyrannical governments but has also become the vehicle for criticizing them. This, as Noemí Vera and Francisco Fuentes argue, is the case of Severed Heads (1970), a joint Spanish-Brazilian adaptation of Shakespeare’s Macbeth. Directed by Brazilian Glauber Rocha, the film portrays the downfall of a despotic ruler who, in Rocha’s words, “might be the apocalyptic encounter of Perón and Franco amidst the ruins of Latin-American civilization”. The essay studies the reception and role of Shakespeare in a tyrannical context through the eyes of Glauber Rocha, a witness to the censorial character of Brazil’s military junta, who went into exile to Spain in 1970. It also aims to show how the filmmaker positioned himself against tyrannies, particularly the ruling mechanisms of dictatorship, appropriating Shakespeare to express his views concerning the political situation of both South America and Spain at the end of the 1960s. In this plea against dictatorships, Rocha resorts to metaphor and allegory, typical characteristics of the Cinema Nôvo movement, to which the director himself belonged. Severed Heads also echoes other Shakespearean plays such as Richard III or King Lear to reveal the possible consequences of tyrannical rule. The focus of Rocha’s Severed Heads is the main character’s fear that the people might want to avenge themselves on him, exploring his madness when he realizes that his power has deserted him.

16

Introduction

It remains for me as editor to thank all of the contributors to this volume, as well as everyone who took part in the originary “Shakespeare and Tyranny” symposium in Murcia and made it such an interesting and productive event. Amongst the latter I would especially like to thank my fellow-organizers, Ángel Luis Pujante, Laura Campillo and Juan Francisco Cerdá. A special debt of gratitude must go to Cambridge Scholars Publishing for their patience in overseeing this volume. There is also, for my part, an obligatory indebtedness to the Spanish Ministry of the Economy for sponsoring the project which has allowed me and the rest of the “Shakespeare in Spain” team to meet the people who have, in different ways, helped bring this book to fruition.

Works Cited Alker, Sharon & Holly Faith Nelson. 2007. “Macbeth, the Jacobean Scot, and the Politics of the Union”. Studies in English Literature 47: 379401. Aravindakshan, V. 1976. “Shakespeare’s Treatment of Tyranny”. Social Scientist 4: 38-44. Dollimore, Jonathan. 1985. “Introduction: Shakespeare, Cultural Materialism and the New Historicism”. In Political Shakespeare: New Essays in Cultural Materialism, eds. Jonathan Dollimore & Alan Sinfield, 2-17. Manchester & New York: Manchester University Press. Frow, John. 2002. “Literature as Regime (Meditations on an Emergence)”. In The Question of Literature: the Place of the Literary in Contemporary Theory, ed. Elizabeth Beaumont Bissell, 142-155. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Frye, Roland Mushat. 1998. “Hitler, Stalin, and Shakespeare’s Macbeth: Modern Totalitarianism and Ancient Tyranny”. Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 142: 81-109. Grady, Hugh & Terence Hawkes. 2009. “Introduction: Presenting Presentism”. In Presentist Shakespeares, eds. Hugh Grady & Terence Hawkes, 1-5. Abingdon & New York: Routledge. Hadfield, Andrew. 2004. Shakespeare and Renaissance Politics. London: Thomson Learning/Arden Shakespeare. Kinney, Arthur F. 1991. “Shakespeare's Macbeth and the Question of Nationalism”. In Literature and Nationalism, eds. Vincent Newey & Ann Thompson, 56-75. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press. Knights, L. C. 1979. “Shakespeare’s Politics: with Some Reflections on the Nature of Tradition”. In Hamlet and Other Shakespearean Essays, 150-171. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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Kott, Jan. 1983. Shakespeare Our Contemporary. London: Methuen. Leggatt, Alexander. 1988. Shakespeare’s Political Drama: the History Plays and the Roman Plays. London & New York: Routledge. McGrail, Mary Ann. 2002. Tyranny in Shakespeare. Lanham, MA: Lexington Books. Nuttal, A. D. 2007. Shakespeare the Thinker. New Haven & London: Yale University Press. Sinfield, Alan. 1986. “Macbeth: History, Ideology and Intellectuals. Critical Quarterly 28: 63-77. Williams, George Walton. 1982. “Macbeth: King James’s Play”. South Atlantic Review 47: 12-21.

CHAPTER ONE TYRANNY IN SHAKESPEARE’S ROMANCES WITH SPECIAL REFERENCE TO CORIOLANUS AND TIMON OF ATHENS MÁRIO VÍTOR BASTOS

Revenge tragedy was a highly popular dramatic genre in London during the Elizabethan and Jacobean periods: all sorts of theatregoers of the time were fascinated with forms of depicting absolute power and tyranny in action, and also with the individual and collective “mechanisms” leading to this type of political government. Yet, as to the taste for repressive and violent themes, theatre and cinemagoers of today have not changed.1 Even if we get more and more numb as to the pain of others as civilization moves forward (Sontag 2003), Coriolanus and Timon as characters are sufferers that deliberately ask from us a response, whether positive or negative, to their pains. Observing the pain of others is one of the oldest human pleasures linked to the origins of theatre, of tragedy and comedy, and that Shakespeare knew well how to codify. Pain in his writings is often the consequence of tyrannical psychological forces and passions, including political tyranny. In aristocratic ages, such as the Elizabethan and Jacobean, there were of course no perfect tyrants or good rulers, but the typical unbalanced mixture of both, incarnated in the figure of the monarch in power, a blending full of tragic possibilities. The word “politician” itself was, for Elizabethans and Jacobeans alike, a term sometimes rather offensive, often synonymous with “intriguer” and “false person”, and denoting, at its worst, directly the idea of “villain” and “tyrant”. The “politician” is a “crafty intriguer” as in King Lear (4.6.171), or a “scurvy” entity in 1 Henry 4 (1.3.241) and in The Tempest (3.2.32).

1

To theatre and cinema one could also add digital games, internet content and even sports.

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Chapter One

Unpopular and anti-popular social models and government practices and their agents gave birth to a highly popular dramatic and theatrical form that was to function, in certain historical periods and contexts, as an artistic counterpoint to the individual and social realities they mirrored and which inspired them. Revenge tragedy would not have been possible without long experience of public and private forms of despotism and the slow accompanying process of dramatic recreation and performance of myth, legend and historical narrative, offering a thoughtful and fictive illustration for events of both individual and social daily life. Shakespeare had only to take revenge tragedy to new levels of sophistication and universality, a task, however, which was far from being small and simple. The relation between tyranny and theatre is old and complex. It may help in explaining, during Shakespeare’s times, the deaths of fellow playwrights Christopher Marlowe and Thomas Kyd, amongst many other victims; and it may suggest later the sudden disappearance of the Bard from London and the uncanny fire which destroyed his theatre, the Globe (1613), when he was also working as a personal playwright for King James I in the last phase of his active life. It is also possible that tyranny has helped to nurture the mystery surrounding the man and the theories about Shakespeare as a pen name. Within this context, the making of an almost fictional character with a life, masks and different personalities may also have been influenced by the personal experience of despotic passions and political tyranny. Shakespeare’s times were dominated by the Elizabethan and Jacobean aristocracy, that is, by the heirs of the families of former warlords, knights and feudal lords, the noble stock that emerged during the Dark Ages to rule over Europe after the fall of the Roman Empire. This large time-span and its legendary and mythical historical characters form the imaginary time-space where most Shakespearean drama evolves and allegorize the present as lived under Tudors and Stuarts. Another historical time much favoured by Shakespeare was Antiquity, in particular famous episodes taken from the history of Rome and Greece. Not far from the examples taken from ancient history, the Elizabethan and Jacobean political and military nobles became dependent on large sums of money (or commodities), much of it lent by merchants and bankers, so as to keep and expand their power. It was a time in many aspects still “old”, “vertical” in its rigid hierarchic symbolism, albeit within a historical process of rapid social and cultural change, as may be noticed in such an unexpected play as The Merry Wives of Windsor (c.1601), a comedy that brings that major anti-tyrannical bourgeois character, Falstaff, back from the 15th century, though here in a somewhat cartoon version of himself.

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In the late medieval-Renaissance political framework, abstracted and depicted by Shakespeare, the tyrant (the bad ruler) and the king (the good, just, and rightful ruler, the one “anointed by God”) are logical antagonists, and the two compete for the leadership of the “body politic”.2 From Antiquity European political thought has stressed the traditional old idea that in government the king/ruler should have good and loyal counsellors, in order to avoid unruliness or tyranny.3 The Renaissance brought the rediscovery of Plato’s and Aristotle’s political ideas, which inspired new political texts throughout Western Europe: Thomas More (later a victim of political tyranny) had already written his Utopia in 1516,4 and Machiavelli’s The Prince appeared in 1532. The stories in verse of the various editions of The Mirror for Magistrates synthesize old and new English political thought after 1559, by making justice and ethics the touchstones for the “true” or most appropriate political practice,5 and providing Shakespeare or Marlowe with important historical models. With powerful and varied sources for political ideas and characters like these, the possibilities opened by Italian Renaissance drama and literature and the rediscovery of the classics, Shakespeare re-invented the politics of his time, as well as of former times, in order to “perfect” his own version of the stage as a “political mirror”, where his contemporaries could view and reflect on their thinking and behaviour, and to pass it on to future generations. In Shakespeare’s “world stage” are depicted some of the most atrocious acts, perpetrated by dramatis personae under the effects of different psychological forms of tyrannical thought and behaviour, generally associated with processes of power concentration, obsessive instincts and “blind, irrational ideas”.6 In Shakespeare “tyranny” is always social (political, economic, cultural) and natural (biological and psychological), and the two usually go together. We find “emotional tyranny”, the tyranny of the passions, in the 2

It is worth recalling that the word tyrant comes from the ancient Greek Turanos, which can be translated both in a positive and in a negative sense, as either the just monarch or the despot. 3 Even in the small and remote kingdom of Portugal, King Edward (D. Duarte) (1391-1438) was aware of European political theory, as revealed by the items of his personal library and the small treatise he wrote on the matter, O Leal Conselheiro, “The Loyal Counsellor” (after 1422). 4 Utopia was published for the first time in 1516 in Latin. The English version was only published in 1551. 5 The number of works and authors was of course much vaster. For a brief catalogue of them see McGrail (2002, 1-17). 6 Friedrich Nietzsche understood the “will for power” (Der Wille zur Macht) as a basic human feature, part of his animal apparatus.

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Chapter One

personal sphere of his major characters. In his later Jacobean romances, such as Pericles (1608-10), the protagonist is victimized and persecuted by an incestuous sadistic tyrant; in Coriolanus family relations are mixed with the struggle for power between the protagonist and Volumnia, son and mother, or in Cymbeline (1608-10) between the protagonist and Imogen, father and daughter. In a more subtle way, this “emotional tyranny” also occurs between Prospero and Miranda, in The Tempest (1811) between father and daughter. King Lear would not have ended up both a tyrant and a victim of tyranny without his own irrational, obsessive, foolish and disastrous acts. A king, powerful as he is, may turn into a fool and irrational tyrant (King Lear) and be dethroned, tragically losing his power to other tyrants. He may even turn himself into an austere tyrant in the wake of a long, paranoid, destructive crisis of jealousy, such as Leontes in the romance The Winter’s Tale. Leontes, who had been a former model of justice, love and friendship, develops into a depressive under the irrational effect of an emotional trauma, and therefore into a bad ruler. Not to mention the puritanical tyranny of Angelo over Vienna in Measure for Measure (1604-5). This sort of intrigue, usually taking the form of a family romance, is part of a narrative tradition, marked by sharp antagonisms which reappear, for example, in La Vida Es Sueño (1636) by Pedro Calderón de la Barca, in the tyrannical relation between father and son, and in direct opposition to what happens in Hamlet.7 Tyranny as an apparently irrational phenomenon (natural, individual or social) is opposed to rational authority (individual or collective), a tension stressed by Shakespeare at the end of many of his plays. Typically, the Shakespearean tyrant is a powerful but selfish being who aims at absolute power, at more power than he has or could have, at the expense of the majority. The most famous example is Richard III, who draws upon his great intellectual gifts to reach absolute power, which he nonetheless attains by means of extreme violence, cruelty and sadism, while pretending to be the epitome of (Machiavellian) virtù to the nobles and the people. A case study for neuroscientists, Richard III is a clever character who knows how to use his “reptilian” nature to achieve elaborate ends. This feature fits with the fact that this natural born “politician” is also a direct heir to the medieval character of the devil, the scourge of God (Flagellum Dei) and a cartoon version of the Aristotelian “political animal”, as Coriolanus also is to a certain extent. Against these negative aspects the only defence rests in the hope that rational authority (in this 7

For the interesting hypothesis of Calderón having known the writings of Shakespeare see Ciriaco Morón (1991, 17). The hypothesis is raised but not explored.

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case the longing for a new king) may turn into effective power, capable of erasing a tyrant who, like a gangster in a modern context, is a “professional” of evil, a personification of disruptive destructive forces. Generally, in Shakespeare’s plays the action and theme develop through the search for a solution to tyrannical and passionate conflicts that usually appear entangled. The idea and practice of tyranny accompany and trigger action and plot, and are responsible for all major Shakespearean dramas and characters, from Falstaff—the most famous parody of a tyrant and an example of “friendship”, “friendly love” and individual liberation, as opposed to the tyrant’s basic and blind instinctive longing for power— to Hamlet, perhaps the most famous victim of passionate tyranny, both political and psychological, inflicted on a character. King Lear or Macbeth are major victims (or slaves) of tyranny as “passion”, which “survives” beyond Shakespeare’s texts. And this is as true for the early ultra-violence of Titus Andronicus as it is for its presence in the coda-romance like Henry VIII (1613), with a tyrant oddly disguised and “embellished”, seemingly to “serve” the taste of a Stuart King, at least by not offending the memory of Elizabeth I in court. In fact, Henry VIII functions as a legitimizing glorification of the former Queen.8 The political Shakespearean hero is often divided in his choice (or deterministic attitude) between tyranny, slavery (political, economic, emotional, etc.) and proper government or social behaviour. Shakespeare also shows tyranny in action, including in his dramatic texts moments of meta-reflexion on the theme. Without his double-edged “tyranny”, Shakespeare’s dramatic universe would not be possible, or at least it would be much poorer. That is why it is impossible to circumscribe tyranny (political or emotional-instinctive) in Shakespeare to a certain set of plays, as it permeates as a driving force all his dramatic works, whether they be tragic, comic, or tragicomic. Each play of Shakespeare’s metamorphoses “tyranny” (in its broader sense, by what rhetoric calls catachresis) into living action. Yet, what he shows and tells in most of his political plays is far from being an apology or a defence of tyranny, sometimes anticipating modern ideas on current democratic practices.9 He, too, on another “front”, that of theatre and drama, was an unconscious liberator from the “enslaving 8 This situation, which is rather unusual in Shakespeare, strengthens the traditional theory that John Fletcher, the most famous of Shakespeare’s disciples, wrote half of Henry VIII. 9 Since Jefferson, the educators and political theorists of the young and democratic republic of the United States never forgot to recommend and quote the Bible in English, together with the works of Shakespeare (Frost and Sikkenga 2003, 17; 383; 482; 507).

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Chapter One

tyranny”, whether by catharsis or by cleverly overcoming the strict neoclassical Renaissance conventions. His creativity, invention and the freedom it emanates were advanced for the time, often disrupting convention and decorum and exposing him to the criticisms of one of his first great French interpreters, the neo-classicist Voltaire, ironically a reference-point for modern democratic and anti-tyrannical political thought, but who frequently took exception to Shakespeare’s dramatic style. “Egalitarian horizontal” democracy, as we know it today, had not yet been born, and a “natural” hierarchy prevailed in Elizabethan-Jacobean society. Nevertheless, the society of Shakespeare was also beginning to go “out of joint”, become broken up, but not yet eased or deluded by ideas of new political egalitarian social utopias. Gonzalo, the good-hearted and benevolent counsellor of Prospero, exposes in The Tempest his famous social utopia based on a return to origins, induced by the beauty of the island where he is kept prisoner, while being ridiculed and subverted by a tyrant, Alonso, and a tyrant-candidate, his brother Sebastian (The Tempest, 2.1.135-164). Alonso and Sebastian have their feet in crude reality and are incapable of daydreaming or thinking about such a serious issue as the government of the “body politic”, as Gonzalo does, when he explains his famous view of a “happy ideal primitive society” (The Tempest, 2.1.143162), that is a society without money, the utopian world where perhaps Timon would be happy. In fact, it seems to me that The Tempest would not be possible without the previous experiences of Coriolanus and Timon of Athens. Where is the modern individual, the citizen, in this context? Does he “exist” in this fictional universe, and is he depicted mirror-like by a “noble, aristocratic and high class” crammed with heroes and villains? Even if Shakespeare was a poet and a playwright, an artist of his time and not a politician (he had to be naturally cautious in his political views or lack of them), we can discern in all of his work, in particular in the plays, the political practice and theory of his (and our) time, as well as a criticism of them. It is remarkable how the Shakespearean textual dynamics is capable of depicting and also adapting its structures to different historical and social contexts, without excluding our volatile, ever-changing, political and cultural present. The politics of Shakespeare included in his texts are, from their very inception, in a process of reinvention for every historical age.10 Reading, listening to or seeing Shakespeare is a game 10

The system of the “Great Chain of Being” is important in clarifying aspects of the culture of the times, but Shakespeare’s literary and cultural universe is not final or closed, as suggested by that static medieval model and defended by much

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controlled by a continuous (and necessary) re-invention of his “original” texts through staging and dramaturgy, by reading theory and interpretation, by their dislocation into other arts, new texts, and afterlives. This process expands Shakespeare in time and space and necessarily uncovers new meanings in his writings. Within this ever-growing context his works dealing directly with tyranny and despotism go beyond the stage or reading room, and remain useful for understanding major flaws in modern democracy and the persistence of tyranny today, although Shakespeare’s political vision was forged at the dawn of the modern world, both in England and beyond. In present-day democratic countries and elsewhere Shakespeare has never ceased to be popular, in particular since his discovery by continental Europe in the 18th century. So it is natural that in the second half of the 20th century a closer analysis of the topic of tyranny in Shakespeare takes place from different political and psychological perspectives. Many of the poetic-dramatic political insights of his writings seem more alive than ever, and they make sense, not only in dramatic and theatrical terms, but also as a counter-text framing a general model for the analysis of political practices in the present. Tyranny is always symbiotically united to slavery, being both opposed to freedom (individual or collective) and alternatively strengthening and disrupting itself in relation to it. For example, Macbeth is both tyrant and slave. As a matter of fact, tyranny usually appears blended in varied proportions in different tyrannical or enslaved characters, acting under psycho-cultural determinants, operating at conscious and unconscious levels of the individual and social life. Tyranny implies the use of force, of power, of “surveillance and punishment” (to use Foucault’s phrase), tragic victimization (individual and collective), usurpation of power, unjust government and excessive coercion, so as to enslave the members of a “body politic”, by depriving them of their rights of citizenship. A tyrant needs necessarily to enslave the citizens. After the annihilation of the enemies, a strong symbiotic union needs to exist, or to be built up, between slave and tyrant/master, in order to empower the latter. Yet, there are men to whom “slavery” may be objective, although naturally the slave aims to be free and the freeman to avoid and reject any form of tyranny.

cultural historicism in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and summarized by Arthur O. Lovejoy in his book The Great Chain of Being: A Study of the History of an Idea (1936). Although helpful, these views provide no explanation of the dynamics that keep pushing Shakespeare into the present, unveiling new realities in the ever-changing conditions of man. See McGrail (2003, 3-4) on the static reading of Shakespeare’s world.

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Chapter One

The Tempest illustrates different symbiotic contexts of slavery and tyranny. The play begins with a chaotic scene where, for the sake of the life of all passengers on board the ship, the mob prevails. There are several tyrants and aspirants to tyranny and usurpation, including ironically the good (but grieved) Prospero who, nevertheless, has two slaves: Ariel (the good intellectual slave) and Caliban (the resentful native field/manual slave). Oddly, in The Tempest Ferdinand (a young nobleman) becomes, for a time, a working field slave (The Tempest, 3.1). After the experience of slavery he is ready to be the future king (hopefully not a tyrant) of Naples and Milan and to marry Prospero’s daughter, Miranda. The situation of young Ferdinand is highly ambiguous, for it is as much an act of revenge (perpetrated on an innocent) as it is a hard initiation ordeal—recalling the erratic fate of Pericles—that in the end will also contribute to “liberating” Miranda. When, for the first time, she sees a gathering of human beings, Miranda believes she is entering a “Brave New World” ruled by love and with no tyranny, without noticing that the opposite is true. Yet, like slavery, tyranny is and was a universal destructive practice. It seems nowadays possible to eradicate a significant part of the power of tyranny from society, from the self, but not from basic deterministic laws that govern life. And there are no “good tyrants”: Prospero is in that sense an oxymoron, a contradiction in terms, if not an aberration. I will focus now my attention on the presence of tyranny (political and psychological) in two of Shakespeare’s lesser-known Jacobean tragedies, where the conventions of the revenge tragedy are mixed with those of the narrative romance: Coriolanus (c. 1607) and Timon of Athens (c. 1608). Coriolanus (born Caius Martius) aims almost by instinct at absolute power, while Timon is confronted with a tyrannical and Dionysian passion for money that enslaves and entrances those who surround him (amongst them we find a poet, a painter, a philosopher, a merchant, a warrior, etc.). Caius Martius is a general, a military leader and a superior warrior living in the early days of the Roman Republic (c. 500 BC), and in the words of Harold Bloom, “the greatest killing machine in all of Shakespeare” (1999, 577), while Timon is, at first, a generous, well-intentioned yet philosophical wealthy man in ancient Athens, probably in the times of Alcibiades,11 who is also a character in the play. The action in Timon unfolds in the opposite direction to that of Coriolanus, although both protagonists come to a tragic end. Their social status makes them serious potential candidates to set up a tyranny, but they do not—for different 11

The historical time of the action of Timon is unclear but the references to Alcibiades suggest the times of Socrates and Plato, or those of the real historical Timon of Phlius (c.320-c.230 BC).

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reasons. Coriolanus is loyal to his principles, cold-hearted but passionate. Somewhat naïve in thought, and sometimes prone to ultra-violent passions—amongst them, revenge—he is extremely efficient as a general. Coriolanus is undermined by social prejudice, as a patrician, a member of the Roman upper class, a “clan” in rapid decline, which had lost its majority in the senate as a result of a severe social crisis. This early negotiation of power recalls an incipient democratic practice. In Rome there prevails the will of the occasionally demagogic representatives of the dispossessed plebeians, a political situation incapable of ending the prevailing famine.12 Caius Martius, the future Coriolanus, is initially described as the “enemy of people” (Coriolanus, 1.1.6). This social and political crisis in Coriolanus is summarized by an old parable: that of the revolt of the working members of the human body against the lazy belly and the catastrophe that such a riot would produce (1.1.50-162). But who is the voracious belly: Coriolanus or the people of Rome? And the working members of the body are represented by whom? Coriolanus could have been the tyrant Rome was waiting for, but the political protodemocratic forces favoured the will of the people. Coriolanus is sometimes reminiscent of the early Titus Andronicus, inasmuch as this play staged the chaotic end of the long political process, depicted in several other plays by Shakespeare and still resonating in Coriolanus. Both characters, Coriolanus and Andronicus, are powerful patriotic military leaders who fail in their political intents, one at the beginning of the Roman Republic (Coriolanus), the other at the fall of the Roman Empire (Titus Andronicus). Coriolanus even recalls a “primitive” Julius Caesar. Like Caesar, Coriolanus was not supported by the Senate, due to his openly tyrannical ambitions, and his murder is as horrendous as that of Caesar. Written at a time when Shakespeare was already performing for James I,13 Coriolanus is, according to Harold Bloom (1999, 577), the most political of his plays, and it may not have been staged during Shakespeare’s time (Brockbank 1976, 71-72) because of the violent and unsympathetic attitudes of the protagonist. It is, in that sense, more “literary” than the other plays of the Bard, a long poem to be read with a content to be meditated upon. Jan Kott called it a pseudo-“monodrama” 12

The association of James I with Coriolanus is a coherent one. As a matter of fact, James I was a dynastic saviour of England, but also an “enemy” at odds with the parliament where the “plebeian Protestants” were dominant. 13 Broadly speaking, Shakespeare seems to have written his last revenge tragedies and romances with James I in mind, a man whose personality was, in many respects, the opposite of Elizabeth I’s.

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(1974, 180).14 The reason for this reading is perhaps related to the predominant lack of intellectual depth in Coriolanus, who openly aspires to being a dictator for “genetic” and family reasons that made him an invincible warrior on the battlefield. Recalling the beginning of The Tempest, the action of Coriolanus starts in turmoil, with its depressed social and economic context of famine (we would say now, a severe and tragic financial crisis) affecting all the city, and which had brought with it the fall of the Roman monarchy (5th century BC) and the advent of the Republic. Like a demi-god, Coriolanus is a hyperbolic war hero, whose body has 27 serious wounds suffered in the battle against the Volscian city of Corioles, amongst many others received before: “[…] twenty-seven: every gash was an enemy’s grave” (2.1.154). From the decisive victory over Corioles Caius Martius derived his new name, Coriolanus. His possessive domineering mother is extremely proud of her son’s responsibility for this crucial military victory: the capacity of her “infant” to inflict pain on the enemies of Rome and their closest relatives is infinite. Unlike that of Caius Martius, her name seems to have been an incidental symbolic coinage by Shakespeare, for history remembers her as Veturia. Coriolanus’s mother, Volumnia, is fundamental in raising her son’s spirits (she herself is, as her name suggests, a human predator) and keeps him in the psychological state of a “man-child”: “[…] I sprang not more in joy at first hearing he was a man-child, than now in first seeing he had proved himself a man” (1.3.1618). The father figure is a striking absence within this context. She is the mother, the family, and the psychological maker of Coriolanus, as well as the main agent of a tragedy without a catastrophe (the destruction of Rome by Coriolanus): it is, in fact, Volumnia who saves Rome at the end of the play and emerges as the real Roman political heroine, by sacrificing her loyal son, the same human being who had been educated by her to be “what he is”. Before the sacrifice of his life, Coriolanus was the main keeper of Rome’s independence. However, inside his city Coriolanus is a radical patrician and a naïve conservative at a time of open social struggle,15 opposing the starving plebeians (the people) who, in the meantime, have won a majority in the Senate. Coriolanus does not have a clear political 14

A “pseudo-” one because “[n]o doubt the play has two protagonists: polis, a city state, and the hero both ‘high in the city’ and stateless” (Kott 1974, 181). 15 See the conflict between Catholics (the former ruling class) and Protestants (the new emerging ruling class) during the reigns of James I and Charles I. This allegorical association turns Coriolanus into a prophecy of the conflicts that will lead to the English Civil Wars of the 17th century.

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doctrine, except his hatred for the poor and his narcissistic militarism. He is violently set against the plebeians, whom he blindly despises without any regard for their circumstances, and finally against the Roman senate, the “voice” of the people. He is a Roman hero respected and feared outside Rome and ironically, at the same time, the main enemy of the people inside Rome, thus becoming, at once, a Roman tragic hero and anti-hero. The political circumstances of Coriolanus are complex and tragic: he is a declared enemy of the people, and behaves in a beastly way towards them. He does not want the people (those who starve, that have no means of subsistence and are left in ignorance) to become tribunes, or even worse, consuls, or even senators. He does not want them to have a better life because, in his view, they have no desire to suffer, as he suffers and wishes to go on suffering. Thus, the plebeians have to remain exploited, oppressed and excluded. According to the citizens of Rome, Coriolanus becomes a “disease” (as Oedipus was to Thebes), a “plague” that has to be “healed” so that the city may regain its prosperity. Coriolanus is perplexed by the famine of the Roman people but cannot help seeing them, the weak plebeians, as slaves and the main cause of their misfortunes. This hero cannot avoid his arrogance and sense of superiority to all his countrymen, as if he had been elected by the gods to bring a glorious future to his city. As he insists on imposing his “patrician” views of the senate, he is accused of treason, sentenced to death and forced to flee to exile. His violent rebellion is first against the senate, not against Rome; next, it develops into hatred against the people of Rome and their city; and finally it transforms itself into hatred of all Romans (without noticing that this move is self-destructive and may end in tragedy). To complicate the situation to the extreme, after the fall of Corioles the Romans have to wage a new war against the Volscians, an old Italic people known for their ferocious rivalry with the Romans, the builders of Corioles, who had been wiped out by Caius Martius. At the time of the action of Coriolanus, they posed a serious threat to the power of Rome. The Romans know that they can only be saved by their child-general, Coriolanus. In his desire for revenge, and suffering an intense and tyrannical negative passion, hatred, Coriolanus, with the support of his former enemies, the Volscians, almost destroys Rome. He is only stopped in extremis by an unexpected moment of compassion, induced by his mother who, in the company of his wife and son, pleads to him for mercy at the city gates,: “Come, let us go:/this fellow had a Volscian to his mother;/His wife is in Corioles, and his child/ Like him by chance” (5.3.177-180). These “magic” words are proffered by Volumnia to her son, for only her pathos (even if she was the first to educate Coriolanus to become a predatory warrior) is capable of moving

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the son’s feelings and emotions. This is the deus ex machina, the enchanting motherly love that saves Rome from destruction by Coriolanus’s might, by victimizing him at the hands the Volcians, who now consider him a traitor. Once conquered by motherly love, the “reptile” cannot attack again and becomes impotent. So is Coriolanus a hero or a villain? The answer to this question seems to depend exclusively on the point of view assumed by the reader or viewer. The tragedy of Coriolanus lies in his doubly contradictory nature: he loves his country/city but with a patrician/primitive “heart,” without ceasing to hate the plebeians/the people whom he sees not as the victims of social injustice, exploitation and ignorance, but as weak, inferior “slaves”, lacking in any sort of useful skill or in the noblest of arts, warfare. The contradictions between the internal and external politics of Rome make Coriolanus a Roman hero in the eyes of the enemies of Rome, and a potentially dangerous predator/tyrant in those of the Roman people. Here lies the fascination of this proto-Julius Caesar, who inspired Beethoven with the image of the Promethean hero during the Napoleonic Wars and who, in the 20th century, fascinated T.S. Eliot, who refers to a “broken Coriolanus” in The Waste Land (1922), having also written a “Coriolan” (1931, but left unfinished), a short condensed modernist rhapsodic variation on the Shakespearean original. Loved and hated since the times of Shakespeare, the play gave rise in the second half the 20th century to a famous version by Bertolt Brecht (1951) which depicts Caius Martius as a fascist leader, while Jan Kott (1964), writing in communist Poland, is bemused by the contradictions in Coriolanus, uncertain whether he is a “fascist” or a “communist” leader. These conflicting views perhaps led 20th-century criticism to consider Coriolanus, if not as one of the most modern, at least as one of the “strangest” of the Bard’s plays (Bloom 1999, 584). Tyrannicide is understood generally as an act of justice. In this light, the murder of Coriolanus and the death/suicide of Timon are controversial and tragic. These characters are in fact two distinct outcasts from societies dominated by the tyranny of the masses,16 by money, with the arts and letters subject to the whims of powerful patrons of dubious taste, where compliance (or not) with the rules may mean “success” or individual annihilation. On the other hand, why can’t the mighty Coriolanus break 16

I use here the expression “tyranny of the masses” in a sense close to that of Ortega y Gasset: the tyranny of mediocre, easy values conveyed voluntarily (or not) by the masses in the 20th century and after, and not as synonymous with the “tyranny of the starving people”.

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away from the affective power exerted on him by his predatory mother, Volumnia? And why can’t Timon overcome the grief induced by treason, ingratitude and become once more a loving person if, at the beginning of the play, he was the most generous, gentle, kind, and humane of all Shakespeare’s characters? Timon of Athens is a play which reflects our tyrannical present. Timon is in fact a cynic or skeptical philosopher disguised as a rich merchant.17 But he also hates the power of money and all the parasitical clientele gathering around it, the greedy, unscrupulous members of the upper classes, some of them asking for pecuniary favours that will only enrich and empower them further. The Western world of today seems perfectly mirrored here, if we except Timon, for he is a utopian idealist who sees his deep love for mankind turn into hatred, leading him to lose all of his considerable fortune and to become an outcast (he could have been a tyrant, at least an economic one).18 Timon of Athens reminds us that money has roots in greed and selfishness, and that tyranny can also be economic, or politico-economic. Far from being a ruffian like Coriolanus, Timon is a cultivated man of his time, a protector of poetry, the arts and the general commonwealth, who is led to conclude that humanity and money is one and the same thing. After spending his fortune and power on feeding the rich and the opportunists, Timon is forced into utter poverty, with no one to help him. What we don’t expect is the violent anti-human pessimism which invades him and leads him to suicide, as if life were not worth living under these cultural and economic circumstances. The economy, justice, tyranny/good government, human nature and human values are all at odds here. ToTimon, love or caritas do not exist amongst human beings, and eros is undermined by economic power, except in the form of prostitution, literal or metaphorical; poetry and the arts are mere ornaments that only serve to flatter the powerful and the rich. Indeed, when Timon in his distress and shortage of money asks for their help, not one of his former beneficiaries will help him. As a reaction to this double and contradictory aspect of human nature (always ready to receive what is materially good and always suspicious about caring about those who ask for help, even if they are friends), Timon voluntarily becomes a poor outcast from society, though never losing his “Midas touch”, “a greatness thrust upon” him and a predestined curse that never deserts him. Thus, when he decides to live in a cave, recalling his prototype Diogenes, the 17

Perhaps Timon of Phlius, the Greek skeptic philosopher, a pupil of Pyrrho. Timon is an outcast, whose ordeals could be compared to those of some biblical characters. Yet, the Bible is the book symptomatically absent from both Timon of Athens and Coriolanus, even though Shakespeare is a master of the anachronism. 18

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cynic (who, according to tradition, lived in a barrel), or a primitive man, gold coins keep appearing in his way: “Gold? Yellow, glittering, precious gold? No Gods […]//Thus much of it will make/Black white, foul fair, wrong right,/Base noble, old young, coward valiant” (4.3.28-30). More than of the fate of Timon, the situation reminds us that there is no such thing as a “pure primitive mankind” and that, as a species, man is a transformed gregarious animal, subject to social and economic rules, to benefit and grow with them, but also to suffer from their flaws, physically and psychologically. Timon is the anti-Shylock but also an anti-Merchant of Venice (Antonio), and even precedes “unknowingly” the milder misanthrope of Molière. He abandons the company of humans, lives alone, but soon finds that human beings are everywhere (looking for money), and this reopens his deep hatred for his species, which he by now considers, Schopenhauer-like, inferior to others. His primitivism and hatred for all mankind will lead him to his tragic death/suicide, so that the social and civilizational orders can be re-established in Athens, for by this time the anti-social and anti-human hatred of Timon has also made him an enemy of the people. If in Coriolanus the theme is mainly politico-military, in Timon of Athens it is mainly politico-economic. Unlike Coriolanus, Timon is a clever man (Coriolanus is more physical/animal, with the odd moment of wit), a philosopher and psychologist of his times who, at the beginning of the play, seems to believe in the power of generous acts in the brotherhood of man, but who happens to be wealthy. Timon soon falls from this state of innocence into disgrace, when he starts understanding the depths of human nature, and how close it is to natural bestiality or, even worse, when dominated by predatory, exploitive instincts, it is transformed into a tool to amass social power and not to enhance its own humanity. Reminiscent of Diogenes, his prototype, and Molière’s Misanthrope, his comic successor, Timon gradually loses his deep love for mankind and civilization, acquiring in return an unbreakable and tragic hatred (his tragic mistake) and ending up by destroying himself. Ironically, a captain named Alcibiades, a former friend of Timon’s—perhaps inspired by the Athenian general and disciple of Socrates, and one of the main characters in Plato’s text on the nature of love, The Symposium—will be the character who, by the end of the action, will vow to respect Timon’s memory. The deaths of Coriolanus and Timon are perpetrated not for the sake of maintaining the political and behavioural status quo, but for the opposite reason. Different as they are from one another, Coriolanus and Timon are victims of the strong tyranny of sadomasochistic impulses, leading them to impotence, self-destruction and death, as they do not—cannot, or will not—comply

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with the right social behaviour. Coriolanus and Timon, in their different ways and psychological types (the “man-child” and the “emancipated man destroyed by irrationality, that is, by hatred for mankind”), cannot bear different forms of ingratitude. And this contributes to their major mistakes, but also to their strength as fictional/dramatic creations. Like Coriolanus, Timon of Athens has, until recently, been excluded by most Shakespearean scholars and directors from their personal canons, owing to the fact that the protagonist usually loses the audience’s sympathy during the course of action. But why should the audience stand “against” the behaviour of Coriolanus and Timon? On the other hand, why should one of the most generous characters of Shakespeare become one of the least loved by the public? Perhaps because Timon ends as a cynical misanthrope, a new Diogenes “searching for an honest man”, moved only by his deep hatred for all mankind, with no comic or ironic relief to help him or us in his failed “regression” into the state of a wild, aggressive primitive caveman, into a pre-social and economic threat to a society based on money and its wonders. Timon is an emancipated tragic hero, the victim of a deliberate psychosocial regression. Like the biblical Jonah, Timon seems constantly subjected to uncanny tests, for the more he runs away from money/gold, the more of it he finds in his way. But like Coriolanus, Timon succeeds in projecting himself into the future, from Molière’s Le Misanthrope (1666) to the satires of Jonathan Swift and the Rêveries du Promeneur Solitaire (1792) by Jean-Jacques Rousseau, a text whose author, in his resentment for mankind, ironically states that it requires no kind of reader. Timon of Athens is, perhaps, as “notorious” as Coriolanus, for it is the only Shakespearean text that deals extensively with the problem of tyranny through money/economics, excepting perhaps The Merchant of Venice which does something similar, but from a different point of view. Like Coriolanus, Timon of Athens received remarkable critical attention in the 19th century, from Hazlitt and Swinburne to Karl Marx, who much admired the play, and in the 20th century, from the works it inspired by the vorticist painter Wyndham Lewis (who often played the modernist artist’s role of society’s enemy) to the great Shakespearean scholar G. Wilson Knight who, in his influential The Wheel of Fire (1930), interpreted Timon as a synthesis of all the major tragic Shakespearean heroes. From the First World War on, Ezra Pound became tragically involved with economics, interpreting usury as the origin of all human evils. However, in 1972, a year before his death, Pound seemed “closer” to Timon when he confessed: “re: USURY: I was out of focus, taking a symptom for a cause/ the cause is AVARICE” (1973, 6).

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Features of Coriolanus and Timon converge, for example, in Prospero. Prospero has an inability to deal with “real politics” that sends him, against his will and ironically, into exile—where he again (another irony) becomes a tyrant with slaves, without being aware of the fact. But what is a “tyrant” today? Does this concept make any sense? Is Kant’s notion of the “enlightened aristocratic ruler” as a sort of “good tyrant” guaranteeing a free society close to Shakespeare’s “good” kings? Kant and the fathers of political democratic thinking and practice in the 18th century were still a long way from Shakespeare. The Bard’s life and work are still a long way from any notion of modern democracy, yet the American influence and modern media have helped adapt his use of “tyranny” to our own “horizontal”, democratic, market-oriented, chaotic times. “Alive” with its archetypes of action/plot and a strong thematics, Shakespeare is, fortunately for us, always work in “progress”. So it is natural to conclude that Shakespeare’s handling of tyranny is not a thing of the past, and that his notions of “good government” are as important today as they were in the past. Problematic and antipathetic as their protagonists may be, Coriolanus and Timon of Athens are outstanding texts: Coriolanus shows us how difficult it is at any historical juncture to escape the cultural values acquired in one’s family, if these do not conform to those of the majority, regardless of their being constructive or destructive forces; Timon of Athens shows us how difficult or impossible it is to become a generous rational human being once hatred, one of the most tyrannical passions, becomes the centre of one’s mental life. Standing, again ironically, at opposite ends of the political spectrum, the art and the lessons conveyed by Coriolanus and Timon of Athens remain more alive than ever.

Works Cited Bloom, Harold. 1999. Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human. London: Fourth Estate. Boas, Frederick S. 1933. An Introduction to Tudor Drama. Oxford: Claredon Press. Brockbank, Philip (ed.). 1976. Coriolanus. The Arden Shakespeare. London: Methuen. Dawson, Anthony B. & Gretchen E. Minton (eds.). 2008. Timon of Athens. The Arden Shakespeare. London: Bloomsbury. Eliot, T. S. 1963. Collected Poems 1909-1962. London: Faber & Faber. Foucault, Michael. 1973. Surveiller et Punir. Paris: Gallimard. Fromm, Eric. 1974. The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness. New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston.

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Frost, Bryan-Paul & Jeffrey Sikkenga (eds.). 2003. History of American Political Thought. Lanham: Lexington Books. Greenblatt, Stephen et al. (eds). 2008. The Norton Shakespeare. New York: W. W. Norton & Co. Holland, Peter (ed.). 2013. Coriolanus. The Arden Shakespeare. London: Bloomsbury. Kott, Jan. 1974. Shakespeare our Contemporary, trans. Bleslaw Taborsky. New York: Norton and Norton. Knight, G. Wilson. 2001. The Wheel of Fire. London: Routledge. MacDonald, Russ (ed.). 2004. Shakespeare. An Anthology of Criticism and Theory 1945-2000. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing. McGrail, Mary Ann. 2001. Tyranny in Shakespeare. Lenham: Lexington Books. Morón, Ciriaco (ed.). 1991. Pedro Calderón de la Barca, La Vida Es Sueño (1636). Madrid: Catedra. Onions, C.T. 1986. A Shakespeare Glossary. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Pound, Ezra. 1973. Selected Prose 1909-1965, ed. William Cookson. London: Faber & Faber. Sontag, Susan. 2003. Regarding the Pain of Others. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux.

CHAPTER TWO CYMBELINE AND THE DISPLAY OF EMPIRE HYWEL DIX

Republican Culture in the Seventeenth Century Although this paper is entitled “Cymbeline and the Display of Empire” it is really about almost the opposite of that. It concerns the wider conflict in British culture in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries between imperialism and republican culture that Cymbeline instantiates, but that the play does not and cannot fully resolve. Indeed, the paper will tentatively suggest by way of a conclusion that that conflict is not and cannot be fully resolved even today. According to several important studies, ideas and debates about republicanism in Britain were relatively common during the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. This was partly due to the Elizabethan rediscovery of Greek and Roman classics, and was partly reflected in many of the creative or imaginative texts in the period. Susan Bassnett’s book Translation Studies, for example, explores how the practice of translation helped late medieval societies across Europe develop a new form of cultural nationalism based on the spread of vernacular languages. She suggests that the first major translators of Europe were the Roman translators of Greek classics into Latin. She also points out, though, that Horace and Cicero were translating for members of an educated patrician readership who could themselves read and appreciate the original Greek manuscripts—so that the point of translation of Greek into Latin was to compare the literary style of the two languages. This was a translation practice far removed from how we understand translation today. Bassnett defines the Roman practice of translation as “enrichment”, building ideas or values from a text in one language into the culture, values and language of another (Bassnett 1991, 44). In a different context, translation as cultural enrichment is also how Bassnett defines the process of translation that gathered momentum across

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Europe in the late middle ages. “As emerging literatures with little or no written tradition of their own to draw upon developed across Europe, works produced in other cultural contexts were translated, adapted and absorbed on a vast scale [...] as a means of increasing the status of their own vernacular. The Roman model of enrichment through translation developed in a new form” (Bassnett 1991, 52). Classic Elizabethan translators such as Arthur Golding and George Chapman brought the texts of the classical world into Elizabethan England. The practice of those translators was perhaps freer than the practice of literary translation today, in the sense that Golding and Chapman ranged quite widely, took liberties with the texts they were translating and were quite happy to insert detail or new material into the text, unrestrained by the parameters of the original. In doing so, they were transplanting the spirit of the literary works from the classical world into contemporary England, enriching and developing the prestige of the national culture and the national vernacular through the practice of artistic imitation. Bassnett cites F.O. Matthiesson in suggesting that a “study of Elizabethan translations is a study of the means by which the Renaissance came to England” (1991, 42). The cultural works of ancient Greece and ancient Rome arose out of the experiments in democracy that had been carried out in the Athenian polis and the Roman republic. By the time those works appeared in the English language they were involved in the process of translation as adding or supplementing what had come before. In other words, the texts of the classical republics arrived in Britain during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries with a specifically English flavour. A recent study by Andrew Hadfield has demonstrated how important ideas of republicanism are to our understanding of Shakespeare’s plays. Hadfield argues that Shakespeare cultivated an interest in ideas of the republic that were becomingly increasingly common during the late sixteenth century. He identifies five common elements of recurring interest in the different forms taken by republican culture in late sixteenth-century England. These can be described briefly as a moral and intellectual resistance to tyranny; a related humanist commitment to the provision of education; a stress on the need for civic virtue within the highest levels of government; an interest in the histories of classical republics, especially in the work of Livy; and a mobilisation of the language of natural rights. The commitment to civic virtue and the pursuit of intellectual freedom implicitly led to the suggestion “that hereditary monarchy was not the ideal form of government because one could not guarantee that the best would inherit the throne” (Hadfield 2005, 52-53). Hadfield analyzes in

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detail Shakespeare’s Rape of Lucrece, emphasizing that the story was also the founding myth of the ancient republic and that the early Shakespeare therefore reveals himself to be interested in the establishment of a republic, which he then proceeds to portray in crisis in Titus Andronicus and Julius Caesar. Closer to home, Hadfield analyzes Shakespeare’s first tetralogy of history plays, identifying as a recurring theme “the failure of those who are supposed to govern” and the crisis that this creates within the political state (112). Alan Sinfield has separately pointed out that a play like Macbeth portrays a crisis in Scottish succession precisely because succession in medieval Scotland was not heriditary, it was negotiable, based on an admittedly loosely defined concept of election (1992, 102). Franco Moretti takes a step beyond this. Moretti’s Signs Taken for Wonders analyzes the violent world of political drama in the seventeenth century, especially the work of Middleton, Webster and Tourner. He concludes that the process of rehearsing the execution of the king on stage made it possible for the people of England to execute the king off stage. “Tragedy disentitled the absolute monarch to all ethical and rational legitimation. Having deconsecrated the king, tragedy made it possible to decapitate him” (Moretti 1997, 42). An important text to appear in English for the first time prior to England’s republican experiment was of course the Bible. Bassnett suggests that the making avaible of the Bible in English was an absolutely critical step in the development of the protestant reformation in England. She also suggests that the use of the vernacular for the texts of worship and communion was important not only for the development of the reformation as such, but also, by expanding potential participation in public ritual, was more democratic. Translating the Bible into English, Bassnett argues, was implicitly a step towards the establishment of a legalistic state based on civic duties and responsibilities. In a period when the divine law provided an assumed structure of common belief, and when the earthly equivalent of God’s word, that is, canon law, exerted strong legal authority, heresy was potentially punishable by death. If the individual subject was purportedly “responsible to God and God’s law,” Bassnett suggests, it was only reasonable that “each man should be granted access to that crucial text in a language he could understand, i.e. in the vernacular” (1991, 46). Translation becomes a legalistic principle that transcends its practical application: if everyone is required to participate in communion, and to profess belief in the scriptures, then it is morally desirable and legally necessary to allow them access to the text itself in a language that can be

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commonly understood. Translation makes both communion and obedience to canon law more participatory and is therefore at least potentially a practice capable of transforming social relationships. For the same reason it was outlawed by church authorities: William Tyndale was burned at the stake in 1536. Translation was perceived to be transgressive and its material context was overtly politicized. For this reason, Bassnett goes as far as to declare that “[t]he (often anonymous) translator of the Bible in the sixteenth century was a radical leader in the struggle to further man’s spiritual progress” (50). Or again “[a]t times the figure of the translator appears almost as a revolutionary activist rather than the servant of an original author or text” (58). The practice of translation presented an opportunity to combine written culture with radical political action. This combination of cultural with political action became more prevalent as the sixteenth century gave way to the seventeenth, and “the effects of the Counter-Reformation, the conflict between absolute monarchy and the developing Parliamentary system, and the widening of the gap between traditional Christian Humanism and science [...] all led to radical changes in the theory of literature” (Bassnett 1991, 58). Bassnett emphasizes the material conditions and social relationships in which translation was produced and which were in turn partly produced by the new practice of translation. Cymbeline stands in the midst of these developments because as we have seen, translation was the primary means by which republican ideas entered England. In contrast, the interrelationship between culture and politics was to gather momentum throughout the political crises of the 1630s and 1640s, leading to a flattening out and cancelling of the conflicts that were still active at the time of the play. In a study entitled Writing the English Republic, David Norbrook situates a number of key imaginative works of the mid and late seventeenth century within the context of the political crisis. Norbrook uses the term speech acts to characterize the relationship between literary creation and social and political context, a relationship which he considers to be one of conscious intervention in the public sphere. Republican speech acts, as Norbrook defines them, are the moments at which literary figures of a republican persuasion use their imaginative or creative work to provide thematic commentary and hence intervention in the political crises that followed the English Civil War. The years of Commonwealth and the years of restoration were both characterized by violent struggle accompanied by ideological conflict, and the speech acts of the republican writers provide moments of intersection between written culture and material political practice.

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Norbrook suggests, for example, that John Milton’s Areopagitica (1644) is not the timeless defence of free speech and intellectual liberty that it is sometimes taken to be. Rather, it “assimilates Christian prophecy to classical rhetoric in a spirit of intellectual tolerance” (1999, 131). Ostensibly about the classical judicial body of Ancient Athens and the place where that body met, Areopagitica’s defence of free thought and humanist learning was also able to speak directly to its contemporary readers about one of their own contemporary institutions: Oxford University. Oxford was a seat of humanist learning on the one hand, but was also the seat of the royalist court during the English Civil War on the other, so that the speech act of the poem, its carefully planned publication, served as an intervention in the ideological conflict of the Civil War. As Norbrook points out, “the Areopagus might have been a conservative institution, but it was firmly associated with republican forms of government” (131). In other words, Milton’s praise of Athens was “calculated to split royalist support, suggesting that humanists who went over to the royal party had betrayed the deeper spirit of their own learning which could only be fulfilled by returning to London” (132). Publication is a calculated action, designed to have a particular effect. This calculation is the political context behind the poem; the speech act operating as a political intervention capable of combining literary or imaginative work with political practice. With the death of Oliver Cromwell and the slide of the Commonwealth into feuding factions, Milton’s sense of political crisis appears to have deepened. Another example Norbrook provides of a republican speech act is Milton’s Sonnet to Vane, a prominent republican executed following the restoration after being deemed to have endangered the fragile peace. The poem is not just a conventional lyrical elegy. Its content is inseparable from the political moment at which it appeared and from the act of publication itself, an act of deep political protest that Norbrook describes as “strongly oppositional” (1999, 435). The strongest example Norbrook provides of a republican speech act is the publication in 1667 of Paradise Lost. Norbrook points out that a common assumption amongst literary scholars is that the epic poem had been completed some time prior to its publication, over which Milton is assumed to have had little or no control. Norbrook, by contrast, suggests that Milton retained a strong controlling influence not just over the text, but also over the material circumstances of its publication, so that the act of publishing became another public political speech act. Following the restoration of the monarchy, Norbrook argues, Milton made “every effort to intervene in the now diminished public sphere as far as he possibly

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could”, and “brought out at least one work in verse or prose each year, as if testifying to his refusal to remain silent” (434-35). Norbrook reads Paradise Lost as the recreation of a Biblical narrative with a protestant sensibility and a republican politics. His emphasis on the speech act of publication, that is, its status as a political intervention, has a double focus. A form of literary history, relating the material conditions of publication to contemporary political processes is reinforced by an application of literary exegesis, interpreting the narrative of the poem in a radical political way. Publication of the text in 1667 was far from a chronological accident. It provided an opportunity to relate a rebellious metaphysical concept of society at the level of content to the presumed dangers and weaknesses of a tyrannical monarchical system at the level of context: Milton seems to have delayed publication until a moment when he would be least threatened by censorship, at a time when the government was in disarray after the Great Plague, the Great Fire, and a mismanaged war with the Dutch which contrasted strikingly with the republic’s successes. (435)

In other words, the speech act of the poem’s publication was carefully timed to coincide with a political moment that would resonate most deeply with the poem’s content. Norbrook interprets that content as taking the form of an extended dialogue on concepts of tyranny and freedom, or monarchy and republic. He suggests that “[t]he extreme oscillations in the Satan episodes between republican and monarchical discourse form a meditation on Milton’s difficulties in responding to the Protectorate” (454). Or as Victoria Kahn puts it, in Milton’s allegory of Sin and Death, kingship is seen as a “deadly, allegorical projection and alienation of the subject’s true freedom” (cited in Norbrook 1999, 460). Norbrook goes a step beyond this, suggesting that the fallen angels in Paradise Lost speak the language of public interest, therefore creating within the poem characters that exist as vehicles for political speech acts which parallel the speech acts that exist outside the text, in the society. Contemporary readers “are thus prepared for the [...] powerful defences of liberty in Satan’s war of words before the war in heaven” (455).

Cymbeline and Speech Act Norbrook’s concept of the republican speech act is a useful tool for analyzing Shakespeare’s Cymbeline partly because it draws attention to the political and cultural conflicts that characterized Britain’s public sphere in the first half of the seventeenth century and partly because the

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concept of the speech act suggests a pivot or point of intersection between the world of the fictional text and the world of the audience or reader. The play concludes with the flags of ancient Britain and ancient Rome displayed in union in order to cement the fragile peace between the two kingdoms that the action of the play has ratified, so that the values and successes of one empire are compared favourably with the symbolism and establishment of another, later empire—during the period in which the latter, that is the British Empire, is being created. Much has been written about Cymbeline and the one thing that most critical writers seem to agree on is that it is a very strange play indeed. Locations change rapidly, but characters are confined to particular locations, and facts are revealed only at the moment at which they are relevant in a way that seems arbitrary or, as it were, magical. The play is episodic in nature and lacking in strict causality, at least at the level of character and plot development. At the level of dramaturgy, however, things are quite different. The final tableau of flags cultivating an implicit association between one empire and another feels contrived and unnatural, yet it is also the frieze towards which the whole of the action is consciously driving, for what connects the Iachimo-Imogen plot with the Belarius-Cymbeline plot is Lucius, the figure of the go-between between Britain and Rome. In keeping with Shakespeare’s other late plays, especially The Tempest, the play is stagey and self-consciously theatrical, so that the effect of performing this final demonstration of power and nationhood is precisely to imagine a new and nascent identity for its British subjects. The Britishness of British subjecthood is in sharp distinction to the more atomized national identities of England, Scotland and Wales that were more prominent both in a slightly earlier historical period and in Shakespeare’s own earlier drama, while the subjective element of that same subjecthood exists in carefully poised contradistinction to the British citizenship that might have existed had the republican conflicts that existed in Britain during the period in which the play was written won out. As Lucius warns Cymbeline, “the event/is yet to name the winner” (3.5.14). In other words, the final tableau of imperial identity enacted at the play’s conclusion is the end point of a whole series of machinations throughout the play which operate to subsume differential identities such as those of Scotland and Wales with regard to the new pan-British imagination on the one hand, and which also subsume an unfulfilled republican agenda on the other. This enactment is achieved through the text’s emphasis on its own selfconscious theatricality. Time and again throughout Cymbeline characters draw attention to the roles that they are playing. I am thinking for example

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of the terms on which Posthumus allows himself to enter into the wager that Iachimo will not be able to seduce his wife, Imogen. Posthumus is goaded by Iachimo’s boasting words “I am the master of my speeches, and would undergo what’s spoken, I swear” (1.4.135) to demonstrate that he too can match his words—and those of his mistress—with actions. There is considerable irony in this, for at the dramaturgical level, Iachimo’s claim to be master of his own words cannot fail to reveal for the audience the extent to which this is not true. For any actor playing such a melodramatic part, the obvious truth on which the text insists is that none of his words are in fact his own. They belong to the dramatist. Another example of the play’s self-conscious theatricality is the scene in which Iachimo brings his wager to fulfilment by devious means. Imogen goes to bed with the oddly stilted and slightly unnatural prayer, “To your protection I commend me gods./From fairies and tempters of the night/Guard me” (2.2.8). The purpose of these lines is far from an attempt at theatrical naturalism. On the contrary, it is to draw attention to the melodramatic nature of the drama. Quick as a flash, as soon as Imogen has uttered these words and lain down to sleep, a tempter of the night appears from inside Iachimo’s trunk. Consistent with a play that so insistently emphasizes its own performative nature, the play invokes a whole series of metaphors of putting on clothes that draw attention to the theatricality of the performance. “A garment out of fashion [...]/I must be ripped. To pieces with me!” (3.4.49), exclaims Imogen on learning that Posthumus believes her to be unfaithful. This gives way to Cloten’s donning of Posthumus’s clothes—“how fit his garments serve me” (4.1.1)—in order to try and win the lady himself. This in turn gives way to Imogen’s horror on finding Cloten’s body dressed like her husband and therefore in effect playing the role of Posthumus. All this suggests that the play is not just about actors playing a role, but actors playing the roles of people playing roles. In turn, it invites the audience to consider what their own relationship to the drama is. If the cast perform the roles of people performing roles, then the audience are positioned by the text as that group of people performing the role of an audience for the figures enacted before them. In other words, the audience is not defined simply as the viewing public in a rather passive sense. Rather, the viewing public exists in the other sense of the word audience: the sense in which one might have an audience with the queen. That is to say, the company performs into existence a newly emergent pan-British identity based on a monarchic state, and the audience is imagined into the position of a private audience for the monarch of that newly imagined state. “Britain [...], you are gods” (5.2.10), exclaims Iachimo, captured

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while fighting for the invading Romans, and addressing his words not only to the other characters, but consciously to this active and deliberately activated audience. “Britain [...], I’ll give no wound to thee” (5.1.21), swears Posthumus, again addressing not just the other characters and indeed not just the audience in the theatre, but addressing directly this newly imagined and newly unified nation. To gain a sense of how the text of Cymbeline breaks down the boundary between the world of the action and the world of the audience, it is interesting to compare Henry V written around 1599. If one thing was clear about the British Union at the end of the sixteenth century it was that the union was new and fragile, having been created by Henry VIII’s Act of Union between England and Wales of 1536, and subsequently bolstered by the accession of James VI of Scotland to the English throne. In Henry V Shakespeare provides a fantasy version of an easy coalition of Scots, Welsh, Irish and English warriors rallying around the common cause, at a time of writing when that commonality itself was far from clear. Despite the symbolic unity portrayed by that play, the characters remain distinctly Scots, Welsh, Irish and English. They have not yet been subsumed. Not so Cymbeline, a decade later. As the text proclaims, the people of Britain are now “more order’d” (2.4.21) than they had been, and out of that order arises another attempt at symbolic unity. The 1536 Act of Union had all but caused Wales to disappear, defining it as simply an extension of England, so that from a legal perspective it ceased to exist. This legal conjuring trick is ratified in Cymbeline through Belarius’s account of the back history of the missing royal princes, Guiderius and Arviragus. Guiderius, for example, has been stolen from his royal household and brought up under the name of “Polydore/The heir of Cymbeline and Britain” who “puts himself in posture/That acts my words” (3.3.87). By putting off one name and putting on another, and again by invoking the metaphor of an actor playing the part of someone playing a part, the text presents a princely figure who is son not simply of the King of England, but the King of Britain. The same is true of Arviragus, who under Belarius’s upbringing as Cadwal “in as like a figure/Strikes life into my speech, and shows much more/His own conceiving” (3.3.95). Again, by discarding his English name and embracing a British identity through the conscious and theatrical performance of that role, Arviragus is portrayed as a prince of Britain, not simply of England. The Act of Union had caused Wales to disappear and this is the same conjuring trick that Cymbeline performs. Unlike Henry V, where the Scottish, Irish and Welsh elements of Henry’s army and kingdom remained distinct, here they have disappeared altogether: all are

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Britons. By presenting its dramatis personae not as people but as characters consciously performing roles in a play, the text communicates with its audience in a very particular way. In effect, it offers to perform the new British empire into existence, with the audience in the conscious role of subjects of that empire. If the empire is imagined into being by subsuming counternationalisms in Scotland and Wales in the interest of a symbolic unity, then such a process of subsuming also necessarily incorporates the subsuming of republican cultural politics into the wider imaginative conceptualization of that empire. Cymbeline rejects the demands of the consul Lucius for payment of a tribute to Rome on the grounds that “Britain is/A world by itself” (3.1.12), whose people, the Britons, “strut with courage” (3.1.33). This is accompanied by his Queen’s narrative of how Julius Caesar had failed to conquer Britain in the first place, his ships—“poor ignorant baubles”—breaking up on “our terrible seas” (3.3.27). For an audience in 1611, this image of the invading fleet being destroyed off the coast of Britain may well have conjured up memories of the Spanish Armada of 1588, giving the newly imagined British state an instant myth of origin in which to take pride and hence fulfil the symbolic unity suggested by the drama. Moreover, the reference to Julius Caesar is instructive, for that play— and indeed that history—is constructed precisely out of the conflict between republican ideals and their travesty during a period of nascent imperialism. That conflict is the edifice on which the whole of Cymbeline is founded. Belarius has wandered in exile in Wales for years, banished by the court because he was believed to have been “confederate with the Romans” (3.3.68). Confederate implies a confederation of differing interests acting mutually in some kind of orchestrated coalition, and this is in strong contrast to the absolutism of Cymbeline. In other words, Belarius has been banished because he was believed to pose a threat not only to the emerging British state, but also and specifically to the emerging British monarchy. There is considerable irony in how the play presents its republican undertone. Within the logic of the drama, republicanism has to be heard in order to be silenced. As the Julius Caesar reference shows, Roman ideals of republicanism are invoked in order to strengthen Britain’s rejection of both Rome and republicanism. “We were free” (3.1.47), claims Cloten, before the Roman tribute was ever demanded. Implicitly, it is in the name of a republican democratic agenda that the tribute is rejected, and yet at another level it is in the name of the symbolic unity of Cymbeline’s panBritish sensibility that Belarius’s supposed republican confederacy is also

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rejected. Republicanism, like the different national identities of Scotland and Wales, provides the raw material that is subsumed into the larger logic of the play and of the world to which the play relates. This leaves the oppositional republican sentiment of the text with nowhere to go: “The law protects not us” (4.2.124), affirms Guiderius on slaying the Queen’s son Cloten, then why “for we do fear the law?” It is a question with no answer. Republican questions have to be heard in order to be silenced, subsumed within the wider performance of a newly unified monarchic state.

Reading, Writing and Republicanism A performance of Cymbeline is tantamount to a speech act of the kind theorized by David Norbrook. The play drives towards a conclusion in which imperial identity and British subjecthood are displayed in tableau, in contrast to the opposing currents of counter-nationalisms around the British isles on the one hand, and in contrast also to Britain’s brief encounter with republican culture on the other. Partly because of the attempt to impose unity over and beyond a heap of disparate and fragmentary tendencies, the play creates a feeling of strangeness, disjointedness, even of schizophrenia. Yet despite the attempt to impose symbolic unity on the play through subsuming these different oppositional faultlines, neither the counternationalisms nor the encounter with republicanism will entirely go away, because they belong to a longer continuous perspective on the evolution of particular forms of republican thought in Britain. Perhaps because republicanism is a long way from dominant cultural or political practices in Britain’s present, critical scholarship on the subject of republicanism in Britain has focused strongly on a revolutionary moment in the past. Theoretical analysis of British republicanism strongly emphasizes the years of Commonwealth and Protectorate between 1649 and 1660. The late medieval and early Renaissance periods are mined as evidence for the genesis of the development and import of republican cultural politics into Britain, as if these periods represent the pre-history to the republican moment in Britain. The strong attention received by the period of the English Commonwealth has given rise to a relative paucity of theoretical analysis of subsequent republican history. It is as though the medieval and Renaissance genealogy of English republicanism is a pre without a post; a prelude to a fuller historical period that never fully materialized. Indeed, the detailed analysis that the period of Commonwealth has attracted is limited in scope to the mid-seventeenth century, as if a

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whole pre-history of republican culture simply ended up with nowhere to go and vanished after 1660. The argument of this paper, however, is that Cymbeline can be read as part of a much larger, longer-term and more complex evolution of different kinds of discourse about republicanism in Britain. One of the reasons for the oddly incoherent, quasi-schizophrenic nature of the play is that it embodies simultaneously each of these different and competing strands of discourse which are made by the writing of the play to co-exist with each other. These co-existing strands of republican discursive practice then unravelled following the political and civil upheavals of the 1640s and 1650s, and the failure of England’s experiment with republicanism in 1660. After this moment, rather than being able to co-exist with different discourses about monarchy and political union, republican cultural practice continued to exist amongst English public intellectuals only in latent and indirect ways, partly determined by the failure of the English Commonwealth itself. The failure of England to become a republic and the travesty of republican ideals has left a wound so deeply scarred on Britain’s collective unconscious that for the subsequent 350 years, public intellectuals have been unable or unwilling to identify themselves as republicans. This scarring has had the result that movements for political reform have been weakened or compromised. Historically, there have been two kinds of reponse to the inability of British writers to write about republicanism from a theoretical perspective. One is to deflect overseas, and write about republicanism in another context. The other is to channel republican-type feelings into a series of under-stated single-issue political campaigns domestically. These responses are interesting, because they can be mapped onto a corresponding set of categories to describe different types of textual practice. A radical like Thomas Paine, for example, instantiates the first response to the challenge. Paine shows how one response to the experience of Britain’s failed republicanism was to deflect overseas, writing in and from other republics. With regard to the British mainland, a telescopic kind of republicanism can only be accessed as a reading practice, illicitly importing works into the country. The ostensible occasion for Thomas Paine’s Rights of Man (1791) was the French Revolution and the conflict in ideological values that accompanied it. Unlike Milton’s public speech acts, Thomas Paine declares at the start of The Rights of Man that his practice is one of textual analysis: republicanism has become a reading strategy. Paine had read Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France and his references to Britain’s Society for Constitutional Information, where Burke argued that

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by the time of the eighteenth century, the English people did not need a revolution because they had already voluntarily submitted themselves to the rule of William and Mary and their heirs and offspring in perpetuity, in the form of the “Glorious” Revolution of 1688. Pace Burke, Paine set out to show what was intellectually and morally rebarbative in Burke’s assertion of the eternal right of monarchy. He demonstrates the illogical and absurd nature of a people in 1688 submitting the people of the future to the rule of the crown on their behalf—because the people of the future have no voice in this submission: “The parliament of 1688 might as well have passed an act to have authorized themselves to live for ever, as to make their authority live for ever [...], they are a formality of words, of as much import, as if those who used them had addressed a congratulation to themselves, and, in the oriental style of antiquity, had said, O Parliament, live for ever!” (Paine 1969, 66-67). It is important to note the relatively accessible nature of Paine’s language and phraseology at the opening of The Rights of Man. He feels like a very modern writer in the sense that he employs a vernacular tone. Later, when he talks about the cruel system of taxes which require the poor to pay for the rich, he says that this is how governments “fleece their countries” (98). The commitment to everyday language is an important element of his democratic agenda. He also goes on to commend the “manly” language in which members of the French National assembly debate political matters. They are frank, truthful and plain. They do not try to hide behind metaphor or obfuscation. “They have not to hold out a language which they do not themselves believe in, for fraudulent purposes” (114). In Paine’s work, an argument for democracy at the level of content is replicated by an accessible written style at the level of form. Where Burke uses elaborate vocabulary and circular argument to present his ideas as common sense, Paine uses vernacular language to create a fundamental dichotomy between power and principles. He then uses this dichotomy to create a broader theoretical perspective on revolution in the name of principle, as opposed to government in the name of abstract, inhuman power. Paine’s critique of Burke, that is to say, anticipates the Foucauldian critique of power structures to a surprising degree. Paine is interested in discursive practice and how such practice is necessarily involved in power relationships and conflict. Paine’s reading of Burke is inextricable from his reading of the French Revolution as a whole. His commitment to revolutionary republican ideas is bound up with his reading strategy and to a lesser extent with his own written practice.

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Paine’s discussion of rights and of the social compact gives rise to his discussion of the French constitution and the convention (or committee) which created it. By implication, this leads Paine to suggest that England needs a constitution: “The continual use of the word Constitution in the English Parliament, shows there is none” (153). Moreover, Paine’s theoretical insight into the obfuscation of constitutional matters in Britain is related to his critical reading and textual analysis of Burke. The republican Paine, having served revolutionary governments in both France and the USA, can see no legalistic guarantee of rights or of participation in civil society without the production of a specific written constitution that will provide such a guarantee. His critique of Burke takes the form of a public gesture different in kind from Milton’s republican speech acts. Having been in effect exiled from England where the government was, to put it mildly, unsympathetic to his democratic agenda, he is obliged to practice a kind of telescopic republicanism, focusing on theoretical matters from afar. His English republicanism is a reading strategy, providing detailed critical engagement with the ideas of Burke and therefore presenting a different reading of monarchical and republican perspectives. His reading practice leads him to the rhetorical gesture of imagining himself attempting to read the English constitution, only to discover that it does not exist. There are two important conclusions to The Rights of Man that underline the relationship that exists between Paine’s reading strategy and his republican practice. He concludes with the assertion that republicanism is the most potentially democratic and hence most radically desirable form of government ever to have been conceived. If all nations were republics, he suggests, they would be able to establish a Congress of Nations. Such a body would convene in the form of a committee or conference, at which representative members of republican governments in different capital cities could discuss matters of common interest or concern. Paine advocates a Congress of Nations in the specific context of the Napoleonic War, and affirms that such a body would reduce the necessity for wars by making sure that the ordinary people—who are most effected by war— have the opportunity to express their views on matters of conflict through their chosen representatives and hence to act as arbiters on disagreements in a directly civic structure. A congress of different republics would be inherently dialogic not only because it would require each state to select its representatives in a democratic manner, but also because it would promote dialogic relationships within and across nation-states. The dialogic nature of democratic forms also relates directly to Paine’s textual practice. He employs an accessible, common language in the

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service of an accessible, common cause. Implicitly, his democratic ideas have been in part derived from his dialogic encounter with the work of other political radicals in the USA, and especially in France. Dialogue is a democratic form, accessed through a critical reading practice that brings Paine into a dialogic relationship with other radical writers and thinkers. The conclusion of The Rights of Man thus affirms that specific writers have played a crucial part in fomenting democratic ideas in France: Montesquieu, Voltaire, Rousseau, Quesnay, Turgot, Sieyès (115). Paine has entered into a dialogic relationship with these writers through a reading practice which is at least potentially transformative. This is the relationship he hopes that his English readers will enter into with him. With regard to England, his republicanism has become a reading strategy practised from afar, because political circumstances in England have obliged him to deflect his political practice overseas.

Republicanism Sublimated: William Cobbett Reading Shakespeare’s Cymbeline as a political speech act in Norbrook’s sense entails situating the play in the context of a much longer-term historical discourse about republican practice in Britain. The first performances of the play can be read retrospectively as interventions in a political and historical moment at which both the political union of Britain and its monarchic state apparatus were actively in question. Milton’s Paradise Lost can be said to have responded to a changing political context three generations later, in which the failure of the English republic in effect foreclosed on those questions. The British discourse on republicanism, if it was to survive at all, then had to be transmuted into different forms, so that another century later, Paine’s response to the failure of the republic was to deflect his republicanism overseas, engaging in a cultural practice that can be described as a kind of reading strategy, distanced from overt political practice in Britain at the time. William Cobbett employed a different response to the historical challenge. Cobbett’s textual practice involved not so much deflecting overseas (although he physically did travel in both revolutionary France and America) as sublimating a rounded republican politics into a series of individual single-issue campaigns. His Rural Rides, written throughout the 1810s and 1820s, are a series of travelogues of short journeys around England. In them, he discusses an agricultural economy in crisis and a countryside in distress due to a slump in the price of corn, wheat and other produce following the Napoleonic War. In turn, according to Cobbett, one reason for Britain’s involvement in the Napoleonic War in the first place

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was to prevent the spread of revolutionary ideas from France to Britain: “What they wanted was to prevent the landing, not of Frenchmen, but of French principles; that is to say, to prevent the example of the French from being alluring to the people of England” (Cobbett 1957, 242-43). As with Norbrook’s description of republican speech acts, the form of Cobbett’s writing replicates the content of what is written. He writes about the need for the reform of civic institutions and he does so in the language and form of civic relationships. Publicly, Cobbett was no republican. Indeed, in Rural Rides he states categorically that he is “not against the monarchy” (159). Then again, Cobbett had already been imprisoned for two years in 1810 for the historically obsolete charge of seditious libel, after printing in his Political Register a series of articles defending some Ely soldiers who were alleged to have mutinied. Having already been in prison for sedition, it appears that he had to disguise a radical agenda within a written package that was, at least overtly, more moderate. Paine had used reading and writing as joint practices for the furtherance of his republican ideas, but at the cost of having to separate both from his political practice overseas. Cobbett applies the inverse practice: trying to maintain a political practice, which in the face of political oppression of all kinds requires him to carry out a self-censorship of his written work. Are these tantamount to republican ideas without the name? Trying to identify a solution to the rural crisis in Rural Rides, Cobbett asks rhetorically, “Would a dissolution of Parliament mend the matter? No— for the same men would be there still” (141). He advocates deep and lasting structural change, and this can be seen as hinting at and approaching by indirect means a published advocacy of increased democratic participation. This advocacy is in tension with the need to carry out a measure of self-censorship arising out of the fact that he has already been imprisoned for sedition and has to be careful not to declare himself openly against the monarchy. The effect created is as though Cobbett has been forced to divide himself from his ideas in order that both he and his ideas can survive. This division appears to be part of the longer heritage of the English experiment with republicanism, an experience of civil war and a whole society divided against itself—which is what Shakespeare had portrayed in Cymbeline, writing at a moment when monarchy and political union were both in active question, and what had become merely latent over the course of the intervening centuries. Cobbett’s tactic is to use subtle and indirect means of attacking the political system—including the monarchy. He implicitly advocates democratic structures and does so in common, that is democratic and accessible, language. The implied advocacy of a new system is unlike the

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dramatic public gesture of a republican speech act. It is also unlike the discursive strategy of Paine, seeking to smuggle radical ideas into England by writing about those radical figures whose work he has recently read. Where Paine’s republicanism speaks to the contemporary situation in England through recourse to a reading practice, Cobbett’s republicanism is far more about writing and selecting written techniques and strategies that will keep his ideas alive while keeping him out of trouble. One of the oblique ways in which Cobbett criticizes monarchy without endangering his own liberty is through recourse to an oppositional rewriting of history, with Henry VIII and Elizabeth I as targets. These are normally thought of as national heroes, even founders. Cobbett by contrast portrays them as cruel tyrants (237). Not only does this perhaps re-open a sense of the republican conflict that Shakespeare had portrayed in order to cancel in Cymbeline, but it may also imply that subsequent monarchs are also tyrants. In other words, Cobbett sublimates republicanism through implied advocacy rather than explicit speech act (as in Milton) or reading practice (as in Paine). Unlike Paine, Cobbett apprehends and expresses his feelings on political matters by writing about a series of single-issue campaigns, rather than a larger orientation towards republicanism as such. But the single issues he identifies—land enclosure, taxation, overproduction, the Corn Laws, poor agricultural practice—can all be traced back to the evils and unfairness of an undemocratic society. Prohibited at great personal risk from making this connection explicit, Cobbett falls back on the technique of indirect, even literary allusion. He includes in his Rural Rides a verse by Byron—“[C]orn, like ev’ry mortal thing, must fall/Kings, conquerors and markets most of all” (120). He has learned from his reading of Paine and Byron that the different matters on which he campaigns are causally related to the very thing he cannot name: the monarchy. Rural Rides, like The Rights of Man, can be seen as an exercise in reading and writing about republicanism. Paine was compelled by historical circumstance to deflect his writing onto a consideration of republicanism in other countries. Cobbett was compelled by personal circumstance to divide himself from his work and so sublimate his feelings into a series of loosely connected single-issue political campaigns. Throughout the subsequent two centuries, for the British writer with an interest in republican ideas, these two tactics have remained the only available outlets. Where British intellectuals have written about republicanism at all, they have tended to do so in the context of republican movements in other countries: eighteenth-century France and the USA, Mexico at the start of

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the twentieth century, Spain in the 1930s. Domestically, public intellectuals whose interests might elsewhere be described as revolutionary have had to sublimate republican-type feelings into single-issue campaigns: Chartism and Parliamentary Reform in the 1830s; the “condition of England” and industrial welfare reform in the 1870s; class warfare and labour relations in the 1920s; right down to the Charter 88 movement prior to the 1987 general election and the Movement for a More Democratic Britain today. In other words, an interest in the things that interest radical republican intellectuals has not disappeared from Britain’s public sphere. The historical experience of republicanism in crisis has had an impact on the collective unconscious of the public sphere and has helped to determine what cultural forms those interests which would have been labelled republican prior to 1660 have been channelled into. That is to say, republican practice throughout that period has existed primarily in the form of a series of exercises in reading and writing. This helps to explain why a radical like Admiral Cochrane left the British Navy to participate in the Chilean struggle for independence in 1818 and allowed his son to write up a detailed account of that practice. It is one reason why Graham Greene’s interest in revolutionary anti-Catholicism took him to Mexico; why George Orwell and Laurie Lee’s narratives of the conflict for republicanism could only be based on the Spanish Civil War and why one of the most significant British writers on the question of republicanism today is the Welsh-born Prime Minister of Australia: Julia Gillard. These discussions of republicanism have dropped out of mainstream political and cultural discourse in Britain, but they have not entirely disappeared. As Imogen exclaims in Cymbeline, “To write and read/Be henceforth treacherous” (4.2.317). For British writers interested in republicanism in the early twenty-first century, it is the kind of treachery that has yet to come to fruition.

Works Cited Bassnett, Susan. 1991. Translation Studies. London: Routledge. Cobbett, William. 1957. Rural Rides: Volume One. London: Everyman. Hadfield, Andrew. 2005. Shakespeare and Republicanism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Moretti, Franco. 1997. Signs Taken for Wonder: on the Sociology of Literary Forms. London: Verso. Norbrook, David. 1999. Writing the English Republic. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Paine, Thomas. 1969. The Rights of Man. Harmondsworth: Penguin.

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Shakespeare, William. 1951. The Complete Works of William Shakespeare, ed. Peter Alexander. London: Collins. Sinfield, Alan. 1992. Faultlines: Cultural Materialism and the Politics of Dissident Reading. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

CHAPTER THREE WHEN THE TYRANT IS A DESPOT: JEAN-FRANÇOIS DUCIS’S ADAPTATIONS OF SHAKESPEARE1 KEITH GREGOR

Defining the Tyrant In Book III of The Social Contract Jean-Jacques Rousseau gives examples of the abuse of different kinds of non-contractarian government and the consequential slide towards “anarchy”. In the case of royalty, the end result is the rise of the “tyrant”, defined by Rousseau, drawing on what he claims to be the “exact” Greek sense of the term,2 as “an individual who arrogates to himself the royal authority without having a right to it”. So like the “despot”, who seizes and assumes the sovereign power, the tyrant is always already a “usurper” (for Rousseau, echoing

1 The research for this chapter was funded by FFI-2011-24160 “La presencia de Shakespeare en España en el marco de su recepción europea”. I am grateful to the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness for its support. 2 For the “exact” sense of the term Rousseau draws on classical authority, namely Cornelius Nepos’s Life of Miltiades and the view that “all are thought and called tyrants who exercise perpetual power in a city accustomed to freedom”. To the Aristotelian idea, expressed in the Nicomachean Ethics, that a tyrant governs for his own advantage, whereas a king governs only for the good of his subjects, Rousseau objects that to follow this criterion would lead to the conclusion that “there had never yet been a single king since the beginning of the world” (1968, 134, note). Confusingly, the inexact or “vulgar” notion of the tyrant as “a king who governs violently and without regard to justice and the law” (133) is nonetheless, as David Lay Williams notes (2005, 449), frequently on Rousseau’s mind in this and other political tracts.

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Locke,3 the terms are “perfectly synonymous”) who lacks legitimacy. Unlike the despot, however, the tyrant does not then “set himself above the laws”, but acts “in accordance with” them. He may have no natural right to the throne, will certainly not have been elected to sit upon it, but once in power, he will govern in much the same law-abiding manner as his more “legitimate” counterparts. Whence Rousseau’s paradoxical-seeming conclusion: “Thus the tyrant need not be a despot, but a despot is always a tyrant” (1968, 133-34). Outlawed in its own day and subsequently vilified as offering more or less a handbook for the aspiring tyrant, The Social Contract would acquire a special relevance at the turn of the 18th century with the irresistible rise to power (and ignominious fall from grace) of Napoleon Bonaparte. Hailed by some 19th-century radicals as a model for the “countermonarch”, whose rise to power was seen as a salutary antidote to hereditary conceptions of monarchical “legitimacy” (Semmel 2000, 145-47), Napoleon also stood as an example of the Nietzschean Übermensch, whose “artistic” obsession with his own personal growth and elevation resulted in his trampling over the rights of his subjects. It was the conservative English poet Coleridge who, in an 1810 entry in his Notebook, would deplore the triumph of such “selfish Cunning, oath-trampling Usurpation, remorseless Tyranny, and thirst of War and Rapine unquenchable”, all hallmarks of the despot (cited in Calleo 1960, 89), though Napoleon was not without influential critics in his own homeland. As early as 1795 the Marquis de Condorcet was already diagnosing what he presented as the perpetuation of tyranny as one unpopular regime is ousted by another, especially when the military is involved: A mutiny of the guards, an insurrection in the capital, may be fatal to the despot, without crushing despotism. The general of an army, by destroying a family rendered sacred by prejudice, may establish a new dynasty, but it is only to exercise a similar tyranny. (1795, 53)

In the cultural sphere one of Napoleon’s most outspoken critics in his own country was the playwright Jean-François Ducis. Chiefly remembered, if not quite celebrated, as the first writer to adapt the work of Shakespeare to a non-English stage, Ducis’s dramatic output will be treated here as a test-case of how deeply the Revolution and its aftermath impacted on the theatre in France and elsewhere. What I am particularly interested in 3

Compare John Locke: “As usurpation is the exercise of power, which another hath a right to; so tyranny is the exercise of power beyond right, which no body can have a right to” (1722, 214; Locke’s emphasis).

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showing is how a self-declared republican like Ducis, who had met Napoleon personally and indeed benefited from that acquaintance, could be moved to salute the 1814 Restoration as a return to constitutional order.4 In order to show this, I will be plumbing the Shakespearean adaptations for evidence of Ducis’s political transformation.5 This may seem unfashionable, for whereas the bulk of Ducis criticism produced so far has (understandably) focused on the relation of the plays to their English originals, the theatrical-aesthetic conditions in which they were written and received, the nature of the multiple revisions to which they were subject and/or their afterlife in nations affected more or less directly by France’s political and cultural hegemony, very little work has been devoted to explaining the choice of tyranny as the plays’ organizing axis. Still less work has been done on the changing political visions enacted in the tragedies and their different revisions or on how contemporary ideas on tyranny may have subtly informed them. To address these issues and their impact on the theatre in “satellite” nations like Spain is the aim of the present chapter. The relationship of the drama, especially tragedy, to power is written into the basic tenets of Enlightenment philosophy. Thus the entry on “Tragédie” in the Encyclopédie declares: The action [of tragedy] is heroic either for itself or for the character of those who perform it. It is heroic for itself when it has a great object, such as the gaining of a throne or the punishing of a tyrant. It is heroic for the character of those who perform it when those who perform it are kings and princes, or against whom it is performed. When it is undertaken by a king, it is elevated and ennobled by the person performing it. When it is against

4

Ducis’s republicanism was admittedly peculiar, occasioning no apparent conflict with his self-perceived condition as “catholique, poëte…et solitaire”, and as he is only too pleased to announce, involving no participation, active or otherwise, in “le théâtre de la politique” (Ducis 1879, 140, 145; see also the letter dated August 1802, where his dedication to the “république des lettres” rather than to the “République française” is, he claims, now total [157]). His salutation to the restored Bourbon (“Vous venez à nous, Sire, avec le pacte social à la main” [Ducis 1879, 362]) is palpably Rousseauesque. 5 It will be clear from what follows that I am using the term “adaptation” in the sense advanced by Linda Hutcheon (2006) as a creative “transposition” of another’s work which includes the possibility of an “appropriation” for more or less overt political ends.

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In the hands of neo-classicist authors like Voltaire, the very form of neoclassical tragedy, with its strict regulation of time, place and action, its heroical language and reduction of the chaos of existence to the strictest criteria of decency and probability, was itself a kind of political intervention, taming and (that key word) “civilizing” even the most unruly temperaments. Voltaire’s discovery of Shakespeare and the English dramatists is presented by Ducis himself as the clearest example of such a civilizing process. “M. de Voltaire was,” he would declare in his address to the Académie on succeeding to Voltaire’s chair, a kind of legislator who, having voyaged for a time in a country amongst whose people he had found some strong, if half-barbarous, morals, great crimes and great virtues, prodigies like the excess of courage in the midst of anarchy, on his return to the land of his birth, and desirous to provide a new set of laws to a civilized people, though possibly enervated by politeness itself, had searched his genius for a form of legislation that might reconcile the highest degree of force with submission to the law, and that, developing the full energy of character, might leave all of its advantages whilst removing its excesses.

“This,” he adds, “is the problem, which is so hard to resolve in politics, that M. de Voltaire sought to resolve in the art of tragedy” (1819, xxiv).7 6

“L’action [de la tragédie] est héroïque ou par elle-même, ou par le caractère de ceux qui la font. Elle est héroïque para elle-même, quand elle a un grand objet, comme l’acquisition d’un trône, la punition d’un tyran. Elle est héroïque para le caractère de ceux qui la font, quand ce sont des rois, des princes qui agissent, ou contre qui on agit. Quand l’entreprise est d’un roi, elle s’élève, s’anoblit par a personne qui agit. Quand elle est contre un roi, elle s’anoblit par la grandeur de celui qu’on ataque.” (All translations in this chapter are my own.) 7 “M. de Voltaire fit comme un législateur qui, après avoir voyage quelque temps chez un people où il aurait trouvé des moeurs fortes, mais à demi barbares, de grands crimes et de de grandes vertus, et les prodigies comme les excès de courage au milieu de l’anarchie, de retour dans le pays de sa naissance, et voulant donner une législation nouvelle à un peuple civilicé, mais peut-être énervé par la politesse même, aurait cherché dans son génie un plan de législation qui pût concilier le plus grand degree de force avec la soumission aux lois, et qui, développant toute l’énergie du caractère, lui laissât tous ses avantages en lui ôtant ses abus. C’est ce problem, si dificile à résoudre en politique, que M. de Volatire entreprit de résoudre dans l’art de la tragédie.”

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Ducis’s adaptations of Shakespeare, and especially of his play Hamlet, could, I believe, be regarded as a continuation of the process initiated by Voltaire and which the later playwright would direct at the peculiar circumstances of turn-of-the-century France.

Appropriating Hamlet In his Shakespeare Goes to Paris (2005) John Pemble has noted the relevance of Ducis’s reworkings of the Bard to contemporary French reality: Hamlet and Le Roi Léar are political plays of the ancien régime. They vindicate the claims of legitimacy by depicting the defeat of subversion by consecrated authority. […] Roméo et Juliette is saturated in sensibilité. It treats the conflict between parental authority and love in the manner of a drame bourgeoise. Macbeth began as a play of the ancien régime and acquired a revolutionary slant when it was revived in 1790. […] Othello absorbed the ideology of the Revolutionary years. The hero owes more to Rousseau than to Shakespeare. He is a noble savage in conflict with a corrupt aristocracy… (99)

This brief account of Ducis’s development as an adaptor of Shakespeare— the apparently unproblematic transition from a pre-Revolutionary vindication of the status quo to an identification with the aims and ideals of the founders of the First Republic, after a brief incursion into the sentimentalism beloved of middle-class audiences—neatly reflects the dominant view of an author prepared to sacrifice artistic integrity to the demands of political and social expediency, if necessary by revising previous versions of the text. That said, the story of an author continually struggling to catch the prevailing ideological winds of absolutist monarchism, bourgeois domesticity and, finally, radical republicanism flies in the face of strict chronological (as well as biographical) accuracy: Roméo et Juliette precedes both Le Roi Léar and the first version of Macbeth, while Othello is written after the unsuccessful Jean Sans-Terre, a sentimentalized adaptation of King John, not mentioned here. Moreover, the sentimentalism attributed solely to Roméo et Juliette is, arguably, equally present in Hamlet, which the author explains as the result of an attempt to “portray especially in Hamlet’s pure and melancholy soul a model of filial tenderness” (Ducis 1879, 14);8 in Le Roi Léar, which is pointedly dedicated to his mother, one 8

“…peindre surtout dans l’âme pure et mélancolique d’Hamlet un modèle de tendresse filiale.

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of the play’s first auditors, whose emotion on hearing the text read to her was shared by the assembled Ducis family;9 or in Othello, which for instance highlights the prescient character of the dying words of Hédelmone’s mother and heightens the emotion by adding a further eight stanzas to Shakespeare’s already chokingly sentimental willow song. Nor finally, and perhaps most importantly, is there any reference to the multiple revisions to which all of the plays were subjected, especially Hamlet, which exists in three published forms and seems to have undergone countless minor adjustments in the period between its first performance (1769) and the appearance of the “definitive” version in the 1813 edition of the Oeuvres. Many of those revisions were prompted by Ducis’s own hyper-sensitivity to the reactions of critics, spectators or actors like Talma to earlier versions, together with the appearance in 1776 of the first volumes of Pierre Letourneur’s Théâtre de Shakespeare, the first renderings in French of the “original” works. But not a few can, I believe, be read as responses to the other missing element from Pemple’s account: the rise of Napoleon Bonaparte. It was still as plain General Bonaparte that Napoleon, accompanied by Josephine, is known to have spent the eve of his departure for Egypt at the première of Ducis’s revised Macbeth.10 The great man’s reaction to the performance is not recorded, though Ducis’s anxiousness that he should be present, expressed in a letter to Talma earlier that month, is matched only by the pleasure he exudes in the response to a reading of his unpublished “Épître à [the poet Gabriel-Marie] Legouvé” at the French Institute the following December: But what really pleased me was, scarcely in my reading had I, after the name of Scipio, uttered that of Bonaparte, that I was suddenly interrupted by an outbreak of the heartiest applause. I cannot tell you the pleasure I

9

See the “Épitre Dédicatoire” to the play in Ducis (1819, 268). At the Théâtre Feydeau, Paris, on 22 April 1798 (Golder 1992, 218). There are at least nine distinct manuscript versions of Macbeth between mid-1782 (or even as early as 1778) and January 1784, the date of its first performance by the Comédie Française, with Larive in the starring role. Ducis revised the play again for its revival in June 1790, and this is the text which, with the author’s own variants (which affect above all scenes 4.1, 5.9, 5.10, 5.11 and 5.12) appears in the first edition to be published that same year by the Parisian publishing-house Gueffier. Following successive performances of the play in 1792, 1798 and 1804, with the fiercely republican Talma in the role of the Scottish tyrant, Ducis would continue to rework the text up to the publication of the so-called “definitive” version included in the Oeuvres of 1813. 10

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took in allowing out of my heart this spark of admiration for, and tender acknowledgement of, that great man.11 (Ducis 1879, 135)

The association of Napoleon with Scipio, the active counterpart of the stoic Cato, derives largely from what Nathaniel Wolloch describes as “the importance that resistance to tyranny had in the minds of most European literati” during the Enlightenment (2008, 77). Ducis’s republican audience clearly appreciated the comparison with the vanquisher of Hannibal, and there is nothing in Ducis’s response to their applause to suggest that, at this stage, his choice of classical paragon was intended as anything but earnest and laudatory. At the 1798 performance of Macbeth Napoleon would probably have been unaware of the careful removal from the text of terms too easily redolent of the ancien régime and the replacement of an overtly monarchical lexicon (“roi”, “prince”, “trône” and “sceptre”) with a terminology more in tune with the current climate. Thus, in the crucial fourth act Loclin, in the name of the “People” (absent from the 1790 edition), offers Macbeth as supreme commander not the crown, but another “symbol of power”: the “livre de la loi” (literally, the “book of law”) which “ensures the right it gives you to imperial rule” and should also “instruct you as to your sacred duties”.12 But rather than a code of moral duties for the prospective ruler, the sacred volume reinforces the Rousseau-inspired idea of subjection to the laws of state and to the popular will. As Loclin goes on to command: “Swear then before us on this daunting book/That your heart will only answer to the welfare of the State;/That you are nothing here but a first citizen/Who will do everything for the law, who is nothing without it” (1819, 151).13 If it is true that the ambitious Bonaparte already nourished the hope of becoming emperor, Loclin’s words in the revised version of the tragedy would be interpreted as a serious, if gentle, reminder of the importance of contractarian

11 “Mais ce qui m’a fait un grand plaisir, c’est qu’à peine dans ma lecture ai-je, après le nom de Scipion, prononcé celui de Bonaparte, j’ai été interrompu tout à coup par un applaudissement de la plus grande force. Je ne puis vous dire combien j’ai joui en laissant sortir de mon coeur cette étincelle de mon admiration et de tendre reconnaissance pour ce grand homme!” 12 “t’assure le droit qu’il te donne à l’empire”, “de tes devoirs sacrés [il doit aussi] t’instruire” 13 “Jure donc devant nous, sur ce livre terrible,/Qu’au seul bien de l’État ton coeur sera sensible;/Que tu n’es rien ici qu’un premier citoyen,/Qui peut tout pour la loi, qui sans la loi n’est rien”

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government and hence of the primacy of the people,14 amongst whom Napoleon/Macbeth was nothing but “first citizen”. By 1804, with Napoleon now crowned Emperor, Ducis’s respect for the “great man” had soured into a bitter repudiation of his betrayal of the republican cause. In a venomous satirical poem,15 the quintessentially patriotic republican Scipio (“Scipio serving his homeland,/Scipio, the terror of kings”) now stood in ironic antithesis to the “base tyrant” Napoleon had become. Where once he had stood out as a “young and moderate vanquisher,/Dear to the arts, beloved of the people”, Napoleon post-Egypt and especially post-coronation was now considered to have reverted to the repressive tactics of the despot, replacing moderation and accountability with “The shining steel of bayonets,/The hidden steel of courts,/The secret deportations,/The appalling chasm of dungeons”;16 whence the poem’s longing for the constitutional stability of monarchical England. The clearest theatrical evidence of Ducis’s political volte-face comes in the numerous revisions of the only other of his plays Napoleon attended, Hamlet.17 If the first published version of the play already differs slightly from the one premiered in September 1769,18 the text would 14 On the popular basis of Rousseau’s idea of the covenant, see Engel (2005, 52728). Several years later, the promulgation of a civil code (the so-called “Napoleonic code”) whose far-reaching statutes governing a wide range of social practices, from contracting a marriage to taking out a mortgage, partly satisfied the demands of the contractarians, ensuring that no one, not even the Emperor himself, could (again, theoretically) act in anything but “accordance” with what the law decreed. 15 The poem, first cited by François-Nicolas-Vincent Campenon in his Essais de mémoires ou Lettres sur la vie, le caractère et les écrits de J.-F. Ducis of 1824, is excerpted in Ducis (1879, lxviii-lxxii). 16 “Scipion servant sa patrie,/Scipion, la terreur des rois”, “vil tyran”, “vainqueur jeune et modéré,/Cher aux arts, du peuple adoré”, “Le fer brillant des baïonnettes,/Le fer caché des tribunaux,/Les déportations secrètes,/Le gouffre affreux des oubliettes”, “Ah! si vos rois, vos grands et vous,/Vous aviez, comme en Angleterre,/Limitant chacun dans sa sphère/Balancé trois pouvoirs jaloux/Par un contrepoids nécessaire!” 17 On 5 April 1803, a year before the coronation and now as First Consul, he once again accompanied Josephine to a benefit performance of Hamlet at the Théâtre de la Porte St-Martin. 18 Most of the changes affected Act 5, with the omission not just of Gertrude’s repeated confession but of Claudius’s suicide. Another novelty is Ophélie’s wrath towards Hamlet, who is now made responsible for Claudius’s death. Despite the pressures to introduce a “real” ghost on stage, Ducis seems to have remained true to his conviction that French audiences were still ill-prepared to countenance one.

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undergo still more changes as the author sought to adapt it to the new aesthetic and political climate. Most of Ducis’s doubts appear to have centered on the final act, though Acts 2 and 3 would also be subjected to multiple changes that were incorporated into the 1807 and 1809 editions of the play. The most important of these have to do with the manner in which the crime is detected and the culprits are punished.19 Thus, as a complement to the notorious “urn” test, in which Gertrude is forced to swear her innocence before her husband’s ashes, Ducis would work in a more obviously “Shakespearean” element: the parallelism between the deaths of the King of Denmark and of England, with Hamlet’s suggestion to Norceste that the latter mention the magnicide in the presence of the usurpers.20 As for Act 5, which Ducis rewrote on innumerable occasions between 1803 and 1807 and continued to rewrite till as late as 1813, the author’s general purpose seems to have been to dispense with part of the 1770 material, such as Claudius’s stabbing of Gertrude and Ophélie’s reencounter with her father, to offer a somewhat more positive, if daunting, vision of Hamlet’s immediate future, as well as that of the country he is left to govern. To that end, Ducis would base much of the “definitive” fifth act on the former Act 4, which had been much applauded in the theatre and had been extended in 1807 to include the reappearance of the revenge-seeking spectre, adding a further 36 lines in which Claudius is slain by Hamlet, Gertrude commits suicide and Hamlet ends the play with a blessing. Determining factors in these and other revisions were largely, as stated above, theatrical praxis and especially the comments of certain actors, most important amongst whom was new star, the staunch republican François-Joseph Talma, whose fruitful partnership with Ducis would last until the latter’s death. Talma it was who almost certainly encouraged Ducis to add the “Shakespearean” elements of the announcement of the English regicide and, of course, an equivalent of Hamlet’s “To be or not to be” soliloquy, for which there were previous models for the nonEven before making these changes, Ducis seems to have cut Gertrude’s confession to her confidante Elvire in Act 2, as well as Hamlet’s raised dagger in Act 4 (Golder 1992, 48). 19 See Downes (1936, 206). 20 Given that this addition, together with that of a soliloquy by Norceste explaining the reasons for his return to Denmark, implied unreasonably expanding Act 2, the act is divided into two in the 1807 edition, which also includes a new Act 3 with a version of Shakespeare’s “To be, or not to be” and a further scene refreshing our memory of the Claudius-Polonius plot. Both scenes would be part of Act 4 in the 1809 edition.

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Anglophone author in the renderings of Voltaire, Ducis’s chief source, Pierre-Antoine La Place, and the newly published Letourneur. It is also conceivable, however, that for the revision of his Hamlet Ducis found motivation in the Revolutionary “Terror” which followed the 1789 uprising and the rise to power of Napoleon. If in the dedication to the translation of Shakespeare’s complete works the monarchist Letourneur openly apologizes for the orgiastic display of violence in the texts translated,21 the republican Ducis’s post-Revolutionary revision of Hamlet seems, despite the limitations of a neoclassical code which condemned such excesses, to have been aimed at intensifying the horrors already present in the text, as well as at introducing others. The new Act 5 is clearly designed with that end in mind since, as Ducis would confide to his nephew, “[i]f there is anything I have ardently desired…it is for [Talma] to hurl this new act upon the audience who worship him as though it were some hellish, smouldering, fiery torch, and to leave at the play’s end in the spectators’ souls nothing but the goblet, the urn, the spectre, Shakespeare, Dante and Talma” (Ducis 1879, 272-273).22 Such a vehemently expressed desire, with its infernal implications, may indeed, as Pemble suggests, read like a belated response to a string of events that had swept aside the ancien régime to replace it with the violent uncertainty of the present. In the midst of the chaos of destruction and despair with which the tragedy concludes, Hamlet’s words (“Privé de tous les miens, dans ce palais funeste/Mes malheurs sont comblés, mais ma vertu me reste”) may indeed sound like an attempt to adapt to a situation which, as the onstage presence of Gertrude’s body reminds us, is patently untenable. On the other hand, by giving more textual weight to the “proper” process of Hamlet’s coronation and, above all, by giving more details of the Claudius conspiracy—as well as strengthening some aspects of the plot which, according to critics of the earlier version, were insufficiently developed—, Ducis could equally be 21 “Your Majesty will witness a succession of tragic scenes of the divisions which have, all too often, torn England apart. It will therefore come as a pleasant and soothing balm to allow your imagination to wander through these foreign settings, while observing a gentle and docile people at your feet” (“Votre Majesté verra passer sous ses yeux les Tableaux tragiques des divisions qui n’ont que trop souvent déchiré Angleterre. Ce sera pour elle un délassement agréable et flatteur de promener son imagination sur ces scènes étrangères tandis qu’elle voit à ses pieds un peuple doux et soumis.”) (Letourneur 1990, viii) 22 “Si j’ai désiré quelque chose vivement [...], c’est qu’il lance ce nouvel acte dans le public qui l’idolâtre comme un tison infernal, tout fumant et brûlant, et qu’il ne laisse dans l’esprit des spectateurs, à la fin de la pièce, que la coupe, l’urne, le spectre, Shakespeare, Dante et Talma.”

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interpreted as giving a voice to the disillusionment produced by the recent enthronement of Napoleon, whose “legitimacy” was no less suspect than that of the regicidal Claudius. Pointedly, the character of Claudius is much developed in the later versions. To his usurpatory schemes to wrest the throne from its rightful heir Hamlet, already made explicit in Act 1 of the 1770 text, is added the “artful device” (“utile artifice”) by which he has managed to turn both the “peuple” and the “soldats” against Prince Hamlet (1834, 11). The tender scene between Hamlet and Ophélie that initially opened Act 3 is replaced by another hard-nosed discussion between Claudius and fellowconspirator Polonius, in which there are allusions to yet more secretive measures (“ressorts secrets”), including the bribery of officers and rumour-mongering amongst the people, to justify his seizure of what, again in a Rousseauesque touch, he terms the “sovereign power” (“pouvoir souverain”) (42). But the last and most significant addition comes at the end of the revised Act 4, in a key scene (4.7) where, having assembled all of the nation’s grandees at the council which ought, at Gertrude’s behest, to declare Hamlet king, Claudius reveals his secret purpose to have them universally discredit the heir apparent and insist that he (Claudius) assume the crown. The reference to his own feigned astonishment at the offer might just bring to mind the reaction of Shakespeare’s Gloucester to the Mayor of London’s proposal in Act 3 Scene 1 of Shakespeare’s Richard III; but a more immediate analogy for French audiences would undoubtedly have been the coronation of Bonaparte, since if there is anything which could be perceived as marking Claudius as a worthy successor, it is, he trusts, the “course of his past glory”, wherein are to be found “the virtue of a monarch and the heart of a soldier” (68).23 His Napoleonic credentials extend to the quashing of popular unrest at the usurpation: “A dispossessed king,” he declares ominously, possibly recalling the death in gaol of Louis XVII, nominal heir to the deposed Louis XVI, “has not long to live:/He is especially lost if the people take arms in his name,/And his tomb is never far from his prison” (69).24 Claudius’s ignominious death at the hands of his fellow conspirators, which Ducis would work into the 1813 text, is not just a fittingly ignoble end to the tyrant’s career; it may even have been motivated by Napoleon’s own “betrayal” and equally demeaning end at the hands of his erstwhile supporters. 23

“le cours de ma gloire passée”, “vertu d’un monarque et le coeur d’un soldat”. “Un roi dépossédé n’a pas long-temps à vivre:/Il est perdu sur-tout si l’on s’arme en son nom,/Et son tombeau jamais n’est loin de sa prison.” 24

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Ducis’s Spanish Interpreters From a 21st-century perspective, it is easy to dismiss Ducis’s Shakespeare adaptations as unreasonable distortions of original texts to which—to compound matters—the author had only second-hand access. For all his declared bardolatry, Ducis appears to have made not the slightest effort to learn his master’s language, relying instead on a combination of selective readings from existing translations, as well as his own theatrical instincts as to what was workable or fashionable on turn-ofthe-century French stages. His reputation as the “unkindest cutter” (McMahon 1964) seems to have accompanied him from the early years of the 19th century, when the work of the “Belles Infidèles” was already being challenged by theorists stressing exactitude as the chief criterion for judging translation.25 As products of, and therefore subject to, ruling aesthetic tastes, it is easy to see how with the advent of romanticism and its attention to historical origins and individual creative genius, such nakedly target-culture-oriented rewritings would quickly give way to the “real” thing. And yet Ducis’s plays continued to be published and anthologized as late as 1834—seven years after the appearance of Victor Hugo’s groundbreaking preface to his play Cromwell. More significantly, Ducis’s version of Hamlet was still being produced by the Comédie Française as late as 1851. Outside of France, and as a consequence of the Empire’s expansionist policy of political and also cultural domination, the quick spread of his work to countries like Spain, Sweden, Portugal, Italy, Holland, Romania, Russia and Poland should be conjoined to the fact that, for decades, they would be the only thing resembling authentic Shakespeare on the different national stages.26 It would, I believe, be highly instructive to learn not just what bearing the plays exported clearly 25 See, amongst others, Lambert (1981, 166) and Delisle & Woodsworth (2012, 70). 26 On the “civilizing” claims of France’s cultural colonization of its various dominions, see Woolf (1989). In Spain, the first translation of a recognizably “Shakespearean” text, Manuel García de Villalta’s Macbeth, was not performed in the theatres till 1838—and with disastrous consequences (Calvo 2002). Ducis’s hand is still visible in Carlos Coello’s 1872 stage version of El príncipe Hamlet, while in Holland, a country which might geographically, culturally and politically be expected to have broken free much earlier from the French sphere of influence, Ducis’s Hamlet was the only version available to stage producers till L. A. J. Burgersdijk’s translation from the English in 1882 (Delabastita 1993, 226). For a discussion of Shakespeare’s early reception in other European nations, see particularly Delabastita (1993), Kujawínska & Moore (2003), Phelps (1964), Senelick (1991), Sorelius (2002).

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had on the foundation of a European Shakespeare canon but, more relevantly here, which versions of the plays were actually translated there and why. The case of neighbouring Spain may, in this last respect, prove enlightening since, as I have shown elsewhere (Gregor 2012),27 not only was it the first country to boast its own translation of a Ducis play, Hamlet, but there are at least four different versions of it, the first two based on the 1770 edition and the last two on the later so-called “definitive” texts. The first of the translations, attributed to playwright Ramón de la Cruz, was played on the Madrid stage in October and December 1772, only six years after one of the most widely known political upheavals in 18thcentury Spain, the 1766 so-called “Esquilache mutiny” (“motín de Esquilache”), in which the people of Madrid rebelled against the minister Leopoldo de Gregorio Esquilache, sacked his house and caused public disorders. King Charles III had to accept the conditions imposed by an angry mob standing just outside the Royal Palace. Things settled down after the minister was replaced, but this was surely the worst political convulsion Spain had had to suffer after the end of the War of Succession in 1713. Ironically, this happened under the reign of a king who has always been regarded as the most efficient of the century and one who gained for himself a fair amount of popularity and respect. It is thus perhaps no accident that in Cruz’s rendering of Hamlet one of the first gestures of the newly-crowned successor is to pardon the rebels in exchange for the loyalty they must ensure him and whose “example” and “pity” are enough, according to Norceste, to discourage future traitors. In other words, the young king achieves his revenge, but shows himself to be very generous with his loyal subjects in a far more explicit way than in Ducis: And, Danes, those amongst you Who are convinced of your error, come that I may teach you, With the kindness that I receive you, The loyalty which you must vow. [...] Who, when shown such an example and such pity, Could possibly turn to treachery? (Pujante & Gregor 2010, 123) 28

27

For a more more detailed discussion of the “politics” of the Spanish Hamlets, see Pujante & Gregor (2008). 28 “Y vosotros, daneses, convencidos/de vuestro error, venid donde os enseñe/en la benignidad con que os recibo/la lealtad que debéis asegurarme./[...] ¿Quién podrá ser traidor con este ejemplo/y con esta piedad?”. References to all four Spanish Hamlets are to the edition by Pujante & Gregor (2010).

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The way in which the translator adapted and manipulated the Ducis original should leave little doubt about the translator’s political sympathies. These may be explained as the mere conservatism of a lawabiding person, or perhaps his political feelings may have been awakened or further enhanced by a very specific historical factor that he must have witnessed. The second translation, anonymous and undated, though certainly written before 1793, follows Cruz’s linguistic manipulations with a vengeance. The most outstanding case of lexico-political tampering in this rendering, known as the “Santander” version after the town where it was located, is to be found in its treatment of the intended assassination of the king (5.2), when Ophelia condemns Claudius’s conspiracy. The original “coups” (“blows”) that Hamlet may suffer will be given in the translation specifically by a “puñal rebelde” (“rebel dagger”) (190). In Ducis the assassination is referred to by Ophelia as an “affreux parricide”, a term which in Spanish —and in its English equivalent— demands “regicidio”, since the victim of a “parricidio” can only be either of one’s parents. This is the way the Cruz and the Santander translations put the original. However, the Santander rendering uses this very specific concept when the original does not require it: “coupables mains” (“guilty hands”) becomes “manos regicidas” (“regicidal hands”) (189), and “regicidas” will be used at the end of the play in lines that have no correspondence with the original. Later in the same scene, Ophelia’s reference to the projected killing of the king as “une action si noire” (“so dark an act”) becomes “hecho tan sacrílego” (“so sacrilegious a deed”) (190), which obviously emphasizes the medieval doctrine of the divine origin of kings. This obsession with punishing “regicidas” and humiliating the conspirators to the extent of dispensing with Ophelia’s presence at this point clearly goes beyond Ducis and opposes Cruz’s image of an explicitly benevolent king capable of pardoning his enemies. As is known, certain words are not much used until events put them into circulation. One of them is “regicide”, which was applied to the English parliamentarians who endorsed the death sentence of Charles I, and in the 18th century to the members of the Directory who voted for the execution of Louis XVI in 1793—even nowadays “régicide” immediately calls to French people’s minds the killing of this king. This execution is now regarded as the turning-point of a historical process, bent on abolishing absolutist monarchy and the ancien régime, which was hailed throughout Europe by many, but also hated and feared by old monarchists and traditionalists. Spain was no exception, and we should not be surprised to find that the Santander translator was such a supporter of the old order and so hated the

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French Revolution as to carry his or her political concerns over to the rendering of this play beyond the letter of the original. The source text of the last two translations to be dealt with was the socalled “definitive” version of 1809, with subsequent (mainly verbal) revisions in 1815, 1816 and 1818. When Antonio de Saviñón wrote his translation of Hamlet, the concerns already voiced in the Santander version could hardly have been more relevant. Spain’s Central Junta, hemmed in in the southern city of Cadiz by an alliance of French troops and so-called “afrancesados” (Frenchified supporters of the regime loyal to Joseph Bonaparte), was in the process of deciding the future of the Spanish monarchy. In a draft constitution which, amongst other measures, provided for a democratically elected government and an end to ministerial despotism, unprecedented emphasis was laid on the sovereignty of the people. For the liberal lawyer Saviñón, whose adaptation of a work by Vittorio Alfieri, pointedly entitled Roma libre, had been played in 1812 to mark the publication of the constitution, Ducis’s play must have stood as a vindication of the idea of legitimate monarchy strengthened by popular support—as well as a sobering lesson in the ever-present threat of usurpation by scheming, hawkish Machiavels. As if to draw more attention to this fact, one of the very few cuts in Saviñón’s virtual line-for-line rendering of the play occurs at the very end of Act 4. In what is plainly the text intended for performance Saviñón edits out Claudius’s response to Polonius’s reservations concerning the popular reaction to Hamlet's overthrow (4.7). A desire to shorten the role of Claudius by a writer who generally omits nothing seems unlikely; rather, Saviñón’s probable intention is revealed by the effect one has from reading through the scene. By slashing the speech, Saviñón appears to have wanted to avoid detailing the extent of Claudius’s callousness (“Je ne crains plus les cris d’une mère éperdue; / Je fais saisir Hamlet...” [“I fear no more the cries of a desperate mother;/I shall have Hamlet arrested...”]), while concentrating the audience’s attention on the purely political implications of ruling with or without the support of the populace. With this stroke, Saviñón thus seemed quite prepared, in performance at least, to play down the insight into Claudius’s “psychological” development in exchange for a fairly blunt rendering of the political reflections of the unscrupulous tyrant. It was just such an appropriation of the genre of drama, either for political or religious ends or even both, together with an excessive concern with the emotional impact of the play and the dependence on spectacular effects, especially in the “free zones” such as Cadiz, where Saviñón almost certainly wrote the piece, that is assumed to have spelt the end of the neoclassical project of theatrical reform. “Of the neoclassical project,” it

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has been claimed, “there remained but one idea: the use-value of drama as a school, but not one in which to learn good manners but where the citizen is given lessons in how to face the new political situation” (Freire 1996, 395-6). The War of Independence had left the country deeply divided between, on the one hand, radical liberals like Saviñón who had pressed for independence from French occupation and the urgent reform of Spain’s outmoded social and political structure, and on the other, conservatives who demanded a firm hand to purge the country of the pernicious presence of the “afrancesados” and, at the same time, to restore to the Church both its influence and its lands. Following an uprising of liberals anxious to restore the 1812 constitution, the formation of an absolutist “apostolic” regency in Urgell and the restoration of Ferdinand by the “Cien mil hijos de San Luis” (“100,000 sons of St Louis”), a new period was ushered in: the so-called “década ominosa” (“shameful decade”) of 1823-1833, which saw the enforced exile and, in many cases, execution of the Crown’s liberal opponents. Amongst the most ardent defenders of the ‘new’ old regime was the journalist and littérateur José María de Carnerero, whose career is a testimony to the persistence of a dramatic model whose very raison d’être had been called into question. These views are especially apparent in his translation of Hamlet. If, from the outset of both Ducis’s play and Carnerero’s translation, the menace of a foreign power sweeping an already divided kingdom is a rhetorical ploy used by Claudius to beguile the populace, in the Spanish version “la guerra horrible/que amenaza el Imperio” (“the dreadful war/which threatens the Empire”) (307), as Polonius calls it, is compounded at home by the uprising of Claudius and his “revolucionarios” (“revolutionaries”) (339)—a striking use of the term which, given its novelty, could not help but identify Claudius and his followers with the French protagonists of 1789. In such a hostile climate, which to many must have evoked the turmoil of the liberal uprising and the Urgell regency, it was indeed reassuring that Hamlet’s apparent madness could (still) be punctuated by moments of genuine selfpossession, moments in which he could address the upstart Claudius with words which carry the weight of authority and legitimacy: “¿O habéis creido por desgracia vuestra/que, aunque Hamlet triste y lánguido se muestra,/sus derechos legítimos descuida...?” (“Or were you foolish enough to believe/that Hamlet, even though he seems so sad and languid,/neglects his lawful rights?”) (321). Hamlet’s victory, though pyrrhic, is, it is suggested, a victory for legitimacy over the lawless rebel and his followers, for dynastic continuity over the illicit aspirations of the “revolutionary” pretender Claudius. In a burst of populism worthy of one

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in his leaders in the La revista española, Carnerero duly rewrites Ducis’s closing lines to render Hamlet not the lonely “homme et roi: réservé pour souffrir” (“A man and king: doomed to suffer”) but the natural leader of men: “¡Vivamos, pues!... ¡Obligación es mía/dar a mis pueblos mi existencia entera!/¡A ellos consagro mi mortal carrera!/Y ¡ojalá logre en aflicción tan dura/mi alivio ser la general ventura!” (“Let us choose life, then! I am duty-bound/to give my people my whole existence!/To them I owe my mortal course!/And being as I am so sorely grieved,/may the general happiness be my only respite!”) (341). Thus ends the play, not on the note of personal resignation which sounds at the close of Ducis’s revised text, but with Hamlet’s almost Christ-like dedication to his people, generously identifyng his own fate with theirs. The (re-)translation of Ducis’s Hamlet in late 18th-/early 19th-century Spain shows how deeply French theatrical cultural impacted on satellite nations both before, during and after the Napoleonic period. But it is Napoleon’s rise to power and the political and cultural colonization his regime put in motion that endowed Ducis’s adaptations with the importance and significance they would gain in both pre- and post-Independence Spain. Whether as liberal defense of constitutional monarchy or celebration of the return to absolute rule, the Spanish Hamlets show how adaptable the French original was to different, even antithetical, interpretations; more generally, it shows how tyranny continued to impinge on the European imagination long after the demise of “Le Petit Caporal”.

Works Cited Calleo, David. 1960. “Coleridge on Napoleon”. Yale French Studies 26: 83-93. Calvo, Clara. 2002. “Románticos españoles y tragedia inglesa: El fracaso del Macbeth de José García de Villalta”. In Neoclásicos y Románticos ante la Traducción, ed. Francisco Lafarga, Concepción Palacios & Alfonso Saura, 59-72. Murcia: Universidad de Murcia. Condorcet, M[arques] de. 1795. Outlines of an Historical View of the Progress of the Human Mind. London: J. Johnson. Delabastita, Dirk. 1993. “Hamlet in the Netherlands in the Late Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Centuries. The Complexities of the History of Shakespeare’s Reception”. In European Shakespeares. Translating Shakespeare in the Romantic Age, eds. Delabastita, Dirk & Lieven D’hulst, 219-233. Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Delisle, Jean & Joan Woodsworth (eds.). 2012. Translators through History. Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins.

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Diderot, Denis et al. 1781. Encyclopédie ou dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers. Vol. 34. Berne & Lausanne: Sociétés Typographiques. Downes, B. W. 1936. “Ducis’ Two Hamlets”. Modern Language Review 31: 206-208. Ducis, Jean-François. 1879. Lettres de Jean-François Ducis, ed. Paul Albert. Paris: G. Jousset. —. 1819. Oeuvres de J. F. Ducis. Paris: Nepveu. —. 1834. Hamlet, Tragédie en Cinq Actes, Imitée de l’Anglois. Brussels: n.p. —. 1770. Hamlet, Tragédie, Imitée de l’Anglois. Paris: Gogué. Engel, Steven T. 2005. “Rousseau and Imagined Communities”. The Review of Politics 67: 515-537. Freire, Ana. 1996. “El definitivo escollo del proyecto neoclásico de reforma del teatro. (Panorama teatral de la Guerra de la Independencia)”. In El teatro español del siglo XVIII, ed. Josep Maria Sala Valldaura, 377-396. Lleida: Ed. Universitat. Golder, John. 1992. Shakespeare for the Age of Reason: the Earliest Stage Adaptations of Jean-François Ducis 1769-1792. Oxford: The Voltaire Foundation. Gregor, Keith. 2012. “The Imprint of France: French Hamlet and Spanish Neoclassicism”. In The Hamlet Zone: Reworking Hamlet for European Cultures, ed. Ruth J. Owen, 137-150. Newcastle-upon-Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. Hutcheon, Linda. 2006. A Theory of Adaptation. London: Routledge. Kujawínska-Courtney, Krystyna & John Moore Mercer (eds.). 2003. The Globalization of Shakespeare in the Nineteenth Century. New York: Edwin Mellen Press. Lambert, José. 1981. “Théorie de la littérature et théorie de la traduction en France (1800-1850): inteprétées à partir de la théorie du polysystème”. Poetics Today 4: 161-170. Letourneur, Pierre. 1990. Préface du Shakespeare traduit de l’anglois, ed. Jacques Gury. Geneva: Droz. Locke, John. 1722. The Works of John Locke, Vol. 5. London: Awnsham Churchill. Matei-Chesnoiu, Monica. 2006. Shakespeare in the Romanian Cultural Memory. Cranbury, NJ: Rosemont/Associated University Presses. McMahon, Joseph H. 1964. “Ducis—Unkindest Cutter?”. Yale French Studies 33: 14-25. Pemble, John. 2005. Shakespeare Goes to Paris: How the Bard Conquered France. London & New York: Hambledon & London.

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Phelps Bailey, Helen. 1964. Hamlet in France: from Voltaire to Laforgue. Geneva: Librairie Droz. Pujante, Ángel-Luis & Keith Gregor. 2008. “Conservatism and Liberalism in the Four Spanish Translations of Ducis’s Hamlet”. In Shakespeare and European Politics, eds. Dirk Delabastita, Jozef de Vos & Paul Franssen, 304-317. Newark: University of Delaware Press. Pujante, Ángel-Luis & Keith Gregor (eds.). 2010. Hamlet en Espana. Las cuatro versions neoclásicas. Salamanca: Ediciones Universidad de Salamanca. Rousseau, Jean-Jacques. 1968. The Social Contract, trans. Maurice Cranston. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Semmel, Stuart. 2000. “British Radicals and ‘Legitimacy’: Napoleon in the Mirror of History”. Past & Present 167: 140-175. Senelick, Laurence (ed.). 1991. National Theatre in Northern and Eastern Europe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Sorelius, Gunnar (ed.). 2002. Shakespeare and Scandinavia: a Collection of Nordic Studies. Cranbury, NJ: Rosemont/Associated University Presses. Voltaire. 1950. Voltaire’s Philosophical Dictionary. New York: Carlton House. Williams, David Lay. 2005. “Modern Theorist of Tyranny? Lessons from Rousseau’s System of Checks and Balances”. Polity 37: 443-465. Wolloch, Nathaniel. 2008. “Cato the Younger in the Enlightenment”. Modern Philology 106: 60-82. Woolf, Stuart. 1989. “French Civilization and Ethnicity in the Napoleonic Empire”. Past & Present 124: 96-120.

CHAPTER FOUR THE MERCHANT OF VENICE IN PEST AND CLUJ (KOLOZSVÁR) DURING THE HABSBURG NEO-ABSOLUTISM KATALIN ÁGNES BARTHA

By taking the particular position of the two leading Hungarian national theatres1 and the context of their Shakespeare repertoire, the study will focus on the relationship between censorship practices identified in The Merchant of Venice promptbooks and the stagings of the play. The aim of the study is to reveal the subversive potentials of the translated play in the context of the ruling power’s constraints and the strategies of the (Hungarian) cultural and theatre elite in the 1850s and 60s.

Censorship2 and the Two Theatres Culturally, the theatre had been an important instrument for cultivating and preserving Hungarian national culture and the Hungarian language 1

Both early and continuous Hungarian professional acting in Pest-Buda (since 1790) and in Kolozsvár/Klausenburg/Cluj (since 1792) marked the future development of Hungarian professional acting. This duality can also be attributed to the fact that the state organization itself had two centres. The decree on the unification of the two “brother lands” had been issued as early as 1848 but was later declared null by the Absolutist Government. Transylvania was annexed to the re-established chancellory in Vienna. Later Law XLIII/1868 laid down the rules for the union of Hungary with Transylvania and thus eliminated the public law status of Transylvania as a separate entity. 2 From the research into Hungarian theatrical censorship some important works must be mentioned: Kádár Jolán Pukánszkyné (1938), Császár Edit Mályuszné (1985), Attila Márffy (1993) and Ágnes Deák (2008). However studies on censorship in the Habsburg Empire (in English) make no reference to these works (Bachleitner 2011; Höbelt 2000; Yates, W. E. 1996; Hüttner 1980).

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already in the Reform Era. Its role increased even more after 1849, and the battle between the Hungarian public and government intentions unfolded most spectacularly in the theatre. The latter became the sanctuary of the Hungarian language, and attending the performances was considered an almost political stance. For example, police reports from the period inform about various demonstrations of the theatergoers during the performances, and such acts were considered manifestations of the national spirit. The Theatre decree issued by the Ministry of the Interior in 1850 defined the operating conditions for theatres and theatre companies within the Habsburg Empire: accordingly, every new play to be premiered required the permission of the head of the given provinces, except for those plays which had already been performed in Vienna. Every reference to the reigning state or to the monarchy itself, or anything that could offend public morals or religion had to be omitted from the performance. In addition, the decree stipulated that: Everything that goes against the respect due to public calm and order, according to the current times, and is capable of provoking either hatred amongst nationalities, social classes and religious groups, or disturbances during the performance, had to be left out (Magyarkoronaországot 1851, 140).

Furthermore, it was strictly forbidden to use real-life uniforms of officers, high-ranking civil servants or priests as stage costumes. The decree consisted of nine sections and an instruction which defined the theatre as an institution of cultural education, and also included the method of application. The decree was published the following year in the bilingual (German and Hungarian) official publication of the Government. Once it was enforced, those violating it faced a monetary fine and a maximum of three months in prison (Magyarkoronaországot 1851, 139143). The supervision of the performances came under the jurisdiction of local police authorities, which could authorize the banning of certain performances or even suspend performances that had already begun. According to Attila Márfi, a Hungarian historian who conducted a meticulous research into the state archives, the theatres in the first decade of the period had been controlled by an over-bureaucratized state structure (Márfi 1993). Police officials and watchdogs attended each performance to observe the reactions of the audience and to supervise whether the actors

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played their parts according to the censorial interventions. In 1852 the extemporizations of the actors were also banned.3 Given this political context, the structure of Hungarian professional acting disintegrated and changed substantially after the suppression of the 1848/49 revolution; at the same time, German acting came to the fore due to the fact that the newly established imperial government favoured German culture, giving state subsidies to German theatres in both Hungary and Transylvania.4 The Hungarian National Theatre from Pest functioned uninterruptedly after the revolutionary period, but the company had to share the stage with the German theatre company for a few months. Although the Hungarian Theatre from Pest was recognized as a leading artistic centre, they struggled from subordination to the Central Lieutenancy of Buda, which restricted and supervised the operation of the theatre.5 The Theatre’s public law status changed even more when they received no funding from either Pest County or the (then non-existent) Hungarian Parliament. Members of the theatre management were appointed by the Imperial Commissioner for Civilian Affairs.6 However, members of the Hungarian aristocracy constituted the majority within the Managing Committee. This fact enabled the company to obtain private donations from several aristocrats, so the theatre company survived the harsh period. Some of its founding members continued to play key roles, while those who had been involved politically in the revolutionary events were banned from acting (Kerényi 2005, 58). Compared to the ethnically mixed population of Pest-Buda, the Hungarians constituted the majority in the Transylvanian town of Kolozsvár/Cluj; 3

Albrecht Friedrich Rudolf, Prince Imperial and Archduke of Austria, governor of Hungary (1851–1860) and ultimate authority in matters of censorship, issued an order (on 2 March, 1852) stipulating that, in the case of extemporizations, the actors would immediately be brought before a military court (Lám 1926, 90). 4 On German theatre, see Gerold & Székely (1990). 5 On the situation of the Hungarian National Theatre in Pest, see Székely (1990) and Kerényi (2005, 57–64). 6 Baron Karl Geringer, the Imperial Commissioner of Civilian Affairs in Hungary (1849–1851), then provisional governor (1851–1852), appointed a Committee to deal with the commercial management of the National Theatre. The first head of the committee (Comité) had been Baron Antal Augusz, the High Sheriff (fĘispán) of the district of Pest-Buda and a good friend of Ferenc Liszt. From 1858 the head of the committee was count József Szapáry. The artistic management was also in the hands of the aristocracy. The first artistic director had been Count Leó Festetics (1852–1854), who was followed by Count Gedeon Ráday until 1860 (Pukánszkyné Kádár 1938, 224–225.; Székely 1990, 372–398).

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however, at first only a German acting company was allowed to play on 1 April, 1850. The Hungarian company could only give its first performance after the revolutionary events in November 1850, so they had to comply with the severe Theatreordnung (Decree on Theatre) issued on 25 November that same year. The Hungarian National Theatre in Cluj had been the leading Hungarian theatrical institution of Transylvania ever since its start (in 1792). However, once the Hungarian Theatre in Pest was established (1837), its role decreased. Renamed the Hungarian National Theatre in1840, this institution attracted the majority of the top Hungarian actors. Given the circumstances relating to the new theatre regulations, in 1850 the Hungarian National Theatre from Cluj lost its “national” attribute and functioned only as a “town theatre” until 1852, when it formally regained its national status under the Management of the old-new National Theatre Committee (Ferenczi 1897, 406, 412). Furthermore, the new town authorities gave performing licenses for only one or two years, so different Hungarian theatre companies were using the stage between 1850 and 1860. And, we should add, funding of theatre initiatives was also scarce and depended on incomes made by each company. Similar to the situation of the Hungarian Theatre from Pest, the patronizing of the Hungarian aristocracy and nobility from Transylvania proved to be essential in maintaining and supporting the theatre.7

Repertoires In terms of repertoires, the politics of theatre management of the National Theatre of Pest reflected the aristocratic taste of the era: accordingly, operas made up almost 50 percent of the programme and guest performances were also significant in number. At the same time, there was a reliance on the Reform Era programme with the staging of Kotzebue, Philipp-François Dumanoir, Bayard, but also of new Hungarian plays. Moreover, in 1852 there was a reestablishment of the Drama Committee for reviewing new dramas.. Although this tendency was common throughout the period, French-style romantic comedies and the Shakespeare canon set the artistic standards of the drama repertoire of the age (Székely 1990, 389-394). 7

See the united fund-raising efforts in 1854: Felszólítás az erdélyi nemzeti Színház jövĘjének biztosítása ügyében [Call for the Support of the Hungarian National Theatre from Transylvania]. Fond No. 313. Hungarian Theatre of Cluj, Act 30, National Archives of Cluj County, Cluj. For the detailed activity of the Committee, see Ferenczi (1897, 449-470).

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In spite of the fact that many plays were either banned8 or severely censored with the purpose of getting rid of any political allusions and remaining neutral (it was forbidden to use words like “homeland”, “freedom”, “suppression”, “nation”), the folk plays (népszínmĦ) and historical plays allowed for staging had the potential to present national themes in indirect ways: and indeed they fulfilled the expectations of the public by using certain theatrical codes and gestures that projected Hungary’s triumph. Concerning Shakespeare’s works, however, many factors prevented the staging of a full-text play. Besides the moral and ideological interferences of censorship, texts needed to be adapted so as to be performable on the proscenium stage-forms used in both theatres. The Shakespeare programme of the Hungarian National Theatre was quite popular. Between 1849 and 1867 the company staged 20 different Shakespeare plays which were performed 213 times in total. The company performed the following: Hamlet, King Lear, The Taming of the Shrew, Coriolanus, Julius Caesar, Othello, Richard III, Macbeth, The Merchant of Venice, Romeo and Juliet, Henry IV, Timon of Athens, The Comedy of Errors, The Merry Wives of Windsor, The Two Gentleman of Verona, Henry VI (under the title Fehér és piros rózsa), Antony and Cleopatra, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, A Winter’s Tale, Henry VIII. The abundance of the British playwright’s works can be explained also by several guest performances. For example, in 1853, when Ira Aldridge, the famous coloured Shakespearean actor first came to town, Shakespeare’s plays were performed on 26 occasions: 12 Hungarian-only productions, 12 mixed productions (in Hungarian and English) and 2 English-only productions (Bayer 1909, vol. II. 352). In comparison, the Shakespeare repertoire of the Hungarian National Theatre from Cluj seems modest: only 12 Shakespeare plays were featured between 1853 and 1867 (on 43 occasions), most of them involving guest star actors from Pest who usually played the leading roles. The following plays were performed: Hamlet, Othello, Romeo and Juliet, The Merchant of Venice, The Two Gentlemen of Verona, Coriolanus, Julius Caesar, The Taming of the Shrew, King Lear, Macbeth, Richard III, A Midsummer Night’s Dream. The number of Shakespeare performances started to increase in 1866, when 8 Shakespeare performances took place. The Merchant of Venice was performed 12 times in Pest during the period; the role of Shylock was played first by Lajos Fáncsy (9 Sept. 1850, 8

Besides revolutionary plays, after September 1849 also banned from the stage were Bánk Bán by József Katona, Báthory Mária and Hunyadi László by Ferenc Erkel and Egmont by Goethe.

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6 March 1851, 8 July 1852), then by Ira Aldridge (2 April 1853, 8 April 1853 in set pieces, 23 August 1853, 11 September 1853 in set pieces, 12 February 1858) and by József Tóth (25 February 1859, 18 October 1859, 19 December 1862, 27 November 1865). During the same period The Merchant was performed twice in Cluj: on 3 November 1853, with Fáncsy as Shlylock, and on 13 December 1865, when Ferenc Gyulai played the same leading role (Bartha 2010, 319-322).

Promptbooks The first Hungarian translation/adaptation of The Merchant of Venice for the stage was completed by Lajos Lukács who, apart from a German translation, must also have used an English source, as his translation is quite close to the English original. The première of the play took place on 27 April 1840 in the National Hungarian Theatre of Pest. This translation in prose remained in use until 1853, when it was replaced by that of the actor József Tóth. In Cluj, however, the performances were based on the first Lukács translation, even as late as 1865.9 Currently, we have knowledge of four handwritten promptbooks relating to these productions. 1. The oldest and most comprehensive copy has been preserved in the Hungarian National Széchényi Library, Budapest. Its cover reads: A velenczei kalmár. Dráma. Négy felvonásban. Shakespeare után Magyar színre alkalmazá Lukács Lajos [The Merchant of Venice. Drama. In Four Acts. Adapted to Hungarian Stage after Shakespeare by Lajos Lukács] 1839.10 The cover included two censorial authorizations: signed by a certain Count named János Pongrácy, the Commissioner of the Buda Lieutenancy, the first is dated 10 April 1840; the second authorization is dated 11 August 1852 and is signed by a certain Chief Officer of the Police from Kassa (“Zur Vorstellung zugeellasen. Kaschau am 11 / 8. 852. k.k. Pol. Comssär”). We presume that an actor brought this promptbook

9

The Hungarian Merchant was first published in 1853 in the translation by Zsigmond Ács. Then, in 1864 a revised version appeared in the series Shakspere minden munkái [Complete Works of Shakespeare]. In the Transylvanian context, besides the Hungarian, the German and Romanian adaptations of the play need to be considered as well. Concerning the German stagings in Transylvania in this period, see Vitéz (n.d.), while for the Romanian translation of the play, see Nicolaescu (2012). 10 It contains 102 unnumbered leaves. N.Sz. V.51. Theatre History Collection, Hungarian National Széchényi Library.

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copy with him to Kassa (Košice, now in Slovakia) for a guest performance, which, of course, needed authorizing. 2. A cleaner copy of the above promptbook with the same title is also in the Hungarian National Széchényi Library. A velenczei kalmár. Dráma 4 felvonásban Shakespeare után magyar színre alkalmazta Lukács Lajos. 1839.11 This copy also has an authorization from the Kassa censor. The censor’s authorization is dated 19 September 1853 (“Wird yur Auflührung gestattet. Kaschau am 19ten septemb. 1853. Dulowil k.k. Pol. Csär”). 3. A copy of the Lukács translation has been preserved in the Documentary Archives of the Hungarian State Theatre in Cluj. This copy was used by the Hungarian theatre company in Cluj; its cover reads as follows: A zsidó vagy velenczei kalmár. Dráma 4 felv. Shakespeare után A.W. Schlegel; magyarra tette [The Jew or the Merchant of Venice. Drama in 4 Acts. Adapted to the Hungarian after Shakespeare by A. W. Schlegel].12 Although the name of the real translator doesn’t appear on the cover, comparing this copy with the first promptbook version makes it clear that it is the translation of Lukács. The name of Schlegel (referring to the German translator of the play) must have been used by mistake by the person who made the copy. 4. The fourth copy is the translation of József Tóth and is kept in the Theatre History Collection of the Hungarian National Széchényi Library. Its cover reads as follows: Velenczei kalmár. Színjáték 5 felvonásban. Írta Shakespeare a londoni kir. Színház színre alkalmazása szerint fordította Tóth József [The Merchant of Venice. Play in 5 acts. Written by Shakespeare and Translated by József Tóth according to the Stage Adaptation of the Theatre Royal from London], 1855.13 Although this copy contains no police authorizations, the inserts and cuts to the text show that this promptbook was also used for staging. The translator must have used both the stage adaptation by John Philip Kemble (1814) and the Lukács translation which he knew well, since he had earlier acted in the production based on that first translation. József Tóth took over most parts translated by Lukács, but he was keen to both Hungarianize and modernize its language so as to resemble live speech. While the Lukács version retains the scenes with the Princes of Morocco and Aragon, Tóth, following Kemble, omitted them and thus 11

It contains 87 leaves. (N.Sz. V. 51/1. Theatre History Collection, Hungarian National Széchényi Library.) 12 It contains 104 unnumbered leaves. (Sz. 3673, Documentary Archives of the Hungarian State Theatre from Cluj.) 13 It contains 65 numbered leaves. (N.Sz. V. 80, Theatre History Collection, Hungarian National Széchényi Library.)

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increased the significance of Shylock’s role. Moreover, Tóth also translated the last act; however, in compliance with Hungarian staging practice and censorial expectations, he applied a kind of self-censorship by writing the following observation at the end of the play: “Should the libertine ending be found to be against moral sensibility, the play may end with Act 4…” (Tóth 1855, f. 35). Here Tóth recommended the end designed by the Lukács translation (omitting Act 4 Scene 2 and the whole of Act 5); accordingly, the play ends suddenly after the trial scene, where Portia suddenly discloses herself after taking the ring from Bassanio, and Antonio receives the good news about his ships. The playbills reveal that the Hungarian National theatre performed it as a four-act play until 1865. While Tóth left out the scenes involving Morocco and Aragon, he did translate passages and scenes omitted by Lukács: for example, he included the whole of Gratiano’s part in Act 1 Scene 1 (ll. 71-112), then the boastful speech of Launcelot (2.2.150-162), the whole of the Garden scene in Act 3, where Launcelot is mocking Jessica because of her Jewishness (3.5.). The instructions from the Tóth script referring to the use of lights, music, and to methods of acting, reveal the directorial concepts used for the production. As a first conclusion, we can state that there was a continuity between the various translations made for the stage: in our case, this meant that the Lukács translation from the Reform Era was improved linguistically, while some of the staging solutions were retained.

Censorial Deletions The handwritten red-ink deletions in the first Lukács copy and the reappearance or absence of the deleted parts in the other promptbooks create the context in which censorship practices and theatrical workshops can be approached. Four categories of censorial intervention can be distinguished in the promptbooks: these involve religious, moral, political and class-based issues. However, we can observe that, in our case, the censor was especially sensitive to texts which challenged moral or religious standards: for example, in the scene where Portia is decrying her wooers (Act 1) the following lines were deleted from both the second copy of the Lukács promptbook and from the one from Cluj: “I should be glad of his approach: if he have the condition of a saint and the complexion of a devil, I had rather he should shrive me than wive me” (1.2.128-130). Similarly, Portia’s fantasies and libertine remarks were also deleted from Act 3: “I have within my mind/A thousand raw tricks of these bragging Jacks,/Which

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I will practice” (3.4.76-77). Shylock’s reply to Bassanio’s lunch invitation was deleted from the first Lukács promptbook: “Yes to smell pork: to eat of the habitation which your prophet, the Nazarite, conjured the devil into” (1.3.33-35). Consequently, the second promptbook-copy doesn’t include it, while the promptbook from Cluj keeps it. And, although the Tóth version did include it, the lines were deleted in his script. In the first promptbook the censor also deleted from Antonio’s reply the part which refers to Jacob: “This was a venture, sir, that Jacob serv’d for;/A thing not on his power to bring to pass,/But sway’d and fashion’d by the hand of Heaven” (1.3.90-93). While the second promptbook had left out these lines, both the script from Cluj and the Tóth promptbook kept them in; however, they were crossed out, so we may assume that these lines were not uttered in either of the stagings. In Act 2, owing to moral and religious concerns, Gratiano’s promise to Bassanio was also removed. If I do not put on a sober habit, Talk with respect and swear but now and then, Wear prayer-books in my pocket, look demurely, Nay more, while grace is saying, hood mine eyes Thus with my hat, and sigh and say “amen”. Use all the observance of civility. (2.2.186-189)

These lines were deleted in both the clean copy of the Lukács translation and in the script from Cluj; the Tóth promptbook keeps it, however, and even gives an instruction according to which these lines should be given more emphasis by means of gestures. Launcelot’s farewell speech was also censored. The following lines were deleted in the first script: “If a Christian do not play the knave and get thee,/I am much deceived” (2.3.11-12). Consequently, neither the later Lukács script nor the one from Cluj kept it; we can find it only in the Tóth promptbook, although the lines were crossed out (so we may assume that these lines weren’t uttered on stage). With regard to class-based issues, a further deletion can be found in Act 2, where Bassanio’s remark about hiring Launcelot was censored: “If it be preferment/To leave a rich Jew’s service, to become/The follower of so poor a gentleman” (2.2.140-142). These lines must have been discarded because they touched upon the subordinate position of the lower social classes, which was considered a dangerous issue (Bachleitner 2011, 250). Thus, the remark is missing from the second or later script; the

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promptbook from Cluj included it (although it was crossed out);14 only the Tóth-promptbook kept it in. With regard to political allusions, we can quote Bassanio’s speech, his meditation on the problem of judging by appearances must have been rejected not only on religious and moral grounds, since questioning the law, religion and bravery was considered an act against the state. The other two scripts include only a few lines from this passage; these were deleted as well: The world is still deceived with ornament. In law, what plea so tainted and corrupt, But, being seasoned with a gracious voice, Obscures the show of evil? In religion, What damned error, but some sober brow Will bless it and approve it with a text, Hiding the grossness with fair ornament? There is no vice so simple but assumes Some mark of virtue on his outward parts: How many cowards, whose hearts are all as false As stairs of sand, wear yet upon their chins The beards of Hercules and frowning Mars; Who, inward search'd, have livers white as milk; And these assume but valour's excrement To render them redoubted! Look on beauty, And you shall see 'tis purchased by the weight. (3.2.73-89)

The Visual Dramaturgy The promptbooks refer only to the textual or verbal component of the theatrical representation; in what follows, I will deal with the visual dramaturgy of the Merchant of Venice performances. The subtitle of the adaptation by Lukács points to the deviation from Shakespeare’s text by stating: “adapted for the Hungarian stage”. This referred mainly to the specific techniques for staging drama. The Shakespeare production of the era may be characterized, on the one hand, by relatively good stage texts15 and, on the other, by scenery facilities inherited from the Reform Era and the limited importance of the director within the overall production. 14

In most cases the deleted lines from the first promptbook were not copied in the second promptbook; the copy from Cluj did keep several passages, however. 15 The language of the translation, however, received a fair amount of criticism in the following articles: Athenaeum 1842, I. 79; RegélĘ 1842, I. 22.

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The first directorial intervention was always to minimize changes in the set by regrouping and deleting certain scenes. Instead of set changes it was common practice for directors to insert short breaks by means of a change drape which signalled the shift between scenes. In the adaptation of Lukács we can see that the translator shortened the play, omitted and rearranged certain scenes and cut longer dialogues, so that the original fiveact play became a four-act one: Act 1 consisted of 6 scenes, Act 2 of 17 scenes, Act 3 of 6 scenes, and Acts 4 and 5 were joined together into 5 scenes. We may notice that Lukács translated neither the verse replies from Act 2 nor the songs from Act 3. The fact that there were more scenes than in Shakespeare’s English version is due to the fact that the appearance of each new character meant a new scene as well. Lukács changed even the initial order of the scenes, so that subsequent scenes could be performed without changing the sets. The following main changes were made: For example, the first scene from Act 2 was placed before Scene 7; accordingly, the two Belmont scenes with the Prince of Morocco were played successively, without being interrupted by the Venice scenes. Scene 8, in which Solanio and Salarino give their satirical portrayal of Shylock (“My daughter! O my ducats! O my daughter!”), was also left out. The third scene from Act 3 (where Shylock would hear nothing of mercy when meeting with Antonio and a jailer) was placed before Act 4. So the two scenes from Venice could be played successively without interrupting them with the scenes from Belmont. The scene where Launcelot teases Jessica about her Jewishness (3.5) was also left out. In spite of these omissions and regroupings, several set changes were needed because the Shakespearean drama-structure rested upon the alternation of scenes. In other words, the four intertwined subplots of the play with the use of alternating scenes was a dramaturgical device used to fill out the stage time of the notional three months elapsing between the signing of the bond and its forfeiture (Moulton 2005, 175-182). The scenery instruction in the Lukács promptbook indicated the following sceneries for Act I: “a street in Venice”, “an apartment in Portia’s house in Belmont”, “A public place in Venice, on the right side Shylock’s house, at the back and on the left side a line of houses”; accordingly, two set changes were required in the first act. The second act demanded four changes (“a street in Venice, on the right side Shylock’s house”, “Shylock’s apartment”, “a street in Venice”, “an apartment in Portia’s house in Belmont”, “a street in Venice, on the right side Shylock’s house”). The third act required two changes (“an apartment in Portia’s house in Belmont”, “a street in Venice”, “an apartment in Portia’s house

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in Belmont”). The fourth and last act took place in a single set (“Venice, a court of justice”). In the scenery instructions in the Lukács promptbook five room interiors are indicated: four times Portia’s chamber, once Shylock’s rooms. A public square in Venice features twice, the street with Shylock’s house, three times. The trial scene indicates an interior as well. However, to imagine how the production might have looked from the audience’s perspective, we shall refer to the sets and props used for the performances. A production lasting two and a half hours made use of hand-painted backdrops indicating the Venice scenery: a room interior for Portia and one for Shylock. In the case of the production from Cluj, the Inventory of Theatrical Property (1855)16 listed yellow room, blue room and red room backdrops, each on two sets of legs. We may conclude that two of these were used for the interior scenes. (As for the public square in Venice, the Town scene curtain with three sets of legs must have been used. For the trial scenery a classical salon scenery and its sets of legs may have been used.) The last leaf of the promptbook from Cluj lists the props being used: “a big book, silver waiter, 3 caskets, 4 leaves of paper, pen and ink, 2 tables, 6 chairs, a big sharp knife, pair of scales, cane, green tablecloth, bell, collar for gown, 3 little identical keys.” The 1853 Cluj production must have used similar props.17 The Book of Sets and Props (1850) of the National Hungarian Theatre from Pest indicated all the furniture used for both the 1850 and 1858 productions. For example, on 9 September 1850 the production of The Merchant was running with the following décor: Act I: Big carpet On the right: on a black Gothic table pens, books, a bell, near the table a sofa, a stool. On the left: Gothic table, near it an armchair

(The scenery of Portia’s room occupied the more richly equipped right side of the stage.)

16

See A Kolozsvári Országos Nemzeti Színház színpadi díszítményeinek és ahhoz tartozó kellékeknek jegyzéke [Inventory of the Theatrical Property of the Hungarian National Theatre of Cluj] 1855. 17 See A zsidó vagy velenczei kalmár... (Sz. 3673. Documentary Archives of the Hungarian State Theatre from Cluj.)

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Act II: On the right: black Gothic table, as in the act I. On the table books, pens and pencils, three keys, On the left table 3 caskets.

(For the scenery of Shylock’s room they only had to remove the keys and caskets and eventually change the backdrop and its sets of legs.) Act IV: In the middle: a big court table with black tablecloth, on the table pens, pencils, papers and files. At the middle of the table on a pulpit a gothic armchair. Near it on the right and left side twelve chairs. On the right: on a throne pulpit an arcmhair; Four men disguised as soldiers, Twelve foreign procession men.18

In the 1858 production the director, Tóth, did not change the scenery in essence. The Gothic style furniture was replaced by Viennese furniture, and as another exterior he added the Belmont Garden scenery (Act 3 Scene 5). Furthermore, he composed the court-scene more carefully.19 As can be seen, the stage directions did not put too much emphasis on the historicity of the set design. The costumes were more important in conveying the theatrical illusion, although historical accuracy was not that important in this regard either. As the theatre management could not afford new costumes for every new première, the productions were based on previous, mostly operatic productions.20 For instance, the costume of the Prince of Morocco had previously been Benza’s in the successful opera Les Huguenots by Meyerbeer, while Bassanio’s outfit came from both the play Ruy Blas by Hugo and Les Huguenots. As the productions required no uniforms for officers, ranking civil servants or priests, the sceneries posed no problems from the point of view of censorship. (On the playbills the soldiers from the Book of Props had been replaced with prison guards, though the prison guards could have aroused unpleasant allusions for some members of the audience.)

18

Bútorok és kellékek jegyzéke 1850-bĘl [List of Sets and Props from 1850]. (N.SZ. 805. Theatre History Collection, Hungarian National Széchényi Library.) 19 See Bútorok és kellékek 1850. 20 Drámai jelmez-utasítások (öltözködés jegyzĘkönyv 1850-53) [Book of Costumes]. (Ms. 789. Theatre History Collection, Hungarian National Széchényi Library.)

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Different Shylock-Actors (Fáncsy, Aldridge and Tóth) Most of the time, the newspapers from the era were not aware of the concrete censorial interventions that occurred during a theatrical performance; and, even if the journalists/theatre critics were aware, they could not write about them because of the similar censorship restrictions that applied to the press.21 The members of the audience who had read the plays previously could have nurtured certain expectations; thus, they must have noticed that the actors left out certain words and/or parts of the dialogues. This fact could have triggered feelings of complicity on their part. In my opinion, the reason for most censorial deletions in our case was that the ruling power was concerned not so much by the inherently subversive potential but by moral segments of the Shakespearean drama. If so, we can view censorial concerns as a continuation or legacy of the prerevolutionary era. However, on the other hand, according to the promptbooks, the censors barely touched upon Shylock’s role. In what follows, I will turn to perspectives opened up by the part of Shylock. Lajos Fáncsy (1809-1854) had been the first to play the role of Shylock. He was an actor, director and translator, and even the manager of the theatre for a short period (1849-1852). He took mainly the roles of villains. He had already played Shylock in the National Theatre in 1840,22 and had performed the role on many stages in historical Hungary. Theatre chronicles of the period had considered his Shylock performance as one of his key roles (Szigligeti 1870, 46). However, neither memoirs/recollections nor reviews provide very vivid accounts of his Shylock portrayal. Theatre reviews from the 1840s found his Shylock very characteristic and effective in many regards, and they noted especially his mimicry, gestures, and movements on the stage.23 Thanks to the report in Hetilap weekly, we have found a little more about his guest performance in Cluj (on 3 November 1853). The article in question refers to the fact that “Fáncsy attracted to the theatre the right segment of the population, and namely the thoughtful and enthusiastic youth who were able to value high arts”. We have many data on the fact that students were keen to frequent the theatre, and they were especially 21

On press censorship, see Sashegyi 1965; Buzinkay 1974, 269–293; Deák 2009, 57–59; Deák 2008, 394–397. 22 The première at the Hungarian National Theatre of Pest was on 27 November 1840, with Károly Megyery in the Shylock role. The première in Cluj was on 19 September, with Lajos Fáncsy in the role. 23 For his Shylock in the 5 November 1842 performance, see the following journals: RegélĘ, 1842, II. 1035; Athenaeum, 1842. II. 464.

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fond of Shakespeare’s works. According to the book-loan registers of the school and college libraries of the era, students from Cluj were familiar with the German translation of the play (by August W. Schlegel). The translation by Zsigmond Ács (1853) became widely read only in 1864, after it was published in the Shakspere minden munkái [Complete Works of Shakespeare] series.24 With regard to Fáncsy’s Shylock interpretation, the journal article from 5 November reported that “[he] reflected hatred, a passion which is so difficult to impersonate, with such realism that our blood froze” (Hetilap 1853, 68). Fáncsy, the first well-known Hungarian Shylock revamped the monotonous and easy-to-recognize villains of touring acting practice, so that through his virtuoso speech and movement techniques, and by adding psychological depth, he created passionate romantic characters and emphasized the mean, demonic aspects of Shylock. Hungarian public opinion welcomed Ira Aldridge as a real phenomenon on the stage. The famous native American actor, “the African Roscius”, approached Shylock’s character in an entirely new way. Theatre critics spoke in superlatives about his costumes,25 gestures and intonation.26 Hooknosed and almost bald, Ira Aldridge appeared on stage as a Shylock with a European (white) face. According to the article from the literary journal Szépirodalmi Lapok (10 April 1853), the Hungarian audience could visually sense the oppression of the Jews: As he wasn’t a common villain, but rather a determined, introverted and exasperated person, for whom we should feel a certain pity and commiseration, because it was not so much evil as over-excitation which led to his rigid hatred. His performance was so moving that the audience didn’t take pleasure in seeing the miserable situation of the convicted and mocked Jew, but instead silently watched the trial scene with a sad thoughtfulness.

Turning to the third Shylock actor, we have more sources at our disposal. Although József Tóth had played the role before Ira Aldridge

24

On the readers of Shakespeare’s plays from Cluj, see Bartha (2010, 29-59). However, the Drámai jelmez-utasítások [Book of Costumes] only indicated that he was wearing his own costumes, though Aldridge’s Shylock costume photo is quite informative in this respect. 26 See the articles in Szépirodalmi Lapok. 1853, April 3, 27; Szépirodalmi Lapok 1853, April 10, 29; Délibáb 1853, April 10, 15. Bernth Lindfors also gives very expressive and detailed accounts about Aldridge’s Shylock performances in the British Isles and St. Petersburg (Lindfors 2007, 180-190). 25

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came to Pest,27 the latter’s portrayal of Shylock must have exerted a great influence on the Hungarian actor.28 We can reconstruct his unitary roleinterpretation by reading not only criticism and reviews from the era,29 but also the actor’s own study about playing Shylock30 and the instructions which he inserted in his translated version.31 József Tóth broke with the stereotypical tradition of the devilish, usurious Jew, and created a character whose condition was rather that of a man deprived of human rights, and the representative of the oppressed Jewish population. However, Tóth didn’t idealize the character beyond the facts inherent in the play; instead, he wanted to show the psychological functioning of a character driven by misery, his hatred towards Christians, his love towards his daughter, and ultimately, by revenge. His Shylock in Act 4 was wearing “a long semi-oriental gown, a typical Jewish cap (kipa) in black velvet on his head, a damask shawl with roses was wrapped around his neck, a black knife sheath was attached to his belt” (Drámai jelmez f. 180). In the first two acts Tóth presented a moderate Shylock, who was not in a hateful frenzy, but rather spoke to Antonio in a complaining tone. According to an article from the magazine Hölgyfutár (20 October 1859), he portrayed repressed anger in a masterful way: “The outbreak of painful feelings draws a dark picture, in which hatred and revenge almost deprive him of his human features.” This is the reason his mourning gave a sentimental colour to the performance. Amongst his most successful scenes we can list his farewell to Jessica, his daughter, and also his dialogue with Tubal. His performance triggered compassion also because the opposing Christian characters, as instructed in the script, acted contemptuously and harshly towards him. Tóth brought humour to the scene, which gave a special flare to his cruelty and unscrupulousness. For example, in the trial scene he was looking for the word charity on the back of the bond. And in Act 4 he expressed the fever of unleashable revenge, 27 As a guest actor in the National Theatre, Tóth had played Shylock’s role already in 1847. After signing a contract with the theatre, he played Tubal to both Lajos Fáncsy’s Shylock (on 8 July 1852) and to Ira Aldridge’s Shylock (on 2 April 1853). 28 Tóth actually refers to this in his 30 December 1857 Magyar Sajtó article. 29 Pesti Napló, 1859 February 27, 47; Hölgyfutár 1859 October 20, 125; Vasárnapi Újság 1859 March 6, 10; Hölgyfutár 1859 March 1, 25; FĘvárosi Lapok 1865 November 27. 30 József, Tóth. Shylock a Velencei kalmárban [Shylock in The Merchant of Venice], 15 March 1854. (Ms. 53.211/VI.C., Hungarian Theatre Museum and Institute, Budapest.) 31 See his translation of the Merchant promptbook.

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where his facial expression, his voice and monologue must have had an astonishing effect on the audience.32

Conclusion The Merchant of Venice is different from the histories and tragedies of the canon in the sense that the theme of power and/or rule is less explicit. Instead of direct and simple allusions or references, the play’s potential— that is, for raising current social issues—lies in its inherent dramaturgy. The picture of Venice as an incredibly vibrant and problematic society served as a background for presenting the relationship between power and minorities, as well as the mechanism of oppression. Interpreting Shylock was crucial in these regards. Both Ira Aldridge and Tóth emphasized on stage the image of the oppressed Jew; besides drawing attention to his greed for money and revenge (which were the antipathetic and best-known features of Shylock), both actors presented him as a victim of legal and political manoeuvres, and in doing so, they managed to obtain commiseration from the audience. Through Shylock’s suffering and deprivation of all his material values, the social position and limited rights of the Jews through history were made visible to the audience and thus for Hungarian society in the second half of the 19th century.33 Beyond theatre aesthetics, the representation of oppression and deprivation of human rights could find a further resonance in the fact that in the 1850s the Jews in Hungary were few in number, and so members of the Hungarian audience were more likely to see the vulnerable situation of the main character as resembling their own—as a nation at the disposal of the Austrian ruling powers. Moreover, the role of Portia in the trial scene offered a form of social resistance, since outwitting the Venetian justice and attaining her goal could be viewed as a model for defying the ruling Austrian power. 32 By looking closely at his description of portraying Shylock in his role-playing essay (Tóth 1854), we may conclude that the vocal effects of his Shylock were rich in paralanguage: slight grunts and laughter accompanied his words, his frequent use of paralinguistic techniques suggesting a more than common awareness of their artistic importance. 33 In this context, it is important to mention that an Imperial patent (government decree) that came in force in 1853 prohibited members of Israeli denominations from acquiring real estate and landed properties. The restriction lasted until 1860 (Deák 2008, 305). The Austrian government also enforced restrictions with regard to the autonomy of denominations.

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By looking at The Merchant performances of both theatres, we may conclude that, thanks to the guest performance of Ira Aldridge and the dedicated involvement of József Tóth (in terms of translation, acting and directing), the productions in Pest were more complex and diverse than those of the performances of the Hungarian National Theatre in Cluj. However, the narrative of the projected but unfulfilled guest performance of Aldridge in Cluj gains importance from the perspective of our inquiry as well. Although an article from the NĘvilág magazine (1 March 1858) informs us of a would-be contract between Boldizsár Láng, the director of the National Theatre in Cluj and Aldridge for several guest performances in the town, the Cluj public could not warm to the actor in any of his famous theatrical roles. Apart from the enthusiastic applause received in the theatre, Aldridge’s popularity as an artist amongst the Hungarian nobility and gentry manifested itself in different banquets given in his honour, the dedication of several poems and the presentation of a souvenir album. These, however, raised the interest of the chief of Police in Pest. Various documents and diplomatic correspondence are quite revealing as to the political reason for his expulsion from Hungary and the Empire. His harassment by the Austrian authorities indirectly made him a victim and hero of the Hungarian resistance.34 Although we have less information about the actual performances in Cluj at our disposal, the play’s success in the Transylvanian town was also recorded, something not unrelated to the fact that the censorship was more permissive in Cluj than in the Hungarian capital: according to the 5 November 1853 Hetilap article, the plea for the sovereign’s mercy was uttered only in the performance in Cluj; these words gained importance in the light of the retributions which followed the 1848-49 revolutionary events.

34 See the letter of complaint from Ira Aldridge to Sir George Hamilton Seymour, British ambassador to the Emperor of Austria (Aldridge to Seymour, 10 February 1859, Manuscript Collection, Hungarian National Széchényi Library) and the letter from Count Karl Ferdinand Buol-Schauenstein, Minister of Foreign Affairs, to Sir George Hamilton Seymour. (Buol to Seymour, 21 February 1858, Manuscript Collection, Hungarian National Széchényi Library). See also the research of László Hajdú Algernon concerning Ira Aldridge (Fond 21/9. Theatre History Collection, Hungarian National Széchényi Library, Budapest). Aldridge’s popularity with the Hungarian public is demonstrated also by the fact that he even became the hero of a biographical novel by ErnĘ Ligeti, a Hungarian writer of Jewish origin (Ligeti 1932).

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Portia’s famous speech on mercy must have been the most controversial for its explicit references to the sovereign’s power; in spite of censorial deletions, the following lines were uttered in Cluj: A fejedelmet trónja jobban ékesíti mint koronája, pálcája, a földi hatalomra a méltóság és fölség tulajdonira mutat, miben a királyok rettegése és félelme nyugszik. A kegyelem mégis több mint a fölségi hatalom, trónul a király szívét bírja, maga az istenség tulajdona az. S földi hatalom istenéhez hasonlít, ha kegyelem jogot Ħz. (4.4.) [“The quality of mercy is not strained [...]. It becomes/The throned monarch better than his crown./His scepter shows the force of temporal power,/The attribute to awe and majesty/Wherein doth sit the dread and fear of kings,/But mercy is above this sceptered sway./It is enthroned in the hearts of kings./It is an attribute to God himself./And earthly power doth then show likest God’s/When mercy seasons justice] (4.1.).

Works Cited Bachleitner, Norbert. 2011. “The Habsburg Monarchy”. In The Frightful Stage: Political Censorship of the Theater in Nineteenth-Century Europe, ed. Robert Justin Goldstein, 228–264. New York, Oxford: Berghahn books. Bartha, Katalin Ágnes. 2010. Shakespeare Erdélyben: XIX. századi magyar nyelvĦ recepció [Shakespeare in Transylvania: Hungarian Reception in 19th century]. Budapest: Argumentum. Bayer József. 1909. Shakespeare drámái hazánkban [Shakespeare’s Plays in our Country]. Budapest: Franklin-Társulat. Bútorok és kellékek jegyzéke 1850-bĘl [List of Sets and Props from 1850]. N.SZ.. 805. Theatre History Collection, Hungarian National Széchényi Library, Budapest. Buzinkay, Géza. 1974. “A magyar irodalom és sajtó irányítása a Bachkorszakban (1849–1860)” [The Supervision of Hungarian Literature and Press during the Bach-era]. Magyar Könyvszemle 3–4: 269–293. Deák, Ágnes. 2008. From Habsburg Neo-Absolutism to the Compromise 1849–1867, trans. Matthew Caples. New Jersey: Atlantic Research and Publications, Inc. Highland Lakes. —. 2009. Polgári átalakulás és neoabszolutizmus 1849–1867 [Bourgeois Transformation and Neo/Absolutism]. Budapest: Kossuth Kiadó. Drámai jelmez-utasítások (öltözködés jegyzĘkönyv 1850-53) [Book of Costumes]. Ms. 789. Theatre History Collection, Hungarian National Széchényi Library, Budapest.

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Ferenczi, Zoltán. 1897. A kolozsvári színészet és színház története [The History of Acting and Theatre from Kolozsvár]. Kolozsvár: Ajtai K. Albert. Gerold, László and Székely, György. 1990. “A nemzetiségek színjátszása.” [Theatre of the Nationalities] In Magyar Színháztörténet 1790–1873 [Hungarian Theatre History], ed. Ferenc Kerényi, 417–419. Budapest: Akadémiai Kiadó. Hajdú Algernon, László munkássága [Researches of Hajdú Algernon, László]. N. d. Fond 21/9. Theatre History Collection, Hungarian National Széchényi Library, Budapest. Höbelt, Lothar. 2000. “The Austrian Empire”. In The War for the Public Mind: Political Censorship in Nighteenth-Century Europe, ed. Robert Justin Goldstein, 211–238. Westport, Connecticut, London: Praeger. Hüttner, Johann. 1980. “Theater Censorship in Metternich’s Vienna.” Theatre Quarterly 37: 61–70. Kerényi, Ferenc. 2005. “Szólnom kisebbség, bĦn a hallgatás” (Az irodalmi élet néhány kérdése az abszolutizmus korában) [“To Speak Means to Be in Minority to Remain Silent Means Sin” (Some aspect of the Literary Life in the Age of Absolutism)]. Gyula: Békés Megyei Levéltár. A Kolozsvári Országos Nemzeti Színház színpadi díszítményeinek és ahhoz tartozó kellékeknek jegyzéke. [Inventory of the Theatrical Property of the Hungarian National Theatre of Cluj] 1855. Fond No. 313. Hungarian Theatre of Cluj, Act 33. National Archives of Cluj County, Cluj. Lám, Frigyes. 1926. “GyĘri adalékok a cenzúrához és Bánk bán történetéhez [Some data on censorship in GyĘr and on history of Bánk bán production].” Irodalomtörténeti Közlemények. 1: 87-101. Ligeti, ErnĘ. 1932. Az idegen csillag. Ira Aldridge regényes élete [The strange star: Novelised biography of Ira Aldridge]. Kolozsvár: Erdélyi Szépmíves Céh. Lindfors, Bernth. 2007. “Mislike me not for my complexion . . . Ira Aldridge in Whiteface.” In Ira Aldridge: The African Roscius, ed. Bernth Lindfors. New York: Rochester University Press. Magyarkoronaországot illetĘ országos törvény- és kormánylap [Governmental Official Issue Concerning Hungary] 1851. II. 28. Mályuszné Császár, Edit. 1985. Megbíráltak és bírálók: A cenzúrahivatal aktáiból (1780–1867) [Censored and Censors: From the files of Censorship Office]. Budapest: Gondolat. Márfi, Attila. 1993. Pécs szabad királyi város német és magyar színjátszásának levéltári forrásai a Baranya megyei Levéltárban,

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1849–1886 [Archival Sources for German and Hungarian Theatre of the Royal Free Town of Pécs in the Baranya County Archive] Budapest: Színháztörténeti könyvtár. Moulton, Richard G. 2005. “Shakespeare’s interweaving of Plots.” In The Merchant of Venice. Shakespeare: The Critical Tradition, eds. Baker William & Brian Vickers, 158-182. London, New York: Thoemmes. Nicolaescu, Mădălina. 2012. “Readings of the Question of Rights in the Merchant of Venice. A Romanian Perspective.” Gender Studies 11 (December): 26–34. Pukánszkyné Kádár, Jolán. ed., 1938. A Nemzeti Színház százéves története: Iratok a Nemzeti Színház történetéhez [Hundred Years of Natioanal Theatre History: Documents for the history of Natioanl Theatre]. Budapest: Magyar Történelmi Társulat. Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice, a Comedy. 1814. Revised by J. P. Kemble. London: Printed for John Miller. Sashegyi, Oszkár, 1965. Az abszolutizmuskori levéltár. [The Archive of the Era of Absolutism] Budapest: Akadémiai Kiadó Székely, György. 1990. “A színészet helyzete az önkényuralom idejében 1849–1861.” [The Place of Acting during the Time of Despotism] In Magyar Színháztörténet 1790–1873 [Hungarian Theatre History], ed. Ferenc Kerényi, 372-398. Budapest: Akadémiai Kiadó. Szigligeti, Ede. 1878. Magyar színészek életrajzai [Biographies of Hungarian Actors]. Budapest: Franklin-Társulat. Tóth József. Shylock a Velencei kalmárban [Shylock in The Merchant of Venice]. 1854. Ms. 53.211 / VI.C., Hungarian Theatre Museum and Institute, Budapest. A velenczei kalmár. Dráma. Négy felvonásban. Shakespeare után Magyar színre alkalmazá Lukács Lajos [The Merchant of Venice. Drama. In four acts. Adapted to Hungarian stage after Shakespeare by Lajos Lukács]. 1839. N.Sz. V.51. Theatre History Collection, Hungarian National Széchényi Library, Budapest. A velenczei kalmár. Dráma 4 felvonásban Shakespeare után magyar színre alkalmazta Lukács Lajos. [The Merchant of Venice. Drama. In four acts. Adapted to Hungarian stage after Shakespeare by Lajos Lukács]. 1839. N.Sz. V. 51 / 1. Theatre History Collection, Hungarian National Széchényi Library, Budapest Velenczei kalmár. Színjáték 5 felvonásban. Írta Shakespeare a londoni kir. Színház színre alkalmazása szerint fordította Tóth József [The Merchant of Venice. Play in 5 acts. Written by Shakespeare and translated by József Tóth]. 1855. N.Sz. V. 80, Theatre History Collection, Hungarian National Széchényi Library, Budapest.

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Vitéz Tibor. N. D. A német színjátszás Erdélyben. Ms 18. Theatre History Collection, Hungarian National Széchényi Library, Budapest. Yates, W. E. 1996. Theatre in Vienna: A critical history, 1776–1995. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. A zsidó vagy velenczei kalmár. Dráma 4 felv. Shakespeare után A.W. Schlegel; magyarra tette [The Jew or the Merchant of Venice. Drama in 4 acts. Adapted to Hungarian after Shakespeare by A. W. Schlegel. N.d. Sz. 3673. Documentary Archives of the Hungarian State Theatre from Cluj.

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Appendix

Fig. 4-1: The playbill for The Merchant of Venice in Cluj, 3 November 1853. (By permission of the Theatre History Collection, Hungarian National Széchényi Library.)

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Fig. 4-2: The playbill for The Merchant of Venice in Pest, 12 February 1858. (By permission of the Theatre History Collection, Hungarian National Széchényi Library.)

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Fig. 4-3: The playbill for The Merchant of Venice in Pest, 25 February 1859 (By permission of the Theatre History Collection, Hungarian National Széchényi Library)

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Fig. 4-4: List of sets and props used in the 1850 and 1858 Merchant productions, National Theatre, Pest (page 95). (By permission of the Theatre History Collection, Hungarian National Széchényi Library.)

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Fig. 4-5: List of sets and props with two sketches of the Court of Justice scenery used in the 1850 and 1858 Merchant productions, National Theatre, Pest (page 96). (By permission of the Theatre History Collection, Hungarian National Széchényi Library.)

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Fig. 4-7: József Tóth

Fig. 4-8: Photograph of Ira Aldridge as Shylock. (By permission of the Charles Deering McCormick Library of Special Collections, Northwestern University Library.)

CHAPTER FIVE CROSSING THE RUBICON IN FASCIST ITALY: MUSSOLINI AND THEATRICAL CAESARISM FROM SHAKESPEARE’S JULIUS CAESAR MICHELE DE BENEDICTIS

CASSIUS And why should Caesar be a tyrant then? Poor man, I know he would not be a wolf But that he sees the Romans are but sheep. He were no lion were not Romans hinds. (Julius Caesar, 1.3.103-106)

In his speech marking the 50th anniversary of the Italian Society of Editors held in Rome at the Argentina Theatre on 28 April 1933, Benito Mussolini personally outlined the reasons for the recent crisis of theatrical productions in Italy and tried to provide the means to react through a new dramatic policy, directly inspired by a fascist ideology and sustained by the state intelligentsia. As the Duce declared, Italian stages would have to appeal directly to the masses, stirring collective passions and working as a public instrument for education, in reaction to the declared enemies of patriotic theatre—namely, the love triangulations of domestic or naturalistic drama, here perceived as a shallow by-product of bourgeois and democratically-aligned societies. Mussolini’s advice nevertheless went almost unheard by the majority of contemporary playwrights, who still preferred to adhere to the plain conservativism of their customary repertories, generally exempt from militant claims for ideology or agitprop overtones against a pre-constituted order.1 His words, however, mirrored the establishment purpose to promote an ideal form of populist theatre, committed to consolidating consensus for 1

See Cavallo (1996, 113-118).

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the current regime through a more demagogic and propagandistic approach to drama, thus re-conceived as a public occasion for the collective celebration of fascist rule and intrinsic virtues. The preliminary procedures and administrative directives consisted in framing a centralized system of control: new offices for censorship and ideological supervision of theatrical productions were appointed by the fascist Government as the Department of Theatre Inspection in 1935, later subsumed under the Ministry of Popular Culture in 1937. These official appendices to the state apparatus actually did not attempt to coerce a radical reform of traditional theatre productions through a pervasive network of artists and producers, since their specific contributions were restricted to unsystematic or semiprofessional initiatives sponsored by the Fascist Party throughout Italy. The itinerant performances offered by the Carri di Tespi and the promotion of Theatrical Saturdays fell within these amateur categories of occasional pastimes,2 purportedly targeting an average working-class audience, whose aversion to political commitment during entertainments normally gave no room to any form of dramatic experimentation. Amongst the artistic priorities of the Duce’s programme, an important place was reserved for the revival of classical theatre to be re-presented within the evocative framework offered by archeological sites and ruins, recently subjected to new restoration works. This cultural project was strengthened by the well-known appropriation of ancient Latin origins, instrumental to totalitarian fascism: the cult of Romanness (or Romanitas), together with the prestigious inheritance of the Roman Empire, for Mussolini constituted a key-point in the legitimation of his autarchic claim for the inborn ethical and cultural supremacy of Italian civilization. This proclaimed revival of Roman illustrious exemplarity implied a full endorsement of Mussolini’s ambition of imperialistic expansionism, in the light of past glories to be renewed. The newly-felt urgency for tragedy was another aspect that well matched this conceptual escalation of heroic paradigms: tragedy, which Mussolini held as the highest form of art, second only to architecture, was progressively regarded by the Duce as the ultimate theatrical genre able to inflame the sense of fervent patriotism.3 In the name of the personality cult and strict discipline, tragic plays represented a suitable medium for inspiring the solemn rewriting of the national epos, urgently required to

2

The official organ appointed to coordinate these spectacles was the OND (Opera Nazionale Dopolavoro), operating from 1925 to manage the leisure time for salaried workers during the fascist Ventennio; see Griffiths (2009, 339, 343-345). 3 Mussolini’s words are reported by Borgese (1946, 203).

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support the fascist ideology and, accordingly, to counter the unheroic inertia of bourgeois drama.4 It is little wonder that the leading historical character proposed as symbolic “father of the nation” by this vogue of populist (if not quite scholarly)5 revisionism was Caius Julius Caesar, who concentrated within a single individual the ideal features of successful political leader, excellent warrior and learned philosopher, as Mussolini himself described the Roman consul in an interview with Emil Ludwig.6 These notions of Caesar’s historical figure—or rather his mythical persona—seemed to concur totally with the Duce’s propagandistic agenda, in stressing the sense of continuity with the past and the parallel urgency of a necessary dictator, fated to take power by force and popular acclamation, as Caesar himself succeeded in ruling legitimately over his country for the benefit of the Roman people, until his tragic sacrifice by republican daggers.7 Fascist oligarchs exploited this trend to propose the destiny of present Italy as a manifest rebirth or restaging of typically indigenous virtues, conforming to their most illustrious centuries-old lineage. Consistent with this perspective, through a twofold instance of devotional reverence and transhistorical continuity, Mussolini meant to expressively replicate Caesar’s victorious march on Rome, when he himself triumphantly entered the capital in October 1922 or, when soon after, he paid homage to the eminent consul at the Forum ruins, the site where the funeral pyre of Caesar was publicly celebrated in 44 BC.8 Unfortunately for the Duce’s personal penchant, no contemporary dramatist in Italy seemed really interested or qualified to write (and to put on stage) tragedies from such a standpoint, with the remarkable exception of Enrico Corradini’s Giulio Cesare (1902),9 still running in Italian 4 The aversion to bourgeois drama, and the complementary apotheosis of ideology through the pathos of tragedy, are discussed in Witt (2001, 22-23). 5 The historian Piero Treves was amongst the few scholars dissenting from this view. He remarked how current biographies of Julius Caesar had mystified historical events in the name of revolutionary propaganda and false psychologism; see Treves (1934, 129-133). 6 Ludwig (1950, 64). 7 See Dunnett (2006, 246-248) and Isenberg (2012, 83-85). 8 Mussolini ordered the erection of a statue to Caesar on Via dell’Impero and donated other statues of the Roman consul to Italian cities, such as Rimini or Torino. On the anniversary of the Ides of March public ceremonies were held to pay homage to these sculptures. See Dunnett (2006, 249). 9 Amongst the first critical contributions to Corradini’s play, Ireneo Sanesi admitted his own difficulty in reading a new tragedy of Caesar without thinking of

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theatres during the 1920s, but originally written before Mussolini’s rise to power and Corradini’s adhesion to the Fascist National Party. The authorial preface to the second edition of this play (1926) had insisted on the immanent relevance of Caesar’s immortal spirit, whose dramatic story for Corradini personifies the holy representation of the whole Italian ancestry, at present still reliant on his myth to nourish national heroism.10 Apart from Corradini, however, theatrical Caesarism during the fascist Ventennio (1922-1943) had to employ other channels to find a proper echo, and not necessarily native sources. Reflecting upon the Italian-born genius and primacy for civilization in another lecture, at the Politeama Theatre (Trieste, 20 September 1920), Mussolini admitted that the “modern spirit” of the contemporary epoch was neither a chauvinistic franchise of Italy nor immune to foreign masterpieces, given the natural inclination towards beauty and truth in the Peninsula. For this reason, he recalled how no modern man could possibly exclude Shakespeare—together with Cervantes or Goethe—from his readings, implying indisputably his own sincere admiration for the Bard’s eternal canon, which had to be included amongst the choicest contributions to human universal knowledge, besides being one of his favourite resources for finding analogies with present socio-historical concerns. Not coincidentally, for more than a decade of fascist hegemony, Shakespeare’s tragedy Julius Caesar was imposed by the Ministry of Education as a set text in middle schools (1921-34), a modern propagandistic instrument for refashioning the cult of Roman supremacy through its Shakespearean rendering, suitably adapted to underscore a parallel selfeulogy of Mussolini’s totalitarian politics. These manipulations of Shakespeare’s content allowed only a careful selection of excerpts considered functional to the schools’ educational aims, with the ensuing suppression of those passages alluding to Caesar’s ambiguities or weaknesses. At the roots of this phenomenon, an unprecedented proliferation of translations of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar took place in Italy between 1920 and 1930,11 strictly connected with the play’s critical fortune in prefaces and other scholarly essays, often in the light of a self-endorsing exaltation of fascist Shakespeare’s version, though he eulogized the epic appeal of Corradini’s work which did not focus purely on Caesar’s last days but privileged his whole life, from the Rubicon onward; see Sanesi (1903, 104-118). 10 Corradini (1926, 9-10); see also Occhini (1926, 446-449). 11 The peak was reached in the biennium 1924-25 with more than thirteen editions. The overall sum for the fascist Ventennio was about forty different editions; see Isenberg (2012, 85-87).

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allegiance to despotism. These contributions tended to revise, by means of parallelism, the main issues of Shakespeare’s tragedy, by focusing on the irresistible rise of Caesar’s majestic figure, to the detriment of Brutus and the other republican conspirators. The latter were openly denounced for being foul idealists or criminals, ungratefully blinded by their own abstract conception of democracy, and finally branded with the infamous label of traitors to their country. Quoting the words of two contemporary scholars, Carlo Formichi or Alessandro Muccioli,12 for Shakespeare the Roman nation is the high-point of human history, above all during those periods of crisis that providentially concentrated power in the hands of a single ruler, the moderate monarch, whose noble purposes had been severely hindered by ambitious humanists or false prophets, acting for the deceitful cause of due tyrannicide. Through the greatness of his blank verse, Shakespeare himself was thus reconceived as an apparent devotee of the permanent genius of Caesarism,13 a political model still necessary and influential for its historical pre-eminence. These deviant misconstructions of Shakespeare’s text went so far as to brand the Bard’s personal attitude as wisely anti-democratic and absolutist, given his negative portrayal of the brutality of the riotous crowd, or his discovery in Caesar’s tragedy of the almighty conflict amongst titanic heroes, finally asserting the usefulness and inevitability of an authoritarian government capable of guaranteeing a peaceful form of order and sway, logically led by a single ruler—i.e., the legitimate autocrat—beyond his theatrical demise at the beginning of the third act.14 The only noteworthy exception to these analyses during the fascist era was Benedetto Croce’s interpretation of the problematic complexity arising from the play, evidenced by Brutus’s unresolved doubts over the search for liberty from Caesar’s dictatorial yoke, with his deeper reflection on the management of violence and the populist consensus.15

12

Both cited, with other examples, in Sestito (1978, 120-121, 125-126) and Bassi (2011, 207-208). 13 This biased re-conceptualization of Shakespeare was amongst the main arguments in Piero Rebora’s essay “Shakespeare e il Cesarismo” (1936), cited in Bassi (2011, 208-210). 14 In his edition of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar Aldo Ricci challenged this vision and affirmed that the real protagonist was not the title role—a mean and frail man—but the spirit of Caesarism, involved in a dramatic conflict, where Brutus had only a marginal function, and finally triumphing over its eternal antagonist, i.e. the spirit of republicanism; see Shakespeare (1946, xiii-xx). 15 See Sestito (1978, 115-116).

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The critical success of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar is, however, all the more striking during the fascist Ventennio if we consider its scant theatre history, suggesting a sort of intestine scission between the authority of textual approval and the play’s suitability for the contemporary stage: the murder of a totalitarian ruler in any case remained a delicate theme to be properly represented in this period, without incurring restrictions or arousing suspicion. In contrast to the omnipresence of plays such as Hamlet or Romeo and Juliet, only a single performance in 1935 broke the embarrassment of the play’s absence from Italian theatres since the 1910s,16 mainly because Julius Caesar remained a mere textual support, a “mirror” for twentiethcentury despotic governors, to be exhibited as pragmatic proof of tragedy’s political erudition, as when Mussolini took a copy of it to his interview with Emil Ludwig, claiming that “this book is a great school for rulers”.17 When Mussolini added that he tended not to consider Caesar an absolute model but rather a genuine patrimony of Italian-born virtues, he purposely did not try to distinguish between the historical consul and Shakespeare’s tragic character, but explicitly stated that both of them had often been prisoners of their rhetorical diction and slogans.18 The sumptuous 1935 production of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar was directed by Nando Tamberlani and staged at the Basilica of Massenzio in Rome. By evoking the glorious (and recently revitalized) splendour of ancient Rome through the pomp of visual stagecraft and costumed players for mass scenes, this outdoor performance profited from the monumental spectacle offered by the close sight of the real Coliseum and Capitol as archeological setting for the show. Predictably, reviewers hailed the performance with widespread enthusiasm and honoured the play mainly for the idealized heroism of 16 The last representation of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar in Italy dated back to Eduardo Boutet and Ferruccio Garavaglia’s production in 1905, already engaged in mimicking the monumentality of ancient ruins, but with scant popular success. See Tempera (2004, 334-335) and also Sestito (1978, 111-112, 117). 17 Actually Ludwig asked Mussolini whether the Duce would have smiled at, or studied as political subtext, any contemporary performance of Julius Caesar or Coriolanus. Mussolini’s first answer consisted in taking a French translation of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, with the above-mentioned considerations; see Ludwig (1950, 190-191). 18 To confirm the utter unreliability of Mussolini’s (apocryphal?) diaries, allegedly “found” in 2007 by the Italian senator Marcello Dell’Utri, on 10 March 1935 the Duce wrote that Shakespeare’s Caesar was only a fictional character, whose remissive fatalism, combined with his indifferent laissez-faire attitude, condemned him to an unavoidably tragic end; see Mussolini (2012, 139).

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Caesar, whose deadly sacrifice should not prevent his spirit from infusing renewed force into Roman hearts and, consequently, into their worthy twentieth-century descendants. For militant and nationalistic critics, the immanent influence of Caesar’s ghost, by heavily conditioning the failure of Brutus’s ethical and political agency, provided further evidence for discrediting every previous interpretation of the play which had privileged the cause of the republican faction, as in the modern readings by Victor Hugo and Giuseppe Mazzini, here overtly challenged.19 Although this approach pre-empted the possibility of any oblique content in Tamberlani’s production, Leopoldo Zurlo, the current Head of the Censorship Office, expressed his personal concerns over Brutus’s potential impact on the audience at the Basilica of Massenzio, still fearing a positive perception of his role in the play, which actually had already been curtailed in the overall number of speeches and meditative monologues.20 More cautiously, the scene of Caesar’s assassination was deliberately unadorned and faded into the background so as not to emphasize the topic of tyrannicide during the years of despotic rule, confirming how, even if combined with Mussolini’s radical fascination for Shakespeare’s play, the tragedy of Julius Caesar was still subject to particular pressures and might have been perceived as potentially dangerous, or at least compromising, once staged in the fascist era. The death of an honourable dictator, though redeemed by his faithful followers, constituted a delicate issue to be enacted before a popular audience at a time of domestic supremacy and international conflicts. By 1936, all English plays were actually boycotted from Italian theatres,21 in line with recent prohibition norms against theatrical works from blacklisted countries: only Shakespeare and Shaw were exempt from this dramatic embargo, the former for his universal appeal and the latter for his alleged fascist sympathies, though the Inspectorate did opt for a precautionary act in suppressing every production of Shakespeare’s Julius

19

See Bassi (2011, 211-212). An anonymous reviewer in 1935 exalted the spiritual force (and victory) of Caesar’s immanent ghost in demystifying Brutus’s abstract and unhistorical moralism; see Anon (1935, 3). 20 Isenberg (2012, 94-96). The theatre critic Ermanno Contini also lamented an excessive resemblance of the actor playing Caesar, rather fat and unathleticlooking, to the Duce himself. 21 Following the invasion of Ethiopia by Italian troops in 1935, the diplomatic relationships between Italy and the United Kingdom collapsed; see Scarpellini (1989, 187-188) and Isenberg (2012, 96-98).

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Caesar—an exception within the exception.22 Tamberlani’s single production thus remained the only performance of Julius Caesar in Italy before the Post-War Republic,23 while Shakespeare’s set text was definitively banned from schools in 1936 as well, when the adhesion to fascist nationalism had begun to evince an evident contiguity with despotic Caesarism and belligerent tyranny. In order to exorcise Caesar’s historical (and theatrical) death by republican daggers, Mussolini had to resort to other meaningful forms of representation of the Roman consul he had explicitly confessed to love, and whose emblematic death he judged a catastrophe for mankind, second only to Christ’s godly sacrifice for the sake of Christianity.24 When Emil Ludwig saw with his own eyes in Rome a Caesar-like Mussolini on the balcony of the Piazza Venezia acclaimed by a gathering of auditors, he could not help but associate the Duce with a theatrical father-figure for his nation, a careful dramatist who personally treads the boards in rehearsing his visionary script for a company of loyal fellowplayers.25 On another occasion, Ludwig directly asked Mussolini about the intimate correlation between man of state and dramatic poet: the Duce answered that the latter was able to be a sensitive prophet in modern times, but not sufficiently so to predict the outcomes of his forecasts, as he who heralds the storm but knows neither where it is coming from nor where it is heading26—an oblique reference to Shakespeare’s Caesar’s encounter with the soothsayer and his interpretation of unnatural presages in Act 2 Scene 2. This analogy was symptomatic of further echoes and indirect developments: in 1934 the drama critic Silvio D’Amico provocatively observed that authentic mass theatre was exactly the spectacle enacted under Mussolini’s balcony in the guise of poet-director, the outstanding histrionic leader who interprets the climate of modern times and communicates 22

Another partial exception was Shaw’s Caesar and Cleopatra, whose performance was significantly hindered by the fascist authorities for Caesar’s (Mussolini-like) baldness and the dramatic focus on his most intimate frailties; see Dunnett (2006, 252). 23 After World War Two all Italian productions of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar privileged an antinaturalist and apolitical approach to the subject, obliterating every instance of monumentality, ancient glories, fascist iconology, mass disorders or unmasking of the regime. In this respect, Giorgio Strehler’s Brechtian Julius Caesar (Milan, 1953) was exemplary for avoiding any parallel with recent forms of despotism; see Sestito (1978, 129-130, 125) and Tempera (2004, 337). 24 Ludwig (1950, 63-64). 25 Ludwig (1950, 116-117). 26 Ludwig (1950, 185-186).

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theatrically with the multitude, leading his own nation towards new epic campaigns in a consciously dramatic manner.27 Mussolini’s inclination towards theatrical writings was not just circumscribed to a simple metaphorical plan. Like the historical Julius Caesar, the Duce ambitiously cultivated from his youth a semiprofessional taste for narrative fiction and drama and personally used to draft a series of plots according to his current literary inclinations or growing political vocation. When the times for populist theatre in Italy were deemed mature enough to support a more regime-inspired type of drama—a direct emanation from the summit of the fascist cultural apparatus—, Mussolini decided to debut as a dramatist within a public milieu. His artistic interventions as author, however, were not completely unmediated. In the decade between 1928 and 1939 Mussolini submitted a trilogy of dramatic sketches—above all, indicating thematic priorities and essential guidelines for the plot structure—to the prolific Giovacchino Forzano, a professional playwright already engaged in writing operatic librettos and unpretentious prose scripts for popular theatre during the fascist Ventennio; his works flexibly ranged from spectacular historical subjects to sentimental comedy.28 The populist conservatism of Forzano’s works, together with his corresponding ascendency in the mass consensus, was gradually associated with the main orientation of fascist propaganda. Thus, throughout the 1930s, Forzano was implicitly identified in Italy as the chief (and solitary) embodiment of totalitarian policy in dramatic entertainments, mostly by conforming to state directives for the theatre, but also through his personal adhesion to official theatrical initiatives such as Carri di Tespi or the Theatrical Sundays.29 Forzano’s ensuing friendship with Mussolini gave life to an artistic partnership aimed at transposing Mussolini’s dramatic efforts from embryonic drafts into accomplished plays for the theatre.30 Thanks to his artisanal expertise in 27

Cited in Witt (2001, 29). Borgese was more caustic in his comparisons, and labelled Mussolini a contemporary classic for the theatre of the dumb masses, whose spectators resembled a loathsome parliamentary assembly; see Borgese (1950, 203). 28 A deeply documented and critically exhaustive analysis of Forzano’s works is featured in Griffiths (2000). See also Fontanelli (1978, 43-45). 29 For Forzano’s adhesion to fascist ideology in his pieces, see Angelini (1993, 6567). 30 Actually, Mussolini’s first (virtual) contact with Forzano was anything but friendly. In 1910, when he was still part of the Italian Socialist Party, Mussolini denounced Forzano’s satirical revue Monopoleone for its mockery of socialist affiliates and unofficially asked the author “for satisfaction”—i.e., challenged Forzano to a manly duel. The violent quarrel was eventually averted by the

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stage business, Forzano was officially enrolled as co-author for Mussolini’s project, to which he contributed by developing the Duce’s hints, polishing his inaccuracies, refining his dialogues and eventually organizing the overall production of these plays: Forzano became the pragmatic executor of Mussolini’s virtual intuitions for the contemporary stage.31 The main focus of Mussolini and Forzano’s dramatic trilogy fell on the greatness of three exceptional figures in European history, condemned to incomprehension and betrayal by their vile inferiors.32 The first outcome of this joint work is illustrative of the historical and didactic perspective underlying this self-celebratory series: Campo di Maggio—premiering at Rome in December 1930—dramatized Napoleon’s exploits in 1815 after his return from imprisonment on Elba, the so-called “Hundred Days”, culminating in the Battle of Waterloo and his subsequent exile.33 The protagonist is here ideologically presented as the superior and solitary hero doomed to a tragic downfall, whose greatness, which would stretch beyond his lifetime, had not yet been appreciated by his short-sighted contemporaries. Napoleon, the leading genius, the beloved dictator who can interpret and galvanize the humour of the crowd, has thus in this play to resign his imperial dream, hindered as it is by the treacherous pose of his pseudo-democratic and corrupt deputies who, instead of struggling for imperial prosperity, defend only their own menial interests.34 The play was successfully staged on an international tour which took it to Rome, Berlin, Paris, Vienna, London and New York. Only in countries other than Italy did Mussolini authorize his own name to appear alongside Forzano’s on the playbills as declared co-author: evidently, the propagandistic fashioning of the Duce’s image as appealing thinker and heroic ruler was more important abroad than at home, for the lustre of Italy’s reputation on a wider scale.35 mediation of some mutual friends; see Lucignani (1990, 20-21) and Forzano (1954, vi-vii). 31 See Verdone (1996, 135-136). 32 See Scarpellini (1989, 265-266). 33 Forzano included in his preface a few interesting anecdotes on his collaboration with Mussolini for Campo di Maggio; see Forzano (1954, xxii-xxix). 34 For the historical and heroic slant of Campo di Maggio, see Angelini (1993, 6768) and Fontanelli (1978, 46-47). 35 An Austrian critic hailed the theatrical impact of Mussolini and Forzano’s Campo di Maggio in Vienna by comparing Mussolini (the dramatist) with Julius Caesar through the famous Latin sentence “Veni. Vidi. Vici” (“I came. I saw. I conquered”), attributed by historians to Caesar himself. By contrast, in Paris many anti-fascist intellectuals and political émigrés reacted against the French version of this tragedy—Les cent jours, directed by Firmin Gémier and translated by André

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The second theatrical fruit of Mussolini’s partnership with Forzano was entitled Villafranca (1932), a partisan portrayal of Cavour’s problematic diplomacy after the Second War of Independence and the ensuing armistice with the Austrian Empire in 1859. The tragedy Cesare (1939) was the third and last episode of this (pseudo-)historical trilogy. The theatrical production received huge government funding and a high degree of consideration from the state apparatus for its crucial importance; only the outbreak of the Second World War prevented completion of the international tour and the ensuing movie, already planned with German producers. 36 The first two acts of Cesare constitute a kind of prologue or rudimentary dramatization of the historical events preceding Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar. From Caesar’s fatal resolution to cross the Rubicon on his advance towards Rome to his expedition to Egypt to settle the knotty question of Cleopatra’s succession to the throne, the spectator is absorbed by the irresistible rise to power of this warlike leader who fought for peace and Roman magnificence, condensing within himself all the authority of the State as a totalitarian despot, beloved by his true countrymen and feared by his disloyal enemies. Caesar’s jealous opponents, such as Brutus and Cicero—the first a notorious usurer, the second indebted to Caesar himself—are here used to dishonestly depict the consul as a traitor to his country, charging him with political nepotism and counterfeit victories in Gaul.37 Once transposed to a contemporary context, this simplifying militant hagiography of the Roman consul seems to comply perfectly with Mussolini’s self-gratifying attempt to legitimize his totalitarian dictatorship through a celebratory correlation between his huge historical ego and Caesar’s epic deeds.38 Caesar’s main supporters are common people and slaves, the trusting feminine masses,39 who devoutly commit their humble fidelity to the charming leader. Moreover, in order to enhance his populist Mauprey—, fearing an ideological penetration of the Duce into “all realms of the spirit”; see Pedullà (1994, 254-260). 36 The film versions of Campo di Maggio and Villafranca were produced and issued instead. Cesare premiered in Italy in April 1939 (Rome, Theatre Argentina), with the presence of Mussolini and all the Fascist Party leaders, but the international tour was interrupted after Berlin and Budapest; see Lodovici (1939, 200-201) and Angelini (1993, 69-70). 37 See Pedullà (1994, 215-216). 38 Nancy Isenberg appropriately describes Mussolini and Forzano’s Caesar as the embodiment of the imperial dream against decadence and inaction, as “the man of destiny”; see Isenberg (2011, 98-99). 39 Mussolini himself declared that the masses “are always feminine”, because they love to be awed by the virile strength of the leading man; see Ludwig (1950, 64).

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appeal, the play does not fail to highlight an explicitly exalted parallel between imperial Caesarism and Mussolini’s recent colonial campaigns in Africa or his land drainage schemes.40 The text obviously did not disregard the more humane side of Caesar’s illuminated personality at times of war and political conflict: he is thus also portrayed on stage as a benevolent arbiter, piously merciful to his foes and with a natural talent for poetry and drama, still writing an original adaptation of Oedipus and planning a new amphitheatre for the city of Ravenna.41 To avoid any inopportune analogies, the censor Leopoldo Zurlo suppressed from the text the shedding of Caesar’s tears over the severed head of Pompey, his greatest rival, together with Potino’s remark on Caesar’s hypocritical nonchalance in mourning a dead enemy: the assassination of Giacomo Matteotti—the socialist activist who denounced Mussolini’s electoral frauds and was killed by fascist action squads—was not so distant in time as to exclude further reverberations.42 The third (and last) act overlaps with the events displayed in Shakespeare’s tragedy and closes with Caesar’s death on the Ides of March. What Forzano and Mussolini tried to point out in this section is how, according to their biased and unambiguous theatrical revision of Shakespeare’s more complex historical perspective, the real revolutionary hero in the piece is Caesar himself, the absorbing subject of despotic power, necessarily summoned by the urgencies of history and acclaimed by his devotees.43 In the field-tents at Pharsalus (2.1) Caesar had already— to no avail—warned an unsure and solitary Brutus about the dangers of delaying the fatal renewal of the Roman state, attempting to instill the need to shake off Uncle Cato’s obsolete republican influence on Brutus’s 40

See also Fontanelli (1978, 50-51). In Act 2 Scene 4 Caesar characterizes his life as half-way between Sophocles’ Antigone and a grotesquerie from Aristophanes. The complete text of Cesare features in Forzano (1954, 330-506). 42 In his polemical deconstruction of Mussolini’s myth, George Seldes—the Italy correspondent for the Chicago Tribune—overtly associated Matteotti with a fascist era sacrificial Brutus, condemning the realpolitik of Mussolini’s Caesarism as a tyrannical by-product of Machiavelli’s cynical policy; see Seldes (1935, 176, 182) and Dunnett (2006, 259-260). 43 According to Forzano’s words in his epistolary exchanges with the Duce, the historical period in which they lived was the fittest for understanding the genius of Julius Caesar (“this Latin God”), a genius that Shakespeare never did comprehend completely because he was conditioned by a typically Lutheran aversion to state institutions and by an infatuation for Brutus; see De Felice (1974, 31-32). The reserved files containing Forzano’s correspondence with Mussolini were inspected and photographed by Allied intelligence in the 1940s. 41

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malleable youth and to find a new paternal authority in Caesar himself, the legitimate leader who operates for peace amongst the factions, not out of tyrannical oppression. The contextual apology for a fascist political agenda and personality cult is apparent in these terms.44 Hence it is Caesar who rebels against the unjust and outdated laws of false democracy to pave the way for a more modern empire; it is Caesar, supported by the lower classes, who discredits and overthrows the oligarchic and falsely representative system embodied by the democratic faction; it is Caesar who openly denounces the dissolute Republic, a conservatively elitist government which still persists in managing power only to split individual interests, while thriving through corruption, intrigue or legal quibbles.45 In any case, even this colossal Caesar, the champion of rightful dictatorship, has to surrender to a clan of ungrateful and parricidal conspirators. In this play the conjurers are portrayed as an alarmist gang of nostalgic idealists who recognize in Caesar an unbearable threat to the old regime: the meanness of their bravery is well rendered by their fearful whispers and their creeping along the walls, “like snails”.46 A disturbed Brutus, the intellectual specimen of this secret group, represents the plain antithesis to Caesar’s heroism, a confused adolescent who spends much of his time brooding, raving, stammering and eventually yearning for the heinous execution to take place as soon as possible in order to relieve his anguished conscience. To lessen the relevance of the conspirators’ dramatic agency, the murder of Caesar happens rigorously offstage, only to be reported as calamitous news to the Roman pioneers embarking hopefully on the conquest of new colonies. The tribune Metellus still encourages them to continue Caesar’s mission of civilization beyond his death, but not before arousing the mob against the bloodstained traitors, still entrapped in the Capitol.47 44

As further evidence of the historical unfaithfulness of Mussolini’s apocryphal diaries, on the night of the première of his Cesare (24 April 1939) the Duce wrote that this play did not contain any epic reference to present facts, and that the times for re-evoking modern “Caesars” had already passed; see Mussolini (2010, 228229). 45 Cesare, Act 2.1, in Forzano (1954, 362-364). 46 Cesare, Act 3.2, in Forzano (1954, 503-505). 47 For the closing credits of the Cesare movie, Mussolini personally added an ode dedicated to Julius Caesar, in which he exalted the glory of Caesar’s political charm and irresistible victories, to be tragically murdered in the name of falseness by those traitors whom the consul himself had pardoned but whom Dante had condemned to the frozen pits of hell for all eternity; see Forzano (1954, xxxvi-

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What motivated Forzano and Mussolini was, in this case, the firm need to suppress any potential inference in interpreting the ruler’s death as due tyrannicide: it was a delicate matter in those years of autarchic regimes and worldwide machinations to visually represent a brutal uprising against Caesar—the surrogate of authoritarian fascism—when the impact of this type of scenes on the spectators would hardly have been manageable even for the well-established self-confidence of dictatorial institutions. This authorial form of pre-emptive censorship, however, succeeded only in mortifying the tragic essence of the play, reduced to a mere series of barren episodes in which the play’s eponymous hero had been deprived of the slightest perception of his own tragedy, along the giddy path from triumph to downfall.48 Even Galeazzo Ciano, Mussolini’s son-in-law and Minister of Popular Culture in office, complained in his diaries about the theatrical flaws of Forzano’s Cesare and condemned it as counterproductive to fascist propaganda for being excessively adulatory.49 Despite these apparent shortcomings, the general approval by mainstream theatre critics and devotees to the regime left no space for any further disagreement. Contemporary reviewers like Renato Simoni supported without hesitation the importance of Cesare’s topicality in hailing the renewed religion of Italian heroism, strictly dependent on the outstanding leadership of a solitary ruler.50 Cesare Vico Lodovici ratified this ideal vision by underscoring the prominence of the historical continuity of the Italian myth, with its announcement of a bright future, but he also dismissively asserted that any theatrical paragon with Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar was irrelevant, because in Mussolini and Forzano’s Cesare there were only two key characters: the solemn hero and the multitude of civilians or fellow soldiers, subjected to the fascination radiating from their leader.51

xxxvii). For Dante’s and Machiavelli’s use of Julius Caesar across the centuries and its connection to Shakespeare’s, see also Chernaik (2011, 85-86). 48 See Witt (2001, 26-27). In the same years of Forzano’s Cesare, Gian Francesco Malipiero submitted to the Duce a copy of his own operatic version of Julius Caesar. This version was more faithful to Shakespeare’s text but excluded the assassination scene as well. The staging of Malipiero’s opera was postponed to increase the exposure of Forzano and Mussolini’s tragedy in Italian theatres; see Isenberg (2012, 96-98). 49 In Griffiths (2009, 346). 50 Simoni stated that the Italian people could sense in this dramatic Caesar “the magnanimous sadness of an amazing solitude and […] the outstanding contemporary relevance it contained” (cited in Fontanelli 1978, 53-54). 51 Lodovici (1939, 20-21).

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The popularity of Mussolini’s association with Julius Caesar was not limited to Italian soil and stretched to other European countries, though not always in earnest: in 1926 the German satirical magazine Simplicissimus had already featured a cartoon caricature of the Duce by Thomas Heine, portraying Mussolini’s conceited theatrical ego as a costumed martial Caesar with a clown’s nose.52 After the Nazi seizure of power, the high esteem for Shakespeare’s works did not decrease in Germany, and Julius Caesar was surely amongst the most successful plays performed in the territories of Third Reich. JiĜí Frejka and František Troster’s German language production in Prague (1936), for instance, emphasized the monumentality of contemporary governments through solemn art direction and the use of classical settings, epitomizing in the collapsing head of Caesar’s statue the ruinous fall of a totalitarian state.53 Jürgen Fehling’s version of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar (Berlin, 1941) put the empathetic consul at the centre of every event because of his charismatic greatness, and—nearly echoing Mussolini’s words on the same topic—went so far as to signal in Caesar’s death a crime of mythological proportions, with catastrophic consequences for the history of mankind.54 No restriction was applied by the authorities for the staging of Caesar’s stabbing, probably because for Nazi officers of surveillance of theatrical contents the death of a righteous dictator, once extracted from ancient history by Shakespeare’s verse, did not constitute an incentive to evoke, or concretely emulate, the advent of seditious tyrannicide in their own time. An intriguing anecdote reported by Bernhard Minetti, the actor playing Brutus in this production, seems to testify quite the opposite.55 Conversely, when Allied forces

52

More recently, Kathleen McCreery, mixing feminist comedy and political farce, produced a radical rewrite of the Taming of the Shrew entitled Mussolini: Kate’s Part in His Downfall, staged in 1987 and directed by Steve Woodward. The play is set in pre-war Italy where the journalist Petruchio—an explicit parody of the Duce—embodies the ambitious megalomaniac macho in search of power and sex through corruption and bribery. At the end of the play, like a contemporary Lysistrata, Kate announces on a radio broadcast her complete rebellion against her husband’s dictatorship, whether affective or political. 53 See Anderegg (2004, 298-299). 54 Fehling, the director, took care to specify that his production was neither proNazi nor dissident, favouring a cathartic spirituality over political content; see Hortmann (1998, 144-147). 55 Minetti reported that when SS officers burst into Claus von Stauffenberg’s refuge to arrest him—von Stauffenberg being one of the German Army officers at the head of “Operation Valkyrie”, the plot to assassinate Adolf Hitler in July 1944—an open copy of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar was found on his desk, in

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occupied Germany all plays with deeply nationalistic, anti-democratic, or fascist-like elements were banned from the stage: Shakespeare’s great tragedies survived this blacklist, but eventually in 1945 Julius Caesar and Coriolanus were officially proscribed for their alleged glorification of dictatorship, a reminiscence of the Third Reich. Meanwhile, reflecting on some recent performances of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, E. M. Forster could not avoid remarking on his difficulty in tracing any form of sympathy towards Caesar, as well as on the present tendency to associate his figure with the Italian Duce. Modern producers and directors, Forster adds, have been easily inspired to converting new representations of Shakespeare’s tragedy into a critical analysis of fascism.56 Symptomatic of this context, Orson Welles’s 1937 Julius Caesar, produced on Broadway by John Houseman and performed 157 times in a record run at the Mercury Theatre, did not fail to give resonance to the similarity of such political issues in the wake of the audience’s consciousness of contemporary totalitarian governments in Europe. Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar was skilfully dragged by Welles in the 20th century through an eccentric, rather provocative, revision of the original play, heavily conditioned by its renewed aim to explore the most recent echoes of the conflict between political despotism and the struggle for liberalism. Two fifths of the original Shakespearean text—above all the last two acts— were suppressed, some topical climaxes completely erased (such as the storm episode, Caesar’s ghost or the conscription lists), the majority of reflective monologues or ideological exchanges silenced and the whole military campaign ignored.57 The whole structure of the play thus revolved around the triangular relationship between a harsh Caesar, an underplayed Brutus and the mob, the hysterical beast innately prone to violence and to manipulation by histrionic rhetoricians like the late consul or his present successor Antony.58 which many speeches by Brutus had been underlined; see Hoenselaars (2013, 232234). 56 Forster introduced his article pointing to the intimate connection between Mussolini’s rhetorical dialectics and the lexicon used by Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar in the passage of the two lions (CAES. “Danger knows full well/That Caesar is more dangerous than he./We are two lions littered in one day,/And I the elder and more terrible” [Julius Caesar, 2.2. 44-47]); see Forster (1969, 60-64). The article was originally published in Forster’s collection Two Cheers for Democracy in 1951, but probably written in the mid-1940s. 57 See Ripley (1980, 224-229). 58 Quite unconventionally, Welles opted for preserving the scene (3.3) in which Cinna the Poet was killed by the brutal crowd, having been mistaken for the homonymous conjurer—the first to exult the death of tyranny after Caesar’s fatal

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The tragedy was properly subtitled Death of a Dictator, emphasizing the darker corollaries of ideological Caesarism, in which the hero, though worshipped by the masses, begins to be perceived as a serious threat to the balance of society, while the old conservative order claims its rigid primacy, questioned in periods of crisis. Stagecraft and design were subordinated to this flirtation with present tyrannical autocracies: a sense of stern discipline pervaded Welles’s modern fashioned Rome, more akin to a militarized police state, where Caesar and his aristocratic followers wore uniforms or black shirts typical of fascist hierarchies, and the leader was always greeted by the gesture of Roman salute.59 No figurative reference was allowed in props or scenery, which were unadorned and austere, to the monumental imagery of ancient empire, except for the prominence of mass scenes in which the noise and rumours of the crowd become the focus of dramatic attention. In this context, the essential bareness of brick walls and beams of light from the floor, in addition to the climactic musical burden of military marches, appeared a clear allusion to the Nazi rallies at Nuremberg in the 1930s.60 Welles accurately selected for Caesar’s part Joseph Holland, whose striking physiognomic resemblance to the real Mussolini, combined with a studied mimicry in postures and facial expressions, made it possible for all the spectators to contemplate the Duce’s doppelgänger before their eyes in New York. Holland’s arrogant Caesar incorporated a highly suggestive authoritarian demeanour, the hallmark of any self-controlled dictator, who rigidly rules over his country and over his own weaknesses as well. But when questioned about the real political leaning of this revival, Welles repeatedly denied this tragedy had any anti-fascist associations,61 being focused instead on the troubles of his unheroic Brutus—the role he himself played—, the impotent liberal alter-ego for the noble and bourgeois idealist who strives to resist dictatorship, without using the same arms (i.e., violence and demagogy), but who is caught up in a self-procured stabbing (3.1.78-79). Modern productions before Welles generally excluded this scene and tended to consider it comic relief. Thanks to a brilliant orchestration of murmurs, silences, shrieks and organ music, Welles’s version of this episode was successfully staged as a frightening instance of the (European?) police state, where the fierce mob can rule over its extemporary idea of justice, by complying with the dictatorial regime; see France (1975, 62-65). 59 A previous production in fascist military garb was performed a few months earlier at the Federal Theatre in Wilmington, Delaware. The title was Julius Caesar in Modern Clothes; see Smith (2008, 498-499). 60 For more details on scenery and costumes, see also France (1975, 55-59). 61 See Ripley (1980, 222-223, 230).

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spiral of atrocities that will finally overwhelm him too.62 Houseman was less reticent as to the play’s historical topicality and defined this rendering of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar as a melodramatic reference to contemporary history, when sophisticated democracies are fated to collapse beneath the blows of tyranny, and self-conflicting individuals can hardly find a solution which satisfies both moral duty and the desire for liberation, without resorting to violence. Prior to the theatrical production, press releases for the promotional campaign seemed to concur with Houseman’s vision and stirred, on the analogical grounds of historical recurrence, the spectators’ awareness and prejudicial anxieties about the present condition of totalitarian regimes.63 By exploiting movie-style newsreels and popular magazines, these press releases emphasized through Caesar’s tragic story the current shortcomings of strict liberalism and the plausible threats represented by present European dictatorships, where manipulative demagogues had proven capable of disinterring the myth of ancient autocracies and of seizing power with the credulous complicity of an overexcited crowd.64 The first critical responses to the unorthodox Mercury Julius Caesar tended to waver between open praise and punctilious polemicizing, although generally reviewers appreciated the topical appeal of this production, even if 62 A journalist defined the story of Welles’s Brutus as the tragedy of a liberal man in a fascist country, outwitted by the arch-demagogue Antony; see Anon (1937, 84-85). 63 One of these press releases, however, reported Welles’s intention to introduce Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar in middle schools, but merely as a form of entertainment, with the possibility of visiting the backstage of his production and publishing mock newspapers with headlines like “DICTATOR SLAIN, ROME REVOLTS!”. In 1938 CBS broadcasted a radio version of Welles’s Julius Caesar, conforming to the narrative style of reportage and the immediacy of breaking news; see Anderegg (2004, 297). 64 Housemann would repeat the post-war phantasms of European tyrannies to produce for MGM a film version of Julius Caesar, directed by Joseph Mankiewicz in 1953. Although the movie was set in ancient Rome, was more respectful of Shakespeare’s scenes and fashioned in a plain Hollywoodian style, it could not help but draw comparisons with Welles’s production; see Anderegg (2003, 89-90) and Chothia (2003, 116-122). Mankiewicz’s Julius Caesar was not initially perceived as a movie with political references to contemporary history, but after 1954, many artists and personnel working for MGM ended up on the blacklists of McCarthyism for their liberal and leftist sympathies: in this context of witchhunting, someone detected in the film implicit elements of domestic topicality, such as the anti-imperialist or anti-militarist propaganda; see Wyke (2004, 67-70) and Miller (2000, 95-100).

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they sensed Welles’s deliberately ambiguous perspective in declining to express a specific political alignment and the ensuing difficulty for theatergoers in establishing their own sympathies in this controversial scenario.65 From the columns of The New York Post John Mason Brown proved less doubtful about the matter and, drawing on Houseman’s metahistorical parallels, asserted that Welles’s version of Julius Caesar was a tragedy “of our times”, no longer belonging to Shakespeare but purportedly targeting the concerns of present history, especially given its anti-proletarian stance against the collective folly of mass consensus, a phenomenon at the founding roots of the most recent tyrannical regimes (cited in France 1975, 65). Not far from Broadway, in the same year as Welles’s Julius Caesar at the Mercury, the Italian refugee Giuseppe Antonio Borgese, a journalist and literary critic, wrote that the Italian people, not unlike Brutus, did not need to wait for external salvation to rid themselves of a fascist dictatorship but to find within themselves the resources necessary to defeat Mussolini’s autocratic supremacy. While “even Brutus was better than most Italians are today,” Borgese adds, “Caesar was a much greater man than their own tyrant is. Yet Caesar died, and tyranny lived on. For the seat of tyranny was not in the heart of Caesar; it was in the hearts of the Romans” (1946, 510-511). What was in Italian hearts after the fall of Mussolini is still difficult to establish consistently, but Forzano himself, in a retrospective appraisal of his theatrical collaborations (1954, xliii), did attempt partially to rehabilitate Mussolini’s figure after World War Two, according to his regretful words, a memorable leader widely misunderstood or forgotten despite the good done to his nation, yet easily recalled to be charged for the consequences of his crimes, such as the ill-fated alliance with Germany. For Mussolini’s specific case, Forzano cites the words of Shakespeare’s Antony before the bleeding corpse of Caesar, not neglectful of the macabre fil rouge connecting this scene with the theatrical exposure of the Duce’s remains on the balcony of the Piazzale Loreto, Milan: The evil that men do lives after them; The good is oft interred with their bones. (3.2.75-76) 65

The majority of conservative critics expressed their disapproval of Welles’s heavy excisions from Shakespeare’s original text. Only Stark Young from The New Republic was disappointed by the excessively modern implications of this Caesar, which “was not Shakespeare’s” but a play with a life of its own, dialoguing with present-day conceptions of dictatorship and revolution; see O’Connor (1980, 347-348).

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Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar continued to haunt Mussolini’s ideological frame of mind till the last days of his hectic life. Twenty days before his assassination, talking with the SS interpreter and diplomat Eugen Dollman, the Duce recalled with pleasure his participation in the Munich conference of 1938, “a gathering of Caesars”,66 and boasted about having shown his own polyglot skills in the presence of such eminent figures as Adolf Hitler or Neville Chamberlain. In his vivid account to Dolmann he did not miss the chance to quote whole passages in English from Shakespeare’s play, gesticulating with the verve of a passionate actor, enthusiastic about his tragically pre-assigned script. .

Works Cited Anderegg, Michael A. 2003. Cinematic Shakespeare. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield. —. 2004. “Orson Welles and After: Julius Caesar and Twentieth Century Totalitarianism”. In Julius Caesar: New Critical Essays, ed. Horst Zandler, 295-305. New York & London: Routledge. Angelini, Franca. 1993. “Populismo e cesarismo nel teatro di Giovacchino Forzano”. Ariel 2.3: 65-70. Anon. 1935. “Il Giulio Cesare di Shakespeare alla Basilica di Massenzio”. Il Giornale d’Italia. 3 August, 3. Anon. 1937. “New York Sees a Modern Julius Caesar”. Life. 22 November, 84-85. Bassi, Shaul. 2011. “Guglielmo and Benito: Shakespeare, Nation and Ethnicity in Fascist Italy”. In The Shakespearean International Yearbook: Vol. 11, eds. Graham Bradshaw, Tom Bishop, Alexander Huang & Jonathan Harris, 199-216. Aldershot: Ashgate. Borgese, Giuseppe A. 1946. Golia. Marcia del Fascismo. Milan: Mondadori (previously published in English, New York: Viking Press, 1937). Cavallo, Pietro. 1996. “Theatre Politics of the Mussolini Régime and their Influence on Fascist Drama”. In Fascism and Theatre: Comparative Studies on the Aesthetics and Politics of Performance in Europe, 19251945, ed. Günter Berghaus, 113-132. Providence, RI & Oxford: Berghahn Books. Chernaik, Warren. 2011. The Myth of Rome in Shakespeare and his Contemporaries. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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See Moseley (2004, 213).

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Chothia, Jean. 2003. “Julius Caesar in Interesting Times”. In Remaking Shakespeare: Performance across Media, Genres and Cultures, eds. Pascale Aebischer, Edward Esche & Nigel Wheale, 115-132. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Corradini, Enrico. 1926. Giulio Cesare. Dramma in tre atti. Milan: Mondadori. De Felice, Enzo. 1974. Mussolini. Il duce. Vol. I: Gli anni del consenso (1929-1936). Turin: Einaudi. Dunnett, Jane. 2006. “The Rhetoric of Romanità: Representation of Caesar in Fascist Theatre”. In Julius Caesar in Western Culture, ed. Maria Wyke, 244-265. Malden, MA: Blackwell. Fontanelli, Giorgio. 1978. “Mussolini drammaturgo”. Dimensioni: documenti, politica, cultura 3.7: 43-56. Forster, Edward Morgan. 1969. “Julius Caesar”. In Shakespeare: Julius Caesar: a Casebook, ed. Peter Ure, 60-64. London: Macmillan. Forzano, Giovacchino. 1954. Mussolini autore drammatico: Campo di Maggio, Villafranca, Cesare. Florence: Barbera. France, Richard. 1975. “Orson Welles’s Modern Dress Production of Julius Caesar”. Theatre Quarterly 5: 55-66. Griffiths, Clive E. 2000. The Theatrical Works of Giovacchino Forzano: Drama for Mussolini’s Italy. Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press. —. 2009. “Theatre under Fascism”. In A History of Italian Theatre, ed. Joseph Farrell & Paolo Puppa, 339-348. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hoenselaars, Ton. 2013. “’A Tongue in Every Wound of Caesar’: Performing Julius Caesar behind Barbed Wire during the Second World War”. In Shakespeare and Conflict: A European Perspective, eds. Carla Dente & Sara Soncini, 222-236. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Hortmann, Wilhelm. 1998. Shakespeare on the German Stage: Vol.2, The Twentieth Century, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Isenberg, Nancy. 2012. “’Caesar’s Word against the World’: Caesarism and the Discourse of Empire”. In Shakespeare and the Second World War: Memory, Culture, Identity, eds. Irena Makaryk & Marissa McHugh, 83-105. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Lodovici, Cesare V. 1939. “Cesare di Forzano”. Scenario 8.5: 200-201. Lucignani, Luciano. 1990. “Premiata ditta Mussolini & Forzano”. La Repubblica - Supplemento Mercurio. 15 December, 20-21. Ludwig, Emil. 1950. Colloqui con Mussolini. Milan: Mondadori. Miller, Anthony. 2000. “Julius Caesar in the Cold War: The HousemanMankiewicz Film”. Literature/Film Quarterly 28: 95-100.

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Mussolini, Benito(?). 2010-2012. I diari di Mussolini (veri o presunti), 4 Vols. Milano: Bompiani. Moseley, Ray. 2004. Mussolini: the Last 600 Days of Il Duce. Lanham, MD: Taylor Trade Publishing. Occhini, Pier Luigi. 1926. “Un dramma della stirpe: il Giulio Cesare di Enrico Corradini”. La Rassegna Italiana 18.93: 441-449. O’Connor, John S. 1980. “But Was It ‘Shakespeare’? Welles’s Macbeth and Julius Caesar”. Theatre Journal 32: 336-348. Pedullà, Gianfranco. 1994. Il teatro italiano nel tempo del fascismo. Bologna: Il Mulino. Ripley, John. 1980. Julius Caesar on stage in England and America, 15991973. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Sanesi, Ireneo. 1903. “Enrico Corradini: Giulio Cesare, dramma in cinque atti”. La Critica 1: 104-118. Scarpellini, Emanuela. 1989. L’organizzazione teatrale e politica del teatro nell’Italia fascista. Florence: La Nuova Italia. Seldes, George. 1935. Sawdust Caesar. The Untold Story of Mussolini and Fascism. New York: Harper & Brothers. Sestito, Marisa. 1978. Julius Caesar in Italia (1726-1974). Bari: Adriatica. Shakespeare, William. 1946. Giulio Cesare, ed. & trans. Aldo Ricci. Florence: Sansoni. Smith, Matthew W. 2008. “Orson Welles”. In The Routledge Companion to Directors’ Shakespeare, ed. John R. Brown, 493-508. London: Routledge. Tempera, Mariangela. 2004. “Political Caesar: Julius Caesar on the Italian Stage”. In Julius Caesar: New Critical Essays, ed. Horst Zandler, 333343. London: Routledge. Treves, Piero. 1934. “Interpretazione di Giulio Cesare”. La cultura 13.9: 129-133. Verdone, Mario. 1996. “Mussolini’s ‘Theatre of Masses’”. In Fascism and Theatre: Comparative Studies on the Aesthetics and Politics of Performance in Europe, 1925-1945, ed. Günter Berghaus, 133-139. Providence, RI; Oxford: Berghahn Books. Witt, Mary Ann F. 2001. The Search for Modern Tragedy: Aesthetic Fascism in Italy and France. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Wyke, Maria. 2004 “Film Style and Fascism: Julius Caesar”. Film Studies 4: 58-74.

CHAPTER SIX FROM THE SNARES OF WATCHFUL TYRANNY TO POST-HUMAN DICTATORS: MACBETH UNDER THE PORTUGUESE DICTATORSHIP AND IN DEMOCRACY FRANCESCA RAYNER

While Portuguese performers have turned most often to A Midsummer Night’s Dream for its entertainment value, within the Shakespeare canon it is Macbeth which has most consistently attracted the attention of theatre practitioners keen to explore the shape and forms of their time. In a 1994 overview of Shakespearean performance in Portugal, the critic Carlos Porto (Porto 1994, 50) notes the diversity of representational approaches the play has inspired, from the highly experimental to the most orthodox of stagings and attributes the consistent return to the play to its accessibility. He suggests that “the approach to Shakespeare seems to be more obvious in the plays in which the political and family conflicts are more evident, the fictional portraits more legible and the situations of violence more visible—which is the case with Macbeth.” Porto’s implication is that the relative simplicity of the play’s varied conflicts have helped to make it a popular choice for performance, although this does not explain why the themes of political and family conflict or violence in particular continue to resonate for Portuguese practitioners and audiences. This chapter explores Porto’s intersection between diverse aesthetics and legible politics in five very different stagings of Macbeth, three under the Portuguese dictatorship (1926-74) and two from the post-revolutionary period. It focuses in particular on the representation of tyranny in these performances, with the broad time span of five very distinct decades enabling an analysis of the ways in which the play’s dramatic focus on tyrants and tyranny has been (re)cast in each of these decades as a result of changing relationships between structures of power, theatre aesthetics and

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theatre artists. What might appear at first glance to condition representations of tyranny most directly, in other words, the presence of mechanisms of censorship under the dictatorship and their dismantling after the revolution, gives way to a more complex picture where the explicit politicization of tyranny in Macbeth coincides with the period of major political unrest in the years just before the Revolution. Before this, representations of tyranny tended to be either more indirect or diluted by contexts of commemoration and celebration, while in the years following the Revolution, the focus on tyranny is relegated to an intercultural nonplace or exported to conflicts outside Portugal in globalized configurations of the political. As such, although there are significant differences between the years of the dictatorship and the democratic period in the performance of Shakespeare, any simplistic division between silence on the question of tyranny under the dictatorship and more explicit representation in the postrevolutionary period cannot be sustained. What can be maintained for both periods, however, is that when the opportunity for a critique of tyranny through the staging of Macbeth is taken, its impact on performers and audience alike is inevitably far-reaching.

Performing Macbeth under the Dictatorship The first question that arises in relation to performances of the play under the dictatorship is how Macbeth, which explicitly labels the central figure a tyrant, could have been performed comparatively frequently under a highly paranoid dictatorship like that of Salazar in Portugal. It might be argued that the regime simply failed to recognize itself in the political machinations of Macbeth, yet the very different fate of Julius Caesar, which was never approved for public performance throughout the dictatorship, suggests that the regime was not wholly unaware of the ways in which parallels might be drawn between Shakespearean figures and contemporary political leaders. While I accept Carlos Porto’s claim, therefore, that the easy legibility of the play’s conflicts helps to explain its popularity in performance, I would add that during the dictatorship, a certain degree of ambiguity was equally significant in determining its consistent appropriation. It enabled, for instance, both regime and opposition to cast each other as the tyrant and themselves as the heroic opposition without having to make such partisan readings explicit in performance. Indeed, it was only when these parallels moved from the tacit to the explicit that the censors felt the need to intervene.

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Post-war Experimentalism and Macbeth It is generally accepted that the defeat of Hitler and his allies in World War Two forced the Salazar regime to abandon its notorious insularity and begin to look outwards. However, the consequences of this long-term lack of sustained contact with international theatre practice continued to condition the ability of Portuguese theatre practitioners to respond to this greater openness. The writer and critic Jorge de Sena (1959, 260) encapsulates these difficulties in his observation that “professional theatre in this country has to do everything: perform classics that no one has yet seen or heard as well as present the best of the universal theatre produced in the last fifty years as if it were a new play”. He adds: [I]t is extremely difficult to create a style of performance where there is no tradition of one [...] and when you are constantly moving between Shakespeare and Guilherme de Figueiredo, Bernardo Santareno and Eugene O’Neill [...]1 and at the same time to ensure that this style is not merely an agreeable common denominator, the consummate art of doing things quickly and well with the little that is available.

The Teatro Experimental do Porto (TEP) was the first of the post-war experimental theatres to attempt to renovate Portuguese theatre practice in the difficult context outlined by Jorge de Sena, and their performances of Macbeth inaugurated the first studio theatre in the Iberian Peninsula, the Teatro do Bolso. Crucially, their Macbeth capitalized on another production examining the effects of political tyranny, for the company had previously staged an adaptation of Antigone in 1954.The main concern of the TEP Macbeth was to present a performance of the play in line with the type of contemporary European theatre aesthetics they wished to promote in Portugal, essentially as an alternative to the rather dull performances at the main national theatre and the often crass commercialism of the privatelyrun theatres. However, there are signs within the translation and the performances of their Macbeth that a concern with the politics of tyranny also inflected these aesthetic choices. António Pedro, who both translated the play and directed the performances, had studied as a young man at the Jesuit seminary in La Guardia with Eduardo Brazão, who became Director 1

Guilherme de Figueiredo (1915-1997) was a Brazilian dramatist whose work explored mythical themes from a comic perspective. Bernardo Santareno (19201980) was probably the most important Portuguese dramatist in the 20th century whose work, concerned with the right to freedom and dignity of all regardless of class, gender or sexual orientation, was censored extensively under the dictatorship.

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of the regime’s main organization overseeing cultural production (SNI) in the same year TEP produced their Macbeth. It has been suggested that this personal relationship enabled Pedro a degree of latitude in his theatre work if, on the other hand, he did not embarrass the regime ideologically.2 These types of tacit arrangement characterize the middle years of a dictatorship which, as Graça dos Santos (2004) has pointed out, preferred preventative self-censorship to direct repression, for such self-censorship left no visible traces of the regime’s mechanisms of control and thus, paradoxically, enabled the regime to deny any ideological interference in theatre. In terms of self-censorship, it is significant that one of the speeches which might have resonated most with Portuguese audiences at this time, Malcolm’s final speech calling on the exiles to return, (“As calling home our exiled friends abroad/That fled the snares of watchful tyranny” [5.9.34]) is cut in Pedro’s translation.3 It is true that the translation also dispenses with much other material from the play in its explicit concern to create a working translation for the stage rather than a literary translation. However, within Pedro’s stated aim (Pedro 1956, n.p.) to introduce “cuts” rather than “mutilations” and his desire to remain “as faithful as possible” to the Shakespeare play, this represents a significant cut to introduce. There is, however, a reference to exile in the introduction to the translation, where Pedro draws attention to the exiled status of Pablo Casals. As all those who saw the play were given copies of the translation with the production programme, a wider audience would thus have had access to this paratextual material and its brief reference to exiles abroad. References to exile were also foregrounded in the performances in the emphasis given to the scene in England (4.3) where Malcolm, Macduff and other exiled nobles discuss Macbeth’s bloody regime in Scotland, a scene which not only takes place in exile but which also carries a number of explicit verbal references to tyranny. In the Shakespeare play, it is already a highly melodramatic scene where the effects of tyranny are presented in emotionally graphic terms. Malcolm, for instance refers to “our country” which “sinks below the yoke;/It weeps, it bleeds, and each new day a gash/Is added to her wounds” (4.3.39-41) and the performances 2

This was suggested to me by Júlio Gago of the Teatro Experimental do Porto. My thanks to him for his conversation with me about this production. 3 Although the major wave of political exile began in the 1960s, several key figures had already left Portugal, such as the writer and intellectual Eduardo Lourenço, while the historic leader of the Communist Party, Álvaro Cunhal, alternated between periods in prison and periods in exile. These resonances of internal and external exile would have been compounded by consciousness of economic emigration to France in particular at this time.

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reinforced this melodrama by having Macduff prostrate on the floor after news of the deaths of his wife and children. The foregrounding of this scene owed much to the relative strengths of the actor playing Macduff in these performances, but aesthetic and political choices do intersect here to convey a sense of the devastation tyranny has brought not only to Scotland but also to Portugal. That the performances could imply an element of political criticism of 1950s Portugal, however refracted, is suggested in a review in O Comercio do Porto (Anon. 1956). The review challenges Sartre’s contention that Shakespeare no longer represented popular theatre, claiming that he underestimated “the special conditions in some countries where plays like Macbeth, despite being written three hundred and fifty years ago, can be considered revolutionary in their defence of ideas common to many peoples.” For the author of the review, these “ideas common to many peoples” included the fight against tyranny, violence and assassination and the struggle for the ideal of peace.

Fig. 6-1: Set design by António Pedro for the Teatro Experimental do Porto Macbeth

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Burning Down the House If the TEP gala performance of Macbeth brought together the great and the good of Porto, the pre-performance gala night at the Teatro Nacional Dona Maria II in Lisbon, during the commemorative year of 1964, was an even more lavish affair. Newspapers commented (J.M.A 1964) on the presence of Salazar himself in the audience, alongside the Minister of Education, the President of the Gulbenkian Foundation, the English ambassador, foreign dignitaries, politicians, bankers, journalists and people from the theatre world, “all those who normally treat each other in a familiar tone” as the newspaper cooed, applauding the “select” audience and the sumptuousness of the women’s dresses. It has been suggested that the theatre originally wanted to stage Julius Caesar, but this idea was shelved without explanation. They then chose to restage their earlier A Midsummer Night’s Dream, but the Gulbenkian Foundation stepped in to encourage something more worthy of the Shakespeare quatercentenary. In fact, “worthy of” is the epithet most often deployed in connection with the performances, which are described in particular as worthy of both Shakespeare and Lisbon as a European capital. The Brazilian poet Manuel Bandeira is considered by Tomáz Ribas (1964) to have produced an “exemplary” translation “which is eminently worthy and of superior literary quality” and, in a form of theatrical keeping up with the Joneses, the presence of Michael Benthall and Michael Annals as, respectively, director and stage designer is used to signal not only a hospitable attitude to prestigious British Shakespeareans but also to prove that the Portuguese theatre artists were as able to produce quality Shakespeare as artists in other parts of Europe. In the proud boast of one critic (J.M.A. 1963) “out there, they don’t do any better”. Not everyone, however, considered the performances as evidence of the European capabilities of Portuguese artists. Several critics pointed to the lack of innovation in the staging and the uneven acting within the company itself. João Guedes, who had already played Macbeth in the TEP performances, is said to have merely shouted louder in his Dona Maria performances and to have mimicked English inflections from John Gielgud picked up via Michael Benthall, earning him the nickname Sir John Guedesgud.4 Although a review by the writer Urbano Tavares Rodrigues (1964) singled out the figure of Macduff as a figure of resistance, this was a literary rather than a performative reference, and despite the inclusion of a toned-down final speech calling home the exiles, the performances 4

My thanks once again to Júlio Gago of the Teatro Experimental do Porto for this testimony.

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aimed above all not to offend the sensibilities of their conservative, bourgeois audience. This is particularly true in terms of the play’s gender politics. After remembering Duncan as “a saintly man”, for instance, Macduff supplements this with an image of his queen who was “most often/found on her knees for when she rose, she died a little every day” (Bandeira 1964, 156; my translation). In this respect, it is worth pointing out that although João Guedes transited unproblematically between the TEP and the Dona Maria II performances, the actress Dalila Rocha, who had played Lady Macbeth in the TEP performances, was prevented by the regime from joining the national theatre on the grounds that she was too closely associated with the political left. The role of Lady Macbeth in the Dona Maria II performances was taken instead by the daughter of the couple who managed the theatre, Mariana Rey Monteiro. At the close of her preview, Manuela de Azevedo (1963) urged wider audiences to attend the Dona Maria performances of Macbeth, illustrating a degree of anxiety that they would not. This confirms Graça dos Santos’s notion of the national theatre as engaged in the construction of an ornamental culture for elites, “a fictitious culture of pomp and circumstance aimed at entertaining a gallery which would have felt privileged to have chosen to support the powers that be” (2004, 77). The performances of Macbeth were interrupted, however, when the theatre burnt to the ground and the actors were forced to perform elsewhere for the rest of the run. Somewhat ironically, as most of the costumes and sets for the performances had been lost in the fire, subsequent performances in Lisbon and Porto took place in modern dress with only a minimum of props, something of a humiliating climb-down for a production so clearly constructed around the decorative. Ironically, though, this parallel tragedy provided exactly the sort of cohesion and commitment from performers and wider support from audiences that had been lacking in the earlier stages of the production, while any notion of tyranny could be conveniently relocated to natural rather than to political forces.

Student Revolts and Political Censorship While the Dona Maria catered to the Portuguese elite, the younger generation being groomed as the elite of the future was becoming radicalized by their experiences under the dictatorship. In 1969 there was a major wave of student protests in Lisbon and particularly in Coimbra, where students went on strike during exam time and the police occupied university buildings. This student radicalism was encouraged by events in Paris and Prague, and particularly by the increasingly unpopular colonial

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wars in Africa. Moreover, it has been suggested by Miguel Cardina (2011) that the experience of helping victims of floods in the south of the country in 1967 brought home to many students the differences between the rosy view of the country promoted by Salazarist propaganda and the economic realities of poverty and cultural backwardness the students encountered. The students involved in the university theatre company CITAC (Círculo de Iniciação Teatral da Academia de Coimbra) had the kind of access to contemporary European theatre which many professionals of the time did not. The Gulbenkian Foundation financed a programme where international guest directors, many of them political exiles, worked with university groups in Coimbra and Porto for short periods of time. This enabled these amateur companies to produce contemporary work of a highly professional standard. The first director to work with CITAC was the Argentinian Víctor García, followed by the Catalan Ricardo Salvat, who was expelled by the political police but continued surreptitiously to direct performances from over the border in Spain. Salvat then recommended another Argentinian, Juan Carlos Oviedo, who directed CITAC’s 1970 Macbeth. The students also had access to contemporary European theatre through visits to theatre festivals, such as that in Parma where their Macbeth was received with great acclaim. Such acclaim contrasted with the indifferent reaction to their work in Portugal, although during the month and a half in which students were on strike in Coimbra, impromptu performances to maintain student morale forged a close connection between political and cultural contestation amongst the students. The circumstances in which these performances of Macbeth took place explain some of the conflicts they provoked. After the student protests the year before, the students who had led the company in the time of Víctor García were conscripted into military service in the south, leaving CITAC in the hands of a group of more radical students influenced by the Situationists and the psychologically-inflected theatre work of Oviedo. The former group of students then returned and were horrified at what they saw as the betrayal of the company’s artistic and political orientation. The performances of Macbeth focused these antagonisms and were consistently disrupted by heckling and physical fighting between the two rival factions, complicated further by political disputes between Maoists, Trotskyists and members of the Communist Party. A review of this Macbeth by the Lisbon-based critic Carlos Porto expresses eloquently the bewilderment of those who saw these conflict-ridden performances from the outside. Indeed, the performance Porto came to see was abandoned after three hours of deadlock, breaking down into an improvised dance in the style of the musical Hair, with the performers still on Act 1 of the play.

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Porto’s account of the performance seems torn between an admiration for the company’s emphasis on experimentation and irritation with what he considers to be the emptier gestures of this experimentation. On the one hand, he identifies a certain lack of imagination in the company’s recycling of techniques from previous performances, and he challenges the authoritarianism of Oviedo, who directed the actors from a raised platform with a whistle and a megaphone and reacted angrily to protests by reading a long justification of the rationale of the performance. However, what seems to annoy Porto most is the fact that despite clear signals from the performers that audience intervention was not only acceptable but an essential element of the performance event, the same performers reacted with hostility and physical aggression when those witnessing this theatrical event made less than flattering comments and intervened to stop the performances. Noting that the only real choices for participation from the public were either saying “Amen” or leaving the room, Porto (1973, 271) notes that “[t]he contesters don’t want to be contested, the provokers don’t want to be provoked and the aggressors can’t take aggression”. On the positive side, however, Porto (271-2) also praises the performance’s “courage in taking things (almost) to their final consequences, the performers’ ability to express themselves physically and vocally, a clarity of intention and a real break with the traditional and the academic,” adding that “[h]ere the violence really is violent, the eroticism really erotic and the aggression genuinely aggressive. Indifference is not an option”. When they originally applied for a licence to perform Macbeth, the CITAC students had sent in an old translation of the play by Domingos Ramos, rather than their own collectively-produced and more radical text. The censors passed the translation of the play without comment. However, when the censor later attended a performance and noted, in his own words, “that there was no kind of similarity between what I read and what I heard,” permission to perform the play was immediately withdrawn.5 The censor’s detailed report on the performance evokes an image of an elderly functionary with highly traditional views of both political and theatrical authority, confronted with a total lack of respect for either. His outrage at this attempt to hoodwink the censors is matched only by a corresponding outrage at what has been done to a play which, “as the spectators will remember at all times, although distorted, [...] is still the work of Shakespeare.” A later incident where members of CITAC were accused of insulting religious pilgrims on their way to the religious shrine at Fátima 5

Anonymous report on rehearsal of CITAC Macbeth, dated 7 September 1970 in Torre do Tombo archive, Lisbon (SNI/DGE p 8999).

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provided the justification for the university and local authorities to close down the company and occupy their facilities, but CITAC’s fate was sealed as soon as they broke what the censor considered to be a circle of trust between censors and performers. As such, performances which linked the political violence of life under a moribund regime with a deliberate deconstruction of the canonicity of the Shakespearean text were met with the full force of the tyranny of political censorship. The three moments in the performance history of Macbeth under the dictatorship suggest the absolute need for contextualization, both historical and theatrical, in studies of the performance of Shakespeare during this period. What could or could not be said about tyranny depended upon who was performing and how they positioned themselves politically, upon the wider political context in which the performance took place and the text of Macbeth that was to be performed. This is illustrated, for instance, in the different trajectories of João Guedes and Dalila Rocha, or in the particular virulence with which the censors treated CITAC at a time of wider political opposition to the regime. Contextualization is also essential in recovering a sense of the shifting relationships between the regime and theatre artists over three decades. The kind of tacit agreement between artists and the regime that characterizes performances of Shakespeare in the late ’50s like that of the Teatro Experimental do Porto is already strained by the mid-60s with the bifurcation of theatre practice into theatrical projects that maintain the political and aesthetic status quo and those seeking new repertoires and new styles of performance. Even in an atypical year such as 1964, the benevolent patronage of the Dona Maria II by members of the regime differed significantly from its more suspicious dealings with the Teatro Moderno de Lisboa’s Measure for Measure in the same year. The regime of the early ’70s wavers uncertainly between making minor concessions to theatre artists and excessive repression of their work, and when the CITAC students challenged the regime’s claim to greater openness, it reacted with characteristic severity. By the end of this period, Macbeth had acquired a status as the Shakespeare political play, where moral and political opposition to tyranny expressed growing discontent with a regime that came increasingly to resemble Macbeth’s paranoid and doomed attempt to hold onto power.

Post-revolutionary Macbeth In the immediate post-revolutionary period, performing Shakespeare was less of a priority than performing playwrights who had been banned from the stage during the dictatorship. However, the mid-nineties witnessed

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a major increase in the number and type of performances of Shakespeare, as companies used performances of the plays as yardsticks of their theatrical maturity, and programmers sought to reinforce economic membership of Europe through appropriation of the cultural capital of Shakespeare. Macbeth, however, retained a somewhat ambivalent position during this period of growth in Shakespearean performance, as likely to be performed as critique as for celebration. It is a period when the primacy of the text is deconstructed by other stage languages, particularly the visual languages of scenography and costume and the physical potential of the corporeal. It is also a period where questions of location, whether geographical or theatrical, assume a new importance in performances of the play.

Punk Interculturalism One of the performances of Macbeth that Carlos Porto discusses in his 1994 overview is the 1993 Macbeth by the Porto-based company Seiva Trupe which celebrated the company’s twentieth anniversary. Porto (1994, 50) labels the performances “an almost ‘punk’ reading of a schematized Macbeth, both in terms of the text and the staging (scenography, costumes, proxemics) which did not, however, minimize some of the values of the original”. In an earlier review in the Jornal de Letras (1993, 19) Porto had revisited Jan Kott’s view of the tragedy, arguing that “isn’t it also the most contemporary, with its carnage and struggle for power, its representation of a cruel and implacable world which resembles ours?”. Both the tendency to strip down the play to what are considered to be its bare essentials and the tendency to focus on the violent consequences of struggles for power characterize performances of Macbeth more generally during this period and are certainly evident in these 1993 performances. Yet the Seive Trupe performances also achieved a degree of notoriety as the most expensive theatre production ever staged in Porto. This was mainly due to the Luso-Brazilian collaboration which structured the performances. A year earlier, the Brazilian Ulysses Cruz had directed the famous stage and television actor, António Fagundes, in a performance of the play in São Paulo. Cruz had then proposed restaging the production in Portugal with Seiva Trupe to celebrate their twenty years of activity. The Portuguese author António Rebordão Navarro reworked Cruz’s translation for the Portuguese performances and the final cast included both Brazilian and Portuguese actors. Although the main roles were taken by Portuguese actors, with two of the founding figures of Seiva Trupe playing Duncan (António Reis) and the Porter (Júlio Cardoso), while two local actors close

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to the company played the drama’s two central figures, António Capelo (Macbeth) and Rosa Quiroga (Lady Macbeth), this obscures the extent to which the Brazilian practitioners dominated the staging of the play. Aside from Cruz’s direction, this was evident in the costume design, music, lighting and intensely physical stage battles. There is a great deal of useful critical work on intercultural performances of Shakespeare, particularly on the ways in which cultural identities are staged and negotiated within such performances. As Yong Li Lan (2008, 548) has remarked, “Shakespeare is now a trade route, an international stage on which the partialities of our cultural identities, and the history of their collocations, is dramatized”. Yet within this critical work, there has been little attention given to intercultural performance within the Portuguese-speaking context and Luso-Brazilian collaborations such as this one in particular. These 1993 performances, for instance, reveal a shifting power differential that parallels the changing political and economic relationship between Portugal and Brazil during this period, as well as some of the anxieties provoked by these changes. As Joanne Tomkins (2008, 622-3) has suggested “intercultural Shakespearean productions have the potential to generate (new) interpretations, based not on a given culture and the oppositional ‘culture’ of Shakespeare but on what is exposed and what is (unintentionally) concealed in this cultural clash”. This notion of intercultural Shakespeare recasting notions of both national culture and Shakespeare is complicated further when the intercultural itself involves a powerful North-South dynamic. In this particular instance, while the Portuguese company made use of Shakespeare to celebrate their performance trajectory, the Brazilian contribution stamped its mark on the performance in an apparently opposite direction, through the reduction of the text to just over an hour and a half, and, compounding this non-reverential attitude to Shakespeare as text-based theatre, with the visual predominance of black leather in the male costumes, young, naked witches located uncertainly between the horrifying and the erotic, a loud rock soundtrack by Guns N’ Roses and the physicalization of the conflicts of the play. Such a radical disregard for the Shakespearean text certainly worried Portuguese critics like Carlos Porto (1993, 19), although he also recognized that “Ulysses Cruz’s reading is, in its aggression, transgressions and informality the expression of an alternative way of understanding not only Shakespeare and theatre, but primarily of the relationship of both of these with the audience”. Porto’s comment illustrates that this “assault” on the Shakespearean text also represented a challenge to the much more reverential performances of Shakespeare characteristic of this period in Portugal. In other words,

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performances intended to reinforce the reputation of Portuguese performers instead reveal Brazilian practitioners shaking off the tyranny of European modes of performing Shakespeare, as they renegotiate constructions of Lusophone identities that no longer start from the inevitable cultural hegemony of Portugal or Europe. The fact that the performances were unusually popular with audiences and school-age audiences in particular reveals the increasing predominance of Brazilian cultural products within Portugal itself, as conventional divisions between centre and periphery, as well as north and south, were overturned by new economic and cultural realities.

Post-human Macbeth It is indicative of the growing importance of the field of Portuguese Theatre Studies in the new millennium that a publication with the same title as Carlos Porto’s 1994 article “Shakespeare amongst Us” becomes a lavishly produced volume by the Centre for Theatre Studies at the University of Lisbon by 2009 and includes articles by both academics and theatre practitioners. João Paulo Seara Cardoso’s (2009) contribution to the volume is an illuminating reflection on the 2001 performance of Macbeth by his Teatro de Marionetas do Porto (TMP) during the year Porto was European Capital of Culture. There is a long-standing popular tradition of marionette performance in both Porto and Lisbon and the TMP, formed in 1998, has established a reputation for creative and innovative marionette performances, as well as for organizing a prestigious yearly international marionette festival in Porto. The company began with more conventional marionette performances where the actors manipulating the marionettes were hidden in the dark so as not to be seen by the audience, but by the time they produced their Macbeth, they had moved towards a style of performance where both actor and marionette were visible to the audience and interacted with each other. Technically, their marionettes had also begun by this time to develop a variety of material guises in terms of size and material. Although rarely associated with performances of Shakespeare for adults, particularly Shakespearean tragedy, there is often a sinister element in marionette performances resulting from the sense of the (in)animate coming to life. As Meike Wagner (2007, 127) has suggested, “[c]ontemporary puppet performances mingle puppet bodies with human actors and mediatized bodies and so draw the human figure into an ambiguous position between an animated agent and an existential symbol of mediatization”. This leads to a situation where, according to Wagner (135)

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“the interaction of puppets and human actors produces temporarily varying degrees of object-hood and subject-hood”. These subject/object, live/inanimate paradoxes lay at the heart of this genuinely harrowing performance of Macbeth. For Seara Cardoso (2009, 85-6), the choice of this play in particular was indebted to recent events in the Balkans, with the performances “a means of confronting ourselves and the public with a reflection on new forms of violent power and the appearance of new types of ‘witches’”.

Fig. 6-2. Macbeth by the Teatro de Marionetas do Porto. Photograph by Susana Paiva. (Courtesy of the Teatro de Marionetas do Porto.)

Seara Cardoso argues in his contribution that for all marionette performances, it is necessary to find a balance between the specific performance and the particular form of marionette to be used. Whereas in previous performances, the company’s creation of “a certain non-realist poetics” (89, 90) had been served well by traditional marionettes, these came to seem fragile in the face of such a powerful text as Macbeth. Seara Cardoso describes this mismatch memorably as “trying to play Chopin on an electric guitar”. The company’s technical solution was to construct onemetre high, four-kilo marionettes with disproportionate limbs and rigid articulations. Inevitably, this also forced reconsideration of the relationship between the four actors and the marionettes. In the performances, the actors held the marionettes by the neck “as we might hold onto a wild

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animal who could escape or attack us” Such an intensely physical relationship between marionette and actor was nevertheless mitigated by the distance created by having actors also function as narrators. This located the actors simultaneously inside and outside the performance, making them both performers and onlookers. Seara Cardoso greatly reduced the text for the performances, accentuating the action to produce a more compact Macbeth. One textual alteration involved reducing the discussion by the Scottish nobles in exile of the worsening situation of Scotland under Macbeth in 4.3 to key lines by Macduff and Malcolm. When spoken by the actors in chorus, these lines emphasized the responsibility of the wider collective to challenge Macbeth’s tyranny. To complement the sparseness of the text, voice microphones reinforced the ominous size of the marionettes and rendered the voices of the actors eerily fragile. It is perhaps not surprising that Seara Cardoso, who was one of the four actors in the performances, besides being responsible for direction and scenography, claimed not to have come out of the experience unscathed. The critic Inês Nadais, writing in the newspaper supplement Público Y (2001, 6) found herself haunted by the production’s striking image of marionettes hanging lifeless along a clothes rail, reminding her of the ways in which wars render human beings simple cannon fodder, while a review by Jorge Louraço Figueira in a different edition of the same paper (2008, 13) connected the play’s focus on power and the style of performance in his observation that this was a play where everyone wants to be the one who manipulates power, rather than the one who is manipulated by it. In response to a question from Nadais about what in the play might be seen as contemporary, Seara Cardoso (apud Nadais 2002, 6) replied “everything”, adding “we continue to be surrounded by people like this, some ‘softer’, others ‘harder’, some European and some in the Third World. The world is full of Macbeths”. In a curious postmodern return, therefore, these performances suggested a redimensioning of tyranny from the human to the post-human and a relocation away from European to non-European contexts. While I have indicated the absolute need for contextualization in establishing what can or cannot be said, by whom and when, for the performances of Macbeth under the dictatorship, contextualization under democracy seems to demand a more geo-political, more diffuse form of contextualization that combines elements of the local and the global, as well as a focus on textual and non-textual elements of performance. Although both Seiva Trupe and the Teatro de Marionetas do Porto situate their work very clearly in the city of Porto, their performances of Macbeth seem more difficult to fix in terms of location, either because they are

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intercultural performances involving European and non-European practitioners or because the scenario of their critique is globalized. Historically, the Seiva Trupe Macbeth is very much part of the ’90s boom in Shakespearean performance, as is seen in its size and scale, as well as in its intense physicality, while concern with events in the Balkans, particularly with perpetrators of violence not brought to justice, permeated several performances of Shakespeare at the beginning of the new millennium, but these tendencies are not specific to Macbeth alone. The transition from dictatorship to democracy seems to have brought with it a certain lack of focus in terms of the representation of tyranny, as if it is to be found everywhere and nowhere. For João Paulo Seara Cardoso, indeed, “[t]he world is full of Macbeths”. Within such a globalized scenario, it becomes more difficult to envisage resistance to tyranny because there is no single point of entry for oppositional politics. Not even the human constitutes the basis of a common bond. After thirty-eight years of democracy, it would appear that Portuguese theatre practitioners are having difficulty discovering theatrical forms of resistance for a tyranny that is increasingly global and infrequently identified with individual figures. However, at the time of writing in 2013, an adaptation of Macbeth by a writer from the Portuguese ex-colony of Guiné-Bissau to this particular African setting is being rehearsed by Portuguese-speaking actors from a variety of national contexts.6 As such, if the contextualization of the play has been moving further and further away from Portugal and Europe, post-colonial responses to questions of tyranny in Macbeth are also speaking back to the ex-colonial power of situations of abuse of power, political corruption and political violence in their own national contexts, thus globalizing not only experiences of tyranny, but also possibilities of resistance to it.

Works Cited Anon. 1956. Review in O Comercio do Porto, 9 May 1956, n.p. Anon. 1970. Report on rehearsal of CITAC Macbeth. In Torre do Tombo archive, Lisbon (SNI/DGE p 8999), 7 September. Bandeira, Manuel. 1964. Macbeth, Lisbon: Presença. Cardina, Miguel. 2011. “Movimentos Estudantis na Crise do Estado Novo: 6

The text The Orations of Mansata by Abdullai Silla is the first theatrical text in Guiné-Bissau. Some of the actors involved in this intercultural production were previously involved in another adaptation of Macbeth to an African setting, performing Makbuhne in Coimbra in 2003 and Namanha Maakbuhne in Lisbon in 2007.

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Mitos e Realidades” (1) e-cadernos ces 1: 53-72. (Accessed 12 December 2011.) De Azevedo, Manuela. 1964. “Macbeth no Nacional”. Diário de Notícias, 19 November, n.p. De Sena, Jorge. 1959. Excerpt from article in Coloquio—Revista de Artes e Letras 3, Mayo 1959. Reproduced in Porto (1997). Dos Santos, Graça. 2004. O Espectáculo Desvirtuado: O Teatro Português sobre o reinado de Salazar (1933-1968), trans. Lígia Calapez. Lisbon: Caminho. Figueira, Jorge Louraço. 2008. “A Noite Mal Dormida de Macbeth”. Público-P2 21: 13. J.M.A. 1963. Novidades, 19 November, n.p. Lan, Yong Li. 2008. “Shakespeare and the Fiction of the Intercultural”. In A Companion to Shakespeare and Performance, eds. Barbara Hodgdon & W.B. Worthen, 527-549. Malden, MA & Oxford & Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell. Nadais, Inês. 2001. “Macbeth de cabedal vermelho vivo” in Público—Y, 2 February, 6. Pedro, António. 1956. “Introduction to Macbeth”. Oporto: Círculo de Cultura Teatral, n.p. Porto, Carlos. 1973. “Macbeth—o que passa na tua cabeça”. In Em Busca do Teatro Perdido II: 1958-71, 269-277. Lisbon: Plátano. —. 1993. “85 minutos de Macbeth”. Jornal de Letras, 16 November, 19. —. 1994. “Shakespeare entre nós”. Adágio 14: 48-53. —. 1997. O TEP e o Teatro em Portugal: Histórias e Imagens. Porto: Fundação Engenheiro António de Almeida. Ribas, Tomas. 1964. “Teatro: Macbeth de Shakespeare inaugurou a temporada no Teatro Nacional”. Actualidades, 28 November. Seara Cardoso, João Paulo. 2009. “Sobre a Encenação de Macbeth”. In Shakespeare entre Nós, eds. Maria Helena Serôdio et al., 85-90. Ribeirão: Húmus. Tavares Rodrigues, Urbano. 1964. Untitled review in Jornal de Comercio, 22 November. (Also published in Letras e Artes Nov 1964, n.p..) Tompkins, Joanne. 2008. “Conflicting Fields of Vision: Performing Self and Other in Two Intercultural Shakespeare Productions”. In A Companion to Shakespeare and Performance, eds. Barbara Hodgdon & W.B. Worthen, 610-624. Malden, MA & Oxford & Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell. Shakespeare, William. 2008. Macbeth, ed. A.R. Braunmuller. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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Wagner, Meike. 2007. “Of Other Bodies: the Intermedial Gaze in Theatre”. In Intermediality in Theatre and Performance, eds. Freda Chapple & Chiel Kattenbelt, 125-136. Amsterdam & New York: Rodopi.

CHAPTER SEVEN (DO) WHAT YOU WILL IN LATE FRANCOIST SPAIN1 ELENA BANDÍN

The period of openness that characterized the Francoist policy of the decade of the sixties came to an end at the beginning of the seventies when, in view of the changes that Spanish society was experiencing, the old guard took charge of the government in an attempt to recover the values of the National Movement. Between 1962 and 1969, the “moderate” Manuel Fraga Iribarne headed the Ministry of Information and Tourism, which was responsible for the Censorship Office. However, in 1969, Alfredo Sánchez Bella, a veteran diplomat of the ultra-right-wing Catholic underground, was personally imposed by Franco to run this institution. This paper explores how this turn to repression becomes evident by examining the censorship file of a new production of the Teatro Experimental Independiente (T.E.I.) (Experimental Independent Theatre) of Madrid directed by José Carlos Plaza: Haz lo que te dé la gana (Do What You Will), an adaptation of the rock-style musical comedy by Hal Hester and Danny Apolinar from the book adaptation by Donald Driver, loosely based on Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night. Although tolerance towards Shakespeare’s plays was a norm of behaviour for the censors, the script submitted to the censorship office on 16 April 1971 was thoroughly examined. The censorship report authorised the performance for an audience of 18 and over, with suppressions and conditional on a viewing of the dress rehearsal. The textual marks present on the theatre script regarding the main taboo topics of the period—sexual morals, religion, politics and improper language—show how the repressive force of official 1

The research for this essay was funded by project FFI-2011-24160 “La presencia de Shakespeare en España en el marco de su recepción europea”. I am grateful to the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness for its support.

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censorship was exerted, as in post-war times, in its zeal to protect the morals of Spaniards. Nonetheless, censors could not put a halt to the latent homosexual issue of the performance, since coming out of the closet was already a common trope in Spanish theatre at the time.

Twelfth Night under Franco Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night was first translated in Spain by Jaime Clark in the nineteenth century (1873-1874). Since then, the play was sporadically staged and, when it was, often based on Jacinto Benavente’s Cuento de amor (Love Story), as this Nobel prize-winning dramatist entitled his stage version of the play in 1899. Nevertheless, during the Franco regime, theatregoing Spaniards could attend six different productions of the play during the 1960s and 1970s, according to the documentation found in the Archivo General de la Administración (AGA), a national archive located in Madrid where all the censorship material from the period is kept.2 Such a boom for the comedy is surprising when the most performed and successful plays during the period were Othello, Hamlet and The Taming of the Shrew. Besides, it is remarkable that most of these productions were staged at fringe venues by independent or commercial companies, which managed without the economic support of the regime. As far as censorship is concerned, it can also be observed how the political changes of the period affected censors’ behaviour by offering an overview of the different productions of Twelfth Night that were performed in the decades of the sixties and the seventies. Throughout the dictatorship, “theatre was subjected to a two-pronged system of control which examined both play script (original or translated) and production of the text (comparison with the original and vigilance with regard to ‘tell-tale’—i.e. subversive—gestures or other business considered too provocative or unseemly to be presented in public)” (Gregor and 2 This work relies on the data compiled in the TRACEtci Catalogue (Traducciones Censuradas de Teatro Clásico Inglés), a database containing more than 600 entries of translations of Shakespeare’s plays published and/or performed in Spain from 1939 to 1985 (see Bandín 2007). Four different censorship files relating to Twelfth Night were recorded in the period mentioned. Rosario Arias (2001, 71) also includes in her work on Twelfth Night a production of the Turkish National Theatre staged at the Teatro de las Naciones in Barcelona in June 1964. To this can be added a Catalan production of the play, La Nit de Reis, staged at the Teatro Romea in Barcelona in 1968 and registered in the SHAKREP database (https://www.um.es/shakespeare/representaciones/).

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Bandín 2011, 144). The variety of reports that a theatre text could obtain ranged from “authorized”, “authorized with cuts”, “authorized prior to dress rehearsal viewing”, “approved for a limited number of performances”, “authorized according to the audience age (for over 14s, 16s or 18s)” to “prohibited”. Four productions of Twelfth Night went through the official censorship boards to be staged in Spain in the 1960s, as shown in the table below. File No. 48-61

14262 48-61

84-67

Title

Translator

Censorship report

Theatre/Company/ Director

No es cordero… que es cordera La noche de Reyes

León Felipe

Authorized +18 No cuts

-/Maritza Caballero/ José Monleón

León Felipe/ José Luis Alonso Mañes León Felipe

Authorized +18 No cuts

William Layton and José Carlos Plaza

Authorized +18 No cuts

Cía. Titular del Teatro Lara/Teatro Lara (Madrid)/-/ José Luis Alonso Palacio de las Naciones de Montjuich/ Teatro Popular de Barcelona/Esteban Polls Teatro Infanta Beatriz (Madrid)/Teatro Estudio de Madrid/ William Layton and José Carlos Plaza

No es cordero… que es cordera Noche de Reyes o lo que queráis

Authorized +18

Table 1: Twelfth Night censorship reports in 1960s Spain Leon Felipe’s recreation of Twelfth Night arrived in Spain thanks to its publication in the theatre magazine Primer Acto in 1961, becoming the most performed version of the play during the period and replacing Jacinto Benavente’s Cuento de amor. Despite the fact that most of León Felipe’s works had been banned by the official censorship during the 1950s, his version of Twelfth Night was authorized every time it went through the censorship boards. The same year as its publication, León Felipe’s version entitled No es cordero…que es cordera (Not a He-lamb...but a She-Lamb) was submitted for the first time by the theatre company Maritza Caballero, directed by José Monleón. The Theatre Censorship Office approved the script for an audience of 18 or over, without any need for cutting or

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modifying the text. The reader-censor José María Cano reported on the theatre text, highlighting its outstanding literary value and its excellent theatrical qualities, and considering that the performance should be authorized for an audience of 18 or over. To his mind, “this ‘tale’ is not morally dangerous since the spectator is able to identify from the very beginning who the real character is” (File 48-61),3 referring to the mistaken identity of the character Viola/Cesareo. Although he also suggested some cuts on the script that give evidence of the censor’s qualms about sexual references, the Theatre Censorship Office issued a favourable report. In 1962 José Luis Alonso, a theatre man well-known for his adaptations, signed a new theatre text entitled Noche de Reyes which was submitted to the censorship boards for staging at the Teatro Lara in Madrid.4 José María Cano reported on the text by José Luis Alonso but this time retracted from the suppressions he had suggested in his previous report on León Felipe’s translation one year before, since “in the present adaptation no suppression is needed” (File 142-62).5 The performance was authorized for an audience of 18 or over, and no cuts were imposed on the text. León Felipe’s version was submitted again in 1964 and registered in File 48-61, when the Teatro Popular de Barcelona, led by Esteban Polls, programmed a performance of the play as part of the festival to commemorate the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare’s birth. As with the script submitted some years before, the performance was authorized for an audience of 18 and above. The last production of the decade, William Layton and José Carlos Plaza’s Noche de Reyes, also obtained a positive report from the Francoist bowdlerizers. The theatre text presented by the directors of the Teatro Estudio de Madrid (T.E.M.) was staged at the Teatro Beatriz, the venue for the Teatro Nacional de Cámara y Ensayo, in 1967. However, this time the censors found fault with the verb acostar (“to accost”), a key pun in the scene in which Sir Toby incites Sir Andrew to approach the maid. In short, it can be stated that all the theatre scripts submitted during the 1960s were passed by the official censorship, and that the only constraints were those regarding the age of the audience attending the performance. 3

AGA (03) 046 SIG 73/09356, File 48-61. All translations from Spanish into English are my own. 4 Bearing in mind that he was keen on plagiarism (see Merino 2001; Bandín 2007), it can be presumed that the text presented by José Luis Alonso was an adaptation from a previous translation. 5 AGA (03) 046 SIG 73/09402, File 142-62.

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Nevertheless, censors were not so lenient in the following years. The files submitted in the seventies, when independent companies were at their very peak, were more severe than those submitted years before, and the authorization of the performance was also conditional on a viewing of the dress rehearsal. File No. 20271

39972

Title

Translator

Haz lo que te dé la gana

Manuel Coronado, Pedro Carvajal & José Carlos Plaza

La duodécima noche

León Felipe

Censorship report Authorized +18. Suppressions. Conditional on viewing of dress rehearsal. Authorized +14. No cuts. Conditional on viewing of dress rehearsal.

Theatre/Company/Director Pequeño Teatro Magallanes/TEI/ José Carlos Plaza; William Layton

Festival de Teatro del Mar Menor /Teatro Universitario de Murcia/César Oliva

Table 2: Twelfth Night censorship reports in 1970s Spain The Teatro Experimental Independiente (TEI), directed by José Carlos Plaza, premiered Lo que te dé la gana at the Pequeño Teatro Magallanes on 7 July 1971. It was an adaptation of the rock-style musical comedy Your Own Thing by Hal Hester and Danny Apolinar, based on Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night. The script submitted to the censorship office on 16 April 1971 was thoroughly examined, and the final censorship report authorized the performance for an audience of 18 or over, with suppressions and conditional on a viewing of the dress rehearsal. Finally, the Teatro Universitario de Murcia, in the hands of César Oliva, performed León Felipe’s No es cordero… que es cordera in 1972, although the original title was replaced by one closer to that of Shakespeare’s comedy: La duodécima noche. César Oliva applied for permission to first perform this play at the Festival de Teatro del Mar Menor, taking place in San Javier (Murcia) on 5 August 1972. This time four censors reported on the theatre text: José María Ortiz, Antonio de Zubiarre, Jesús Vasallo and the ecclesiastical censor, Father Artola. This file is much more complete and harsh than the ones submitted years

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before, as the production was authorized for an audience of 14 or over, without suppressions but conditional on a viewing of the dress rehearsal, to ensure “against likely stage abuses”, as Antonio de Zubiarre remarked (File 399-72).6 The three civil censors extolled the beauty of Léon Felipe’s rewriting, while the ecclesiastical member insisted on watching out for possible situations of sexual ambiguity during the performance. This brief overview reveals how Twelfth Night, which was only vaguely familiar to the audience, gained acceptance on the Francoist Spanish stages from 1961 on. It is likely that the strongest reason for its popularity is the appearance of a fresh “translation” of the play, a new and more actable rewriting by León Felipe. His approach to the original play as a translator was dynamic, poetic and fertile. He felt free to violate and manipulate Shakespeare’s play making the text his own, as he declared in the complete title of his particular version: No es cordero…que es cordera. Cuento milesio contado dramáticamente en inglés por William Shakespeare, con el nombre de Twelfth Night y vertido al castellano con una libertad que va más allá de la parafrásis [Not a He-lamb…but a Shelamb. Milesian Tale Dramatically Told in English by William Shakespeare and Translated into Spanish with a Freedom that Goes beyond Paraphrasis]. The result was a text both poetic and dramatic at the same time, since Felipe was able to combine both the rhythm of the verse and of the play. Felipe also breathed new life into the comedy, drifting away from conservative readings of the original text. This gave rise to more daring productions that explored previously taboo issues such as homosexuality. For the first time in Spain, productions openly dealing with sexual ambiguity were performed, as occurred with the production that is the focus of the present paper, the rock-musical version of the play Haz lo que te dé la gana, based on the American musical Your Own Thing.

Musical Shakespeare in the Twilight of the Regime: Your Own Thing Arrives in Spain After an ideological disagreement with some of the members of the original Teatro Estudio de Madrid (TEM), Miguel Narros, José Carlos Plaza, William Layton and some others created the Teatro Experimental Independiente (TEI) in 1968.7 Then, in July 1971, the TEI opened the 6

AGA 03(046) SIG 73/09845, File 202-71. “The split had its origin in the refusal of the directors of the TEM to stage Bertolt Brecht’s Fear and Misery of the Third Reich (1935-38), fearing the problems it

7

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Pequeño Teatro Magallanes, “one of the numerous cafés-teatro that had emerged in Madrid around that time and offered an alternative to the mainstream and commercial theatre, becoming the Madrid off-Broadway” (Espejo 1997, 67). Actually, the Pequeño Teatro was the first alternative venue created in Spain that staged both the TEI productions and those by other non-mainstream theatre companies in the country. Moreover, this initiative was closely related to actor training and experimentation. In the mornings the venue became a theatre lab directed by William Layton, who introduced the Stanislavski method of acting in Spain, with a two-fold purpose: to provide a performance school for actors and a research centre for its productions, with a team comprising actors, directors and teachers (Ruiz Ramón 2001, 476-479). The play chosen to inaugurate the Pequeño Teatro was Lo que te dé la gana, a Spanish version of the off-Broadway musical Your Own Thing.8 As was mentioned in the previous section, the TEM had already staged Twelfth Night in one of the National Theatres in 1967. However, this time José Carlos Plaza and William Layton turned to a musical version of Twelfth Night to tell the story of the twins in which the gender issues of the play were fully exposed. They defied official censorship by presenting homosexuality as an explicit issue of the play, though it was not the first time that Layton confronted it. He engaged in a somewhat drawn-out epistolary exchange with the red-pencil men until The Zoo Story was finally approved to be staged for a single performance in 1963.9 The script of Lo que te dé la gana is derived from the off-Broadway musical Your Own Thing, premiered in 1968, with music and lyrics by Hal Hester and Danny Apolinar and the book adaptation by Donald Driver, could land them in with the Regime. Some decided to abandon the TEM and set up the TEI, whose first production was based on the same work by Brecht” (Espejo 1997, 66). Espejo does not mention the fact that the performance was prohibited within 24 hours of its première. 8 Lo que te dé la gana was first performed on 7 July 1971 with the following crew. Director: José Carlos Plaza; Supervision: William Layton; Stage director: Francisco Ramos; Choreography: Arnold Taburelli; Costumes: Begoña Valle; Musical Advisor: Pilar Francés; Musical arrangements: Víctor Martín Kino. Cast: Silvia Vivó (substituting for Victoria Vera), Carmen A. Buylla, Cecilia Azagra, Manuel A. Egea, Francisco Vidal, Eduardo Pueceiro, Joaquín Rodríguez and Francisco J. Algora. http://teatro.es/es/recursos/bases-de-datos/profesionales #2resultspointer (accessed January 2014). José Carlos Plaza and Pedro Carvajal are listed as the authors of the Spanish version in the script registered in the censorship file. 9 See Merino (2005) for a more detailed analysis of the reception, translation and censorship of The Zoo Story; see also the work by Ramón Espejo (1997).

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who also directed the original production. The show was a success, running for 933 performances, winning the New York Drama Critics’ award for Best Musical, and then touring the United States, Canada and Australia. The production is registered by Wes Folkerth in Richard Burt’s Shakespeares after Shakespeare (2006) in the section devoted to popular music in the following terms: Your Own Thing premiered off Broadway just before Hair started to grow on Broadway fans, which made it the first successful rock musical. Winning the New York Drama Critics’ award for Best Musical, it ran for 933 performances and even went on tour; however, it has not been restaged since its original run. Based somewhat loosely on Twelfth Night, the plot focuses on a rock band called The Apocalypse. (Folkerth 2006, 399)10

This updated version is set in the late sixties on Manhattan Island where “a twin brother and sister singing team, Sebastian and Viola are shipwrecked. Once the siblings split up, much confusion is caused when Viola disguises herself as a boy in order to join the Four Apocalypse rock group, performing at a disco owned by Olivia. Olivia falls in love with the new ‘boy’ but all gets sorted out when she settles for twin brother Sebastian, and Viola ends up with Orson, the rock group’s manager”.11 Although popular music is “largely an undiscovered country in Shakespeare studies”, research on popular works can enlighten us about different aspects of the reception of Shakespeare’s plays. According to Folkerth (368), “it can inform our understanding of literary characters, both in terms of their reception, and their transmission in the greater culture. The field is also wide open for studies that treat the emergence of specific plays at certain periods and in certain genres”. In this respect, it is remarkable to observe how Your Own Thing emerged at this particular moment of US history, when massive protests against the Vietnam War were taking place and different movements engaged with the fight for civil rights at work. Your Own Thing emerged, as Irene G. Dash has pointed out (2010, 122), “[a]t a time when many Americans were flirting with the idea of people ‘doing their own thing’, but before such behavior was acceptable, the adaptors saw a Shakespeare work that, as Donald Driver said, offered a theme worth fighting for. In 1968 homosexual unions remained hidden in the closet”. Consequently, the play was related to the counterculture of the 1960s, the hippie movement, the massive protests 10

Despite its success in the United States, its run in London lasted a mere six weeks. 11 http://www.overthefootlights.co.uk/1969.pdf (accessed September 2013).

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against the military intervention in Vietnam and, ultimately, to the rise of a youth subculture that stood up for human rights and sexual freedom and fought against traditional modes of authority. Likewise, new cultural forms such as British pop music led by The Beatles also conquered American youngsters who were willing to change, experiment and “do your own thing”, as the title of the musical claims. Rock’n’roll also invaded the form of the American organic musical, and proof of this is Your Own Thing. The musical’s composer and lyricist, Hester and Apolinar, devised a rock musical different from other Broadway musicals in which “the features of rock concerts replace[d] the full orchestras of the earlier period” (Dash 2010, 124). Besides, the originality of this production also resided in its being a multimedia rock musical, bringing, for the first time, rock music and multimedia projections to an American Shakespeare adaptation. Dash, in her work on the American musical, relates her excitement at seeing the musical: “How new and fresh it was, and how inventive was the use of film and slides with the primary plot running in another dimension on the stage!” (6). Hester and Apolinar could also count on the collaboration of Donald Driver, who helped strengthen the plot of the comedy. As Dash states, “Donald Driver wanted to write a work with a message, and Your Own Thing’s stand on Vietnam War, its open discussion of homosexuality, and its examination of Hollywood stars and people of the cloth in the slide projections offered this opportunity. For Driver, the musical’s message was that the brutally masculine world has got to go” (127). Thus, the comic elements of the subplot were banished, since the focus of the production was to explore the sexual ambiguity pervading the play. This musical recalls another American musical of the period: Hair. Both reflect how the peace movement had continued to grow, and how more and more Americans were against the war in Vietnam. Similarly, both exploited long hair as a symbol of rebellion and individual freedom. Growing long hair was considered an indecent and revolutionary act against the authorities not only in America, but also in Spain. The American musical had burst onto the Spanish stage with South Pacific in 1955. From that moment on, the Anglo-American musical style was a reference-point for those wanting to make an incursion into the musical genre. The first musical Shakespeare, Kiss me, Kate by Cole Porter, first performed in Madrid in 1963 and was a box office hit.12 The Spanish adaptation of Your Own Thing, premiering in 1971, was followed 12

See Patterson (2010) for a more detailed history of musical theatre in Spain.

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by acclaimed productions such as Hair (1975) or Jesus Christ Superstar (1975), which shows how the musical had conquered the Spanish theatres of the period. The Spanish adaptation, Lo que te dé la gana, is pretty much a faithful translation of the original, although some local references were introduced to accommodate the play to a new cultural context. The scene shifts from New York City to Madrid, and some famous Spanish people were also introduced in the visual projections. Thus, we find dialogues featuring the talking heads not only of Humphrey Bogart, John Wayne or Queen Elizabeth I, but also of José María Pemán, the most representative playwright of the Francoist party, Lola Flores, the most famous and picturesque flamenco singer in Spain, or Arias Navarro, the mayor of the city of Madrid. “These projections,” Dash remarks, “are not static. They interact, arguing with one another without being constrained by their original context or era. In addition, thought balloons like those on comic strips appear above their head when they are thinking, connecting the projections with the onstage characters and integrating the multiple dimensions of the presentations” (2010, 131). The Spanish version opens with the projection of an explosion on board a ship, just as the original production does. Then, while the voice of Everett Dirksen, a reactionary American senator, greeted the American audience with the opening lines from Twelfth Night “If music be the food of love, play on!”, it was José María Pemán who welcomed the Spanish spectators to the Pequeño Teatro Magallanes in Madrid.13 He appears on the screen writing and reading these lines aloud, as well as adding a cultural referent: “I don’t know if this is Paso’s or mine”, ridiculing a famous rival writer (Alfonso Paso) of the period. Next, the audience is confronted with a projection of a ship exploding and sinking. Both projections and voice-over help create a modern visual theatrical atmosphere, in which the focus of attention is continually shifted from the stage to the backlit projections. Suddenly, Viola and Sebastian enter, arguing about whether they should rush to the lifeboat or return to their cabin to save their musical instruments. The argument turns into a song in which the twins dramatize their relationship: “Why can’t you ever be nice?,” Sebastian begins. In view of Sebastian’s refusal to fetch their instruments, Viola blurts out: “What an adventurous brother I have! You don’t give a damn if we have to go back to our village!”. The twins’ 13

Since I have had no access to the original script, all the allusions and references to it are based on the work by Irene G. Dash, Shakespeare and the American Musical (2010). As for the Spanish version, this work relies on the theatre script kept in the Censorship File 202-71 from the AGA.

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hometown Akron, Ohio, is simply replaced by “our village”. Eventually, Sebastian heads for the cabin to fetch the instruments, while the ship’s purser pushes Viola into the lifeboat with a spank, an additional stage direction which gives the production that Spanish taste: the Spanish macho’s inability to come to terms with sexual freedom. The lights are extinguished and the twins sundered. After the blackout, Viola arrives in Illyria, Manhattan Island in the original, but Madrid in the Spanish rendering. As a result, the slide projections of a breathtaking sight of the Manhattan skyline were replaced by the streets and buildings of Madrid. When Viola asks the Purser “Who governs here?”, a slide with the image of Carlos Arias Navarro, then Madrid’s mayor, appears on screen to replace John Lindsay, New York’s mayor at that time. These visual images seek to capture the dusty and unfertile character of twentieth-century urban life, preparing the ground for Viola to sing “The Flowers”, though official censorship must have appreciated some sign of criticism towards Arias Navarro here, because they had to be cut, as we will see later on. Viola’s concerns about her brother are projected towards a balloon above her head: “Oh, my God, I fear Sebastian has been lost in the shipwreck”. Her thoughts are interwoven with a dialogue between the Sistine God and Buddha. The Sistine God states: “She’s talking to me. Disasters are my speciality”. Buddha replies: “Disasters may be your speciality, but after Harmony, mine is pop music”. A Buddha’s gong strikes and a job card appears: “Boy wanted”. Viola stares at her chest and asks herself: “Why not?” Another blackout and the rest of the characters are introduced onto the stage: Orson, the band’s manager, is a graduate from the beat generation; Olivia, the owner of the nightclub, and Dany, Juan and Mike, the three remaining members of The Apocalypse rock band. With their unkempt appearance and long hair, they represent a new generation who aim to do their own thing and mock Orson’s for their oldfashioned manners. After exhibiting the generation clash between Orson and the youngsters, they sing one of the key songs of the production, “This Is a Man”, a fragment of which is reproduced below: Este es un hombre, mirad su pelo, Sin ser vuestra idea del hombre viril. Pensad lo que queráis, ¡qué me importa! Solo quiero ser un hombre libre ¡Para ser yo hombre! Este es un hombre, mirad sus ropas Sin ser vuestra idea de un hombre duro.

This is a man, look at his hair, Not your idea of a he-man Think what you will, what do I care? I just want to be a free man. To be me, man. This is a man, look at his clothes,

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Pensad lo que queráis, y ni es una pose No necesito pretender que soy un hombre duro Soy suficiente hombre.

Not your idea of a tough man. Think what you will, this is no pose. Don’t have to pretend I’m a rough man, I’m man enough.

The lyrics of most of the songs were translated literally and catch the spirit of rebellion and freedom that young people were claiming in Spain after more than thirty years of dictatorial repression. In particular, this song, as Dash states (2010, 133), “describes all the offbeat ways that a man (perhaps a homosexual) can behave and dress in ‘doing his own thing’[…]. Here the adaptors are emphasizing the superficiality of the many areas where gay men are attacked for being different”. Guided by Buddha and disguised as her brother, Viola’s adventure starts as the fourth member of The Apocalypse rock band, since “Disease” had been sent to the Vietnam War in the original version, or to do military service in the Spanish one. Viola introduces herself to Orson and the band as Charlie and, after briefly demonstrating her musical talent, she is hired. Besides, Viola/Charlie soon becomes Orson’s emissary to woo Olivia for him, trying to convince her that he is not so old-fashioned. Meanwhile, a dialogue amongst Queen Elizabeth, Bogart, The Sistine God and John Wayne is projected on screen to comment on the recruitment of the new member. The lights go down and it is time for Sebastian’s appearance on stage reciting some lines from Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night and singing “Come Away, Come Away, Death”. As Antonio has been dismissed from the musical, the action focuses on Sebastian and the hospital nurse, who mistakes him for a woman due to his long hair, though she realizes he is a man while washing him, which provides the scene with a heavy eroticism that caught the censor’s attention. Once recovered, Sebastian departs for Illyria and, like his sister, receives a “boy wanted” card, thus beginning the game of confusion between brother and sister. He first meets Orson, who mistakes him for Viola/Charlie and asks him about the letter he has given Viola/Charlie before. Afterwards, the setting moves to Olivia’s place, where she meets Viola/Charlie and immediately feels attracted to her/him: “You’re kind of young! He doesn’t have a beard!” is the first speech she utters, taking Shakespeare’s lines out of context. In the list of characters Olivia is introduced as a charming, witty and gorgeous woman of about thirty, the owner of a discotheque. She adores being surrounded by young people and dressing fashionably; “therefore her preference for Viola naturally follows” (Dash 2010, 139). She expresses her attraction by means of a

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song, “Let it be”, echoing Shakespeare’s words14: “Beardless, nothing else can be asked for!/And now, what?/It seems to me that the perfections of this young man/With subtle and invisible cleverness/Pierce to my eyes./Is that illness so fast?/Well, let it be/If I have found love so quickly, let it be”. With a slide of Orson projected in the background, Viola proceeds to deliver Orson’s letter to Olivia, who tries to seduce Charlie while dismissing Orson. Then, it is Sebastian, dressed in the same clothes as his sister, who plays the role of the wooer. By means of this game of seduction, the authors of Your Own Thing shift “the weight of the plot from Olivia’s affection for Viola to Orson’s affection for Charlie” (Dash 2010, 141), highlighting the issue of homosexuality and deviating from Shakespeare’s play. As Dash remarks, [w]hile rejecting Shakespeare creative approach to women, the musical opens a new path toward acceptance of homosexuality as a legitimate choice. Orson becomes enamored of Charlie/Viola and must reexamine some of his long-held ideas, just as the audience must confront theirs. The musical creatively misreads Shakespeare, emphasizing the positive possibilities of homosexual unions. (139)

Surprisingly enough, the central issue of the musical, homosexuality, has been explicitly preserved in the Spanish script. Analyzing the Spanish text, it seems clear that the translators retained the sexual ambiguity of the musical and that the question of homosexuality pervades the whole production as one of its main topics. At that time, and indeed beyond Franco’s death, being a homosexual was considered a punishable offense, and the regime’s aversion towards homosexuality was reflected in legislation. The Ley de Vagos y Maleantes, issued in 1954, was applied till 1970, when the regime designed another socially repressive force to control it, the Ley de Peligrosidad y Rehabilitación Social. Besides, they also made use of Articles 431 and 432 of the Penal Code to repress sexual freedom (Merino 2008, 243). Homosexuality was also a taboo topic which censors put every effort into deleting, especially in film and theatre. Nevertheless, Raquel Merino (2005, 2008) has demonstrated in several works that homosexuality “settled down in the Spanish theatre against all predictions, mainly through foreign translated and censored texts”. In her study of The Boys in the Band, first performed in Spain in 1975, she traces how the topic was 14

“Methinks I feel this youth’s perfections/With an invisible and subtle stealth/To creep in at mine eyes. Well, let it be.” (Twelfth Night, 1.5.218-220)

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timidly and subtly introduced on stage from the 1950s: Tea and Sympathy in 1956, Five Finger Exercise in 1959, The Zoo Story in 1963 (in Studio Theatre till 1973, thereafter in commercial theatres, where it continues to be present today) and The Boys in the Band in 1975, the year of Franco’s death, provide abundant evidence of how Spain’s theatrical system was gradually permeated by one of the issues that was most keenly persecuted by the censors and how it so happened that, a couple of months before Franco’s death and the vast political change that ensued, authorization and all manner of media coverage could be given to the production of a play whose thematics were clear for all to see, and all of whose characters are openly homosexual and act and talk accordingly on stage. (2008, 264)

Thus, it is not odd that the most avant-garde independent theatre company of the period dared to stage this unconventional rock musical in 1971. Proof of this audacity is the scene in which an insightful Orson appears onstage reading some books, from psychology to history, in an attempt to find answers to his homosexual feelings. Despite the fact that it is likely that the original scene had been shortened in the Spanish version, the authors were true to their intention of justifying homosexuality as a legitimate choice, by presenting historical figures that had been recognized as homosexuals, even in the Bible. ORSON: (Reading) “It is a usual thing that these latent desires appear once the fears of the society’s animosity have been suppressed. And because the affected individual is not able to include them in his own view of masculine behaviour”. This has to be with me! […] (He takes out a second book) I’m glad Mum can’t see me. […] “[T]hroughout History there have been civilizations which have accepted man’s love for another man as part of the society is which it took place”. […] “[A]ll kids have read about Hector and Achilles at school, and King David and …”. King David? “… and his friend Jonathan”. That’s true, I have read things about them at school; so… well, well…

Orson bursts into a song proclaiming his new love, while images of Viola/Charlie are projected on the screen creating a dream-like scene. Suddenly, images from the Far West are shown with a menacing John Wayne: “Bring him to the West and there we’ll make him stiff as a stick”. Orson goes back pretending his hands are tied behind his back: “What do you want from me, old Chisum?,” to which John Wayne replies: “We don’t want effeminate guys around here, so fetch your horse and get out of here!”. Viola appears to save Orson from this fantasy and tries to reveal her true identity; “Call me Viola,” she declares. But Orson thinks she has

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made up a name and protests: “Charlie, that’s not playing this stuff seriously!”. Incapable of convincing Orson she is a girl, Viola angrily asks: “Do you mean you only love me because I am a boy?”. In the American version, “Viola finally takes off her shirt and throws it down, clearly revealing that she is a girl” (Dash 2010, 147). Although this stage direction is absent from the censored Spanish script, probably to avoid censorship, the undressing was staged, as documented in some reviews of the period: The plot of Lo que te dé la gana15 consists of introducing the multiple sexual misunderstandings caused by the likeness of the twins, derived from the continuous relations that both maintain with Orson and Olivia; until everything is cleared up: on the part of Viola in the clearest and most convincing way: showing without hesitation the anatomy of her female thorax—and the comedy ended in what could be called an ironic happy ending. (La Gaceta ilustrada, in Álvaro 1972, 213-214)

From this review we assume that Viola showed her breasts on stage to demonstrate to Orson that she was a girl, but this action is not made explicit in the theatre script and probably not performed on the day of the dress rehearsal in order to avoid censorship.

Lo que te dé la gana Faces the Francoist Censorship Censors must have been shocked by having in their hands a Shakespeare play turned into a modern rock musical, and this astonishment is made explicit in the censorship reports they issued. Although Shakespeare’s plays were normally authorized, the script of Haz lo que te dé la gana was minutely scrutinized. It was submitted to the Theatre Censorship Office on 16 April 1971. The final censorship report, issued on 27 April, authorized the performance for an audience of 18 or over, with suppressions on pages 3, 8, 14, 24 and 36 and conditional on the viewing of the dress rehearsal. The procedure required three different reports before a final dictum was issued. A detailed analysis of these individual reports thus provides an insight into censors’ behaviour regarding this production. Apart from the suppressions imposed on the theatre text, these reports show how cautious censors were about the 15

Reviews referred to the play as Lo que te dé la gana [What you Will], when in fact there is one word missing in the title. The theatre script submitted to the censorship boards reads: Haz lo que te dé la gana [Do What You Will]. It is not clear why this word was omitted from the final title.

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performance. The textual marks present on the script are also indicative of the main taboo topics of the period: sexual morals, religion, politics and improper language. One of the civil censors, Sr Vázquez Dodero, signalled what he regarded as the most dangerous passages of the script: “See pages 14, 19, 20, 30 and 33; regarding politics: 3-14-24-36; rude language: 1-3; Pemán, Felipe II, Lola Flores: 20-25”. In his view, the performance should be authorized for an audience of 18 or over and made conditional on a dress rehearsal viewing.16 This insistence on the viewing of the dress rehearsal is also expressed in Sr Ruiz Martínez’s report: “Updated version and musical adaptation from Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night. A strict viewing of the dress rehearsal is needed, owing to the continuous scenes with cross-dressing 16 Mr Vázquez Dodero: “Ver págs. 14, 19, 20, 30 y 33 y para política: 3-14-24-36; malsonantes palabras: 1-3- Pemán, Felipe II, Lola Flores: 20-25. Autorizada para mayores de 18 años. No Radiable. A reserva de visado del ensayo general”. AGA 03(046) SIG 73/09845, File 202-71. Apart from the final suppressions imposed on the script, Vázquez Dodero alluded in his report to the following fragments: Page14: Nurse: Won’t you be afraid of going to the War? Sebastian: No, only of being shot. (Slides) Wayne: These kinds of people are the ones who help and encourage the enemy. My country above all! Bogart: Yes, that’s the same thing Hitler said. Page 19: Olivia: I’m going to fetch my anti-baby pills and see you at 2 o’clock. Viola: I said… if I were Orson… Page 20: (After Viola disguised as Charlie and Orson singing together. Slides) Wayne: What a shame! This guy likes the boy. Bogart: Your old problem comes to the surface again! It’s not a boy but a girl! Wayne: Right, but he doesn’t know it. Bogart: Would it make any difference if he did? Wayne: Of course, then it would be decent! Bogart: No, it would just be legal. Page 30: On this page, Orson realizes that he likes Charlie, so he appears on stage reading books about homosexuality, about how the appearance of this sexual desire towards men can cause an emotional disorder. Then he goes on reading a book where homosexuality is depicted in the relationship between famous characters from History. Page 33: Here, Orson confesses his love to Charlie and Viola says that she is a girl, although Orson doesn’t believe her. Orson: You don’t have to believe me if you don’t want to, but I’m going to tell you the truth. It’s true, you are the first boy that I’ve ever loved. Viola: What!!!

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characters and the theatrical game that springs from them. Strict dress rehearsal viewing regarding the visual projections and slides too”. He proposed cuts on pages 3, 14 and 36 of the first act and the play’s authorization for an audience of 18 or over. Finally, Sr Mampaso asserted: “Comic musical folly that must be carefully examined in the dress rehearsal in order to be finally approved. Regarding the script, it can be authorized for an audience of 18 or over, taking into account the signalled suppressions”. He suggested that some passages on pages 8, 24 and 36 should be omitted and that authorization depended on a viewing of the dress rehearsal. Taking into account these reports, on 27 April 1971 the Theatre Censorship Office issued the final verdict, imposing suppressions on pages 3, 8, 14, 24 and 36, prohibiting a radio broadcast of the play and authorizing the production for an audience of 18 or over, conditional on a viewing of the dress rehearsal. In the first place, the cuts to page 3 correspond to the projections of modern buildings, metallic structures and the slide of Carlos Arias Navarro, the mayor of the city of Madrid from 1965 to 1973 and then President of Spain from 1974 to 1976. Official censorship seems to have appreciated some sort of criticism of the mayor here, as the images had to be cut. Arias was a member of the Franco courtmartials during the Civil War and the post-war, and was known as the “butcher of Málaga”. It is believed that he was responsible for more than 4,000 executions. Second, on page eight the following speech by the projected God of the Sistine Chapel had to be omitted: “The old Queen is right, ‘four’ is not a biblical number”. The curious thing is that the censor signalled this speech, but not the previous ones: Isabel I: What do they need four musicians for? In my times, bards sang alone. Bogart: They call it a protest song. Shhhh, the government doesn’t like it at all.

The scene between Sebastian and the nurse who attended him after the shipwreck is full of innuendo that did not go unnoticed by the censors. Thus, page 14 features the following deletion: Nurse: You should be in the Army with your head shaved! Sebastian: I don’t see the connection. Nurse: There they will make you stand nice and straight [bien tiesecito]. Sebastian: You just have. Nurse: You see? That’s what I mean. To the army and with your head shaved!

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As well as in the original version, references to the Vietnam War are constant in the Spanish rendering of the musical. Despite not being a Spanish War, all these claims against authority are perfectly applicable in a country in which a military dictatorship had been imposed by force. This production is the tribute of youth to freedom, rejecting any symbol of military authority. This became evident in the lyrics of some of the songs, and for this reason, censors cut the line of the song “The New Generation” on page 24: “ALL: Down with your shaved heads and your uniforms!!”. As in many other cultural contexts, the length of one’s hair became a symbol of freedom. Short hair was linked to virility, to being a proper “macho”, whereas boys with long hair were seen as homosexuals or effeminate. The play seeks to challenge this vision, by playing with the likeness of the twins. After singing the final song, “Your Own Thing”, the musical ends with a blackout, followed by a slide showing a dialogue between God and Adam in the Sistine Chapel that reflects the attempts of male authority to emasculate any sign of rebellion on the part of the young: God of the Sistine Chapel: Eh, boy! Son: What’s up, Dad? God of the Sistine Chapel: When are you going to have your hair cut!?

The Spanish adaptors made an effort to preserve this passage, by including the following note: “Please bear in mind that this ending has a respectful and naïve tone which can in no way be considered offensive and, in fact, is not an attempt to be so”. However, the Francoist censorship exerted its power by doctoring the fragment. Regarding the critical reception of the performance, it should be pointed out that it was a complete success, as can be inferred from the reviews of the period. The play remained on stage for more than eight months. The critic of La estafeta literaria claimed: “It is an unusual spectacle, an island which stands out in the monotonous sea of our theatre, an extraordinary invention which, fortunately, drifts too far from the common theatre” (Álvaro 1972, 213). Lo que te dé la gana was a modern production that followed British and American standards insofar as it explored the sexual implications of Viola’s cross-dressing and emphatically staged the issue of homosexuality. As can be read in Nuevo Diario: It’s a splendid and ordered confusion of constant and fast movement, a funny mess—in perfect doses—which mixes dialogues and songs, races and maxims by popular characters, shouts and triumphal marches. There is

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a shipwreck that brings confusion due to the great likeness between brother and sister, which causes ambiguous crossed loves and qualms about homosexuality on the part of one of the characters. (Álvaro 1972, 213)

Lo que te dé la gana reflects the changes that Spanish society was undergoing during the 1970s. Traditional patriarchal values were questioned and confronted, and young people led a sexual revolution that also flooded the cultural realm. It was also the age of the “destape” (or “unveiling”) both in the cinema and in the press, and sexual freedom was also tested on stage. This production claimed the liberty to act and to love, with no prejudices about gender or age, just as the Spanish youth were demanding. Undoubtedly, Lo que te dé la gana had a powerful impact on the contemporary Spanish theatrical scene, as it marked, as clearly as the American version did, “a new direction for musicalizing Shakespeare” (Dash 2010, 154). It is striking that some later productions of Twelfth Night, staged in a freer and more democratic environment, ignored the erotic tension of the original play (Gregor 1998). Although the behaviour of the censors reflects an attempt to repress the production, this does not mean that they achieved their goal. It was just an attempt to stop the unstoppable.

Works Cited Álvaro, Francisco. 1972. El espectador y la crítica. El teatro en España en 1971. Libro XIV. Madrid: Prensa Española. Arias, Rosario. 2001. “Paratextos y metatextos en la recepción de las traducciones españolas de Twelfth Night”. TRANS. Revista de Traductología 5: 57-75. Bandín Fuertes, Elena. 2007. Traducción, recepción y censura de teatroclásicoinglés. Estudio descriptivo–comparativo del Corpus TRACEtci (1939–1985). León: Universidad de León (https://buleria.unileon.es/handle/10612/1885). Dash, Irene G. 2010. Shakespeare and the American Musical. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Espejo, Ramón. 1997. “Historia del Zoo de Edward Albee y el teatro independiente español”. Atlantis: Revista de la Asociación Española de Estudios Anglo-Norteamericanos 19: 65-76. Gregor, Keith. 1998. “Spanish ‘Shakespeare-manía’: Twelfth Night in Madrid, 1996-97”. Shakespeare Quarterly 49: 421-431. Gregor, Keith & Elena Bandín. 2011. “The Role of the Censor in the Reception of Shakespearean Drama in Francoist Spain: the Strange Case of The Taming of the Shrew”. In Censorship Across Borders, eds.

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Alberto Lázaro & Catherine O’Leary, 143–160. Newcastle-upon-Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. Folkerth, Wes. 2006. “Pop Music. Introduction, Shakespeare in Popular Music”. In Shakespeares after Shakespeare. An Encyclopedia of the Bard in Mass Media and Popular Culture, ed. Richard Burt, 366. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press. Merino Álvarez, Raquel. 2001. “Del plagio como método de traducción del teatro inglés en España: una tradición demasiado arraigada”. TRANS. Revista de traductología 5: 219-226. —. 2005. “From Catalogues to Corpus in DTS: Translations Censored under Franco. The TRACE Project”. Revista canaria de estudios ingleses 51: 85-103. —. 2008. “La homosexualidad censurada: estudio sobre corpus de teatro TRACEti inglés-español (desde 1960)”. In Traducción y censura en España (1939-1985). Estudios sobre corpus TRACE: cine, narrativa, teatro, ed. Raquel Merino, 243-286. Bilbao: Universidad del País Vasco/Universidad de León. Patterson, Mia. 2010. 75 años de historia del musical en España (19302005). Madrid: Ediciones y Publicaciones Autor SRL. Ruiz Ramón, Francisco. 2001. Historia del Teatro Español. Siglo XX. Madrid: Cátedra.

CHAPTER EIGHT WRITING BETWEEN THE LINES: REVIEWING SHAKESPEARE PRODUCTIONS IN SOCIALIST HUNGARY VERONIKA SCHANDL

Philter: A Hungarian Database of Socialist Theatre History As is evident from the name, theatre history engages itself with theatrical conditions, general trends, but first and foremost with theatrical performances, as opposed to dramatic texts. The most commonly quoted basic definition of a theatre performance was formulated by Eric Bentley as follows: A performs B for C (1975, 150). In this equation C knows that A is playing a role and they both share a common code (based on culture, social conventions and history) which prescribes their behaviour. This obviously means that theatre performance is a direct form of art, which needs the personal presence of both participants, whose interaction is indispensable for theatre to be born. Consequently, it is easily deducible that performance is an ephemeral art form which only exists in the present moment. Peggy Phelan’s oftenquoted remark about performance art could indeed be extended to every theatrical performance, since: “[it] cannot be saved, recorded, documented or otherwise participate in the circulation of representation of representations: once it does so, it becomes something other than performance” (1993, 146). Performance’s ontological quality, as Phelan argues, is precisely its disappearance with time—hence research directed at performances, by definition, has no subject—, the sign to which we wish to give interpretive significance is non-existent. Thus with Árpád Kékesi-Kun (2006, 35) we can conclude that theatre research has, in the Foucaultian sense, no primary source—all sources we rely on are postulated, secondary sources, later records of performances. Although much of the twentieth century was spent by theatre historians in the attempt to establish theatre history as

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a scientific discipline which relies on evidence, and this documentary imperative led to the establishment of important archives and databases, it also has to be admitted that the value of this information lies in their application, which is often problematic in itself. First, because it would be naïve to suggest that these documents are neutral recordings of the events. Although they ultimately replace the reality of the performance, they all carry a purpose, so that they can be seen as performative in their own right. Photographs are taken with the aim of preserving the significant moments of a performance—thus out of context, interrupting the flow of the staged events, which changes every night—; reviews, though sometimes seeming eye-witness accounts, are always written with a critical purpose, and the audience, although an essential element of the theatre event, is often missing from these data altogether. Second, we have to be aware that our relation to the “events” of theatre history is not historical, but linguistic—“the archives in which a historian works are repositories not of pure data, but of texts: and the criteria by which texts qualify as evidence must always be subject to negotiation” (Ingram 1997, 218). Texts are not only the most common sources for our knowledge about performances, but constructing narratives is also the most dominant way we discuss the theatre. (Even Phelan, in the above quoted text, in which she establishes the ontological nonreproductive nature of performance, does so by giving narrative examples of certain performances.) The narrative form, as William Ingram reminds us, is “hospitable to all comers”, thus is probably still the most suitable form in which to relate history, “so long as the various narratives [...] can coexist in some relation to each other, so long as they remain fairly particularized rather than all-embracing, so long as they offer themselves as provisional rather than final” (1997, 218). One therefore has to avoid the narrativizing impulse and construct all encompassing cause and effect master-narratives from theatrical events (or, more specifically, from the documents we have about them). That is why the most recent Hungarian project on recent theatre history,1 in a wish to resist the narrative urge and use the possibilities offered by cyberspace, instead of compiling a bulky volume on Hungarian theatre history from 1960 to 2008, launched a website: a database of 400 or so productions from the period. The choice of the productions included in the database was made on the basis of whether or not they were 1

Philter, a Hungarian theatre history from 1960 to 2008, is a project financed by OTKA.

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considered to have been significant—that is, if they had actively influenced current theatrical trends in the country. However controversial this approach may at first sound, it at least consciously admits that we look at the past from the point of view of the present and mostly construct it through the filter of our present narratives and discursive patterns. To unify the rather diverse material, the project created a category system, with the help of which it wishes to assess the productions. According to this, the database will discuss the shows from the following viewpoints: 1. The theatrical and cultural context of the production 2. Dramaturgy, or what happened to the dramatic text in the production 3. Major directorial concepts of a production 4. Acting—main actors, acting styles, noteworthy performances 5. Scenery and costumes, visual representation 6. The artistic influence the production had on later shows—the production’s “historical significance” This seemingly all-encompassing and wide-ranging set of criteria, combined with the possibilities of cyberspace, did at first present itself as a liberating research angle, but once we got down to work, a few problems did arise. Especially when it came to Shakespeare productions between 1964 and 1989, that is the so-called Kádár era2 of socialist Hungary.

Censorship and Socialist Shakespeare Productions First we realized that several of the socialist Hungarian Shakespeare productions that inhabit a pivotal place in Hungarian cultural memory and are regarded as milestones of not only Shakespearean reception history, but also Hungarian theatre history, had left very little or no mark on current Hungarian theatrical trends. Although celebrated in their own time as politically daring and expressing the sentiments of a generation, quite a few of these productions, when seen outside their socio-political context, solely from an aesthetic point of view, appear traditional or outdated, even when compared to their contemporaries.

2

The Kádár regime occupies the period in Hungarian history between 1956 and 1989, named after Party secretary János Kádár, who governed Hungary for more than thirty years after the 1956 revolution.

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Just to give one example here: in 1962 László Vámos directed Hamlet at the Madách Theatre in Budapest, starring Miklós Gábor as Hamlet. This production became an emblem for the post-1956 era, and a reference-point for a generation of youngsters living at the time. The show ran for more than 250 performances and was preserved for future generations on film as well. The video document, however, offers more questions than answers. When watched in 2013, the production, which cultural memory preserved as topical and revolutionary, appears to be highly traditional in its acting style and conservatively literary in its focus. In a retrospective essay, reviewer Gábor Mihályi remembered the show thus: The new Hamlet—both Miklós Gábor and the production—summed up the occurrences and the life philosophy of a generation. Experiencing Hamlet’s tragedy, the generation of Miklós Gábor, and partly also my own, one could relive and rethink the events of the past ten or so years, the beliefs and the disappointments, the bitter tragedies of the 1950s and the renewed hopes of the 1960s. Hamlet, even if we did not consciously realize it, made us recap and review our lives, while he also made us ask ourselves where we were to go from here. (1976, 16-17)

Watching the performance and reading the reviews, the historian has to conclude that the 1962 Hamlet was perceived as topical by a generation because of factors which were never pronounced or recorded, but were felt and understood by the members of the audience. As Miklós Gábor himself summarized in 1984: “The reason why Hamlet became so successful is because the social condition at the time could be understood as a version of ‘Hamlet’s situation’” (Valachi 1984, 12). Studied through aesthetic categories only, however, the show loses almost all its appeal— it seems neither inventive in its directorial concept nor forward-looking in its scenery or acting style. Productions like these did indeed force us researchers to rethink the choices of selection we had made in preparing the database. The second problem presented itself when it came to acquiring documents about highly influential, but culturally subversive, productions that were originally shown in counter-cultural venues by “tolerated”, but non-“supported” artists. One example for the difficulties we encountered can be seen in the case of a 1964 Measure for Measure production, directed by József Ruszt, one of the most significant theatre figures of the socialist Hungarian theatre world. The show is not only important as the first post-war production of Measure for Measure, but was also instrumental in launching Ruszt’s lifelong interest in Shakespeare, as well

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as the Universitas Ensemble, several members of which later played crucial roles in Hungarian theatre. The theatre archive project aims at production reconstructions, and for the database it is essential that each production should be described using the same set of criteria, but in the case of the 1964 Measure, available data were so limited that we were almost stopped from including this, albeit highly significant, production in the database. The reason for this lies in the workings of socialist Hungarian cultural politics, one method of which, to prevent subversive productions from reaching a wider audience, was to order media silence on the shows that were deemed harmless enough to be produced, but were on the verge of the tolerable. In the case of the 1964 Measure, what we had at hand were three short reviews in a university paper and a blurry photograph. While we did end up relying on personal interviews, they were scarce and often contradictory; moreover, they left us guessing about scenery or personal performances. The last problematic I would like to touch upon is of a general methodological nature. Most of the Shakespeare productions we decided to include in the database were not recorded on video, so we only have access to written sources. But written sources from an authoritarian era are highly unreliable. This is especially true in the case of the reviews, interviews and secret service files from the Kádár era that are left for us as resources to work on, which are all problematic for various reasons. Starting at the end of the list, let us consider how far secret service files can be helpful in reconstructing past productions. Unfortunately many of the files, especially those of the artists observed by the Agency (labelled “F”, short for Hungarian “observed”) were destroyed in 1989, while most remaining records discuss personal matters of actors and very rarely touch upon actual performances. Theatre historian Krisztina Kovács saw the reason for this bias in the workings of the Secret Service since, according to her, “the leaders of the state did not really fear the power of publicity the theatre possessed, but instead dreaded the secret plots actors may have been hatching behind the scenes. They did not measure the weight of words that were uttered on stage but analyzed the private conversations of the theatre practitioners” (2011, 24). The Archive of the State Surveillance Agency, therefore, gives ample information about actors who reported to the Secret Service and is a rich source of data about the general atmosphere of the theatre world at a given moment, but it provides very little information about actual performances. To be able to understand the reasons for this, as well as the problems one faces when consulting contemporary reviews and indeed all printed

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materials as sources, there is one very peculiarly Hungarian aspect of cultural politics we have to shed light on. Uniquely amongst most Central European countries, Hungary did not have a central censorship office. Instead of direct censorship, the Kádár regime developed a multi-level system, in which it expected the members on all levels to self-censor themselves. Through this regulatory system of many layers, and anticipating the self-censoring cooperation of its citizens, the authorities very rarely had to resort to the method of direct control. Contrary to the binary system of banned or supported materials of the Stalinist regime, the new regulations relied on the tripartite value scale of banned, tolerated and supported, the second being a non-prescribed, only vaguely defined, category of works of art which, though not openly socialist, were at least partly acceptable for the regime. This group changed incessantly: what was banned one day could easily be performed the next. No official guidelines were put down for what passed as tolerable, since the regime wished to keep everyone on their toes, guessing. There were certain general taboos that had to be avoided (anything that would offend the Soviet Union or any friendly socialist countries, any criticism of the Party leadership, any obscenity or vulgarity, or open description of sexual acts), but everything beyond these was up to the temporary judgment of the officials. In a brochure on the theory and practice of theatre programme politics published in 1972, the general directives of cultural politics were summarized as follows: It is not necessary to use either strong-hand or tight-grip policies, nor is it advisable to use administrative measures. Only refer to these measures when dealing with a direct threat from the artist, directed at our social order. The new methods of the regime require: a. a constant and serious analysis of works of art, b. the elevation of the professional level of reviewing, together with a strengthening of its ideological-political adherence, its willingness to start debates, its activism, its offensive tendencies and its popularity. (Cited in Kovács 2011, 25)

Putting these directives into everyday practice meant that the officials controlled the seasonal programmes of the theatres, which had to be licensed by Party functionaries every year. Furthermore, it required theatre reviews to exercise a strong sense of self-censorship and a complete adherence to the political directives of the Party. Monitoring both ends of the theatre production-line this way, since both the repertoires had to be streamlined to be ideologically correct, while public reports on performances

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were also strictly coded, very few shows had to be rejected and direct confrontation with the authorities was surprisingly rare. Instead, in official resolutions the authorities made use of several mediatory, restricting categories, reducing shows to studio theatres, allowing productions only to be performed with constant Party supervision or in exchange for personal guarantees, and relegating performances to the following season.3 Zoltán Imre has summarized these trends succinctly: Open confrontation with the authorities was not significant… and this was amplified by the aversion of the regime to all extremes or deflections, that is, the Kádárist “middle-of-the-road” political strategy that has become the general norm of discourse. Therefore, the authorities endeavoured to avoid open conflicts, while seeking ways of smoothing over disagreements without drawing much attention. The typical means of conflict resolution —if they were possible to induce—stopped at verbal threats, aided by the custom of official supervision, as well as by the two forms of reviews: critical censorship in reviews meant for inner political circles and public reprimands in official Party papers. (Cited in Radnóti 2012, 392)

Therefore, although by the 1970s and especially the 1980s, several subversive tendencies had gained a foothold in Hungarian Shakespeare productions, alternative interpretations flooded the stages and there was a general widening of the theatre scene, there is very little trace of these tendencies in contemporary theatre reviews. Just to give one example: many young scholars are overjoyed to discover the many references to the topicalities a show presented, only to realize later that “topicality” was simply one of the many required clichés reviews used to point out that, in a Marxist vein, with art depicting life, these productions were legitimized as politically correct. Very few of the contemporary allusions many audience members had looked for in the productions made it into the reviews. On the contrary, it was more often the case that a supporting review veiled these, often subversive or critical, references to protect the show from official scrutiny. Since reviews were closely-regulated parts of the official discourse on culture, they adhered to more or less the same pattern, which, in the case of Shakespeare productions, included a lengthy, often bardolatrous praise of Shakespeare, followed by a detailed analysis of the play, often resting on the interpretation of the epilogues written to the Complete Hungarian Edition of Shakespeare’s Plays (Kéry 1955). Next, they detailed the directorial concepts—that is, they gave a “reading” of the show, offered 3

See Gajdó (2012, 361).

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fleeting references to scenery and costumes and closed with two or three paragraphs on personal performances. The self-censoring regulations generally worked so smoothly that univocally condemnatory reviews are very hard to find. When a production was deemed by the authorities to fail, reviewers were mostly sent to watch the performance, yet they were not allowed to publish their reviews. Cutting-edge, avant-garde and amateur productions, let alone happenings, were the only examples over which there is complete silence in the reviews, and they only feature in Secret Service files. Overall, we can conclude that despite the fact that Hungary did not have an official censorship authority, the literary focus, as well as the selfcensoring discourse of written sources we have from the Kádár regime on socialist Shakespeare directions, make it increasingly difficult to reconstruct productions. Working mostly from reviews, interviews and (auto)biographies, our work resembles a treasure-hunt, where one is looking for clues in contextual materials, using the crutches of history, sociology and other social sciences, while admitting that the end result is largely a mixture of fact and fiction. Let me, in what follows, present a case study of a 1983 As You Like It production at the Katona József Theatre in Budapest, a production which, though well-documented, continues to demonstrate the difficulties this essay has tried to outline so far.

A Case Study: As You Like It, Katona József Theatre, 1983 As You Like It, directed by Gábor Székely at the Katona József Theatre in Budapest, ran between 1983 and 1987 and was performed on 88 occasions. It was a hugely successful production, the second in the long line of many more to come for a young company which was to write Hungarian theatre history as the most influential ensemble of the country in the 1980s. Their unique style of acting, which later was labelled “minute realism”, or “psychological realism”, had a long-lasting influence on Hungarian theatre, which is still felt today. The popularity of the show is clearly visible in contemporary reviews as well, since all the major daily papers, as well as the literary weeklies, wrote at least two-column analyses of the production, while the monthly theatre magazine devoted four pages to assessing the première. All reviews are enthusiastic in their tone and praise the ensemble work, as well as the thorough directorial concept behind the show. Starting with a literary analysis, critics call the performance “a charming tale for adults” (Barabás 1983, 10), a “bucolic play” (Tarján 1983, 1), “a droll frolicking of love in the woods” (Várhelyi 1983, 11); however, they do admit that the

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lighter hues of the comedy are overshadowed by the potentiality of tragedy, visible in this direction as well.4 Several longer writings linger, in lieu of the play, on the rhapsodic twists of fate it exhibits,5 concluding that both the comedy and the production are about the uncertainty of human existence. They also stress the unusually realistic tune of the production, linking it to the director, Gábor Székely, who by then was known for his “philosophical” productions: Where are those former As You Like Its from twenty to thirty years ago, with their nonchalant, fairy-tale-like, bucolic idyll? Where are those Dukes who regarded the Forest of Arden and their exile as a funny interlude, as a weekend trip which they spent hunting, eating drinking and singing, until their fates turn for the better again? The leave of the Old Duke is becoming more and more sombre, it is almost a protest against the intrigues and cruel verdicts of city life. Gábor Székely, in his direction at Katona József Színház, turned his back on a politicizing, forced interpretation that only utilizes parts of the play and, unusually for a romantic comedy, chose a realistically down-to-earth reading of the comedy. (Barta 1983, 10)

When touching upon individual performances, the reviews stress repeatedly how well the two young stars of the ensemble, Dorottya Udvaros and Ibolya Csonka, played Rosalind and Celia: Udvaros’s Rosalind smartens-saddens into a grown-up during the three hours of the performance […], while Ibolya Csonka is the same young realist actress she often plays, full of life, down-to-earth and a type otherwise sadly missing from the Hungarian stages. (Tarján 1983, 4)

To Celia’s character the production added the conflicting emotions of teenager-like adoration and jealousy towards Rosalind, a great romantic wish to fall in love, as well as a tolerance towards all matters of love that made critics praise Júlia Csonka’s portrayal, which made them even believe “the unbelievable”—that is, her love towards Oliver (Földes 1983, 7). Although homosexuality was one of the taboos of socialist discourse, one critic lamented the lack of androgynous, homosexual doubleentendres in both Celia’s and Rosalind’s relationship, and also in Orlando’s courting of Rosalind, condemning the nonchalant mirth of the forest wooing scenes (Mészáros 1983, 11). Finally, almost all writings mention László Szacsvai’s Touchstone, whom they depict as a disillusioned philosopher, who “really used to be a 4 5

See, for example, the articles by Földes, Barta and Varjas (1983). See, for example, Mészáros (1983), Barta and Koltai (1983).

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courtier before; this bespectacled, intellectual-looking wise man became a fool, because this was the only way he could stay innocent in a world that seems inhabitable—with jovial superiority” (Koltai 1983, 5), as well as Miklós Benedek’s Jaques, whose grumpy bitterness seemed to have originated not from melancholy, but from a wish to “compensate for his loneliness, that was forced upon him by external pressure” (Varjas 1983, 9). His recital of the “All the world’s a stage” soliloquy was seen as strange, too, since he belted out the famous lines with an anger and rancour directed at his shallow companions (Barabás 1983, 10). With fleeting comments on scenery and costumes, the reviews concluded that the production’s success lay in being up-to-date without being forcefully modern or political, just by depicting how “even behind our moments of ecstasy, there is the dread of our public and private anxieties about life being threatened” (Varjas 1983, 9), an interesting thought that, however, was not further contextualized by any of the critics. As the above suggests, reviews gave a rather general impression about the 1983 As You Like It, mostly providing the reader with a literary analysis of the play and only secondarily describing the stage events of the production. Luckily, we have a video document of the show from 1987, recorded at the last performance. Watching the film, one becomes painfully aware how lacking in information the reviews are. In the following I will try to highlight some aspects of the show which would have been lost to a theatre historian, if the visual footage had not been available. The first thing that strikes the viewer is something that is hinted at in the reviews as well: the unusually realistic, but also gloomy, interpretation of the play. The tone of the production was evidently influenced by the director Gábor Székely’s previous Chekhov productions, since here he also employed the same psychological realism as in his 1971 Seagull and 1974 Three Sisters. The show both started and ended with a storm that played as a distressing backdrop to the joyous events in between, while it also showed the characters in a state of realistic anger and despair. To understand As You Like It as a sad comedy was already a deviation from the accepted norm of interpretation. This is also evident from the video footage, where in the interval the interviewer repeatedly asks Székely about his “odd” choice of turning the colour of the play a few hues darker than usual. What, however, attracts the attention of the theatre historian is that one important element of the show that strengthens this more sombre reading of the play is surprisingly missing from all the reviews: namely, that when Ganymede’s identity is revealed in the wedding scene, Orlando does not

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accept Rosalind’s hand. Instead, utterly hurt by being lied to, he stands there in disbelief and only joins the awkward formal cotillion that rounds off the wedding because he is shoved into it. Finally, it is the storm at the end of the performance that unravels the couples again, what is needed to push him towards Rosalind, so that the two finally embrace in a shivering clinch beneath a dripping half-curtain. Their union is shown as the only available choice, but it is conspicuously far from being a happy ending. Other than in vague general references, the reviews did not refer to the production’s contemporary relevance which, as I have indicated before, was a staple element in the required structure of critical writings. This is less surprising if we consider that the director, and indeed the whole ensemble, had previously been constant acteurs in the turbulent culturalpolitical debates of the previous years, and their status as “accepted” or “tolerated” was still in the making, since the 1983 As You Like It was only the second première at the newly constituted Katona József Theatre and the first play to be directed there by Gábor Székely. The theatre was managed by Székely and fellow-director Gábor Zsámbéki, or “the Gábors”, as they were by then known. These two young artists shared a similar background and were in a unique position in the Hungarian theatre scene. After graduating, both were sent down to the countryside (to Szolnok and Kaposvár, respectively), to venues not regarded as cultural hubs, so that they could be kept out of the artistic mainstream.6 Within seven years, however, they had created the two most buoyant theatre centres in the country and reshuffled the whole Hungarian theatre scene. The mainstream theatre world in late socialist Hungary had several strata. The National Theatre of Budapest, its flagship and at the same time its problem child, was of central interest for the cultural prestige of the socialist regime. Its management always included politically trustworthy artists, while its repertoire was also decided on a political basis, mostly consisting of classical European plays, Soviet dramas and new Hungarian plays supporting a socialist agenda. Shakespeare featured prominently in their programme, often in highly stylized, traditional productions. There were several attempts to invigorate the artistic material that the National Theatre produced, yet none of these efforts were successful in the long run. Some outstanding productions were mounted at the nation’s premier theatre, but it could never really become the centre of new Hungarian theatrical trends.7 6

Since the theatres of the country were nationalized, all theatre personnel were public servants. Therefore, their employment was decided by the Ministry of Culture, which had to answer to the Party authorities. 7 For the debate on the role the National Theatre should play, see Antal (1983).

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Largely thanks to the Gábors, by the middle of the 1970s, exciting theatre in Hungary was produced in the countryside. The Hungarian artistic scene was almost solely based in the capital; hence, the provincial venues were, for a long time, considered second-rate. Performing in a Budapest theatre meant cultural prestige, while employment at a rural venue was often considered a form of punishment. With outdated machinery and poor infrastructure, these theatres operated a season-ticket system. This meant that however successful a production of theirs was, it could only have a short run, because the shows did not draw audiences beyond the small circle of season-ticket holders. Therefore, these ensembles fell back on plays that were easy to produce but enjoyed general popularity: operettas, comedies and classical tragedies. Several of the politically less trustworthy artists were therefore sent to these theatres, in order to be kept out of the public eye, so that they could produce shows of no real national importance for limited audiences. This tactic, however, backfired when, during the tenure of Gábor Zsámbéki and Gábor Székely, Kaposvár and Szolnok introduced new theatrical idioms to the country. During their time there, these previously unnoticed theatres attracted a young generation of theatre makers. Turning the neglected status of rural locations to their advantage, they produced shows that were stretching the boundaries of centrally accepted artistic and political norms. These productions in turn appealed to the country’s young intellectuals, who often travelled for hours, even from Budapest, to watch these productions. Hovering between the categories of “tolerated” and “banned,” these theatres introduced the Hungarian public to absurdist plays, to new contemporary Hungarian dramas, as well as to new ways of interpreting the classics. They reshuffled the Shakespearean canon as well, turning their focus towards the lesser-known plays, such as the problem plays or the romances. In 1978 the authorities attempted to quash these newly formed cultural hubs, by offering the leading directorial position at the National Theatre of Budapest to Székely and Zsámbéki. The decision to relocate them to the nation’s premier theatre does, at first sight, seem like the promotion of a lifetime, but it mostly meant that, within the rigid structures of the National, the two young artists were more under the watchful eyes of the cultural authorities. In their five years as directors they had to struggle with the untouchable giants of the National Pantheon who inhabited the stage of the National Theatre, and while it quickly turned out that the artistic spirit of the rural theatres was not compatible with the conservative theatrical ideas of the nation’s foremost venue, they did manage to put on some breakthrough productions. Their struggle came to an end when a

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new “chinovnik” general manager was placed above them to exercise political control over their artistic endeavours. In 1982 they quit their position. Due to unforeseen international events (the Polish political takeover and Brezhnev’s death, amongst others), there was an internal political struggle within the Hungarian Socialist Workers’ Party around this time, from which the more conservative side emerged victorious. As a revenge on his opponents, the defeated Minister of Culture’s last signed decree, however, gave the former chamber theatre of the National over to the Gábors. This was to become an independent venue, known by the name of the Katona József Theatre. Chosen as the first, programme-setting direction at the Katona, parallels between the 1983 As You Like It and the newly-founded theatre’s position are hard to miss. Like the old Duke and his company of courtiers, Zsámbéki and Székely were also exiles, kicked out of their former positions because of their popularity. The Katona József Theatre was indeed their Forest of Arden, an artistic refuge, out of the limelight, where they enjoyed certain privileges they could never have dreamt of at the National. Refusing to be the tennis balls of political fate any longer, the two young directors gathered an ensemble which represented the cream of the contemporary Hungarian theatre world and set about continuing the work they had started in the countryside. As You Like It also included a choice of cast that can be seen as political, as well as artistic. Significantly enlarging Amiens’s role, Székely cast singer-songwriter Tamás Cseh as a melancholic raisonneur to comment on the events of the play. The production opened with his recital of Sonnet 23 (“As an unperfect actor on the stage…”) and finished with him singing about how, in real life, friends would betray you and lovers cheat on you. Cseh, known as the Hungarian Vysotsky, a commentator of public events and the voice of a generation of young urban intellectuals, appeared not in costume, but in his “normal” performing clothes, constantly providing a contrastingly melancholic visual, as well as verbal, link to the world outside Shakespeare’s enchanted forest. The interpretation of Touchstone’s and Jaques’s characters also brought the production closer to the present. As I mentioned above, Jaques’s anger was something critics also noted. They even talked about his life being lived in “internal immigration” (Koltai 1983, 5), a term then associated with Hungarian intellectuals of the counter-cultural scene. In their outlook and conduct, both he and Touchstone resembled the stereotypical figure of the drifting Hungarian intellectual in his thirties, who had been sidetracked by the political climate. Frustrated, instead of acting, they only voiced their complaints in bars and off-scene venues.

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These characters, who also populated the screens in contemporary Hungarian films, were depicted, similarly to Jaques, as eternal outsiders, moralizing without end; or as Touchstone, who gave up his former intellectual existence and, at the end of the production, was seen dragging the pots and pans of his new meagre household, overwhelmed and eventually silenced by his choice of a “normal” family life. Theirs and Amiens’s running commentary did much to enhance the melancholic atmosphere of the play, which was present both at Duke Frederic’s court and in Arden. The Duke was surrounded by paid chirrupers, Orlando fought a life and death battle with Charles and almost killed his brother, Oliver, Celia’s and Rosalind’s friendship was tested by jealousy. In the value system of the stage-world, cheating and misleading others with hypocrisy were seen as the most condemnable crimes of all, an attitude that can also be seen as a subtle criticism of contemporary society, where Hungarians were living within the well-defined confines of goulash socialism, accepting the status quo, constantly lying about their past and present.8 This is why Orlando’s final rejection of Rosalind’s hand became a symbolic moment of the production—one, however, better not mentioned in the reviews. Székely, in a retrospective interview, mused upon the sombre tones of his early directing at the Katona József Theatre: Nowadays, we usually distinguish between two types of theatre-making. One aims at entertainment, an experience that only lasts as long as when the curtain falls. [… ] But there is another kind of theatre as well, in which the primary goal is not that the spectator should spend two or three hours pleasantly and then leave as someone who has done his job, but that something should happen to him, he should take part in something without which his life would have become less valuable. Or he should at least rethink ideas he had previously thought complete, form new resolutions and face himself over and over again. This kind of theatre should also take on the role of provoking its audience. If that is what you meant, my answer is yes: my productions at the Katona were gloomier than most shows. (Mészáros 1997, 52)

The thought-provoking function of theatre, combined with a psychologically realistic understanding of a classic comedy, are what made the 1983 As You Like It a unique production that set the tone for the Katona József Theatre for many years to come. It was, indeed, this minute realism that, uniquely in Hungary, enabled Zsámbéki and Székely to create 8

For more on the hypocritical nature of the Kádár regime, see, for instance, Horváth (2008).

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productions where high-quality ensemble work strengthened a reading which enabled the audience to reflect on their offstage reality as well. This connection between the onstage and offstage worlds, the innuendos that a more realistic understanding of a Shakespeare play allowed to be established, made As You Like It a programme-setting production for the theatre, a milestone that indeed commands its place in the historical theatre archive of the age. Taking the example of a 1983 As You Like It production, this essay has concerned itself with the problem of sources, that is, the sources a researcher has at hand when discussing Shakespeare productions in an authoritarian regime, in this case socialist Hungary. It has discussed the question of what and how we can use historical sources as data for possible performance reconstructions, or whether contemporary reviews have more to say about critical discourse and censorship, as well as the self-censorship practices of dictatorial regimes, than about the actual productions themselves. One conclusion the essay wishes to offer is the importance of contextualization, without which written sources seem meagre and insufficient. At the same time, it has to admit that, with contextualization, all performance reconstructions border on fiction, since the data we use to supplement reviews and written sources depend on the researcher’s choice. Acknowledging this, however, should not limit the scope of our research but widen it, since it should lead to a closer scrutiny of the sources we have at hand. Besides understanding the nature of censorship and critical discourse as a whole, these studies could help theatre studies to reflect upon its methodology, as well as offering channels of communication between critics and theatre historians on the nature of the work we are doing. When dealing with authoritarian regimes and the uses of censorship, such discussions could offer valuable insights into the dynamics of dictatorial cultural politics, something this essay has also wished to discuss.

Works Cited Antal, Gábor (ed.). 1993. SzínházmĦvészetünkrĘl. Budapest: Kossuth Könyvkiadó. Árpád Kékesi-Kun. 2006. “Hist(o)riográfia. A színházi emlékezet problémája”. In Színház, kultúra, emlékezet, 35. Veszprém: Pannon Egyetem Kiadó. Barabás, Tamás. 1983. “Ahogy tetszik”. Esti Hírlap, 28 February. Barta, András. 1983. “Ahogy tetszik”. Magyar Nemzet, 13 March. Bentley, Eric. 1975. The Life of the Drama. New York: Applause.

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Földes, Anna. 1983. “Színház az egész világ”. NĘk Lapja, 26 March. Gajdó, Tamás. 2012. “Színházi diktatúra Magyarországon 1919-1962”. In Színház és diktatúra, ed. György Lengyel. Budapest: Corvina. Horváth, Sándor (ed.). 2008. Mindennapok Rákosi és Kádár korában. Budapest: Nyitott KönyvmĦhely. Ingram, William. 1997. “What Kind of Future for the Theatrical Past: or, What Will Count as Theatre History in the Next Millennium?”. Shakespeare Quarterly 48. Kéry, László (ed.). 1955. Shakespeare Összes MĦvei. Budapest: Európa Könyvkiadó. Koltai, Tamás. 1983. “Az Ahogy tetszik a Katona József Színházban”. Új Tükör, 13 March 1983. Kovács, Krisztina, 2011. “A színész, mint megfigyelĘ”. In A 20. századi magyar színháztörténeti kánon alakulása, ed. Magdolna Jákfalvi. Budapest: Balassi Kiadó, 2011. Mészáros Tamás. 1997. A Katona. Budapest: Pesti Szalon Kiadó. —. 1983. “Oly édes az élet?”. Magyar Hírlap, 5 March. Mihályi, Gábor. 1976. Hamletekre emlékezve. Színházelméleti Füzetek 3. Budapest: Magyar Színházi Intézet. Phelan, Peggy. 1993. “The Ontology of Performance: Representation without Reproduction”. In Unmarked. London: Routledge. Radnóti, Zsuzsa. 2012. “A hetvenes-nyolcvanas évtized”. In Színház és diktatúra, ed. György Lengyel. Budapest: Corvina. Tarján, Tamás. 1983. “Szentivánéji Vízkereszt”. Színház 6. Valachi, Anna. 1984. “A halhatatlan legenda”. Magyar Hírlap, 12. 10 July. Várhelyi, András. 1983. “Ahogy tetszik”. Magyar Ifjúság. 11 March. Varjas, Endre. 1983. “Az idézĘjel megidĘjelezése”. Élet és Irodalom. 18 March.

CHAPTER NINE ANALYZING SHAKESPEAREAN MODELS OF TYRANNY IN A COMMUNIST REGIME: SOME EXAMPLES FROM THE SLOVENE THEATRE IN THE PERIOD 1945-1983 DENIS PONIŽ

Some Facts about (Theatrical) Censorship in Slovenia After 1945, when communist totalitarian regimes established themselves in the countries of Central and Eastern Europe on the Soviet model, artistic activity, like all other public activities, was constantly monitored, controlled and directed by censorship that was highly complex in terms of its organisation and content (Bradley 2010; Šmejkalová-Strickland 1994; Poniž 2010). What was paradoxical here was the fact that in these countries in which power was “in the hands of the working people”, censorship did not officially exist. As the above-mentioned studies have shown, it was not even permitted to talk about it in public. Secret, noninstitutional censorship operated without written rules, with procedures adapted to each case separately. As a result, when we examine this period, it is extremely difficult to separate true censorship measures from those that we might call repressive and intimidatory. The consequence of such measures was self-censorship, which is even more difficult to identify and analyze. Censorship and repressive measures encouraged self-censorship, although in many cases they also encouraged resistance against the antidemocratic processes of denying basic human rights. All non-institutional forms of censorship and repression in different countries were, however, focused on those artistic activities which seemed most dangerous and provocative to the authorities, who characterised them in general as being against the State, the ruling (Communist) party and in the service of “imperialist and anti-democratic forces from the West”. The

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transfer of artistic theatrical models created in post-war Western Europe (from existentialism to the theatre of the absurd) was likewise under the watchful eye of censorship. It was only permitted to print or portray that which was supposed to show the decadence and moral decay of Western European and American society. Despite the many similarities of noninstitutional measures of censorship which have already been researched and commented upon, measures in individual countries also differed. They were formulated in accordance with the unpredictable policy of the communist authorities, who continued to seek enemies (domestic and foreign) and who saw in art a segment of the life of society that could easily stray from the permitted or prescribed course. A special place in the history of censorship was occupied by multiethnic, multicultural, multi-faith Yugoslavia (see Režek et al. 2010) which, between 1945 and 1990, when the country began to break up, consisted of six republics and two autonomous regions. Between 1945 and 1990 institutional censorship was unknown in Yugoslavia, but the role of the censor’s offices was assumed by a variety of bodies within the single (ruling) Communist Party. Everything connected with censorship was taboo. Even the use of the word “censorship” was frowned upon, and there was no public discussion of the actions of censors, let alone dissenting opinions. The institutional “nonexistence” of censorship was covered in particular by those institutions which also supervised public and private life in the country in other ways. Specifically, this meant the secret (political) police, in collaboration with certain “volunteers”, in other words people working in cultural institutions who, for a range of objective and subjective reasons, became collaborators of the police and informers with regard to the goings-on in a specific cultural institution. The interconnectedness of Party and State bodies means that even today, despite the possibility of access to archives, it is still not possible to state with certainty who gave the initiative for a given censorship measure, who implemented the measure and who, because of personal interests, attempted to alleviate or even eliminate it or, on the other hand, make it more harsh. When all cultural institutions were nationalized in 1946 and 1947, censorship became much easier. The Communist Party positioned its own members amongst the leaders of cultural institutions so that they could oversee what went on and act as “first censors”. These people therefore represented the fundamental and most important form of censorship. Their function was, of course, not only censorship in the true sense of the word, but also reporting on everything that happened and that might interest the

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authorities. It is no surprise, then, that in many cases they were professional or voluntary collaborators with the secret political police. This brief report is focused on censorship measures in Slovenian drama from 1945, when the communists established a one-party totalitarian regime in the territory of Slovenia (when it became one of the federal units, a republic of the “new”, AVNOJ Yugoslavia), and that regime rapidly and uncompromisingly set out its position regarding all political opponents (Vodušek Stariþ 1992), whom in the spirit of the MarxistLeninist-Stalinist doctrine they regarded as “class enemies” who under no circumstances could be trusted and against whom all means were permitted for their destruction, and a little later, neutralization. The period between 1945 and 1990, when the present-day state of Slovenia and its multiparty democratic political system started to emerge from the ruins of the AVNOJ Yugoslavia, can be divided into several brief periods in which forms of the “class struggle” changed in the areas of culture and art. So it is possible to speak roughly of the period 1945-52, the most “glacial” period,1 when the methods of class struggle were the most militant (these methods also extended to infighting within the party between particular ideological orientations). In this period the role of censor was assumed by Agitprop (the Committee for Agitation and Propaganda), which was terminated in autumn 1952 (Gabriþ 1995, 19). From 1953 on, the role of censor at all levels, from merely intimidating writers who might be “problematic” to banning the publication or staging of specific dramatic works, was taken over by what were called “administrative committees” as “bodies of social management in culture”. They typified the period from 1953 to 1971,2 when liberal tendencies within the party gained momentum, along with the possibility of more relaxed creativity outside its ideological boundaries. The cultural historian Aleš Gabriþ describes their censorship role as follows: As the system of social management in cultural institutions became established, classical censorship was no longer necessary. The administrative committees became the censors of what, ideologically, were the most 1

See Gabriþ (1995, 5); in the autumn of 1952 the Agitprops were terminated, and replaced in 1956 by Ideology Committees on the Republic committees of the Communist Party. 2 Režek (2008, 32). The period after 1953 is divided into two “sub-periods”, 19531974 and 1974-1989, but Režek adds: “both periods are marked, alongside certain formal and semi-formal forms of censorship, by freedom of expression being restricted and governed primarily by self-censorship, so from this perspective we may treat it as a single period” (32).

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A particular problem for the researcher of censorship in communist Yugoslavia is represented by the relations between federal authorities and republican authorities. Although these followed a strict hierarchy, it very frequently happened, particularly after 1966, that orders issued by the federal authorities to the leaders of the individual republics were not obeyed. The leaderships of the individual republics became increasingly autonomous in the adoption of decisions regarding censorship, although, in general, prohibitions of printing, representing and distributing an artistic work in one republic applied to the whole country. There were, however, also exceptions, where a censorship measure in one republic was ignored in another; we even have cases where an artistic work that was censored in one republic was printed or performed in another. In a system of “invisible” censorship such as this, drama and the theatre represented a special problem. If printed dramatic texts can be subjected to censorship like all other literary texts, the transposition of a text to the stage always carries the risk that the creators of the theatrical production will interpret the text in such a way that it expresses everything that has been identified as “prohibited” or at least “undesirable”, and has therefore become the object of censorship measures. It is also necessary to distinguish between censorship measures in new (domestic and foreign) dramatic texts, and texts belonging to the “classic repertoire” of dramatic works from classical antiquity to the present day. Censorship of contemporary (domestic) texts was usually more rigorous, and contemporary authors, particularly those branded as dissidents, were under stricter control than those considered loyal; but this was not always the rule. Because of the complexity of the messages we find in many classic dramatic texts, because of the ambiguities that characterized many statements and rendered them “currently political”, even classical works were subjected to censorship. The essential point is that every staging of a theatrical work is able, through interpretation, to highlight precisely those statements which the audience has understood as not being part of the action within the chronotopic structure of the classical drama (and which therefore related to the truth of that chronotope and not to the present), which could be said to reflect reality “here and now”. Such messages were, at the very least, frowned upon, if not even prohibited. For this reason, particularly watchful attention was paid to adaptations and paraphrases of classical texts, which had become one of the ways in which authors who were unable to express the truth directly (and through an original text of their own) found a “bypass” in the work of a classical

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author and the messages contained therein, which did not need much changing, since the audience understood what the author’s true message was. Censorship measures were thus, in the majority of cases, unpredictable; texts which had avoided censorship as printed editions (in magazines or in books) caused bigger problems as events on the stage, ranging from “wellintentioned” recommendations to their creators that they eliminate controversial passages to prohibitions of performance. Since censorship operated in a non-institutional manner, and procedures for deciding on censorship measures were random, particularly at the vertical level of decision-making, and did not follow the logic of earlier, already adopted measures (in similar cases), studying censorship and censorship measures in totalitarian (communist) systems is a difficult process, where it is necessary to consider each case separately and where adequate archival information is, not infrequently, absent, since one of the characteristics of non-institutional censorship is that it was secret and undocumented, with orders given verbally or by telephone and no records, or at best only superficial ones, kept of procedures. There is also another fact that should not be overlooked here. The majority of censorship procedures were conducted by people who did not have the appropriate knowledge and who therefore made decisions, in many cases, “by gut feeling” or “in accordance with general ideological guidelines”. In special cases, they would seek the help of experts, who naturally viewed the issues from a different point of view. As we have established in a separate study (Poniž 2010b), changes occurred both in the method of censorship and in its intensity, which quickly weakened, particularly after 1964, allowing an increasing number of opportunities for “agreement” between those who implemented censorship measures and artists. Some topics and issues, however, remained subjects about which it was not possible to talk directly. Such topics included the attitude towards the period of history in which the Communist Party took power, its actions during and after the war against genuine or perceived political opponents, and the inter-ethnic and interfaith frictions that began to appear in the 1960s and continued to grow. Party leaders were particularly sensitive to all situations that portrayed the arbitrary, tyrannical and repressive actions of the ruling elite and their circle. Above all, Party leaders would accept no criticism that focused on their unreasonable or even illegal decisions. It is for this reason that the example we describe—the adaptation and paraphrase of Shakespeare’s tragedies King Lear, Macbeth and Romeo and Juliet—is so instructive.

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Shakespeare’s Reception in Slovenia The reception of Shakespeare’s drama is closely tied to the formation and development of a Slovene national theatre. This development was the result of the political, economic and cultural conditions that, from the early 19th century, had been shaping Slovene national destiny with particular intensity and, within this process, raising the question of the establishment of a national theatre. Because we were part of a larger (Austrian) political entity which was rapidly and systematically Germanizing the territory inhabited by Slovenes (“Drang nach Osten, Drang nach Adria”), the initiatives of Slovenes to form their own national theatre were blocked until the end of the 19th century. A national theatre that would stage original Slovene drama alongside foreign works, in this way strengthening national awareness, was constantly subject to political blockades. Yet the blockade of the Austrian authorities was only partially successful, since in 1880 a national theatre was finally created and began to function with growing intensity. As a herald of ideas about national independence, the theatre had always emphasized, in the Slovene national programmes that began to appear in 1848, the need to stage the best works of world drama. Shakespeare is frequently mentioned, and this is also the period of the first translation of Romeo and Juliet (1864) by philology student Ivan VrbanZadravski (1841–1864); he was followed by other translators such as Janko Pajk, Dragotin Šauperl and Karol Glaser—the last of whom was also the author of the first serious studies on Hamlet (1874) and The Merchant of Venice (1877).3 Karol Glaser calls Shakespeare a playwright who is “the enemy of all despots, autocrats and tyrants”, and who in his dramatic works wishes to show “how a man can only be free if mankind is also free; with great talent Shakespeare portrays the rises and falls of tyrants and their foul works, and also the consequences of such works”. Glaser links Shakespeare’s work to the struggle of the Slovenes for national and cultural independence, referring to Shakespeare as “a playwright who loved freedom and justice for all people in this world”. The first Slovene translations of Shakespeare and the first Shakespearean studies in Slovene were also connected to efforts to stage Shakespeare’s 3

The first treatise on Shakespeare, which is above all a brief biography drawing on various authors, was written and published in 1873 by Davorin Trstenjak (1817– 1890), who was particularly enthusiastic about the “historical tragedy” Julius Caesar and who calls Shakespeare “the greatest of all playwrights”. He also mentions the (till then) lost translation of King Lear by Dragotin Šauperl (1840– 1869), who would later complete the first translation of Hamlet.

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plays in Slovene. The first three “Slovene” performances of Shakespeare took place in 1896 (Othello), 1897 (The Merchant of Venice) and 1898 (The Taming of the Shrew). All three were directed by the Czech director Rudolf Inemann4 (1861–1907) and met with a positive response from critics. Once again we can read about a Shakespeare “who shows the conflict between justice and injustice”, about “knowledge of the human spirit that wants to be free of all violence” and about “a dramatist who is able to penetrate into the depths of the human soul, where good and bad intentions abide”. The true development of a Slovene national theatre began with the founding of permanent professional theatres in Trieste and Ljubljana in the late 19th century and in Maribor after the First World War. This also permitted the more intensive performing (and translating) of Shakespeare, and the seventh première (and first staging of Julius Caesar, on 5 March 1910) was directed by a Slovene director, Hinko Nuþiþ (1883–1970), who together with another Slovene director, Osip Šest (1893–1962), went on to stage the majority of Shakespeare’s plays by 1925. Such a positive development also encouraged (both around 1900 and later on) the translation of the whole of Shakespeare’s dramatic oeuvre which, in the period between the wars, was also performed in various theatres. Naturally, some works were staged frequently and others only once or twice, as happened elsewhere in Europe. The “great” tragedies and comedies were at the forefront, while the romances and histories were performed somewhat less often. Yet the first written translations of Shakespeare’s plays and the simultaneous discussions of his poetics, its effectiveness and its specific characteristics, date from the mid-19th century, a period in which German translations were no longer sufficient for Slovenes (all Slovene intellectuals knew German, and many also knew Italian, again because of the absence of universities using Slovene as the language of instruction), who instead accepted the challenge of translating the plays into Slovene. Translation activity was already intensifying before the First World War but it entered a particularly intense period after the end of that conflict, when Slovene culture began to turn away from its traditional connections with the Germanic world and orient itself towards Romance and English culture and literature. The translators, in particular the poet Oton Županþiþ (18781949), drew attention in their accompanying studies and dramaturgical 4

Owing to the acute shortage of professionally trained Slovene actors and directors, most of the actors and directors in Slovene theatres in the period between 1890 and 1914 were Czechs who had to come to Slovenia because of their PanSlavist convictions.

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analyses (Županþiþ was at this time dramaturge of the National Theatre in Ljubljana) to Shakespeare’s intense involvement with the phenomenon of political and also psychological violence, and the mechanisms that form tyrants and guide their actions. By the end of the 1930s, the process of translating Shakespeare into Slovene was complete, while the period between 1918 and 1941 also saw the stage production of the whole of Shakespeare’s dramatic oeuvre reach a greater intensity than in the 1920s. Parallel to this were numerous studies and treatises, which amongst other things considered issues of the “historical, political and cultural” importance of Shakespeare’s plays to contemporary society. After the Second World War, or rather the occupation, which for the Slovenes lasted from 1941 to 1945, Slovenia became part of the second Yugoslavia and at the same time subject to a totalitarian communist regime. This regime immediately initiated a “class struggle” in the field of culture. This did not only mean the appearance of two indices librorum prohibitorum (for the most part, these included works by Slovene authors who had opposed communist doctrine before and during the war, although the list also covered works by Russian anarchists, anti-Stalinist books reporting on the situation in the Soviet Union and those authors who more or less openly sympathized with Nazism, such as Knut Hamsun, Ezra Pound and Jean Giono). Fortunately, the lists did not touch dramatic literature, except works by those Slovene authors whom the communist authorities saw as their enemies and who for the most part emigrated. Since, in the first post-war years, the programmes of Slovenia’s theatres were dominated by home-grown propaganda plays, works of socialist realism by Soviet authors and a small number of classics, amongst which we also find a few of Shakespeare’s plays, the authorities, who organized a special form of censorship known as Agitprop, a body of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Slovenia, began to monitor more closely the works that theatres intended to stage. Between 1945 and 1950 contemporary European drama was almost a taboo, and even a number of contemporary Slovene works which, in the opinion of the invisible censors, strayed too far from the ordained canon were banned or withdrawn shortly after being premiered. The best description of Agitprop is provided by the leading Slovene historian Aleš Gabriþ: The behind-the-scenes censorship office of the new communist authorities, which had the last word in the formation of the Slovene cultural scene in the first years following the Second World War, operated, like the Communist Party in general, according to the old methods from the Party's underground period, and as a result, the numerous directives or

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prohibitions were not written on paper, but instead functionaries of varying grades of importance enforced their will with the blessing of the regime, which was immune to the views of those who thought differently. (2011, 179)

In the same study Gabriþ states that as a result of the above, “Agitprop did not leave much written material behind”. By pure coincidence, the author of this essay found, in the otherwise extremely incomplete Agitprop archives (this incompleteness is explained by the quotation above!), a document bearing the date 7 March 1947 and the title “Ideological political work and measures to introduce progressive dramatic works in our theatres”. This is a 23-page report which begins with the statement that “elements working from a position of bourgeois cosmopolitanism” had infiltrated themselves amongst the artists in professional theatres and were “attempting to assert ideological and aesthetic views that are alien to our own”. This was apparent not only in the choice of dramatic texts but also in “tendentious directing, costume and set design” that showed the “decadent bourgeois world in too bright and positive a light”. If we pass over the apostrophizing of individual artists, particularly directors and theatre managers, who are accused in the report of a range of “ideological faults”, some more serious than others, there is an interesting section to which it is worth devoting more attention and which concerns drama portraying “violence, incest, the victory of feudal forces over the peasant class and the capitalist exploitation of the working class, and all other situations in which communist doctrine, its leading figures and the results of the class struggle, are criticized”. The author (or authors) thus implicitly introduces censorship criteria which are very loose and able to be interpreted in several ways; on the other hand, these prohibitions apply to an extremely wide range of dramatic works which such implicit censorship can classify as undesirable or even unperformable. What is interesting, however, is when we come to the point where several of Shakespeare’s plays are included amongst these works. The document reads as follows: “While Shakespeare is considered one of the world’s greatest playwrights, he was working within a feudal social order which he did not criticize but, more often than not, even affirmed”. But this was not Shakespeare’s only sin: “The playwright delights in portraying the triumph of violence and tyranny over innocent people; for the most part, the victims in his plays belong to the deprived classes, but Shakespeare does not clearly indicate where the solution lies or portray progressive ideas in the struggle for a more just social system.” The document continues with a list of works by Shakespeare, including quite a long list of “controversial” plays. These works, which could harm

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theatregoers—with the help, of course, of directors who were not “ideologically and politically sound” and lacked “class consciousness”— included, in particular, Coriolanus, Henry IV Part 1, Henry VIII, Pericles Prince of Tyre, Richard III, Timon of Athens and Titus Andronicus. Yet the compilers of the document, which was designed to restrict or prohibit the staging of “violent” Shakespeare, did not stop at general statements. Further on, they explicitly point out specific places in the plays “which are not suitable to be performed on stage, since there is no guarantee that the directors, amongst whom there are secret sympathizers with petit-bourgeois ideas and aesthetic opportunism, would not stage them in such a way as to awaken doubts in audiences, or to ideologically disorient them”. Since this was an official Party document, clearly sent to all theatres and perhaps also to certain other addresses, it was, of course, impossible to discuss it, let alone take exception to it. It represents a censorship list of works (alongside Shakespeare, it includes quite a number of classical works, but interestingly no ancient authors, not even “bloody” Seneca, which suggests that the compiler or compilers were not familiar with this particular playwright) deemed unsuitable for performance, on the basis of—to put it mildly—ridiculous arguments, the most absurd of which, without doubt, is that Shakespeare advocated violence and tyranny, and even that he enjoyed portraying them in his plays. Linking the great Elizabethan/Jacobean dramatist to the (communist) “class struggle”, and citing his unwillingness to be part of this struggle through his plays, are also ridiculous and indicative of the dire spiritual condition under a totalitarian system. We see that the list of unsuitable works viewed as capable of causing ideological confusion and worse (the document prefers not to state this explicitly) amongst the theatregoing public includes, in particular, those plays in which Shakespeare portrays and, through his dramatic language, analyzes the struggle for power, political intrigue, the rise and fall of tyrants and violence with an ideological element, meaning that audiences might associate them with current political conditions since the communists took power. Yet the communist authorities behaved in exactly the same way as Shakespeare’s heroes, stopping at nothing in their struggle for (absolute) power and allowing violence against their enemies (real and imagined) to become tyranny—which of course Shakespeare does not support or side with, but rather exposes and condemns (although of course he is aware that in real life, just as in his plays, good does not always triumph over evil).

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Clearly, it was precisely the fact that audiences could see images from their own present existence in the rise of tyrants, in their methods and in the political machinations they used to eliminate their opponents (with murder an extreme yet common resource); in other words, the fact that Shakespeare’s dramatic characters, scenes and situations could be associated by audiences with their own situation, trapped in the tyranny of the new communist authorities, left to the mercy of new tyrants who hardly differed from those portrayed by Shakespeare, that guided the leaders of Agitprop in their decisions to restrict the staging of Shakespeare to those works that would not evoke such associations in audiences. The censorship process was clear: they could conceal their own tyranny, the tyranny that they attributed to Shakespeare, at least from the eyes of the theatregoing public, by prohibiting all those works by the Elizabethan/Jacobean dramatist that reveal the mechanisms of tyranny as they appear in the relationships amongst the individuals and groups who make up a political environment. Even Shakespeare understood this environment as a place in which opponents were unscrupulously eliminated, which is by definition one of the fundamental characteristics of every tyranny, namely “a government in which absolute power is vested in a single ruler or a small group; despotic abuse of authority”.5 Naturally, the new authorities did not wish to see any of this in Slovenia’s theatres, but if it did happen that a play managed to elude their vigilance, they took other measures; this is discussed in the second part of the paper.

Shakespeare’s Reception in the Communist Era As pointed out above, the control of cultural life was particularly uncompromising in the period from 1945 to 1953. Performances of Shakespeare were infrequent in this period, as the instructions discussed in the first part of the essay achieved their effect. When Shakespeare was performed, it was usually his comedies, although some productions also managed to exploit the semantic polyvalence of Shakespeare’s theatrical metaphors. And since there is no doubt that many of Shakespeare’s works touch on violence in all its forms, from the mechanisms of unrestrained authority, in particular the tyrannical abuse of political power, to models portraying the merciless elimination of (political) opponents—and since 5

The government or authority of a tyrant; a country governed by an absolute ruler; hence, arbitrary or despotic exercise of power; exercise of power over subjects and others with a rigour not authorized by law or justice, or not requisite for the purposes of government.

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such works were capable of causing associations that might remind audiences of the reality in which they were living—, directors tended to steer clear of them. The memoirs of directors working in this period contain numerous clear references to the fact that they were compelled to renounce any directorial concepts that might have caused them serious problems at the personal level, ranging from police interrogations to a loss of position.

King Lear, 1949 And yet one of the most important directors working in the former Yugoslavia, Branko Gavella (1885–1962), who, though a Croat, worked mainly in Slovenia in this period, brought King Lear to the stage of the National Theatre in Ljubljana (premiered on 1 November 1949) as an explicitly political tragedy about a ruler living in his own isolated world and unable to see what was really happening around him, and about the madness that is caused by the sensation of limitless power. Some critics were disturbed by the set (by Ernest Franz) which, throughout all of the acts, consisted of red drapes adorned by verses from the play, giving the set the appearance of the propaganda billboards with revolutionary slogans erected in honour of Yugoslav and Soviet leaders. The director established a clear, albeit indirectly associative, link between the stage set and reality, between Lear as authority figure and the communist leaders. He emphasized the empty words behind which there was nothing but arbitrariness and arrogance, blindness and, ultimately, political impotence. Critics were even more concerned about the director’s concept, which confronted Lear with his real and apparent opponents in an extremely direct, “almost brutally realistic”, manner. “Addressing political problems in such a violent manner is not something that our socialist society would accept without imagining the director’s true intentions,” noted another critic, before going on to say: “the director has evidently not understood that political power has passed from the hands of individuals, who attempted to rule through tyranny and brute force, to working people, who after great struggles are, here and now, building a new and better world”. Gavella did not respond to these reviews, since it was clear that only criticism that was ideologically orthodox could reach the pages of the dailies. Polemicizing was useless and could only lead to the rapid removal of the play from the theatre’s programme. There were no other interventions, and thus Gavella’s Lear enjoyed a further 21 performances, which for a director who, in the opinion of the critics, was hardly the most suitable for these revolutionary times, was actually a considerable success.

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King Lear was revisited in February of the following year by the anonymous writer of an annual report on the “ideological situation in our professional theatres”, a confidential communiqué intended for the highest party and national leaders. Gavella’s Lear is mentioned in the report as an example of “an ideologically unsuitable production that is misleading for the audience”, along with the remark that “in future it will be necessary to be more attentive when directors wish to stage Shakespeare or any other classical author in a politically unsuitable manner”. The writer of the report does, however, add optimistically: “Our theatre critics and our public are, however, sufficiently ideologically aware to be able to distinguish between true art and tendencies that recall past, undemocratic times”. Who knows what would have happened to Gavella if he had continued with productions of this kind, but that same year (1950) he returned to his native Zagreb, where he founded the Academy of Dramatic Arts and began directing plays in Croatian theatres. Not without difficulties and problems—but that is another story.

Macbeth, 1956 Another Shakespeare production that provoked strong reactions was the staging of Macbeth at the City Theatre in Celje, an industrial town 75 kilometres north-west of Ljubljana. The première (on 17 January 1956), prepared by playwright and director Andrej Hieng (1925–2000), condensed Macbeth into an 80-minute “political chronicle” (as the director himself put it in the theatre programme) focusing on the existential problems of the struggle for power, trials of strength and the murkiest political intrigues. According to the director, the production was designed as a complete political exposé, a chronicle of political crime and retribution. In the opinion of the theatre manager, the play was a hit with the public, but it was problematic for the local authorities. Not only that, they considered it to be a political provocation by a director of the younger generation who was, in some sense, ideologically unreliable. Nevertheless, the authorities did decide—presumably after consultation with their “comrades” in Ljubljana—that there were insufficient grounds to attempt to remove the production from the programme or to take action against the director. Instead, they chose another tried and tested route, preferring to mobilize a pair of critics in the fight against the unsuitable staging of Shakespeare in the socialist age, against the “brutality that has nothing to do with our reality”, as the report of the City Committee of the Communist Party in Celje put it, post festum. One of these critics, who wrote for one of the highest-circulation newspapers (Slovenski poroþevalec [Slovene

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Reporter] in Ljubljana), was particularly effective at this task. This was Tit Vidmar (1929–1999), the son of Josip Vidmar (1895–1992), a cultural authority who did much of the “dirty work” for the Slovene Communist Party and who had evidently also initiated his son into this function. The critic was disturbed by everything in the production, from the dramaturgical analysis and reduction of the text to the style of acting, the costumes, the sets and the music (which at one point included a few bars from a “revolutionary” Soviet song), but he concentrated on the “idea” of the directorial concept. Here, apparently unfamiliar with the content of the tragedy, and probably somewhat superficially acquainted with Shakespeare's oeuvre as a whole, he wrote, amongst other things: Shakespeare had no sense even of the various phenomena that showed that ordinary people had ever grown in awareness. All revolutionary progressive experiments in English history are either concealed or ridiculed by Shakespeare. The director, Hieng, gives him ample help here, for neither the dramatist nor the director shows how the seeds of the democratic social movements which we are developing in socialism were already forming during the Renaissance.

Later, in a similar vein: Hieng, who has already demonstrated several times in his productions what he thinks of our struggle for a new social order based on the political participation of all working people, has once again portrayed the murky world of political intrigue and the untrammelled thirst for power which is alien to our system, and using a wealth of theatrical metaphors has attempted to draw a parallel between that age and our own [the emphasis is the critic’s]. No, comrade Hieng, we are intelligent enough to have ignored your intentions!

In this case, too, the director avoided polemicizing with the critic, but he did answer him indirectly in the programme bill for Ben Jonson’s Volpone, which was staged at the theatre in Celje a short time later (20 March 1957). In an article entitled “The Renaissance View of the World”, Hieng refuted all the accusations of Shakespeare’s “reactionaryism” and, using numerous quotations from his works, demonstrated how the playwright understood and, with great genius, portrayed the mechanisms of power, tyranny and political intrigues which not only governed the Renaissance period, but which Hieng interpreted as “universal metaphors for the relationship between reason and power, art and politics, freedom and tyranny”. Hieng went on to analyze mechanisms of political power, not only in the “royal chronicles” but also in the best of the tragedies,

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where he particularly highlighted not only Macbeth but also Richard III and Julius Caesar. He painted a picture of Shakespeare as an author who hated all forms of political repression, but at the same time who did not believe that a “brave new world” was possible, as demonstrated by his fun-poking at (political) utopias in The Tempest. Hieng concluded his analysis with a theory that was probably highly provocative at that time: There are many people, and critics are no exception, who think that we live in a time when as a result of progress we have become more civilized, and that what the Renaissance authors show us is today hardly possible. But look around you and you will see that the human being, when he is seized by the desire for power, when he feels that he can succeed even with the help of illicit means, has not changed in the slightest. And this is a truth which we must communicate to our audience.

The following season, however, when Andrej Hieng wanted to stage either Timon of Athens or Titus Andronicus, the municipal party leadership, which played the role of an invisible and informal censor, roundly rejected his proposal, presumably swayed by the negative, not to say hostile, criticism that had reached Celje from the capital with regard to the theatre’s staging of Macbeth. It is characteristic of the period in question that the party leadership in smaller towns was always very cautious and reluctant to test the limits. They did, however, raise Macbeth from the dead as one of the proofs of the “ideological unsuitability of the director Andrej Hieng” when, in 1960, he was not reconfirmed as “house director” and, according to the custom of the time, needed a positive report from the City Committee, despite the fact that he was not a member of the Party. Hieng left Celje for Ljubljana, where he worked for many years as a freelance writer and dramaturge, not returning to the theatre until the mid1980s. After 1960, the ideological pressure began to diminish relatively quickly. Although Shakespeare would experience other critical rejections as a result of the position of the ruling ideology, rather than of questions of theatrical aesthetics, the nomenklatura no longer concerned itself with the staging of his works. This, however, is only part of the truth. At present, when the archives of Slovenia’s theatres have still to be examined, it is difficult to say how many of Shakespeare’s plays were not staged between 1945 and 1990 because they were considered ideologically controversial by the communist authorities. Tyranny cannot allow art—be it Renaissance or contemporary—to hold a mirror up to it. But tyranny also likes to hide from the light that might expose it. The last known attempt to censor Shakespeare illustrates the ambiguous position of invisible censorship.

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The Romeo and Juliet Project, 1983 There was a difference again with the invisible censorship imposed from 1971 to 1980, when there was a resurgence of the idea of “class struggle”, and then with the period 1980-1989, which involved first the unravelling and then the collapse of the one-party totalitarian system. Of course, there are some years, such as 1964, which at the same time saw the closure of the literary magazine Perspektive (1960-1964) and Oder 57 (Stage 57) (1957-1964) and various arrests and condemnations of writers, that are probably especially interesting, both in terms of the intensification of informal and mostly “invisible” censorship (along with other intimidating and repressive measures) and in terms of the strengthened awareness that self-censorship approaches were needed to enable some kind of tolerable creativity. In the middle of the seventies, when stage director and playwright Dušan Jovanoviþ started to run it, the Slovensko mladinsko gledališþe (SMG, or Slovenian Youth Theatre) signed on to an idea of production that subordinated theatre aesthetics to modern concepts. By 1980, the main Slovenian theatre for children and youth had been transformed into a modern theatre that, with two productions by the Serbian director Ljubiša Ristiü, suddenly revealed a new political concept of the sociallycommitted and historically-oriented theatre. In her review of theatre events for the collected essays on the avantgardes, neo-avant-gardes and retro-avant-gardes in the area of the former Yugoslavia (1918-1991), Eda ýufer (2003, 381) enumerates the following theatrical artefacts from the decade prior to the collapse, which bring together elements of the political and the neo-avant-garde: Slovensko mladinsko gledališþe, EG Glej (Experimental Theatre “Look”), Gledališþe Ane Monro (Theatre Ana Monro), Gledališþe FV-112 (Theatre FV-112), Borghesia (a multimedial group) and Gledališþe sester Scipion Nasice (Scipion Nasice Sisters Theatre, a theatrical group founded and conducted by Dragan Živadinov). A large number of judgements, aesthetic analyses, dramaturgical profiles and socio-historical studies have been made regarding SMG and its concepts in the early 80s. Yet it appears that its function can be condensed into a quotation from Toporišiþ’s study Od politiþnega gledališþa do gledališþa podob (From Political Theatre to a Theatre of Images), which reads: This theatre was a theatre of opposition, non-agreement (dissidence). Its protagonists were the author and director, and its tools the space and body. And there was the special Brook approach to plays, which critics rather

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clumsily labelled as a phenomenon of ensemble acting, while in fact it needs to be understood in terms of the comprehensive—including political—and especially artistic engagement of the team of actors in an individual performance and of the theatre as a whole, as well as of the entire collective of artists who collaborated on the individual project of this theatre. (Toporišiþ 2007, 89)

Dissidence and political stakes are certainly terms that most accurately describe the social and aesthetic dimensions of the theatre, which gave notice of this trend with Ristiü’s productions of Aeschylus’s The Persians (9 December 1980) and the Kiš-Ristiü Mass in A Minor (with the significant subtitle De re publika et de rebus novis, 21 December 1980). It was no coincidence that Ristiü revived the first political tragedy in the history of European drama (and the first to be politically censored!), while at the same time he pointed the way with “his” monumental collage production, based on a 1976 book, Grobnica za Borisa Davidoviþa [A Tomb for Boris Davidoviþ] by Danilo Kiš (1935-1989), a prominent dissident Yugoslav writer of Hungarian-Jewish and Montenegro origin. The concepts of so-called political theatre, with significant dissident markers both in stage directorial concepts and in the adaptation of Kiš’s texts, were used again in a three-tiered project of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet. We may say that one of the most successful stage productions directed by Ljubiša Ristiü was an adaptation of the most beautiful romantic tragedy of the Renaissance, Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet. The production was part of a series of modern, provocative stagings of classical works, from the already mentioned production of Aeschylus’s The Persians to Genet’s The Balcony. Because the building that houses the Mladinsko Youth Theatre contains, in addition to the two theatres belonging to Mladinsko, also a large public ballroom, Ristiü and his collaborators devised a three-tiered production. Professional ballet dancers from the National Opera and Ballet would perform a ballet version of Romeo and Juliet in the ballroom. In the middle theatre, professional actors from Mladinsko Theatre would perform a “spoken” version of Romeo and Juliet, while for the basement theatre, Ristiü came up with a dramaturgically complex reinterpretation of Romeo and Juliet, which he placed in a modern context. Here, professional actors would collaborate with amateurs selected by the director at a public audition. He therefore decided to call the production Romeo and Juliet – Commentaries. From the point of view of our research into the attempt to censor the entire production, which lasted a total of more than four hours, it is the

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third and final tier of the production that is the most interesting. The performance was conceived in such a way that the audience would move from one venue to another, while at the same time symbolically descending from higher, more brilliantly lit, settings to progressively darker and abandoned ones. The basement venue at the Mladinsko Theatre was not originally conceived as a theatre, but was temporarily converted into a theatrical venue in the 1980s, when a series of “dissident” performances were staged. The brick-built vaulted cellar, with its associations of prisons, interrogation rooms of the secret political police and the underground, also had an unusually suggestive effect in the case of the third Romeo and Juliet and, in the opinion of the majority of critics, the venue was extremely well chosen. In the third production, Ristiü asked his collaborators to formulate the details of the fictional contemporary story presented to them: Julija Novak, a student of comparative literature, falls in love with a worker called Stevo Macura, an ethnic Serb from Kninska Krajina in Croatia, who is working in Ljubljana as a seasonal worker. During the Carnival season the two lovers watch the (at the time) very popular Franco Zeffirelli film Romeo and Juliet (1968). After the film, Stevo (Romeo) gets involved in a quarrel with some Slovene youths. In the ensuing altercation he fatally stabs one of them and runs away. Later on, the police inspector who is questioning witnesses, particularly Julija, tries to reconstruct the event but at the same time raises all the dilemmas of Julija and Stevo’s love, both in its contemporary dimensions and in its associations with the Renaissance story. In a police raid Stevo is killed, even though he tries to surrender. If the first ballet version of the narration of the tragedy, entitled Principles (and divided into four parts: Agon, Eros, Polis and Thanatos) is the opening chord, which only announces the transition to modernity and contemporaneity in its final scene, featuring “youths of Verona” who are no longer wearing historical, Renaissance costumes, but are dressed as modern teenagers, the second performance is already a synthesis and, at the same time, a political supplementing of the Shakespearean story, placed in a contemporary context: a group of young people watch a professional production of Romeo and Juliet and decide to create their own drama group which will also perform this Renaissance tragedy but will try and set it in the present, “without all the Renaissance junk”, as one of the participants describes it. This version, called Space, takes place in four locations (a suburb of Ljubljana, a fictional Verona, Knin and, finally, the centre of Ljubljana), and we are constantly moving between Shakespeare’s time and the present, i.e. the mid-1980s, in a country where

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deep ethnic, religious and political disagreements between nations and republics are already apparent. The third production, which takes us completely into reality, is called Time, and once again it has four parts. The action takes place between 14 February (St Valentine’s Day) and 17 February, where 15 February is Shrove Tuesday, 16 February is Ash Wednesday and 17 February is an ordinary day, the day the police kill the murderer and the story ends. In the last part, where the course of the story and the dialogues were created by the participants themselves and the entire story had an extremely provocative background (tensions amongst ethnic groups in the former Yugoslavia were in the mid-1980s already very evident and strong), there were quite a number of aspects that disturbed the so-called invisible censors. Even the theme of the third production attracted their attention: a crime caused by an inter-ethnic dispute between Slovene students and a nonSlovene seasonal worker, similar to the dispute between the two rival Veronese families living in a state of mortal enmity. Officially, even in the 1980s, when it was already possible to foresee those quarrels that degenerated, in the 1990s, into armed conflict and, eventually, into the “Balkan wars”, there were no tensions. All problems were blamed on the “enemies of socialism” and on the foreign intelligence services that supported them, in this way igniting conflict between individual nations and ethnic groups. This was the official explanation for the situation in the country. Talking about tensions was actually not permitted—especially not openly and in a context such as the one in which Ristiü places them. But Ristiü (and his collaborators), as Shakespeare had done in the original Romeo and Juliet, opens both levels of dramatic narration: a political one, which is devoted to the crowd, to the public sphere, and an intimate one, the story of an unhappy and unfulfilled passionate love between student Julija Novak and worker Stevo Macura. Since invisible censorship operated informally (Poniž 2010b, 192), the attempts to put pressure on the theatre management to consider deleting or at least radically softening the third production were also informal. Naturally, neither the Mladinsko management nor the team involved in the production were willing to agree to this. The problem was that the theatre management included people whom the regime already had its eye on because of certain earlier events. Dušan Jovanoviü, director of the Mladinsko Theatre and a well-known theatre director, was one of the contributors to the literary magazine Perspektive (1960-64), a publication which the regime had suppressed because it considered it to be crossing the line into open political opposition. In 1968 the theatre’s artistic

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director, the poet and dramatist Ivo Svetina, had caused a scandal with the publication of a poem in which he portrayed the communist authorities during the war as a band of brigands, only escaping prison because he came from a well-known communist family (his father was the political head of the secret political police after the war, and his mother was a national heroine and a senior party official). The dramaturge, Marko Slodnjak, was also from a well-known dissident family of literary historian dr. Anton Slodnjak. All of them were mentioned in files of the secret political police as unreliable persons with dissident ideas and as proWestern. The first pressures came by telephone. Later, however, the director and artistic director were summoned to an “informative discussion” at police headquarters, where they were interrogated (as they put it) by two members of the secret political police, which in the meantime had obtained a copy of the text (and parts of the director’s script), with the result that the two interrogators knew precisely what was contained in the text that the theatre was planning to stage. According to the account of the two subjects of the interrogation, the police officers were initially polite. When, however, they would not be persuaded to delete the third production, the officers became increasingly rude and began making threats. One of them even tried to prove that there was no connection between Shakespeare’s text and the additional text, and that Shakespeare was merely a pretext for undermining the regime and insulting a Communist Party that was incapable of resolving ethnic and economic problems in society. The interview, which lasted several hours, did not lead to the result that the interrogators expected. Finally, they resorted to the threat that they had “sufficient means of preventing the performance”. Since the director and artistic director refused to be intimidated and there were no serious arguments for banning or invisibly censoring the project, the authorities adopted new tactics. A few days later, as the creators of the play continued to work on the project, the secretary responsible for theatre at the Cultural Secretariat (a cultural ministry) called on the director of the Mladinsko Theatre. He persuaded the director that it was not only the third, additional production that was problematic, but also that in the second-tier production, the students who wanted to transpose the tragedy to the present had “an uncultured attitude towards a classic dramatic text of world fame”, and that their attempt to adapt the text was actually a form of “censorship”. The Culture Ministry, which co-financed the activity of the Mladinsko Theatre, could not “stand idly by and watch such a cultural violation of the text of a world-famous dramatic text”. He added that the Ministry would

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cancel financial aid to the theatre, but the director replied that they would pay for the project with their own money and that the participants in the project would waive their fees. Since the attempt had clearly been a failure, the Culture Minister himself (actually a State Secretary, because Yugoslavia did not have ministries at the republic level) summoned the theatre director Dušan Jovanoviü and once again attempted to convince him to consider omitting the third tier of the production. He also cited excerpts from the text as proof of the “unsuitability” of the whole. Unfortunately, however, because the person who had prepared the material for the secretary was not sufficiently familiar with Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, he also quoted fragments of Shakespeare’s text. The director asked the Secretary whether this meant that Shakespeare had also become controversial, to the point that he needed censoring. This provoked a furious reaction from the Secretary. When the theatre director, who had with him a copy of Shakespeare’s tragedy, pointed to the places in the text that the ministry wished to censor, the Secretary apologized and explained that there had been an “administrative error”. This was the end of the last known attempt at censorship and Romeo and Juliet—Commentaries was successfully premiered on 23 June 1983.

Works Cited Bradley, Laura. 2010. Cooperation & Conflict. GDR Theatre Censorship 1961-1989. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ýufer, Eda. 2003. “’Between the Curtains’: New Theater in Slovenia, 1980-1990”. In Impossible Histories, ed. D. Djuriü & M. Šuvakoviü, 376-403. Cambridge, MA: M.I.T. Gabriþ, Aleš. 1995. Socialistiþna kulturna revolucija. Slovenska kulturna politika 1953-1962 [Socialist cultural Revolution, Slovene cultural politics 1953-1962]. Ljubljana: Cankarjeva založba. Poniž, Denis. 2010a. Cenzura in avtocenzura v slovenski dramatiki in gledališþu 1945-1990; Prvi del: Obdobje 1945-1964/Censorship and Self-censorship in Slovenian Drama and Theatre 1945-1990; Part One: 1945-1964. Ljubljana, AGRFT and Slovenski gledališki muzej. —. 2010b. “Nekaj vprašanj in ugotovitev v zvezi s cenzuro in samocenzuro v slovenski dramatiki 1945-1990” [Some Questions and Statements About Censorship and Self.Censorship in Slovene Drama Production 1945-1990]. In Cenzurirano [Censored], ed. Mateja Režek, 189-196. Ljubljana: Nova revija. Režek, Mateja. 2008. “Cenzura v genih. Politiþna cenzura in fenomen samocenzure v Sloveniji/Jugoslaviji v obdobju komunizma” [Censorship

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in the Genes. Political Censorship and the Phenomenon of Selfcensorship in Slovenia/Yugoslavia in the Communist Period]. Newsletter of the Scientific and Research Centre of Pimorska University 6. Šmejkalová-Strickland, JiĜina. 1994. “Censoring Canons: Transitions and Prospects of Literary Institutions in Czechoslovakia”. In The Administration of the Aesthetic: Censorship, Political Criticism and the Public Sphere, ed. Richard Burt, 195-215. Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press. Toporišiþ, Tomaž. 2007. “Od politiþnega gledališþa h gledališþu podob. Slovensko mladinsko gledališþe osemdesetih let 20. Stoletja” [From Political Theatre to the Theatre of Images. Slovene Youth Theatre in the 1980s]. In Ali je prihodnost že prišla? Petdeset let Slovenskega mladinskega gledališþa [Is the Future already Coming? Fifty Years of Slovene Youth Theatre], eds. Tomaž Toporišiþ, Barbara Skubic, Tina Maliþ & Mateja Dermelj, 89-101. Ljubljana: Slovensko mladinsko gledališþe. Vodušek-Stariþ, Jera. 1992. Prevzem oblasti 1944-1946 [Taking Power 1944-1946]. Ljubljana: Cankarjeva založba.

CHAPTER TEN WAJDA’S HAMLET IV: A POST-POLITICAL PRODUCTION?1 JACEK FABISZAK

Introductory Remarks Andrzej Wajda in his Hamlet IV (1989) addresses significant issues of censorship in the late communist Poland … without addressing them. The production was staged at a most sensitive moment in Poland’s history: June 1989, in the wake of the establishment of the first non-communist government after 1945, following the 4 June semi-democratic elections. Wajda worked on his fourth version of Hamlet, perhaps the most politically-exploited play in the communist regime, necessarily aware of the significant political changes that were taking place in the first half of 1989, especially the so-called Round Table talks, which eventually led to the elections. As one may suppose, censorship at that time was slacker than before; furthermore, it is generally assumed that out of all the communist countries in Europe, Polish censorship could not be and was not so strict as elsewhere, if only because the socialist grip was not as tight as it may have been elsewhere; as a popular saying had it at the time, Poland was the merriest barracks in the Eastern bloc. Slacker it may have been, yet censorship was a problem any artist had to face; consequently, part of the article will need to focus on Andrzej Wajda and his relations with the censor, or on how he was treated by the latter. Furthermore, questions about whether the director compromised with the old system (having been one of the most celebrated Polish film artists since the 1950s) 1 Substantial parts of this article were earlier published in Shakesplorations. Essays in Honour of Professor Marta GibiĔska, eds. Jerzy Limon, Maágorzata Grzegorzewska & Jacek Fabiszak (GdaĔsk: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu GdaĔskiego, 2012), pp. 122-130. This is an extended and revised version of the earlier article.

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or boldly revealed the system’s evil and wrongdoing, albeit in a veiled manner, will also be of importance. The latter part of the article will be devoted to the question of how the director reacted to the political, economic, and social changes in anticipating and delineating a new role for the theatre in Poland.

Wajda and Censorship Although the production was premiered after the Round Table talks, when the communist system was falling apart in Poland, the censorship was still quite impervious to the changes that had occurred and were still (for some time at least) to come. Formally, the office of the censor, the Gáówny Urząd Kontroli Prasy, Publikacji i Widowisk (Main Office for the Control of the Press, Publications and Performances) was dissolved in 1990. Its activity, taciturn and almost clandestine, is at its most manifest when one looks at the fate and subject matter of films (rather than stage productions, which were less exposed and publicized than cinema). There are some significant films either falling victims to rather extreme censorship practices or discussing the position of censorship in the Polish culture of the 1980s. An example of the former is most notably Ryszard Bugajski’s Przesáuchanie (Interrogation), shot in 1981 and distributed in 1989, in which a rather carefree female singer is treated by the secret police as a member of a seditious group in the 1950s, aiming at overthrowing the prevalent regime. Now, this film belonged to a category called by critics “póákownik”, a play on the word “puákownik” (“colonel” in Polish) and “póáka” (“shelf”), which denoted a film whose distribution was rendered impossible or delayed by literally putting the tape on a shelf. An instance of a film directly addressing censorship issues was Ucieczka z kina WolnoĞü (An Escape from “Freedom” Cinema), directed by Wojciech Marczewski and distributed in 1990. Here, the voice of the censor is heard giving the rationale for censoring, in contrast to the film artists’ practice of how at least to reach a compromise, if not to out-Herod Herod, in the context of metafilmic devices clearly borrowed from Woody Allen’s films, especially his Purple Rose of Cairo (1985). As the date of distribution suggests, such a film could not only be shot but actually shown at the cinemas, only when the political situation allowed for an open discussion of censorship and its influence on culture. Significantly enough, even in such a production the image of the censor is quite positive, as it shows a figure who needs to be clever and skilful enough to introduce changes that the recipient will not notice at all. A censor thus presented himself as an artist, almost a co-author of the censored work of

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art. One cannot but recall here Richard Dutton’s article about censoring practices in Elizabethan times and about the contribution of the Master of the Revels to the works he “perused” (Dutton 1997). Censorship and its routines are elements that Andrzej Wajda, too, showed and referred to in his films, particularly his famous and (from the perspective of the authorities) controversial The Man of Marble (1977). The movie can be treated as a stark defiance of the censorship system, allowed by the authorities for the cinemas after a long and rather painstaking process of negotiation: “The Man of Marble was given a painful birth. It took a lot of effort and procedures to convince the officials and managers of culture that the film was not an accusation of the communist state. Was it not? It was indeed, and an accurate one at that, as it led to panic. The distribution of Wajda’s film was limited, which— instead of reaching a select audience—rendered the movie fairly wellknown and popular”.2 Be that as it may, Wajda’s film was shown in Poland at regular movie-theatres at the turn of the 1970s and 1980s, which I can personally to testify to (I had no problem buying a ticket to a screening of the movie in 1981).3 At this point, I should add yet another dimension of the treatment of censorship in Poland: the spectators (or any recipients of art) were perfectly aware of the possible manipulations to the work they were dealing with, so they were well trained (in terms of conventions) in reading between the lines. Furthermore, they automatically (as it were) assumed that the censors had intervened and that a set of reading practices should be employed in order to read the work properly. We should also bring to notice the fact that, in his The Man of Marble, Wajda did actually address the issue of censorship in the mid-1970s—the protagonist, Agnieszka (Krystyna Janda) and her supervisors are worried about whether the film she is working upon (about a forgotten socialist working hero from the 1950s) will be accepted by the censorship. It is due to the official and internal public television censorship that Agnieszka’s film is never shown. Wajda thus self-consciously provokes the authorities, perhaps asking them whether this will be the fate of his own movie and thus putting them in a rather awkward position.4 Be that as it may have 2

See http://www.filmpolski.pl/fp/index.php/12435 (accessed 3 December 2011; my translation). 3 Now, 1981 was a time of what, in Poland these days, is called a “Solidarity festival”, when the communist authorities were forced to make concessions. 4 There are more such moments in the film when Wajda, in a way, self-consciously teases the communist regime. Let me mention one such scene: Agnieszka, in her search for support for her project, turns to a well-known director, Jerzy Burski, who happens to be well-connected with the political establishment. This role was

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been, the director, both on stage and screen, certainly had to tackle the censors and find a way of having his works avoid too drastic censorial interventions.5 Yet, Andrzej Wajda’s film was not deposited on a shelf but licensed for (albeit limited) distribution. This may be accounted for also by the fact that the director’s fame was world-wide and that it was simply not politic to chastise Andrzej Wajda. In other words, the intelligent communists, having considered the pros and cons, preferred to keep Wajda as their director, rather than forcing him into emigration. At the same time, Wajda, apparently, did not object to such a solution. Yet, by the communists Wajda was treated as somebody who, though critical of the system, did not reject it: his films became, simultaneously, a justification of the ancien régime and a commentary on the new times.6 A slogan extremely popular and readily employed by the authorities in times of crisis was: “Socialism with a human face” (“socjalizm z ludzką twarzą”), seconded by “Yes to socialism, no to its distortions” (“Socjalizm—tak, wypaczenia—nie”). Obviously, both catchphrases emphasize the lasting nature of socialism, a system which may not yet be perfect, but which will be one day. A system which imperfect people (i.e. the ones who still yield to capitalist ideas and abuse them in order to heap up riches rather than serve others, etc.) have corrupted, but one which is a most natural choice for any progressive society. A digression is needed here: for a number of reasons, such an approach to socialism was convenient to both the supporters of the system and its critics. On the one hand, the former had a chance to admit that something had gone wrong and propose ways of addressing the mistakes in the future (not that such measures were implemented). On the other, the latter (or at least some of them) were not forced to start a real revolution given to one of the best Polish actors in the 20th century, Tadeusz àomnicki, who at the time was a member of the politburo of the Polish United Workers’ Party! 5 In his speech of 12 April 2013, delivered at the gala of the Polish Society of Cinematography, Andrzej Wajda emphasized the problems with censorship he had had before 1989, noting that the censors had the tendency to focus on words and that, generally, they found the verbal plane easier to control, unlike the picture (for the full text of Wajda’s speech, see http://www.psc.pl/pl/aktualnosci,wpis, przemowienie-andrzeja-wajdy-na-gali-psc,62.html). 6 This statement may sound too categorical, as there were more shades of grey and the situation was much more complex than what may be suggested by such a simplistic classification. In his manoeuvring in the meanders of the ancien régime, Wajda reminds me of a well-known Polish writer, actually one of the director’s favourites, Jerzy Iwaszkiewicz, whose prose Wajda successfully filmed (see his highly acclaimed Brzezina [The Birch Wood, 1970] or Panny z Wilka [Young Girls of Wilko, 1979]).

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which would polarize their position, either working for the system or openly opposing it, risking imprisonment and their lives (see the casualties of the anti-communist uprisings of 1956, 1970, 1976 and 1981). Either for the sake of convenience (a sort of “legalized” opposition, manifest amongst other things in allowing into the Polish parliament a group of Christian members belonging to a Catholically-oriented political circle tolerated by the communist authorities, though not necessarily by the Polish Church) or for the lack of hope in any change or faith in some sort of stability (I am far from judging such stances), even the opposition did not openly question the need to “fully” establish the socialist system in Poland. Another piece of evidence supporting this view was the widespread emigration of Poles to the West for both political and economic reasons,7 which naturally proves that Poles did not believe in the change of the world political status quo and the firm division into the capitalist, stable, affluent West and the socialist, ever-striving, less affluent East. Today, in hindsight, we know that such divisions were far from accurate; yet, in a totalitarian world, there is hardly any room for such complexities, for such shades of grey, as it is founded on a dichotomy of black and white. Be that as it may, justice needs to be done to Wajda’s Man of Marble and Man of Iron. Dzidek, a character from the latter movie, and a fellowstudent of the protagonist, writes after the 1970 Gdynia events a letter of support to the new gensec, conveniently believing in his assurances that he will build a new socialist Poland. Naturally, Mateusz, the protagonist of the movie, condemns his ex-friend for having done that. He and his wife opt for more radical action, a revolution against the authorities, but not against socialism as such—even the SolidarnoĞü movement in 1980 and 1981 did not reject socialism, perhaps because such a rejection could not have been voiced at that time. The situation was different in 1989. The first night of Wajda’s Hamlet IV took place on 30 June 1989, over three weeks after the first semidemocratic elections since 1945 in Poland (4 June 1989) and three months after the Round Table talks which paved the way for the elections. In other words, the première came in the midst of a most complex, and indeed perplexing, political situation, one, however, marked by social enthusiasm and hope for a better future, however pompous that may sound today. One could risk the statement that perhaps the context is, to a degree, responsible for the rather happy ending: Hamlet, after s/he is killed by Laertes, hangs his/her doublet on a chair in his dressing room, where most 7 The motivation was of course, in the majority of cases, more complex than this simple polarization suggests.

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of the action of the performance is set. Fortinbras (a rather sympathetic character in Wajda’s rendering) puts on the doublet, thus becoming the next Hamlet in a circular reading of the play. Wajda called this scene “Hamlet lives forever” (“Hamlet wiecznie Īywy”).8 The dynamic political and social situation did contribute to the final shaping of the production, especially in view of two observations: one, the director had been known for introducing political comments at least in some of his works (both films and theatrical performances) and two, Hamlet has been treated in Poland (and other socialist countries) as a most important political play. Surprisingly enough, however, Wajda and his actors officially (in interviews) distanced themselves from political readings of the play and claimed the opposite; critics note that in comparison with his other renderings of Hamlet, especially the previous Hamlet (III) from 1981, Hamlet IV was the least politically-oriented production (Walaszek 2003, 116; ĩurowski 2003, 48). As Joanna Walaszek noted (Walaszek 2003, 374), “The election campaign, politics, the press, all belonged to a different sphere of reality. Wajda and the whole troupe stood up in defence of the independence of the theatre from politics. Perhaps it was thanks to this attitude that the deep and free breath of Hamlet IV corresponded closely to the atmosphere of June 1989. Just like the desperation of the previous Hamlet corresponded to the social climate of the dramatic autumn of 1981”.

Wajda and the Challenges of the “Brave New World” The “more matter, less politics” approach in Wajda’s production was also noted by another critic who, when assessing in the year 2000 the condition of the Polish theatre in the decade after the political and economic change, observed: Almost 10 years ago Polish theatre heard the following words: “you are free, play what and how you want”. Freeing the theatre from national service was not the thing it most needed; it was, however, convenient. Suddenly, the most important criterion became the artistic value of the performance, to a large degree associated with the ability to adequately comment on the new reality. […] The audience expected the Shakespearean mirror which, by showing reality, would help us the better to understand it. The theatre is not, however, a column in a newspaper and is unable to do things at 8 Walaszek (2003, 325). All paraphrases and quotations from Walaszek’s book are in my own translation.

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somebody’s beck and call. It needed time to understand what had happened and, for this reason, just after 1989, it became a self-conscious theatre, exploring its own condition. Even when it tried to play stories, like those found in the best of the world dramatic canon, it was seeking first and foremost an answer to the question: what is theatre, where is it performed, what is its audience, what plays should be staged? Artistically, the best production of this kind was Andrzej Wajda’s Hamlet IV, whose action is ostentatiously moved to the dressing room, backstage, away from the limelight of the main stage and politics. Suspending the allusive way of playing and interpreting was not easy. Communist Poland was a school of allusions, of reading between the lines, of mocking the more or less alert censorship. (GruszczyĔski 2000)9

This quotation illustrates quite clearly the changes that occurred in the Polish theatre at the turn of the two political eras and, in hindsight, shows that Andrzej Wajda’s production was indeed a forerunner of the way theatre was treated and functioned in the new, communist-free Poland. In this manner, too, the director could finally offer a play which did not, at least to such a large extent, require the ability to read between the lines, although references to some anti-regime practices from the rather close past were easily identified by the audience and critics in the production (see below). What does matter, however, is that Andrzej Wajda could have been less bothered by the need to outsmart the censors, especially at a time when censorship was becoming slacker. In other words, my reading of 9

The original reads as follows: Prawie 10 lat temu powiedziano teatrowi: jesteĞ wolny, graj jak chcesz i co chcesz. Uwolnienie od narodowych posáug nie byáo mu jednak najbardziej potrzebne, a w kaĪdym razie—wygodne. Nagle jedynym kryterium oceny staáa siĊ wartoĞü artystyczna, w duĪej mierze toĪsama z umiejĊtnoĞcią wáaĞciwego komentowania nowej rzeczywistoĞci[...]. PublicznoĞü oczekiwaáa szekspirowskiego zwierciadáa, które odbijając rzeczywistoĞü pozwoli zarazem lepiej siĊ w niej rozeznaü. Teatr nie jest jednak felietonem i nie potrafi robiü niczego na zawoáanie. Potrzebowaá czasu na zrozumienie tego, co siĊ staáo i dlatego tuĪ po roku 1989 staá siĊ teatrem autotematycznym, badającym wáasną kondycjĊ. Nawet kiedy próbowaá graü historie, choüby te zapisane w najĞwietniejszych dramatach Ğwiatowego kanonu, szukaá w nich przede wszystkim odpowiedzi na pytanie: kim jestem, gdzie ĪyjĊ, jaka jest moja publicznoĞü, co mam graü. Najlepszym artystycznie przykáadem takiego przedstawienia byá „Hamlet IV” Andrzeja Wajdy, ostentacyjnie przeniesiony do garderoby aktorskiej, grany na tyáach wielkiej sceny i wielkiej polityki. Zawieszenie aluzyjnego stylu gry i interpretacji równieĪ nie byáo rzeczą áatwą. Peerel byá szkoáą aluzji, czytania miĊdzy wierszami, okpiwania mniej lub bardziej czujnej cenzury.

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Wajda’s Hamlet IV is similar to GruszczyĔski’s thesis: this play suggested a new way of looking at theatre’s social role in the new Poland/Poland to come. Thus, to answer the question posed in the title of this chapter, Hamlet IV is a post-political production, as Wajda is rather more interested in developing a concept for a new, post-censorship theatre. Some critics were not happy with Wajda’s decision to depoliticize Hamlet. However, they were countered by reviewers who found the director’s interpretation justifiable and who came to his defence. One of them, Tomasz Kubikowski (1990), referred to an ongoing discussion as to the interpretation of Wajda’s Hamlet IV, more specifically the criticism of the director’s ostentatious back-turning on political issues: “Wajda carried out—to use a popular term in the 1980s—a ‘deconstruction’ of the Shakespearean text. He approached it from the least expected of directions. He did not just stage Hamlet; he related to it. And in this way he managed to unearth profounder meanings than [the critics, Maágorzata Dziewulska and Paweá ĝpiewak] would find”.10 The claim that the production avoided politics seems substantiated by two elements. On the one hand, Wajda’s previous attempt to direct Hamlet in 1981 was made in the atmosphere of the development of the Solidarity movement and, during rehearsals, actors and the director excitedly discussed the latest events in Poland, which of course affected the production. On the other hand, it was as early as 1982 that, during the performances of this Hamlet, it occurred to the director to stage the play as a sort of chamberpiece, with a sharp focus on the actors, apparently both in the sense of space and the (ideological) issues it was supposed to address. It was at that time that Wajda got the idea of moving the performance off the stage (Walaszek 2003, 366-368). He was hoping to finally produce the new Hamlet in 1988 (368) but, what with the new translation of the play by Stanisáaw BaraĔczak (Wajda first asked the poet and translator to render only Hamlet’s soliloquies into Polish), work with the actors did not begin until November that year, delaying the première until June 1989. Furthermore, by denying the topical political import of the production, Wajda anticipated the moment when political freedom would call for de-

10

http://www.e-teatr.pl/pl/artykuly/81611.html. In the Polish original: “Wajda dokonaá—uĪyjĊ obiegowego sáowa teatralnych lat 80-tych—‘dekonstrukcji’ Szekspirowskiego tekstu. Obszedá go od niespodziewanych stron i znalazá do tekstu dojĞcia nieoczekiwane. Nie wystawiá go—powtórzmy raz jeszcze—odniósá siĊ do niego. I z tego odniesienia siĊ wydobyá chyba rzeczy gáĊbsze, niĪ to rozmówcy zechcieli odczytaü.”

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politicizing theatre.11 It was perhaps for this reason that the relationship between Claudius and Hamlet was presented as basically one between a man and a woman. Interestingly enough, Wajda presents Claudius as a male patriarch who feels free to enjoy his new position and abuse the female figures around him. As it happens, there are three of them: Hamlet (Claudius recognizes the figure’s femininity), his wife, a definitely elderly Gertrude (much older than the still robust Claudius) and the somewhat autistic Ophelia, afraid of contact with the outer world,12 but forced into exposure to it by her father and brother—no wonder that, when the two characters are gone, she is doomed to madness. The only female figure that a raunchy Claudius can turn his attention to is, then, Hamlet/the actress playing the part of the Prince. In light of the production’s focus on acting and the condition of the actor, the borderline between a character and actor impersonating him/her often becomes blurred, which also occurs in the rendering of the relationship between Claudius and Hamlet, in which the Hamlet figure is ambiguously gendered, at least in the eyes of the play’s tyrant. As a result, in 1.2, after his “throne speech”, Claudius does not hesitate to welcome Hamlet as his relative but also as an attractive woman. He seals the welcome with a far from “fatherly” full kiss on Hamlet’s mouth, which the latter wipes away in disgust.13 Joanna Walaszek does acknowledge Claudius’s brute force and (indirectly) his masculinity, yet she fails to imply any sexual innuendoes in his kissing Hamlet, seeing it rather as a gesture of power and appropriation: “His gestures are strong and decisive; he is not familiar with subtleties or the art of diplomacy. He can only use the power of his personality and his royalty. He comes to Hamlet and he actually does not ask him to do anything. He threatens the Prince and seals the threat with a kiss, which Hamlet finds uncontrollably repulsive”.14 11 It was fascinating watching this production in hindsight, aired on Polish television in January 1992, when political and social changes had already been firmly and irrevocably grounded, without the necessity to “read” between the lines. 12 In my opinion, a brilliant rendering of the character by Dorota Segda. Like Cordelia, suffering clearly from Asperger syndrome, Ophelia is autistic, albeit in a different way, dominated by her father, brother and lover in spe, who not surprisingly can freely empathize with her. 13 Let us note that in 1990 Franco Zeffirelli directed a filmic Hamlet, which brings up the issue of explicitly erotic relations between a mother and her son. In this case, we are dealing with a stepfather and his stepdaughter (?). 14 Walaszek (1990), at http://www.e-teatr.pl/pl/artykuly/81620.html. In the original: “Jego gesty są mocne i twarde, Īadne subtelnoĞci gry nie są mu znane. Ani subtelnoĞci dyplomacji. Umie korzystaü tylko z siáy swojej osoby i swojej wáadzy. Przychodzi do Hamleta i tak naprawdĊ o nic go nie prosi. Grozi i groĨbĊ

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In Wajda’s production Gertrude (Ewa Lassek and Dorota Pomykaáa)15 is visibly worried by Claudius’s act, yet she does not intervene: she knows her position in the patriarchal world and the ways in which it can be used to save her daughter. Furthermore, in Wajda’s performance Claudius is distanced from Hamlet’s space, the dressing room. He belongs to the highly histrionic stage, the pomp of kingship, which he enjoys more than anything else. Thus, Hamlet remains safe from Claudius’s dirty grip. The new king appears in Wajda’s rendering as a tyrant of a kind: not necessarily in the political sense, but in that of a relationship between the genders, in which he may be outwitted by Hamlet and Getrude, though in different ways. As a result, I would like to claim, Wajda looks at a new gender, tyranny, which, in communist times, was downplayed for the sake of politics, of expressing a stance against the regime, rather than of fighting for woman’s rights. Here, the mixing of the artistic/theatrical and gender-based appears rather justified. Furthermore, in one way, Wajda looks forward to a new political scenario, where theatre or art in general are not bothered by censorship but find themselves in an entirely new situation, that of a politically free world, which calls for a substantial redefinition of the artistic practices adopted under the former regime. Hamlet’s gender did not, of course, go unnoticed in the critical reviews of the production. One of the reviewers, Józef Hen, a well-known Polish writer, in a somewhat poetical manner, commented on one of the effects Budzisz-KrzyĪanowska had on the audience: And I think gentlemen were fascinated with how, in her acting, perhaps unconsciously, her femininity was made manifest. Not effeminacy, nor bisexuality. It was—comparing it with her other roles—almost a clinical study of femininity. One could understand, when watching Teresa’s playing, how one’s gender identity and the difference between a man and a woman are expressed in facial expressions or in the look. That Hamlet’s eyes! More lively, more quivering, more active and at the same time more suffering. As if they were coated with the light of suffering and melancholy. And they must have captivated the male spectators who suddenly understood what a woman’s eyes were. Which man could resist their allure? And her smile. That Hamlet smile. Completely different from …a male actor’s smile…. Hers was a very emotional Hamlet. Some of the outbursts of the tormented Prince were truly gripping.16 przypieczĊtowuje pocaáunkiem, który w Hamlecie wywoáuje odruch nieskrywanego wstrĊtu”. 15 Ewa Lassek died shortly after the première. Her part was taken by Dorota Pomykaáa, who also features in the television version of the production (1991). 16 http://www.e-teatr.pl/pl/artykuly/81598.html . In the Polish original:

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What the reviewer did focus on was, on the one hand, the confirmation of Hamlet’s gender identity and, on the other, its potential effect on the audience. He did not, however, discuss the significance of the fluid interplay between the gender of the Prince and actress for the relations between characters in the production, which, in my view, are vital. The gender issues are closely linked to the question of what the new theatre should be like. The gender of the actor/actress playing Hamlet is thus skilfully deployed by the director, and it matters in two ways: on the one hand, the director thus highlights the conventional nature of the theatre, its reliance on signs, rather than on verisimilitude. Andrzej Wajda himself would acknowledge this, when he commented on casting a woman in the role of the Danish Prince: at the time that casting decisions were being made, Teresa Budzisz-KrzyĪanowska was, in his eyes, the best Polish actor, regardless of gender.17 On the other hand, with the foregrounding of gender, of Hamlet’s resistance to Claudius’s sexual advances and of Gertrude’s exploitation of the patriarchal system to secure her son’s/daughter’s position and safety at court and, finally, the treatment of the victim of the system, Ophelia, the epitome of the “weak vessel”, Wajda anticipates, if not a change in the social status quo in Poland, certainly a problem that the “brave new world” of post-socialist Poland would sooner or later need to face. In other words, the director thus signals a most pertinent social issue for the theatre to address. I myĞlĊ, Īe panów fascynowaáo to, jak poprzez jej grĊ przebijaáa, w sposób niekoniecznie uĞwiadomiony, kobiecoĞü. Nie zniewieĞciaáoĞü i nie biseksualnoĞü. Byáo to—przez porównanie z innymi kreacjami—niemal kliniczne studium kobiecoĞci. MoĪna byáo, obserwując grĊ pani Teresy, zrozumieü, jak w mimice, w spojrzeniu wyraĪa siĊ páeü, genetyczna róĪnica miĊdzy mĊĪczyzną a kobietą. Oczy tego Hamleta! ĩywsze, bardziej rozedrgane, ruchliwsze i zarazem mocniej cierpiąc. Jakby powleczone blaskiem w cierpieniu i melancholii. I to zapewne tak frapowaáo mĊską czĊĞü widowni. Bo nagle zrozumieli, czym są oczy kobiety. KtóryĪ prawdziwy mĊĪczyzna oprze siĊ ich urokowi? I jeszcze uĞmiech. UĞmiech tego Hamleta. Zupeánie inny … niĪ uĞmiech aktoramĊĪczyzny… To byá Hamlet niewątpliwie bardzo uczuciowy. Niektóre wybuchy udrĊczonego ksiĊcia przejmowaáy do ucisku w gardle. 17 Wajda did not bother to justify the presence of a woman playing Hamlet by changing the plot, etc. (his explanation comes in the form of a meta-theatrical comment offered to critics and spectators in interviews, as well as in the director’s introduction to the televised version of the production). It may be recalled that some directors who decided to employ an actress to play the Prince went so far as to introduce drastic changes in the original plot to rationalize the gender change (see Schall and Gade’s elaborate explanation for Asta Nielsen as the Prince in their silent film Hamlet, 1921).

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There is a moment in the production when the identity of the character’s gender is powerfully questioned. In the television version the viewer, at the beginning of the production, witnesses the following sequence: Wajda’s meta-theatrical introduction, giving the raison d’être for the play, followed/illustrated by Teresa Budzisz-KrzyĪanowska, the empirical actress, in a jacket and matching skirt which underscore her femininity, crossing the auditorium and the stage on her way to the dressing room, where she takes off her jacket and puts on Hamlet’s Renaissance doublet, which hides the straps of her bra. This is, on the one hand, a symbolic change from the empirical world to the fictitious one, a change that turns out to be very smooth and “natural”. On the other hand, this scene marks a blurring of genders: it seems that the doublet indicates not so much the masculine nature of the character as his/her androgyny. Thus, we are dealing not with a confusion of genders but with their blending, which actually might corroborate Wajda’s explanation, were it not for the fact that Hamlet’s gender identity is, on a number of occasions, quite clearly determined. At the same time, the androgynous nature of the doublet, which marks one as Hamlet, enhances the reading of the protagonist as crossing the borders of gender.18 This is the case when Hamlet meets Ophelia: the Prince looks at Ophelia in the nunnery and the play-within-the-play scenes with compassion. Ophelia (Dorota Segda) is shown as a delicate, doll-like character, very feminine, ideally filling her social role of a woman in a patriarchal world. Hamlet, with his/her superior (masculine?) intelligence,19 feels sorry for her, realizing the machinations of her father, brother and Hamlet’s stepfather. The Prince despises Ophelia for her inability to realize the scheming and, at the same time, cannot help expressing a sort of feminine solidarity with the victimized Ophelia. For this reason, s/he takes the trouble to make Polonius’s daughter aware of the situation, though at the same time s/he knows that it is to no avail. This is at least what Hamlet can do for Ophelia without losing her human and female integrity. As Walaszek (1990) observed, “[i]n the relationship between Ophelia and Hamlet-the-Actress there is no suggestion of eroticism. It is a relationship between experience and naïveté, maturity and childhood. Hamlet is angry at Ophelia’s thoughtless submissiveness to her father, and—at the same time—Hamlet sympathizes with her. And a few words of Hamlet bring that stiff marionette to life. Ophelia lays her head on Hamlet’s lap and 18

As will be shown below, it is not only the “clothes that…make Hamlet”. Of course not! Wajda makes sure that it is women (Hamlet and Gertrude) who prove intelligent, more so than the men, albeit in different ways.

19

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Hamlet tenderly strokes her”.20 In other words, a relationship between two women, or perhaps more like a relationship between two sisters. Hamlet thus appears to function like the true and caring sibling the lost Ophelia never had. It seems only natural to reverse the relationship and have Hamlet confront Fortinbras and Horatio. Wajda sees these characters as representatives of a new generation, daughters and sons of the ancien régime who reject and rebel against it and have a special relationship with…Hamlet/Hamlet. Let us first deal with the Hamlet/Fortinbras configuration. Hamlet’s story is, as signalled above, repeated in a cyclical manner. Yet, it is not a mere repetition; rather, it is passed on with the hope of finally deposing the patriarchal system. The fact that Hamlet does not die, leaving the Danish throne empty, but that s/he actually passes it and the role to another character, one who, in this production, is shown as a noble figure, presents the ending as one which contains hope, not just sorrow, after the protagonist’s inevitable death. Hope for a better future, for depoliticized Hamlets on the Polish stage. This idea seems to be further explored in the relationship between the Prince and Horatio. The latter is less rebellious than Fortinbras, being (as it were) more culture- and textoriented. This is most visible in the scene preceding the play-within-theplay, when Horatio, alone in the dressing room, finds on the dressing table a copy of the script for Wajda’s performance and is allowed to become yet another Hamlet-figure, reading the opening lines of the most famous soliloquy. Thus, Hamlet does indeed live forever! If Claudius (and Polonius) represents the old system in Wajda’s production, then certainly the play can be seen as an attempt to settle accounts with the past and the ancien régime. Consequently, Claudius’s suspicion that the play-within-the-play may be seditious and his questioning Hamlet as to the play’s “offensive” nature (which the Prince brushes off, by claiming that the Players “do but jest, poison in jest”) become symbolic inasmuch as it is, in fact, with censorship that the director and other Polish artists had to struggle for over forty years. Interestingly enough, the function of the censor in Shakespeare’s play is actually entrusted to…Hamlet, who is responsible for the preparation of 20 http://www.e-teatr.pl/pl/artykuly/81598.html . In the Polish original: “W relacji miĊdzy Ofelia i Hamletem-aktorką nie ma Īadnej dwuznacznoĞci. Nie ma w niej erotyzmu. To raczej relacja pomiĊdzy doĞwiadczeniem i naiwnoĞcią, dojrzaáoĞcią i dzieciĔstwem. Hamleta gniewa i záoĞci gáupia powolnoĞü Ofelii wobec ojca, ale równoczeĞnie jej wspóáczuje. I wystarczy kilka jego sáów, Īeby w tej sztywnej marionetce obudziü Īycie. Ofelia káadzie gáowĊ na kolanach Hamleta, ten czule ją gáaszcze”.

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the royal entertainment. Hamlet and Budzisz-KrzyĪanowska’s rendering of the part make light of the office, clearly belittling its significance and pointing to its uselessness, thus suggesting that in the new world political censorship will no longer be necessary.21 At the same time, one should note that taking distance from politics and focusing on the condition of the theatre in the case of Hamlet is not, after all, such a novelty. Although the political ramifications of performing this play in the socialist countries have already been stressed on several occasions, the tragedy has long been identified as one of the most theatrically-oriented plays in the Shakespearean canon. For this reason, the fact that Wajda returns to this issue in his fourth attempt at staging Hamlet should not, after all, come as a surprise. What matters is that the director decided to take this new/old angle on the play at a most delicate and sensitive historical moment, one which would call for yet another political 21

Hamlet’s use of the word “jest” is significant here: he refers to fiction, not an account of real-life events. Of course, the recipient is aware of dramatic irony in this case—Hamlet, after all, attempts to use the play/fiction to comment on his reality. Yet, perhaps under the influence of Sidneyan poetics, Shakespeare was fully aware that the “mirror up to nature” only reflects what is real, makes it perhaps more beautiful, but in the end is only a “jest”. At the same time, he and his fellow playwrights and actors had, like Wajda, to convince the Master of the Revels that, no matter how apt and topical the commentary may be, it is only a work of fiction. Wajda seems to explore this contradiction in the social sphere of the functioning of the theatre, as well in his play. Polish theatre has witnessed moments when the alleged topicality of a production became a “key” to its reading by the audience, although the play’s fictional nature was intended and emphasized, at least by the director. A case in point is the (in)famous (depending on one’s political perspective) production of Adam Mickiewicz’s Dziady (Forefathers’ Eve) in 1968 in Warsaw, which sparked off social unrest and led to riots as the spectators read it as a political anti-Soviet production (the play is a Romantic piece about the Polish resistance to the Russian/Tsarist oppression in the 19th century). The director of the production (which was taken off soon after its première), Kazimierz Dejmek, continued to deny the political import of the performance, but the spectators—due to censorship and the already developed habit of reading between the lines—thought otherwise. I myself experienced the work of an (internal, as it were) censorship when I was attending a vocational college in 1986, whose students (and my schoolmates) were trying to stage Mickiewicz’s play under the direction of our teachers of Polish. It was an amateur school performance, but the headmaster of the school eventually decided to ban the performance for political reasons (considering it an anti-Soviet production). This was not, unfortunately, the end of the troubles for the production team: they were subsequently interrogated by the secret police! Fortunately enough, no one was arrested.

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rendering of the tragedy. A question could be posed here: why did the director keep politics out of the production? It appears that the search for a new artistic formula in a pre-capitalist and pre-politically-free Poland as the only answer to this question is not sufficient. Perhaps Wajda was tired of fighting the censors and thus turned to safer territory? One in which the focus was on theatre-as-art and gender relations, which in the eyes of a potential censor, seemed less troublesome or completely neutral? The chamber-piece atmosphere of the production may also help highlight this issue: the number of spectators, due to the limited space of the dressing room, was drastically reduced; consequently, only a small “bunch” of intellectuals would have seen the play (its nationwide television première was not until 1992). Yet, the director could not completely avoid politics, even in a production which examines the actors’ condition and acting itself. On the one hand, at the time of some of the last rehearsals, he himself was involved in running for the newly re-established senate (he did eventually become a senator). As he puts it himself, referring to the link between politics and his (then) brand-new theatrical project in a letter of 27 April 1989 to Stanisáaw BaraĔczak, “I set out after Fortinbras for the fictional Poland in order to win the Elections, although the fight is for ‘a little patch of ground/That hath in it no profit but the name’ [Hamlet 4.4.1819]…‘Why, then the Polack never will defend it. Yes, it is already garrison’d’ [4.4.23-24]” (cited in Walaszek 2003, 372), which again underscores the positive image of Fortinbras, who—like a Pole in the Romantic vision—is doomed to fighting a hopeless cause for the sake of mere honour in the vicious circle of the theatre. Thus Fortinbras and Hamlet and the Players and…all of us…chase a dream.22 On the other hand, being an actor in a socialist country, no matter if winds of drastic changes had just been ushered in, had ideological implications.23 No wonder, then, that the Players who had to leave the capital, again despite the production’s concentration on the profession and sense of acting, were inevitably interpreted in the light, say, of the Polish actors’ refusal to play on the official Polish stage or screen after the introduction of Martial Law on 13 December 1981. The most memorable cases were those of Daniel Olbrychski, one of the most popular Polish 22

For Andrzej Wajda, the Polish Romantic myth has been a most prominent issue which he has addressed in one way or another in all his theatrical, television and film productions. 23 The communist system, like any totalitarian system, aimed at developing new people, new citizens in many areas of life, including art and artists; thus, actors were expected to share the new stance.

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actors, and Krzysztof Kolberger. The former preferred to drive a taxi instead and later to emigrate and play in films abroad. For this reason, for example, the 1981 television Othello with Olbrychski playing the Moor was aired in 1984, thus becoming another instance of a “póákownik” (Fabiszak 2005, 128-129). The latter did not cease to act either, except that he did not emigrate but preferred to perform, unofficially, on impromptu organized parish stages (the Catholic Church in Poland functioned as an unofficial form of political opposition). As a result, the Players in Wajda’s Hamlet IV were thus perceived as the equivalents of such objectors to the regime and to its ruthless practices.24 Tony Howard, too, reminds us of the political implications of the fact that the First Player became a Gravedigger: “Like the Players’ expulsion from the city, it [Peszek’s doubling of roles] alluded to Martial Law and the leading actors’ very public boycott of the controlled mass media” (1997, 61). However, he pays less attention to the many ways in which the Players are shown in the production and the spaces they occupy. The Players come to Hamlet from the world outside Elsinore; in Wajda’s performance they are literally associated with the real/empirical world as they move into the dressing room area through a passage which leads to the back entrance to the theatre from the street; this additionally supports the idea that they may have been interpreted by the audience as an allusion to the actors’ self-imposed life outside the theatre. They wear modern clothing and they act/behave naturally. The First Player’s [Jan Peszek’s] rendering of the “Ragged Pyrrhus” speech is overwhelming and realistic. The Players are thus like Hamlet him/herself when, in the opening, s/he first crossed the stage dressed in modern apparel in order to change in the dressing room into an Elizabethan doublet. Like Hamlet, when they prepare for the mousetrap, they change into Renaissance-style dress in order to play on stage. The change of costumes is accompanied by the Players putting on very heavy make-up, which, what with the exaggerated acting in the play-within-the-play, implies a different reality on the one hand (one consisting of the world of Claudius, or courtly pomp, as well as histrionics) and a political statement on the other. Apparently, they again become “regime” players, catering to the rather unrefined taste of the King. At the same time, however, they are in collusion with Hamlet, behaving as his/her accomplices. They perform something that amounts to a theatrical hyperbole, bordering on farce (Fabiszak 2005, 269). Consequently, Wajda distanced himself from the 24 Ironically, today Daniel Olbrychski supports General Jaruzelski and opposes his indictment for the introduction of Martial Law.

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kind of political theatre that had haunted Polish stages so far (the rehearsals for the performance began in May 1989, when enthusiasm for the political, social and economic changes had already been riding high amongst Poles), proposing a production which, both at the time (in 1989) and in hindsight (after the airing of the teleplay in 1992, and now, 20 years later) marked a novel approach to Hamlet, in the context of a political freedom hardly anybody in Poland had dared to dream of before. In this way, I would like to compare Wajda’s important production for the theatre with what perhaps the greatest Polish writer of the second half of the 20th century, Stanisáaw Lem, achieved in his prose works for the future of our world: both artists made very accurate predictions and both were (equally) ignored.

Conclusion What Andrzej Wajda performed in 1989 was a genuine theatrical volteface: he depoliticized the stage rendering of Hamlet by highlighting the issue of theatricality and gender relations, and pointing to directions in which Polish theatre could develop in the decades to come after 1989: no longer contesting the political rigidity of the ancien régime, but celebrating the freedom of theatrical artists who had become free of the necessity to address politics in a veiled manner, but who needed to adopt a different approach (instead of pro- or anti-communist) to the practice of theatre, one in which other topical problems (art, gender, unemployment, national identity, morals, etc.) are to be dealt with. Andrzej Wajda, for example, chose Polish national identity, producing movies like KatyĔ. It is also interesting to note that the artist has not directed another Hamlet since 1989, although he has produced other plays by Shakespeare, notably his famous Macbeth of 2005. Does this mean that his Hamlet IV was a sort of farewell to the play, the director’s final statement, a kind of last Hamletian will? Or perhaps Wajda treated the performance in the way many directors regard The Tempest, as an artistic creed rather than as a valediction to the theatre? This would explain why, in the new times, Andrzej Wajda has not felt the need to determine his artistic choices. But, of course, any attempt to answer these questions will be futile, as the director continues to launch new projects, ones also linked with Shakespeare: on 14 September 2009 he directed and coordinated the staging of scenes from Shakespeare by some eighty well-known Polish actors in the GdaĔsk Dáugi Targ to commemorate the laying of the foundation-stone for the GdaĔsk Shakespeare Theatre (see Limon 2011 and GostyĔska & Ratkiewicz-Sytek 2012)! Certainly,

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that happening, called “The Actors are come hither”, was very much about the theatre and its function in the contemporary world.

Works Cited Czáowiek z marmuru [Man of Marble]. At FILMPOLSKI.PL internetowa baza filmu polskiego. http://www.filmpolski.pl/fp/index.php/12435. (Accessed 3 December 2011.) Dutton, Richard. 1997. “Censorship”. In A New History of Early English Drama, eds. John D. Cox & David Scott Kastan, 287-304. New York: Columbia University Press. Fabiszak, Jacek. 2005. Polish Televised Shakespeares. A Study of Shakespeare Productins within the Television Theatre Format. PoznaĔ: Motivex. GostyĔska, Maria & Anna Ratkiewicz-Sytek (eds.) 2012. Hamlet dwóch czasów [Hamlet of two times]. GdaĔsk: GdaĔski Teatr Szekspirowski. GruszczyĔski, Piotr. 2000. “Teatr na wolnoĞci” [Theatre set free]. Tygodnik Powszechny. http://www.tygodnik.com.pl/kontrapunkt/2223/gruszcz.html. (Accessed 14 May 2013.) Hen, Józef. 1992. “Kobiece oczy Hamleta” [Hamlet’s woman’s eyes]. Rzeczpospolita 87. 11.04.1992. http://www.e-teatr.pl/pl/artykuly/ 81598.html . (Accessed 10 November 2011.) Howard, Tony. 1997. “Behind the Arras, through the Wall: Wajda’s ‘Hamlet’ in Krakow, 1989”. New Theatre Quarterly 13: 53-68. Kubikowski, Tomasz. 1990. “Glosa w sprawie Wajdy” [Footnote in Wajda’s case]. Teatr No. 5. 1 May 1990. http://www.e-teatr.pl/pl/ artykuly/81611.html . (Accessed 10 November 2011.) Limon, Jerzy. 2011. “’The Actors are Come Hither’: Andrzej Wajda’s Shakespearean Happening in GdaĔsk”. Cahiers Élisabethains 79: 4768. Shakespeare, William. 2006. Hamlet, eds. Ann Thompson & Neil Taylor. The Arden Shakespeare. London: Thomson Learning. Wajda, Andrzej. 2013. Przemówienie Andrzeja Wajdy na Gali PSC [Andrzej Wajda’s address at the gala of of the Polish Society of Cinematography]. Delivered on 12 April 2013. http://www.psc.pl/pl/aktualnosci,wpis,przemowienie-andrzeja-wajdyna-gali-psc,62.html . (Accessed 3 May 2013.) Walaszek, Joanna. 1990. “Hamlet IV Wajdy i Budzisz-KrzyĪanowskiej” [Wajda’s and Budzisz-KrzyĪanowska’s Hamlet IV]. Dialog 6. 1 June 1990. http://www.e-teatr.pl/pl/artykuly/81620.html. (Accessed 10 November 2011.)

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Walaszek, Joanna. 2003. Teatr Wajdy. W krĊgu arcydzieá: Dostojewski, Hamlet, Wesele [Wajda’s Theatre: in the Circle of Masterpieces: Dostoyevsky, Hamlet, The Wedding]. Kraków: Wydawnictwo Literackie. ĩurowski, Andrzej. 2003. Szekspir— ich rówieĞnik [Shakespeare—Their Contemporary]. GdaĔsk: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu GdaĔskiego.

CHAPTER ELEVEN HAMLET OR THE SKELETONS IN THE CUPBOARD NICOLETA CINPOEù

Hamlet has been the Shakespeare play that has enabled Romania to ask “Who’s there?” (1.1.1) at crucial moments in the country’s history. For over two hundred years, Romanian productions, translations and critical appropriations of the seventeenth-century work have been Romania’s way of thinking through its historical moments. Hamlet, the first Shakespeare play to be rendered into Romanian, was translated around 1810 by Ioan Barac. Though not translated directly from English (but from a German translation mediated through a Hungarian performance touring Transylvania at the end of the eighteenth century), his work remains a bold attempt: besides being the first complete Shakespeare play translated1 and “constituting crucial linguistic evidence of the process of modernization and consolidation of the Romanian language before standardization” (Cinpoeú 2010b, 12) in 1855, the very act of translating Hamlet into Romanian in AustroHungarian Transylvania meant taking a bold political stance. Barac’s effort, albeit remaining in manuscript form, marked the beginning of the crucial political work this play would do: from this point onwards, Hamlet’s and Romania’s stories would be intertwined. As I have argued extensively elsewhere, Hamlet “was there” and played a part in the 1848 Romanian Revolution, the development of indigenous playwriting, the establishment of the national theatres (in Iaúi, Craiova and Bucharest), through the two world wars, the swift move from monarchy through military dictatorship to socialism and the long dark years of the communist regime. It was Hamlet (cast in the 1985 Tocilescu production) riding a tank who announced “We are free, Ceauúescu has fled…” at the 1989 Revolution and Hamlet that paved the way through the transition to 1

Fragments and speeches from Shakespeare plays and sonnets had been translated into Romanian before the end of the eighteenth century.

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democracy. While in this article I aim to trace the intertwined story of Hamlet and Romania by observing stage productions of Hamlet in Romania of the first decade of the third millennium, my focus of enquiry is also why Hamlet has not been happening on Romanian stages since 2009 and aims to start posing questions as to why this is the current state of affairs. My enquiry starts in the theatre. Not with a Romanian production, but with the latest London National Theatre production of Hamlet directed by Nicholas Hyntner (2010). About ten minutes into the performance, the stiff brass band march that made the background music to the coronation scene was eerily familiar to me; a few bars in, I found myself involuntarily supplying the lyrics to it: my lyrics and the production’s tune, it took me a while to remember, actually belonged to a Romanian communist hymn I had to learn by heart as a primary school child. The tune, I had discovered years later, had a long national(ist) history: it was originally composed as a patriotic song militating for the unification of Moldavia and Wallachia in 1859; it had been hijacked and rewritten during the communist 1970s, in the regime’s double attempt to erase its previous right-wing connotations and to paste on it the Communist Party’s own nationalist claims to these (national unification) roots. The same tune, my recent research found, currently serves as the Albanian national anthem. Several other details in this production took me back to Eastern Bloc Romania and its practices. Amongst them, Laertes’s application to leave the country being signed off but Hamlet’s being rejected. While the Danish Prince (Rory Kinnear) tore the rejected application form in anger, albeit after Claudius had made his exit, he got to keep his passport—this wouldn’t have been an option in the olden days: as the only means of escaping the regime, one’s passport would have been retained by its Office. Also uncannily familiar was the persecution of the actors (after the interrupted Mousetrap), punished for their daring critique of the regime. But I was not alone in making these links between the National Theatre’s 2010 Elsinore and Eastern Bloc Romania. In the short film about the production’s stage design, when commenting on the overall take on the play in the 2010 production, Richard Eyre stated: “I was visiting Romania in the worst years of Ceauúescu’s [regime], when it was the worst policed state amongst many in Eastern Europe, that seems to me the perfect analogy for Elsinore”.2 The 2010 production programme, too, made 2

Richard Eyre visited Bucharest in the 1980s with the aim of directing Hamlet at the Bulandra Theatre, Bucharest, a project he couldn’t pursue when he was offered the BBC contract. The production was eventually directed by Alexandru Tocilescu and opened after four years of tough negotiation with the censors.

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numerous references to the Eastern Bloc and its close relation to Hamlet, rendering thus the Eastern experience as intrinsic to the understanding of the play anywhere today. Peter Holland begins his programme feature thus: Stalin did not like Hamlet. When the Moscow Art Theatre was in rehearsal for a production with a new translation by Boris Pasternak, a hint from the Kremlin was enough for the production to be cancelled immediately by the nervous director. Plays about assassinating the ruler were not recommended under a dictatorship—and, in any case, Stalin probably disapproved of a revenger who takes such a long time to carry out his plan. (2010, 22)

Later in the piece, he reads the Elizabethan context of the play through Stalin’s Russia: “no less totalitarian than Stalin’s Russia, Elizabethan England was, like Claudius’s Denmark, dependent on the mechanisms of control and supervision” (24) of the State. Russell Jackson’s survey of Hamlets and “the pressure” of their “times” (2010, 26-31) remembers Russian director Grigori Kosintzev’s 1964 film and Romanian director Alexandru Tocilescu’s 1985 stage production, citing the latter visually (with a photograph of Ion Caramitru and the Gravediggers) between two of the most famous English Danish Princes: David Garrick’s in 1773 and Lawrence Olivier’s in the 1948 film. Such analogies and references were not only possible but also productive in a 2010 Hamlet in Britain which, like Polonius, “by indirections directions found”: in order to examine its present, it used the Eastern Hamlet tropes. What I aim to argue in this article is that such tropes have lost both their appeal and currency in Romanian productions of Hamlet after 1989 and even more so in new millennium ones. In order to explore some of the reasons behind it, I will examine how post-1989 Romanian productions of the play have cited forms of tyranny, focusing on the two most recent Romanian stage Hamlets and how they site and criticize interpretive tyrannies and their effects on staging Hamlet—from inescapable nostalgia, to crisis, erasure, self-imposed exile and silence. Post-1989, Hamlet has undertaken a long and painful process of cleansing of political hints, games, and double codes in Romania—more than any other Shakespeare play, given its extreme popularity. As early as 1991, when the “Prince from the Bloc” visited the London National Theatre, the Romanian production faced this challenge when required to shorten the performance from five and a half hours to the standard (in the UK) three and a half hours. In pure statistical terms, this revision significantly reduced the number of political puns and double-entendres

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used in the production initially. It also drastically cut the musical interludes between Hamlet and the pianist permanently on stage, rendering the latter and his function of ghosting the production almost redundant. Back in mid-1980s Romania, this double act had been another dissident stance not only in the Hamlet production but also outside it: the pianist and the lead actor toured Romania with recitals of poetry (by authors often on the Regime’s blacklist) and music during this dire decade. At the time, the cuts and revisions required of the production, while touring, were regarded as toning down the euphoria of the recent liberation and denunciation of the past. With hindsight, they were a wakeup call to free communication— linguistic and theatrical—from decades of dissident encoding and to see the “forms and pressures” of the present “time”. In this sense, it was a UK reviewer who read the production’s ending—Fortinbras returning, clad in victorious red, not as a liberator but as the “new” tyrant—as telling of the post-1989 Romania and its neo-communist regime seizing power. To Joan Montgomery Byles, Fortinbras ordering his trustworthy guards (no other than Rosencrantz and Guildenstern uncannily “returned” from the dead) to kill Horatio, and with him Hamlet’s story so “the rest is silence”, was no cathartic exposure of past practices, but a sharp warning about the present and that history was set too dangerously on fast replay (1991, 26). Having done its duty—which was to voice a present the Regime should deny and to expose its practices once overthrown—, the play and its protagonist’s voice fell silent on the stages of Romania. The Prince needed to cast off his heavily politicized “antic disposition”, find new meanings in his “words, words, words…” and a new part to play. The first production in democratic Romania, eight years later, was itself a lesson in democracy. Gabor Tompa’s 1997 Hamlet at the Craiova National Theatre proposed unpacking the play’s heritage—Romanian and international. Its trope was an incursion behind the Iron Curtain, the design element that literally opened and closed the production to the sound of Pink Floyd’s track “The Wall”. Other “walls” occasioned incursions back in time and interpretive traditions: the red curtains—of communism old and new?—parted to reveal a wall of mirrors which opened to welcome “the tragedians”, a motley crew of classical masks, a Chaplin lookalike and a Player King who uncannily resembled Shakespeare as we know him from the Droeshout (1622) portrait.

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Fig. 11-1. The Ghost—Shakespeare lookalike crossing the stage in the closet scene between Hamlet and Gertrude. (Courtesy of Teatrul National “Marin Sorescu” Craiova, 1997.)

Recent past (pre-1989 Romania) and remote past (seventeenth-century England) lived cheek by jowl in this production and promoted interpretive democracy. Doubling as the Player King, the Ghost of the dead King was an overt reference to the undercover work Shakespeare did in communist Romania, but also a reference to the apocryphal story of Shakespeare having once performed the Ghost’s part in the play. Claudius’s cry “Give me some light: away!” (3.2.285) translated performatively into the collapse of the light rig over the players, crushing them to death. This was no accident, but the swift execution of an order; Shakespeare’s line “Lights, lights, light!” (3.2.286) became the cue to dispose of the actors who dared to criticize the regime. This scene, like the entire production, was ghosted by a previous Hamlet—Gabor Tompa’s 1987 Hungarian stage version of the play for the Hungarian Theatre, Cluj—which the regime persecuted repeatedly. As Josefina Komporaly argues, in 1987, a time when the Iron Curtain was a reality, this particular “tableau could only have one obvious interpretation to those watching in the audience: there is no mercy for those exposing and opposing tyranny; resistance, be it political or cultural, is in vain”.3 3

Komporaly discusses this production and its troublesome journey from rehearsal to its relatively short run (35 performances). She argues that the lead actor’s refusal

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In 1997 the same scene worked as a dutiful act of remembrance, but also as a ghost laid to rest, with all other things of the past. In the latter sense, the ending of Tompa’s production marked a clear interpretive departure. He re-played Tocilescu’s ending and exposed its meta-theatrical function. Fortinbras’s last words: “Go, bid the soldiers shoot” (5.2.417) were not an order to silence Horatio but were repeated louder and louder— a broken record, mocking its meaning.4 That version of Hamlet, the production suggested, was clearly a thing of the past: the theatrical iron curtain fell for the last time, not only separating Horatio spatially from the rest of the cast but also setting him free from the past and enabling him to look the present in the eye. More than meets the eye was the interpretive approach put forward by the 1998 production of Hamlet for the “Mihai Eminescu” National Theatre, Botoúani. Its director, Ioan Sapdaru, who was cutting his teeth on Shakespeare with this show, proposed Hamlet as a shock-therapy lesson for the audience in an overt attempt to free the play of its pre-1989 politics of dissent. While the royal couple uncannily resembled the infamous Ceauúescus (due to the heavy makeup, which gradually wore off), the production’s focus was not to remember that past but to purge the colour red and the playtext of political associations. For Romanian audiences, the colour red was, by default, associated with communism, Party flags and membership cards. Using red as the only colour amongst black, white and shades of grey for set, props and costumes, the production worked hard to erase its past meanings and re-inscribe it with other meanings: murder, passion, sexuality, and murder again. Polonius’s red briefcase and the red bouquet he offered the Queen at the coronation marked him as the regime’s apparatchik. Claudius’s red tie and Gertrude’s red tights, however, indicated their sexually charged relationship more than their political colour. Most significant, however, was a stage-long piece of red silk that to speak Romanian in a Party meeting was a choice which resulted in his name being removed from the production bill, publicity material, and reviews, increasing the persecutory measures on the production itself: the prizes the production received at the time were denied collection by the cast. 4 The re-play of the ruler’s last order as voiceover would have reminded some spectators of the real events of November 1989: the Communist Party’s 14th (and last) Congress ended with Ceauúescu’s (enforced) re-election and his balcony speech (thanking the nation for trusting him with another five years of Party leadership and condemning the anti-communist movements shaking Europe at the time) was met with recorded applause and real booing from the audience gathered outside the Central Committee building.

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Fig. 11-2. Enter the royal couple—Claudius (Marius Rogojinschi) and Gertrude (Irina Mititelu). (Courtesy of Teatrul NaĠional “Mihai Eminescu” Botoúani, 1998.)

metamorphosed throughout the production to tell a number of stories. It draped the Ghost and enfolded the entire stage as he unfolded the story of his murder, which trapped Hamlet physically in the revenge task. It covered the bed in the closet scene, made the impromptu arras behind which Polonius found his death and became the handy means for Hamlet to drag Polonius’s dead body offstage. Once the red silk utilitarian functions were exhausted, the colour red ceased to be the key visual stimulator of meaning. The production emphasized this by giving red the spotlight initially, then reducing it to a simple backdrop, and finally displacing its symbolic meaning completely. In a similar manner, the production worked to undo the audience’s decades-old habit of reading politically into the play’s words. In order to avoid the default political puns and double-speak (such as taking “a rat” for a Party official; “friends” for “comrades”, “a mole” for a Securitate informer), the production employed a famous 1980s philological translation. Leon LeviĠchi’s translation provided the necessary departure from the script for the 1985 Bulandra production (clearly produced with a dissident agenda). Having never been used on stage prior to 1998, it provided a clean slate ready for new meanings to be inscribed and supported the production’s aim to start, at least linguistically, afresh. Both Tompa’s and Sapdaru’s were direct and timely reconsiderations of the play’s role in Romanian theatre at the end of the 1990s; they found

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ways—albeit different in each production’s approach, scale, locality and theatre—to tune into present concerns and priorities, and to reengage a public bombarded by media freedom and experimentalism. When compared to the productions of Hamlet marking the turn of the millennium, however, they were somewhat ahead of their time—Hamlet, stage history confirmed it, had a few more accounts to “set right”. In 2000, Liviu Ciulei’s production at the Bulandra Theatre, Bucharest, set the play in an end of the nineteenth-century Bismarkian court. The choice, however, was not alluding to the Romanian monarchy (whose popularity, incidentally, was on the increase at the time). Rather, it was the result of the director’s preoccupation with spatial potential afforded by this approach. Ciulei’s Elsinore had shifting columns which created new corridors and spaces for the action to develop. The set was cast in the lead role in this production: it was an exquisite architectural project more attentive to the geometry of politics than to the fate of the individual, and it overwhelmed the actors. In this sense, the production’s interpretive approach was stuck in the past (the late 1960s), not only in its use of the Grand Mechanism of repression, social and psychological, but also in the autobiographical sense, in that it allowed the director to complete an unfinished project. In the late 1960s Ciulei was banned as a director of the Bulandra Theatre; after extensive pleading with the Party officials, he was eventually allowed to continue working for the theatre but only as stage designer. A few years later, Ciulei’s dossier was reopened following his radical production of Gogol’s The Inspector General which the regime did not approve of, and he was dismissed from his position, a decision which forced Ciulei into exile. While he did not get the chance to direct Hamlet on his home turf, Ciulei mounted the play in 1986 as an impressive architectural exercise at the Guthrie Theatre, Minneapolis, the oldest and largest regional American theatre he had been employed to run in 1980. Hired for his radical approach to staging in Romania and abroad, his work as artistic director sought, as he stated in a later interview for the New York Times: [to] expose the audience to new ideas, to new ways of understanding performances. I didn’t cut them off from the different currents which are present around us and which we shouldn’t ignore. I opened some dangerous doors, and I think they can’t be closed again. (Shewey 1986)

But even in 1986 his vision of Hamlet was regarded by critics as straining to incorporate too many possible approaches to the play—from political to psychoanalytical, from philosophical to revenge tragedy, of no time and of any time—and failing to settle on any, thus turning the

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visually beautiful large scale production into an interpretive cacophony. Similar was the fate of the 2000 Bulandra production: despite the elaborate design and the top artistic potential employed, the production flopped.5 Some doors, it seemed to suggest, were best left closed. What the production suffered from was that this Hamlet didn’t engage with its contemporary audiences, for most of whom the production functioned at best as a museum visit and its playscript (the version used by the Bulandra production in 1985) as having no coherent or immediate story to tell. Retrospectively, it signalled that a new stage script was a pressing need if Hamlet was to tell any story on a Romanian stage. Hamlet as a story left untold was also the starting point for Vlad Mugur in 2001. This was not his first Hamlet either. In 1958, he staged his first Hamlet at the National Theatre, Craiova, where he was sent as a visionary director to revitalize the theatre’s profile—in non-Party speak, this was a disciplinary move for not toeing the Party line and being too revolutionary in ideas. His second Hamlet, due to open in 1971 at the National Theatre in Cluj, where Mugur was sent on a similar cultural recovery mission—meaning away from Bucharest, because his radical work had too much unwanted impact—was stopped half-way through rehearsals and the director had to flee the country. The Party took offence at the fact that his production was using a newly commissioned, thus yet uncensored, translation and that his cast conducted their research for this Hamlet in psychiatric wards, otherwise known as political prisons in Romania. While Mugur-the-director’s life story is not dissimilar to Ciulei’s, his 2001 production of Hamlet couldn’t have been more different from Ciulei’s. He, too, returned to the theatre where he left work unfinished—the National Theatre, Cluj; his Hamlet, though, was not pastbound but dead set to “fix” the present. Mugur and his creative team (the key being his exiled brother-in-arms, stage designer Helmut Stürmer) saw Hamlet as a building site, where the playtext, the set, the story, were literally under construction. The commissioned script, the young cast (recruited from several theatres across the country), the fast pace of the story (two and a quarter hours) and the overall interpretation were firmly grounded in the present—a style he had launched in 1958 and which became known as “the Mugur style”. This approach allowed for alternative stories to emerge; it disinterred the older generation’s stories— the Ghost’s, Yorick’s and, most importantly, it made room for the young 5

Despite the press hype before its opening, the production struggled to run profitably. This was also due to it having failed to adapt to the spectators’ needs and priorities: the over four-hour long show had to be divided into two halves which ran on consecutive evenings.

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generation’s stories—Hamlet’s, Laertes’s, Ophelia’s, Fortinbras’s. In doing so, it warned against the dangers of using Hamlet only to give voice to a silenced past which needed recovering, at the cost of ignoring the present reality. Significantly, by reassigning Horatio’s final lines: You shall hear of Unnatural and bloody deaths, Of arbitrary acts, of corrupt judgements, Of wanton and perverse crimes, And crowning them all, of a plot That struck its own devisers

to a seven-year young Fortinbras who solemnly promised: “I shall disclose them all”,6 this interpretation of the play embraced its double task: to remember and move on. Unlike Ciulei’s Hamlet, which was still tributary to his “metaphorical realist” method (Cinpoeú 2010b, 114),7 Mugur’s Hamlet was shockingly topical both in concerns and in stage solutions. Romania, a re-construction site a decade after the 1989 Revolution, with both the decaying old institutions and the new ventures emerging, was captured in the production set (a building site) and props (scaffolding, a wheelbarrow, ropes, dust sheets, mud clods, wet paint). To the entire production’s approach, which warned against the looming danger of this world remaining stuck in this in-between phase (literally trapped into the lime paste of the grave timed to solidify at the end of each performance), Mugur offered a surprising yet simple resolution. As the very young Fortinbras of this production declared, not only did telling Hamlet’s (past) story not preclude focusing on constructing a different future, but made the urgency of the latter more poignant—a message summing up Mugur’s lifetime belief in the young generation as the way forward.8 6

This was the production’s translation of Shakespeare’s lines: so shall you hear Of carnal, bloody, and unnatural acts, Of accidental judgements, casual slaughters; Of deaths put on by cunning and forc’d cause, And, in this upshot, purposes mistook Fall’n on the inventors’ heads; all this can I Truly deliver (5.2.394-399). 7 Ciulei’s metaphorical realism emerged to counter the deadly effects of socialist realism in the late 1950s and was crucial to the theatre of resistance practised at the time. For more details, see Cinpoeú (2010b, 114-127). 8 During his entire career as a director, Mugur made it his mission to work with young actors and to empower their artistic and civic agency.

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This was a testing production—for other Romanian directors, for actors and for audiences—and a hard act to follow, hardened even more by the fact that the director died before the production completed its previewing stage and opened for the public.9 So hard that for seven years no new Hamlet was staged in Romania. Mugur’s production continued to tour for a few years after its opening at a number of national and international festivals, received an impressive number of prizes and artistic accolades, and consolidated its impact—its playscript was published in 2001 and the production was filmed for television and has been broadcast regularly since.

Fig. 11-3. Seven-year old Fortinbras making his promise amongst the carnage in Elsinore. (Courtesy of Teatrul NaĠional Cluj-Napoca, 2001.)

In was only in 2008 that Hamlet was staged again, in Sibiu, the town where it had first arrived in Romania two centuries before. Directed by Radu Alexandru Nica, this production engaged with the pressure of the text and of the past via intermediality. His take read Hamlet as a sequence of stand-up acts in which the protagonists were literally competing for the open mike. In her number, Ophelia actually re-titled the play: Hamlet & 9

Mugur was terminally ill when he started the project—a personal detail he chose not to share with the team or the press while rehearsing for Hamlet literally against the clock.

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Ophelia—A Love Story; Horatio tried to con Hamlet into avenging his father; Hamlet forced Gertrude and Claudius into a drama-therapy confession-session; Claudius pushed antidepressants and sleeping pills on Gertrude, who easily lent them to Ophelia later.

Fig. 11-4. Open mike—Ophelia’s love story. (Courtesy of Dragoú SpiĠeru, Teatrul NaĠional “Radu Stanca” Sibiu, 2008.) Fig. 11-5. Hamlet taking his cue from Olivier. (Courtesy of Russell Young, Teatrul NaĠional “Radu Stanca” Sibiu, 2008.)

Fig. 11-6. Gertrude’s mike number—“Ophelia is dead”. (Courtesy of Russell Young, Teatrul NaĠional “Radu Stanca” Sibiu, 2008.)

Alongside this updating of the play, Nica’s 2008 Hamlet dealt live with the “encyclopaedic cultural product the play Hamlet has become” (Runcan 2010, 56) by taking a direct stance on the textual history of the play and its psychoanalytical readings. The textual battle began with a new translation, specially commissioned (to Rareú Moldovan) but eventually discarded in favour of Ion Vinea’s 1971 version (rarely used in the theatre) as the basis for further adaptation by Nica and Oana Stoica. In retrospect, this decision toned down the production’s radical siting and citing of past Hamlets (a two-hour, intermedial production, with a nine-strong cast and reassigned parts and lines), a disconcerting choice considering the director’s aim to counter the “rhetoric-centred tradition of performing Hamlet in Romania”

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and “engage in polemical dialogue with language-centred productions” (Production Programme). Secondly, the decision signalled the imperative for a new translation of the play for the stage; thirdly, and perhaps most importantly, it suggested that while productions such as this had no qualms about updating stage Shakespeare, they still found a modernized text—especially in the case of Hamlet—a step too far, and therefore, preferred to submit to old hierarchies and fallacies, and reassert the tyranny of the text.10

Fig. 11-7. The end of The Mousetrap as a failed drama therapy session/confession. (Courtesy of Russell Young, Teatrul NaĠional “Radu Stanca” Sibiu, 2008.)

Taking to task psychoanalytical approaches which, Nica commented, had dominated the interpretation of the play during the twentieth century, was achieved especially via projections of iconic clips from Laurence Olivier’s 1948 film on the two television screens onstage and on the ceiling screen, the latter turning the acting space into a giant box. In doing so, this interpretation of Hamlet also went some way to retraining the spectators by playing on and, in turn, displacing their media expertise in, and experiences of, theatre, live performance, cinema and TV viewing, as well as textual Hamlet. Its method invited audiences to engage in piecing together Hamlet in a complex process of experiencing and prioritizing live action, sound, visuals, silence, screen projections, in a complex process of 10

The director himself commented that the decision to return to an older translation was motivated by the fact that the commissioned text somewhat “lost the power of the original” in the modernized translation.

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(what I term elsewhere) spectediting, thus more akin to computer and digital editing.11 The ending this Hamlet proposed levelled the live competition and erased all stories, literally burying them in a communal grave: the production ended with a projection, on the ceiling screen, of Horatio and the Gravediggers “piling the dust upon the dead” Hamlet, Ophelia, Laertes, Claudius, Gertrude, whose bodies, lying on the stage, were barely visible to the audience. Hamlet’s head-on struggle with the past was also at the heart of the 2009 production of the play. The latest Romanian Hamlet to date, László Bocsárdi’s production for The Metropolis Theatre, Bucharest, was the first independent theatre production of the play in Romania since the nationalization of theatres in 1948. This Hamlet posed directly some of the questions that have been preoccupying me for the past fifteen years: how can Hamlet and audiences deal with the past and the present? What is Hamlet’s role in post-dramatic theatre? What story is left to be told? Who’s there to tell the story? Is there anyone who’d listen? Several elements of this small-scale production—the casting choice and the set in particular—were crucial in articulating these questions. Some spectators would have seen this Hamlet (Marius Stănescu) cast as Hamlet in the grand-scale operatic production of Heiner Müller’s Hamletmachine only a few seasons before (at the Odeon Theatre, Bucharest, in 2006). Fewer might have seen this production’s Claudius as Mugur’s Hamlet (from the 2001 production). While the former choice was an overt interrogation regarding what part Hamlet can still play, the latter was a comment perhaps as much on the old-new political regime as on what actors have to do in the open-market competition. In the intimate space of the Metropolis Theatre, this production’s set (designed by József Bartha) was an old eight-panel cupboard whose revolving doors exposed various skeletons: a domestic looking Ghost, Hamlet and Ophelia’s love story, the “rat” behind the arras. The back of the cupboard doors doubled as the “mirror held to nature”—for actors and audience alike. Most intriguing, however, was the fact that the set itself was fitted on a revolving stage. Though a mechanical facility used only on a couple of occasions, the revolving stage decided the fate of the Prince and of this production: the long wooden handle (to the left of the cupboard), which allowed for the rotation of the set, was physically disputed by Hamlet and the Ghost. The young Prince pushed it clockwise; the Ghost of the dead king, his father, insisted on pushing it

11

For more on spectediting, see Cinpoeú (2010a).

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anti-clockwise. The latter won the fight and Hamlet dutifully (albeit reluctantly) remembered the past.

Fig. 11-8. Dead Polonius (Alexandru Repan) falling out of the cupboard in the closet scene. (Courtesy of Teatrul Metropolis, Bucharest, 2009)

But for László Bocsárdi, Hamlet was a story of refusniks par excellence: the Ghost of late King Hamlet lingered insistently (in more than his two scripted scenes) and refused to let go of his “rights” to be “remembered” and “revenged”, even when knowing that such demands jeopardized the lives of his own son and of his country. Nagged by this selfish “old mole” Ghost, this production’s Hamlet was a son reluctant to believe in ghosts, fathers, history or theatre as traditions and values capable of either redeeming the past or altering the present. In this sense, he was much like the refusnik Hamlet in Müller’s Hamletmachine (he performed under Dragoú GalgoĠiu’s direction in 2006). Bocsárdi’s production articulated the struggle Hamlet as a play continues to face in Romania—and elsewhere: the dead weight of the politicized text in translation and in previous stage versions; the past-present, East-West counterproductive dichotomies. Perhaps the production’s most striking statement in this sense was its finale: yes, it cut the arrival of Fortinbras and gave Hamlet the last words. But Horatio’s actions in this scene were crucial: he ignored Hamlet’s

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request to “Absent […] from felicity a while/[…]/To tell my story” (5.2.361, 363). Telling Hamlet’s story would have surrendered the play to the posthistoire routine it fought to escape and would have per force edited out the other Hamlet stories this production—like every production—of the play contained. This Horatio chose not to do so by drinking the leftover poison and leaving his friend Hamlet and the play Hamlet to die at the end of the evening. His was a conscious act of erasing Hamlet’s “rights of memory”, insofar as it deprived the Prince of his chosen story-teller. Besides cancelling Hamlet’s story, Horatio’s act aimed to free future Hamlets/Hamlets from the pressure of history, and to free Hamlet, the play, which has been politicized with a vengeance in Romania for too long, of its posthistoire condition.

Fig. 11-9. Horatio stepping outside the vicious circle of telling Hamlet’s story, while Gertrude, Claudius and Laertes join the skeletons in the cupboard. (Courtesy of Teatrul Metropolis, Bucharest, 2009.)

Remembering was no longer the play’s sole task in either Nica’s or Bocsárdi’s production. Their respective Hamlets and Hamlets died not as action-slackers, victims of a political conspiracy, but simply as victims of an indifferent society. When ending with Horatio performing Hamlet’s “rights of memory” as a silent burial (as Nica did in 2008) or with Hamlet left prey to the realization “Horatio, I die?/The rest is silence” (as Bocsárdi did in 2009), these productions refused to tie Hamlet the part and Hamlet

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the play to the past—as stories, histories, theatrics. Instead, they “gave” their audiences “pause” before posing, from beyond the grave and with renewed urgency, the question “Who’s there?” (1.1.1), thus turning the page to Romania’s (and Hamlet’s) new histoire. This, however, is yet to be written. Some of the reasons as to why Hamlet remains silent in Romania have been signalled in this article. The political burden of the play on the stage has been slowly discarded, as the recent productions of Hamlet seem to suggest; the main hindrance, however, remains the textual tyranny this, of all Shakespeare’s plays, continues to exercise.12 The issue of Romanian translations of Shakespeare is the cause, director Alexandru Dabija commented back in 2009, of Romanian directors’ hesitation to stage Shakespeare until “good, sensational, contemporary” translations are out: “we have a megaInternational Shakespeare Festival and no decent Shakespeare Complete Works edition.”13 Small steps to liberate stage Shakespeare from the pressure of the translated text have been taken since. A modernized translation of Hamlet by George Volceanov has been released at the International Shakespeare Festival in Craiova, Romania, in April 2010, at the Festival’s edition that focused exclusively on Hamlet.14 Like the entire New Shakespeare Complete Works venture, the second volume, Hamlet, pays keen attention to the play’s performability and its introductory study surveys the different (cultural and political) missions Hamlet took up in Romanian history, thus signalling the need for different Hamlets for different times. With several plays in the new modernized translation series—seven volumes strong in 2014—having already been used on the stage (some in their entirety, such as Edward III, others as fragments, such 12

I argue elsewhere that besides the play’s status in the Shakespeare canon, its rich Romanian translation and stage history make the task more difficult. A play such as The Tempest has seen four stage productions in the recent years, in four new translations and adaptations of the text, also because of the relatively clean slate it offered the director and the audiences—the play has one translation and a couple of productions prior to 1989, and therefore little history, less work to undo and very few audience expectations. Conversely, fifteen translations of Hamlet (with only one for the stage) and dozens of productions in over two centuries of its Romanian existence may go some way to explain the difficulty of the task for contemporary translators and directors. (See Cinpoeú 2011.) 13 Dabija commented on the state of the affairs back in 2010, after recently directing Pyramus and Thisbe 4U, an adaptation of A Midsummer Night’s Dream in four takes. See Runcan (2010, 36). 14 A complete novelty for the Romanian readership, the volume (following the third Arden edition model) includes an extensive introductory study and the play in its three versions: Q1, Q2 and F1.

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as The Tempest), there is a good chance that a new leaf in Hamlet’s Romanian history is waiting to be turned.

Works Cited Cinpoeú, Nicoleta. 2010a. “‘The (Inter)play’s the Thing’: Hamlet, Sibiu, 2008”. In Theatrical Blends: Art in the Theatre / Theatre in the Arts, eds. Jerzy Limon & Agnieszka Zukowska, 184-194. Gdansk: Slowo/Obraz Terytoria. —. 2010b. Shakespeare’s Hamlet in Romania, 1778–2008: A Study in Translation, Performance, and Cultural Adaptation. Lewiston; Lampeter: Edwin Mellen Press. —. 2011. “(Ship)wrecked Shakespeare in Romanian Tempests”. Shakespeare Bulletin 29: 313-326. “Creating Elsinore in Hamlet”. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7V5IezYgTOM&list=PL48EDBCB 4915D0ACA&index=1. Holland, Peter. 2010. “Hamlet: a play of mirrors.” Production Programme, 22-25. Hamlet, dir. Nicholas Hynter, National Theatre, London. Jackson, Russell. 2010. “Hamlet and the pressure of the time.” Production Programme, 26-31. Hamlet, dir. Nicholas Hynter, National Theatre, London. Komporaly, Josefina. Forthcoming. “Contesting Censorship: Hamlet as Political Intervention.” Montgomery Byles, Joan. 1991. “Political Theatre: Hamlet in Romania”. Shakespeare Bulletin 9: 25–26. Runcan, Miruna. 2010. Habarnam în oraЮul teatrului Universul spectacolelor lui Alexandru Dabija. Cluj: Editura Limes. —. 2008. “HoraĠio-Hamlet: scrisoare din pântecul mausoleului—Hamlet.” Teatrul azi 5–6–7: 56-61. Shewey, Don. 1986. “Interview with Liviu Ciulei.” New York Times. 6 June.

CHAPTER TWELVE SHAKESPEARE AND THE POLITICAL AWAKENING IN THE ARAB WORLD: AN ANALYSIS OF SOME ARAB ADAPTATIONS OF THE ENGLISH BARD RAFIK DARRAGI

The theatrical tradition in the Arab countries is generally considered as a foreign artefact, with no relation whatsoever with their past. By the end of the 19th century, the appearance of this type of Western art in the Arab world was a simple form of entertainment of an elitist fraction of the population, showing no links with the social and popular preoccupations of the period. Then a change took place. With the First World War and the English mandate over Egypt, the Arab intelligentsia as a whole came to realize the powerful role of the theatre in the political awakening of the people. The best example of this political awakening is, without contest, Ahmed Shawky’s Masra’ Cleopatra (The Death of Cleopatra).1 This play appeared in 1927, that is, at a very crucial period of Egyptian history, in the wake of the 1919 Revolution of the leader Saad Zaghloul, and right in the middle of that long literary quarrel which opposed the tenants of the old, conservative order and the young, freelance writers newly trained in the European universities. Ahmed Shawky did not take part directly in that literary quarrel, but his family origins, as well as his education—he studied for over three years in Montpellier and Paris—and his literary output, including Masra' Cleopatra, bear witness to his general orientation. Though he was born in Cairo in 1868, his parents were not Egyptians; his father was a Kurd, his mother a Turk and his grandmother a Greek. In fact it was precisely this grandmother who introduced him to 1

See Darragi (2008).

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Egyptian high society. After studying law in France, he came back to his country and was appointed “poet” laureate by his protector, the Khedive ’Abbas. Given the negative Western moral attitudes towards Cleopatra and the political and social situation prevailing in that period in the Arab world in general and in Egypt in particular, the strong interest in Cleopatra on the part of a Western-educated Egyptian is by no means surprising. If not her tumultuous love affairs, at least her powerful personality, her fight against Rome as well as her tragic fate, could certainly serve to provoke reflection in his society, which was, in those days, very much characterized by blind dogmatism. A play about this queen, written in classical Arabic, in verse, with musical interludes in line with the operatic trend of the period, could contain ingredients susceptible to develop the ferment of patriotism and to awaken the Arab conscience in general and that of the Egyptian people in particular, a people who, at that time, were under the yoke of the British colonial forces. It was probably such political and social preoccupations which led Shawky to write his Masra’ Cleopatra. From a structural point of view, Masra’ Cleopatra does not follow Shakespeare’s play. For this Frencheducated man, the structure of the English tragedy was simply unworkable. Cleopatra’s tempestuous love affair with Antony could not, by any means, serve his secret purpose. He therefore started his plot immediately after the defeat of Antony and Cleopatra at Actium. This change enabled him to devote the whole play to the Egyptian queen. His aim was not to provoke terror or pity in his spectators, but to glorify the fighting spirit of Cleopatra, a legendary queen whose name had simply become a metonym for Egypt. Arab writers still ignore all of the Aristotelian dramatic principles. Such terms as nemesis, hubris, catharsis or even such classical notions as the unities of time, place and action, are not to be found in their works, probably because they have always considered the Greek civilization as distinct from the Roman one. Consequently, Western spectators should not expect to find in Shawky’s play a superior transcendence, a somewhat divine power dominating the central figure, reminiscent of Aeschylus’s or Sophocles’s tragedies, or a devouring passion as in Euripides. In those tragedies, the hero or heroine stands powerless in the face of this transcendental force or blinding drive. There is no hope in Greek tragedy, a distinctive trait compared with the historical or romantic drama. Sophocles’s Antigone, for instance, is not like Hernani, Victor Hugo’s romantic hero, who is fighting for himself, not for a cause, for principles or values imposed by a social

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order. Because he is guided by his own will and not overpowered by a transcendental force, he always has hope. Shawky’s work is rather different. He refrains from taking a clear attitude to Cleopatra’s unbridled sexuality. Of course, he does not ignore her blameworthy conduct, but whenever a negative trait appears, he immediately intervenes to divert, as it were, the audience’s attention. Indeed, we do find a driving, overpowering force in the character-drawing of his heroine, but it is not a force derived from a sensual passion, a love for a man; it is rather a transcendental force, symbolized by the values imposed by the prevailing social order. Shawky’s Cleopatra abides by the laws of her country. She does not disrupt the ethical stereotypes of the dominant paternalistic ideology. Her incestuous marriage with her brother, for instance, meant neither a subversive attitude to male supremacy nor total feminine submission. It was dictated to her by an old patriarchal custom linked to the deification of kings and queens. Owing to its coercive character, it was supposed to raise the crowned head above the status of a mere mortal head of state. Like Shakespeare in his histories, Shawky used many structural devices to preserve the royal figure vis-à-vis the highly dangerous theme of rebellion. He, of course, appears more than once as a moralist desirous to legitimize the spirit of revolt likely to be felt even by the most loyal subject when facing the innumerable exactions perpetrated by the authorities that be. He even allows some characters, in particular Old Zenon, the High Priest, to defend the national cause and justify his stand in a serious, convincing manner. Yet given Old Zenon’s character drawing, this does not come down to making an apology for rebellion. Fully conscious of the intrinsic value of this indomitable queen, of her divine right as well as of her deep love for her country, the playwright deftly shifts to his main preoccupation, that is, the complaints of the people oppressed by foreign forces. In Shakespeare’s play, as in the work of the French playwright Racine, passion seems to be the keyword, the blind driving force that ultimately leads to death. Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra remains, still today, both baffling and challenging, giving rise to endless explanations and interpretations. This is all the more so, given that history which is largely made up of our own questions, repeats itself. It is thus relatively easy to find parallels and similarities between events. Shakespeare’s play appeared too at a crucial period, in 1606, a moment of spiritual, Puritan upheaval in England. He may well have written his play as a reaction to it. Viewed in this light, Cleopatra’s figure necessarily undergoes a fundamental change;

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she becomes not a dissolute prostitute but a political and social model, whose passion stands as a bold challenge to the Puritan values of the time. Ahmed Shawky’s play opens in Cleopatra’s library, where three assistants, Haby, Dion and Lysias, are working. From the open window they can hear the crowd in the streets of Alexandria celebrating the “victory” of Actium and singing patriotic, stirring songs: Our glorious day in Actium has spread all over the world Ask the Roman fleet what great havoc did we inflict Our victorious sails overflowed the country with joy. Heaping the honors and filling the hearts with pride Alexandria the beacon in the sea Wreathed with an earthly crown, A city seated on a sea throne.2

But soon, the dialogue between the librarians invites the audience to reach another interpretation of this patriotic upsurge: it is not a spontaneous, clear manifestation of the emergence of a new social entity, but a hasty and stupid interpretation of a military event by that “manyeyed monster”, the crowd, that unpredictable, blind force, which turns with the wind like a weather-cock. For these three shrewd observers of human nature, the wreath of real victory has yet to come. Their education, as well as their psychological insight into matters of political analysis, raises them above the status of mere play characters to become a chorus, a voice to Shawky himself. The so-called “victory” of Actium offers the playwright a golden opportunity to underline the rotten situation of the country and to lash out at the blindness of his contemporaries. “That truth should be silent I had almost forgot,” says Enobarbus to Antony in Shakespeare’s play. Shawky probably did not forget this saying. Though he mentions in his play the young Caesarion, he kept silent about the true life of Cleopatra. He did not reveal some details damaging to the relationship of Antony and Cleopatra. Though he did refer to Cleopatra’s traitorous retreat at Actium and to the dissolute life of the couple and to their children, he did not evoke the murder of Arsinoe, Cleopatra’s own sister, a murder committed by Antony at the instigation of Cleopatra herself, who was jealous of her. He equally kept silent about the two marriages successively contracted by Cleopatra with her two brothers in order to be Queen of Egypt; the first died in the Nile river while fighting Caesar, the second was murdered in Rome. Like Shakespeare, Shawky did his best to glorify Cleopatra. Thus she 2

Shawky (1954). All the translations are my own.

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pardons her servant Charmian, who knowingly spread the false news of victory at Actium. She confesses her disastrous retreat, explaining it as a move to save her country at the expense of her love. Though Cleopatra has been presented as an incestuous prostitute more than once over the centuries, precisely as early as Virgil in his Aeneid, Shawky however refrains from mentioning her incestuous marriages. He, of course, must have known this detail. The incestuous marriage between brothers and sisters in ancient Egypt was, in fact, a highly respected tradition that has far-reaching connotations. By this union, these kings and queens were deified. The mythological gods were good examples. Zeus married his sister Hera. But Shawky had to take into consideration the prevailing religious situation and, obviously, was not desirous to offend the highly sensitive audience. This relationship between the Roman general and the Egyptian queen gave rise to several interpretations over the centuries, depending on the political and social circumstances of the time.3 Both Shakespeare and Shawky overlooked them to concentrate, the first, on the love side, the second, on the political side. Contrary to Plutarch, neither Shakespeare nor Shawky ever refer to the religious, Dionysian society set up by Antony and Cleopatra called “The Inimitable Life”, the ultimate end of which was their deification, Cleopatra as Aphrodite/Isis and Antony as Dionysius. Shawky does not only avoid criticizing his heroine, he even surrounds her with the royal halo pertaining to the sacred, highly respected sovereign. The dilemma shown in the play by the faithful, deeply nationalist priest, Anobis, adds a far-reaching dimension to the stature of Egypt’s queen, because her later fall does not appear as the logical outcome of concupiscence and a morally bad policy, as is the case for Shakespeare’s heroine. The divine laws which this priest represents and which had established her on the throne are those which now, through Anobis’s advice, commend her to commit suicide. Thus the priest’s promise to provide Cleopatra with the fatal asps rightly stands as a supportive apology of sacrifice for the sake of the country. Because it is entirely devoted to the glorification of Cleopatra, Shawky’s play contains details giving evidence of the highest virtues but, 3

In the sixteenth century the theme of Antony and Cleopatra inspired in Italy Giraldi Cinthio’s Cleopatra (1541-3), performed in 1555, published in 1583; Cesare di Cesari’s Cleopatra, published in 1552; Celso Pistorelli’s Marc'Antonin e Cleopatra, published in 1576; and in France Estienne Jodelle’s Cléopâtre captive (performed in 1552-53 and published in 1574); Nicholas de Montreaux’s Cléopâtre, performed in 1594 and published in Oeuvres de Chasteté in 1595, and Robert Garnier’s Marc Antoine, written and performed in 1578.

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contrary to Shakespeare’s habit, war does not function in Shawky’s work as a background for virtue, daring and courage. Though Shawky does not overtly exalt warfare, he skilfully transmutes Cleopatra’s dubious role in the naval encounter of Actium into a clever military move, aware as he is that Egypt’s sustained fight against the Romans must necessarily appear as the major preoccupation in the play. Shawky’s Cleopatra experiences the same catharsis as Shakespeare’s. Death is no longer a dreadful thing but rather a source of comfort and joy. As though under a transcendental order, in a perfect state of grace, in keeping with her oriental sense of femininity, she sings a long hymn to the glory of freedom, patriotism and love: O Death, carry me! I had rather be thy captive Than chained by a senator in Rome. […] I shall die as I lived, for the sake of the Egyptian crown. Claiming the throne of beauty, in exchange And by death rejecting the life of submission. Come, viper of the valley, come.

Though Shakespeare and Shawky were writing for a different public in terms of tastes, cultures and aspirations, it is nevertheless this powerful sense of reconciliation in death, this sense of atonement and equanimity felt in defeat, which constitutes the unifying link between their two plays. Suicide has an intrinsic symbolic value and is not merely introduced to satisfy a certain blood-thirstiness in the theatre-going public. As a violent, horrific act, it is endowed with a suggestiveness which forces it to be presented in a somewhat allegorical manner, and the resulting sublimation has the effect of purifying and mitigating the unbearable weight of the violence. In the case of Cleopatra, both in Shakespeare and Shawky, suicide loses its cruel and fantastical character, and is transformed into a supreme sacrifice for love and freedom. Today, almost one century after Ahmed Shawky’s play, there are still many questions relating to Arab appropriations of Shakespeare designed to engage with a cross-cultural audience. The reputation and status of Shakespeare cannot be questioned in the Arab world. There is indeed a respectful admiration for the English Bard everywhere. His work has always been perceived as universal, a rich, true reflection of our human bondage, with really nothing shocking or disrespectful towards our social or religious beliefs. In fact, what is at stake is more than a literary reputation. Arab writers and producers have to show some restraint when dealing with Shakespeare for several reasons. With totally different historical and religious backgrounds,

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the perception of the audience varies from one country to another. The French-speaking Arab countries in particular do not know much of English civilization and literature in general and of Shakespeare in particular. Nevertheless, we have registered in some countries, especially Egypt,4 many adaptations of Shakespeare by outstanding Arab producers, who, each in his way, marked a determination not to follow the English Bard literally but rather to appropriate him to clear-cut, well-defined political, religious or social aims. I would particularly highlight two works: Richard III: An Arab Tragedy by the English-Kuwaiti Soulayman Al-Bassam and Richard III by the Tunisian Mohamed Kouka. These two contemporary Arab theatrical figures have forged a new model of what to expect from a great Shakespearean classic on tyranny, one that includes high-profile interpretations and provocative speeches. Let us point out from the outset that, in the Arab countries, Richard III has not shared the fame as, say, Othello, Hamlet or King Lear. Not a single significant Arab adaptation of Richard III was ever attempted before our two plays. We also suspect that not a single modern Arab novel made use of Richard III. This is, indeed, a striking fact when we consider how much a Shakespearean play like Othello, for instance, has inspired many famous works.5 In Tunisia, unlike Othello, which remains a very popular play, Richard III does not appeal so much to the public. This is not only because of its historical nature. In this small North African country, what is ultimately at stake is more than a literary reputation or a religious ostracism. Largely because of its historical background, the perception of the Tunisian audience is forcibly different. Though Shakespeare is and has been taught at the Faculties of Arts of all universities, his plays are not frequently staged. In this French-speaking Arab country people do not know much of English civilization and literature in general and of Shakespeare in particular. 4

The first Shakespearean adaptation to be staged was in Egypt. It was Naguib Al Haddad’s Romeo and Juliet. He adapted it for his friend, the producer Yacub Sannu. The title was Shuhada al gharam (Martyrs of Love). The famous actor and singer, the Egyptian Salama Higazi, played the role of Romeo in Alexandria in April 1890 for the first time, and it was a considerable success. This production would be followed by Tanyus abduh’s free adaptation of Hamlet, in which Shakespeare’s hero does not die at the end of the play. 5 See in particular Mawsim al hijrah ila al-shimal (1966) (Season of Migration to the North, 1969) by the Sudanese Tayeb Salih (b.1926) and Al-W'aqai' al-gharibah fi hayat Sa'id Abu Al-Vahs al-mutasha 'il (The Extraordinary Adventures of Saeed, the Peptimist) by the Palestinian-Israeli Emile Habibi (1921-1996), first published in Haïfa (1974).

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Compared with the Middle Eastern Arab countries, Shakespeare was late reaching the Maghreb. His influence only began to make itself felt when travelling Egyptian companies visited Tunisia, Algeria and Morocco at the turn of the twentieth century. Hamlet, Othello and Romeo and Juliet were the first plays recalling Shakespeare in Tunisia. They were presented in Tunis in 1909 by the Egyptian director, Kerdahy.6 Following Tunisia’s independence in 1956, the first theatrical performances generally kept in line with the traditional French trend: that is, they concerned serious, classical tragedies in keeping with the great political events of the time. The most recent Shakespeare production was Richard III (1984 and 1992), adapted by the playwright Ezeddin Madani and directed by Mohamed Kouka. Mohamed Kouka started his rich career first in France, where he worked over a period of twelve years with such prestigious figures as Jerzy Grotowski, Antoine Vitez and Pierre Débauche. In 1977 he acted at the Festival d’Avignon in a play, Le Collier des Ruses, adapted from the Maqamat of Badi‘al-Zaman al-Hamadhani, before returning home to direct the Troupe de la Ville de Tunis. Of course, just like any Arab director, Kouka has to take into consideration not only the financial repercussions of his choice, but also the moral and religious code of his society and, therefore, show some restraint when dealing with any foreign work, including Shakespeare. In all Arab countries, without exception, especially when it comes to political and religious motives, writers as well as directors are usually required to adopt some form of self-inflicted censorship. This stems, of course, from a pragmatic concern. Shakespeare’s plays do appeal to them, as they frequently involve a character, most of the time the fool, who asks questions challenging conventional thinking. Without doubt, they offer an ideal opportunity to develop combative ideas, but like many Arab countries, and until quite recently, Tunisia had for decades been suffering from lack of freedom and from political repression. Yet Shakespeare’s theatre has always been a powerful medium of expression and, despite the rigorous censorship, Mohamed Kouka has always admired the English Bard’s modernity. In a letter he sent to the author of this chapter, he wrote: Shakespeare’s modernity is time-challenging. I have worked with him on three occasions, more or less successfully, for he is an extremely complex playwright: Julius Caesar, Richard III, and Measure for Measure. I do not consider him as our contemporary. He is our model, to be questioned in

6

See Darragi (2007).

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order to comprehend the world today.7

Thus he thought it appropriate in his adaptation to introduce his personal convictions safely, in the form of many details intended to raise awareness, by offering the spectator a multiplicity of interpretations, prompting him to think about such crucial problems as freedom, power relations, politics or religion. As one might guess, despite his good intentions, his Richard III was not very successful. As a matter of fact, ten years earlier, in 1972, another Shakespearean adaptation, Macbeth, produced by the well-known actor and director Mohamed Souissi, had suffered the same fate. That was one of the experiences that had helped establish Shakespeare’s reputation as a highly difficult source of inspiration. Only Hamlet and Othello had met with great success, but that was fifty years previously, owing to the genius and courage of a great actor and director, now dead, Aly Ben Ayed, as well as to the prevailing situation. At that period, the theatre audience was still largely made up of a solid, Western-educated elite, including the director himself, well aware of Shakespeare’s importance on the world stage. The Tunisian press was, in general, not very warm about the first performance of Kouka’s Richard III, which took place in Hammamet (Tunisia) in the summer of 1984. English traditions, history and religion were, at that time, barely known in the former French colonial empire, which included many Arab countries. Even today, such writers as Molière or Racine are much better known and much more regularly adapted than Shakespeare. In an article entitled “The Theatrical Intention”, a leading Tunisian journalist criticized Kouka’s adaptation in harsh terms: To choose Shakespeare is all right; but what about the Tunisian theatre? What about the Tunisian public? And, in a word, what is the usefulness of Shakespeare as rendered in this full-size dimension [...] to the promotion or even to the popularization of the theatre in our country?8

7

Facsimile sent by Mohamed Kouka to the author on 8 May 2007. (My translation; available at http://www.rafikdarragi.over-blog.com. Accessed 16 April 2014.) 8 “Shakespeare d’accord. Mais le théâtre tunisien? Mais le public tunisien? Et, en un mot, l’apport de Shakespeare dans la grandeur nature que Kouka tient à lui préserver, à la promotion, voire la vulgarisation du théâtre dans notre pays?” (Messaoudi 1984).

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Mohamed Kouka who, in addition to directing the play, played the role of Richard, did expect this unfavourable attitude. He was well aware that Shakespeare’s impact on Tunisian theatre was still limited, but the temptation to carry out his project was great. As head of the major theatrical institution of the country, he had relatively significant human and financial resources at his disposal. What, then, accounted for his choice was the aura attached to the English Bard’s name as well as the rich allegorical, religious and political possibilities of his play. As a former actor in France for over twelve years, Kouka could not ignore the importance of Richard III. This is what he wrote about it: Richard III is a fable, a quite current, luminous one, about the workings of ambition and the practice of politics in its purest form, where the only operational arguments are murder, physical liquidation and rigged trials.9

Thus beneath the light satirical vein which tinged some of his scenes and speeches, there often lurked a loophole which the spectator was invited to fill in by himself. For instance, implicit in his presentation of the would-be king Richard deeply absorbed in the reading of the Bible, was the close interrelation between the working of an elaborate system of ephemeral political alliances and the increasingly predominant religious order. Throughout the play, the spectator is deftly invited to operate an association of ideas and to link the various double-edged satirical barbs not only to the original creator of the play, but also to the prevailing situation of Tunisian society, which had seen an upsurge of religious fundamentalism. Amongst the various sets and props used by Mohamed Kouka in his Richard III, one must mention the huge tower standing in the middle of the stage. But, as expected, most of the spectators failed to link it with the famous London monument and its historical connotations of tyranny and imprisonment. In the same manner, the peculiar, vaguely oriental, costumes of the characters, the work of a French designer, were meant to suggest the religious element of the play and the impending threat seen in these characters’ inability to see beyond the frontiers of their faith. As Kouka confessed: “The use of religion as a political argument to seduce the people led me to dress the characters in Richard III in Ayatollah

9

“Richard III est une fable on ne peut plus actuelle, lumineuse sur les mécanismes de l’ambition, et sur la pratique politique à l’état pur où les seuls arguments opérationnels sont le meurtre, la liquidation physique et les procès fabriqués” (Kouka, fascimile).

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costumes”.10 In that period, however, the audience, as well as the press, failed to notice this detail, probably because the religious threat in Tunisia was not yet so overwhelming. In his article about the play, the Tunisian journalist, Messaoudi, referred to these costumes simply as being “too jolly, oriental (Persian?)”. Yet, produced anew in the early 1990s, still in classical Arabic, the play once again took aim at the fundamentalist upsurge now looming everywhere in the Arab world, including Tunisia. Mohamed Kouka’s intentions were crystal-clear: Today, we are living in a world where, under the cover of the sacred, a certain “religious” hope is striving to destroy mankind. We must go back to Shakespeare to try to understand and to react. What’s new? Shakespeare!11

The second Arab adaptation of Richard III, a work by the 40 year-old Anglo-Kuwaiti director, Sulayman Al-Bassam, is a totally new rendering of the Shakespearean classic. After writing Hamlet in Kuwait, performed for the first time in Kuwait, and another adaptation called The Arab League Hamlet, presented even in Tunisia, Sulayman Al-Bassam came out with a third version, entitled The Al-Hamlet Summit, an adaptation which may be considered a landmark in the history of the Arab theatre. According to Shirley Dent, a journalist: When the piece opened in Cairo, there was a riot for tickets outside the theatre and the British ambassador was forced to enter the theatre through the stage door! In the Arab world, where political theatre is fiercely monitored by the state, The Al-Hamlet Summit was a much-needed breath of air. As it happens, Arab audiences discovered a streak of black comedy in the piece that until then had been very overlooked by Western audiences. (Dent 2007)

The play’s success is due mainly to its political allusions to contemporary events and specific situations brought to a highly grotesque degree, and clearly referring to the Arab Middle East countries. Performed by the director’s London-based company, Zaoum Theatre, it was awarded several 10 “L’usage de la religion comme argument politique pour séduire le bon peuple, m’a fait habiller les personnages de Richard III en Ayatollah.” (Facsimile) 11 “Aujourd’hui, nous vivons un monde où sous couvert du sacré, un certain espoir ‘religieux’ sérvit, pour détruire l’humain. Il faut revenir à Shakespeare pour tenter de comprendre et ‘réagir’.” (Facsimile)

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international prizes after its première in Edinburgh (August 2002).12 It was in 2007 that Sulayman Al-Bassam presented the first Arab Shakespearean adaptation in Stratford-upon-Avon. Entitled Richard III: an Arab Tragedy, it was performed at the 2007 Royal Shakespeare Company’s Complete Works Festival. According to Sam Marlowe, who watched the play at the Swan Theatre in Stratford-Upon-Avon, Sulayman Al-Bassam’s attempt was “vigorous and occasionally arresting”, but it “offers few insights into the politics of Shakespeare’s dramatization of English history or of the modern Middle East” (2007). Given the written French text of this play, presented in Paris at the Bouffes du Nord theatre in May 2000, it is difficult to share this opinion of the English journalist. Richard III: an Arab Tragedy does not feel distant, as it resonates with contemporary, relevant realities. Set nominally in an undetermined country, but with enough allusions to Iraq, with Arabs dressed in wide, white robes, and wearing the traditional Arab keffieh, the play is written in the colloquial Gulf, metaphorical Arab language, mingled with proverbs and literary references.13 Furthermore, it deals with highly relevant issues that face the Arab world today, and which the producer touched upon in his previous works, such as power, tyranny, political strategies, wars, violence and tribal and religious conflicts. As reflected in the character-drawing of Gloucester and his acolytes, the process of revolutionary change in the Arab world is strongly linked to the weakening and degradation of social morality. Etymologically, morality for a given society at a given period consists of rules concerning the mores of the time. Such principles are part of the oral or written tradition and constitute a set of codes which have to be respected. In Shakespeare’s time, social morality had worked against the heretic—the common enemy of religion—, and all types of punishment, from burning to warfare, were justified by the demands of faith. Once this theatre was eliminated, the same morality, which alone determined ideals and norms, pointed to Spain as the popular enemy, and Elizabeth’s faithful subjects did wonders to defend their country and the faith. This social, pragmatic form of morality, which legalizes and legitimizes what is termed today “positive violence”, is totally absent in Richard II: 12 Amongst them, the Fringe First Award for innovation in writing and directing (Edinburgh Festival, 2002), the Best Performance Award, and the Best Director Award (Cairo International Festival of Experimental Theatre, 2002.) 13 See, in Act 3 Scene 2, the verse quoted by Richard in Arabic to Buckingham: “A’lamtahu el-rimayata kulla yaoumin/Ua lamma ichtadda sa’iduhu ramani” (“I kept teaching him archery every day/And when his arm grew stronger, he shot me”).

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An Arab Tragedy. Though at the heart of the plot, war is not justified by the demands of faith but by sheer personal ambition and doubtful political motivations. Significantly, the setting recalls Baghdad with its “Green Zone” and the American presence. The military atmosphere is very much emphasized throughout the play. Gloucester delivers his first soliloquy dressed in an imposing uniform of a high-ranking officer, underlining the fact that the Wars of the Roses are being used to explain not only the context of his ascension to the throne, but also to shed light on the ongoing “war on terror” and the invasion of Iraq. Though newly elected king, Al-Bassam’s Richard does not exalt warfare, nor does he paint himself as a martial hero, because war, for him, does not function as a background for virtue, courage and daring. As shown in Act 4 Scene 6, war, like religion, serves as a justification for his cunning strategies. It is Richmond who, by his threats, indirectly underlines the corollary of the divine power of kingship: to defend the country from any foreign invasion or rebellion. His victory gives evidence not only of his political wisdom and his capacity as a ruler, but also of his legitimacy to the throne. The originality of Al-Bassam’s adaptation lies in such creative additions which, most of the time, speak for themselves; they include a wide range of interesting and challenging, relevant issues. Thus, right from the first scene, following the brief presentation of Queen Margaret, the director sets his play in the highly modern Arab world, with Gloucester announcing the end of the wars on TV and receiving an e-mail from Buckingham telling him about the impending death of E. If generals, he says in his first soliloquy, are able to wage war and destroy the world with Microsoft PowerPoint, why can’t he reduce it to ashes with a few boxes of Semtex? In addition to the various parades and battle scenes, the producer uses various sounds in the background such as in Act 4 Scene 7, where Stanley and Elizabeth appear plotting against Richard, according to the stage direction, “in a very low voice, as if they were under surveillance”, while, far off, loud jet plane noises and bomb explosions can be heard. The war on terror Richard is supposed to be waging is, of course, simply a pretext to show off his so-called social morality and to suspend the civil liberties of his people, in the same way as those petty despots, now toppled, of Tunisia, Egypt and Libya. His first soliloquy in which he describes with gloating relish his physical deformities and reveals his hatred for his mother, as well as the many violent deeds he is planning, takes on a lurid aspect and carries exaggeration to the limits of absurdity : he has planted bombs in various parts of the town, leaving clear signs that

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lead to the mosques of his brother Clarence, whom he refers to as his “socalled brother Clarence, born Gamal”, a religious terrorist, “with his Salafist expressions and his well-brushed beard”. Gloucester’s adviser, Buckingham, in Act 3 Scene 7, speaks of a society with all too many parallels to our own. The war against terrorism, he says, is the best way “to draw another map of the globe with a single finger”, “to invade foreign territories with a twist” and even to change a democratic state into a land of tyranny very smoothly, thanks to a Security Council resolution. In the same scene, Hastings, the former Minister of State, will be accused of terrorism. Catesby symbolically stifles him on stage with a money bag. Then, to stress further the unleashed violence and to prolong the atrocity of the deed, a grotesque parade follows, showing soldiers playing American football with Hastings’s severed head while pom-pom girls dance around them. This macabre trophy of victory will be afterwards brandished in the air by Catesby, while all the characters on stage start chanting such prayers as: Protect our nation! O God! Bless our actions! O God! Show your wrath! O God! In a bath of blood! O God!

This process, the use of the strength of objective images in awakening the imagination of men, is not to be found in Kouka’s adaptation of Richard III. The Tunisian producer did not enjoy the same freedom of expression as the Anglo-Kuwaiti Al-Bassam. But, as shown above, he was aware that “under the cover of the sacred, a certain ‘religious’ hope is striving to destroy mankind”. Yet as he conveyed it in his production, his reaction was almost insignificant. The return to Shakespeare which he advocated, “to try to understand and to react”, is not enough. Unlike AlBassam, he did not portray at length the horror of state violence. Cautiously, Kouka does not openly lash out at rebellion or even at war, although it is a well-known fact that the archetype of institutional violence, that Minotaur called war, whose supreme commander is the king, serves power by allowing it total control over the country; it justifies taxes and expenses, calls for the mobilization of all the energies and resources of the country, but it also calls for the silencing of opposing forces when the state must be unified in the face of the enemy. This, in fact, is the main reason advocated for stifling civil liberties. Yet, all in all, when compared to the most recent adaptation of Shakespeare in Tunisia, Othello ou L’étoile d’un Jour (Othello, or the One-day Star) by Mohamed Driss, performed successfully in 2007, Kouka’s attempt supports many more challenging

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issues in relation to tyranny. In contrast to Mohamed Driss, who had been head of the National Tunisian Theatre for over twenty years, and therefore felt safe with his Othello, Kouka was caught in the cross-fire between his desire to attack the oppressive state and religious violence and the fear of censorship, if not the threat of prison and humiliation. From a theatrical point of view, however, unlike Al-Bassam, he failed to invest the violent act with a strong visual impact. As shown in Richard III: an Arab Tragedy, the theme of violence on stage is the proof of a creative originality. Apparently, no aesthetic criteria enter into the decision of the producer to underline certain gory tableaux. Al-Bassam does not hesitate to show an execution or a severed head on stage, so long as it does not impair the theatrical illusion. As Margaret Litvin, a young American Shakespearean scholar, pointed out (2007), in Richard III: an Arab Tragedy “no one’s hands are clean”. This, of course, does not mean that Al-Bassam used violence gratuitously and without aesthetic and moral preconceptions. In fact, it is not by way of Richard that Al-Bassam shows his insight into the fundamentally vicious nature of state violence, as one would normally expect, but by way of Richard’s devotees such as Buckingham, at least when faced with Richard’s refusal to give him the promised oilfields. Like Hobbes’s Leviathan, Sheik Catesby, Ratcliff and Tyrrell stand as the embodiment of the cruel instrument of state violence. Because it is often carried out blindly, because it is far more insidious, this kind of violence is what man fears most. An awkward euphemism— “Human rights abuse”—is naïvely used today to refer to this most pernicious, most hideous manifestation of state violence. “Shakespeare is not our poet but the world’s”. W.S. Landor‘s famous statement has never sounded so true. As shown above, despite the tension and the growing doctrinal differences prevailing today in the world, Shakespeare’s works are still leading to a rich, varied appropriation in the Arab countries. Long life and success for plays depend on the taste and fashions of the public which vary with the times. Because History reconstructs the past, illustrating the adage that “the possession of the crown purgeth all defects”. Evidently, Richard III cannot really change all at once what kings say and what the public think, nor can it give total support to any philosophical teaching. But it does bring its customary ration of sensational events, moral teaching and awareness. It is precisely this very awareness, the primal, instructive aim of the stage, which in Tunisia today is behind that “Arab Spring” now gathering momentum in the Arab world, taking its cue mainly from this small, French-speaking, North African country. Of course, although there is no convincing evidence that people behind this upsurge are influenced by the

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theatre, this highly combative medium may somehow have served as a wake-up call for political and social change. No doubt, the stage is today strongly linked to the prevailing political situation not only in the Arab countries but all over the world. Despite the fragmentation and melting of identities which we are witnessing everywhere, it remains the ideal place for questioning. And whether the questions it raises are temporal or not, as a collective phenomenon intended for the crowd and a formidable art of the instant, it lives and develops within the contemporary world. The stage has never been an exact reflection of society, yet it is the expression of it, offering a possibly deformed image which can nevertheless serve as the basis for reflection and which acts as a useful source of information, as the indirect critique of the age. This is certainly true for our three Arab theatrical adaptations of Shakespeare. Because of their conceptualization of power, of containment and oppression, they can be termed “engagés” in the sense we understand the writing of certain modern literary figures, like Jean-Paul Sartre, Bertolt Brecht or Harold Pinter, for instance. They were not created by chance. Rather, they were the bubbling up of an open-minded, liberal undercurrent which is, in fact, increasingly evident in Arab societies, as shown through the recent democratic surge. This fact must be well underlined because, much like the Italian city-states of the Renaissance, the Arab countries, especially the rich ones, plagued as they are with tyrannical systems, appear today as the ideal place for philosophers, enlightened men and scientists desirous to develop their qualities in happy security. Nevertheless, the Tunisian revolution has been a significant signal for the Arab countries to claim their rights and to demand equality and human dignity. It mobilized current activists and leaders and inspired a new generation of young people to be the agents of change and to envision the future with optimism. Yet now that Tunisia, followed by some Arab states, is embarking on a transition to a genuine democracy, some people are already beginning to “worry that the secular revolution in this moderate state—the revolt that galvanized the Arab Spring—might see the birth of a conservative Islamic government”.14 Since the theatre has always been “the mousetrap that will imprison the King’s conscience and reflect the envies and the problems of the public” (Becker 2008, 261), let’s hope that Shakespeare’s bid for influence in the Arab world will not go unheeded, and that highly provocative directors, like Al-Bassam in Kuwait and Mohamed Kouka in Tunisia, will prove more numerous and more politically engaged. 13

New York Times (15 May, 2011).

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Works Cited Becker, Von et al. 2008. “Conclusions du comité directeur”. In Pouvoir et théâtre, Pouvoir du théâtre —Forum du théâtre européen 2008. Nice: Actes Sud. Darragi, Rafik. 2008. “Ideological Appropriation and Sexual Politics: Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra and Ahmed Shawky’s Masra’ Cleopatra. In Shakespeare’s World/World Shakespeares, The Selected Proceedings of the VIII World Shakespeare Congress, Brisbane, 2006, ed. Richard Forthringham, Christa Jansohn & R.S.White. Newark: University of Delaware Press. —. 2007. “The Tunisian Stage: Shakespeare’s Part in Question”. Critical Survey 19: 95-106. Dent, Shirley. 2007. “Sulayman Al-Bassam Playwright/director, The AlHamlet Summit”. 15 February. (http://www.culturewars.org.uk/200301/albassam.html. (Accessed 20/05/11.) Litvin, Margaret. “Sulayman Al-Bassam in the Arab Shakespeare Tradition-Arab Shakespeare: An Overview” (http://muslimvoicesfestival.org/resources/sulayman-al-bassam-arabshakespeare-tradition. (Accessed 17 April 2014.) Marlowe, Sam. 2007. “Richard III: An Arab Tragedy”. The Times, 15 February. Messaoudi, Mohamed. 1984. “L’intention théâtrale”. La Presse de Tunisie, 2 August. Shawky, Ahmed. 1954. Masra’ Cleopatra [Cleopatra’s Death]. Cairo: Ettaba’ Edition.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN TRANSCONTINENTAL SHAKESPEARE: MACBETH AND TYRANNY IN GLAUBER ROCHA’S SEVERED HEADS FRANCISCO FUENTES AND NOEMÍ VERA

In most of his works, if not in all of them, Shakespeare establishes a critical dialogue with politics. As John A. Murley and Sean D. Sutton point out, “Shakespeare is a political thinker of the first order” who examines “the persistent problems associated with political life” (2006, 2). And like his religious views, Shakespeare’s politics can be described, if nothing else, as being moderate. To pick sides means to express unconformity; and the playwright has generally been described as being rather politically correct. Depending on our reading of his plays, Shakespeare may be conservative, liberal, or even a political rebel who wrote in code.1 In politics the big question is what should be done next. Several directors have appropriated Shakespeare’s Macbeth, his “most straightforwardly political play” (Guntner 2007, 128), to address this very same issue from diverse political viewpoints and contexts. In the aftermath of World War Two, allowing for the devastation it caused, Orson Welles explored this problem in Macbeth (1948) with a clear emphasis on the morality of the main character, illustrated in the film by the transformation of the play into “a cinematic expedition into the dark reaches of Macbeth’s heart and mind” (Guntner 2007, 129). In 1957 Akira Kurosawa transformed Shakespeare’s Scottish play into a jidaigeki, translating it into a Japanese feudal context in Throne of Blood, which seems to support the idea that a political evolution away from tyrannical governments is only attainable if the people pull together. In the words of E. Pearlman, “the tyrant and the rotten feudalism for which he stands cannot be brought to its knees by one 1

See Asquith (2005).

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individual, but can be overcome by the people acting in concert” (2002, 258). Polanski’s Macbeth (1971), on the other hand, moves away from politics and reduces Shakespeare’s play to “a cruel and absurd nightmare that perpetually repeats itself” (Guntner 2007, 131). The Bard has been used to channel and promote the views of different tyrannical governments but, at the same time, he has also become the vehicle or instrument to criticize them all over the world. Glauber Rocha’s 1970 Severed Heads (Cabezas Cortadas),2 a joint Spanish-Brazilian free adaptation of Shakespeare’s Macbeth, tells the story of Díaz II (interpreted by Spanish actor Francisco Rabal), an old Latin American dictator who faces his downfall exiled in Spain. The political dimension of Macbeth is taken to the extreme by Rocha, a director who, in the words of Rubén Hernández, “was not a militant filmmaker but a cinema militant, a true believer in the film image, in its ability to transform reality and its value as foundation of a new revolutionary art” (2008, 76).

Glauber Rocha and Cinema Novo In order to reach a complete understanding of the relationship between Severed Heads and Shakespeare’s Macbeth, and how the latter is altered to suit the director’s demands, it is worth considering the conditions under which Rocha’s film was produced, contextualizing it within the Brazilian film industry of the end of the 1960s. Because the film is characteristic of the Brazilian anti-dictatorial cinematic form of expression, and so as to illustrate the ideological boundaries within which the film was conceived, the main political facts prior to the emergence of Cinema Novo—a movement of which Glauber Rocha was a member, theorist and main spokesman—will be briefly considered. The Brazilian Revolution of 1964, which culminated in the overthrow of President João Goulart by the Brazilian Armed Forces, was motivated, amongst other reasons, by the lack of solutions to underdevelopment. Restrictions on multinational investment had been imposed and nationalist policies, mainly focusing on social programmes, led to the organization of the working class, which threatened the bourgeoisie.3 With a view to preventing these newly organized groups from making demands opposed to the dependent capitalist developmental system, the military forces took action. This was crucial for the generation of young filmmakers who, 2

Though the original idea of the film is Rocha’s, Augusto Martínez Torres, Josefa Pruna and Ricardo Muñoz Suay are also listed as scriptwriters. 3 See Moreira Alves (1985).

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fostered by the desire to get involved in social changes, produced structural innovations in the filmmaking processes (Tal 2005, 11). During this period, Brazil was a country oppressed by a military dictatorship. Paradoxically or not, this was also the time of a flourishing cinematic renaissance. The political crisis deepened popular mobilization, which was the backdrop for the creation in 1961 of the Centro Popular de Cultura da União Nacional dos Estudantes (Popular Centre of Culture of the Brazilian National Union of Students). In the very same year the CPC produced the film Five Times Favela, which was everything but commercial. CPC official leader Carlos Estevam stated in his manifesto “For a Popular Revolutionary Art” that the real revolutionary art is produced by intellectuals in an attempt to lead their people to revolution, while the culture created by less popular sectors is merely reactionary (Tal 2005, 40-41). Art cannot simply be “the formalization of the spontaneous manifestations of the people” but should arm the people “with the will, the values, the revolutionary feelings, and all of the subjective elements that will help them overcome the present situation of material oppression” (Estevam 1982, 62). In spite of the advantages of mass communication as a tool for national identity construction, former governments did not consider cinema to have an important role in their policies (Tal 2005, 20). From the 1920s, Brazilian audiences and critics had been particularly attracted to Hollywood. Such was the interest that, when the first Brazilian film studio was founded in 1930, its main productions were a type of film called chanchadas, which basically parodied the American model. However, Cinema Novo supporters were against this type of films, as they blamed them for alienating the people and, in a way, preventing their involvement in social and political causes. Later, in 1949, a new company, Veracruz, was established in an attempt to improve the image of Brazilian cinema. Nonetheless, instead of building an alternative to the system, they simply adapted the canon established by Hollywood (Tal 2005, 20) to their needs (Singlemann 1975, 59-83). It was not until the 1950s, with the Cinema Novo movement, that a truly national film industry, preoccupied with the political and social situation of the country, appeared. Cinema Novo was part of a cultural renovation and continental aesthetic and was supported, amongst many others, by Glauber Rocha, Joaquim Pedro de Andrade, Ruy Guerra, Carlos Diegues and Nelson Pereira dos Santos (Oubiña 2010, 35). The filmmakers’ commitment to social change was expressed in articles and manifestos. Glauber Rocha had begun to publish film reviews in 1957, and his enthusiasm for developmental politics turned into a desire to build a

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film industry in Bahia, his home town (Tal 2005, 42). Amongst Cinema Novo members, Rocha was the director who produced the most complex and deepest texts, probably moved by his active engagement with the movement. He even went as far as stating, “I am Cinema Novo”, paraphrasing Louis XIV’s famous quote “L’État, c’est moi”. In his “An Esthetic of Hunger” (1982), Rocha talks about the position of Brazil as a colony politically and economically dependent on foreign powers. For him, impotence and hysteria are cultural expressions of the inconsistency of consciousness regarding dependence and hunger, and the violence of the hungry is the noblest expression of the struggle for human dignity. As suggested by Rocha, hunger in Latin America would not only be something just wrong, but the very essence of its society, something characteristic of its people (1982). Facing censorship and refusing to support the neo-colonial imitative cinema imposed by the dictatorship, Rocha proposed a violent aesthetics. In his films, the director portrayed the aggressive character of the oppressed and attacked the passivity and conformism of the viewer, breaking away from the hegemonic cinema he was used to (Tal 2005, 46). This was illustrated in his “Aesthetics of Dream” (2008), where he said that “revolutionary art must be magic capable of bewitching man to such a degree that he can no longer stand living in this absurd reality”. In the 1960s the ideological control was so stifling that many artists and intellectuals were under the surveillance of the dictatorship. Rocha could have stayed in Brazil and produced films with undercover political content to avoid censorship, but in 1970 he went into exile, looking for new cultural spaces. In his vision of the future, paradoxically based on the European reality of the time, the world would be something like “a cultural common market where exchange, integration and syncretism would take place” (Tal 2005, 47). His late films, including Severed Heads, filmed in Cuba, Africa, and Europe, depicted a cultural and linguistic amalgamation of characters and heroes of different nationalities. Rocha mixed iconographies and production methods, which gave rise to a multicultural and supranational aesthetics, opposing the popular and cosmopolitan films produced in Hollywood (Bentes 1999). Most shots were filmed in rural settings (although urban spaces were also used), and natural light and direct sound were generally preferred. Characters were usually played by local people or amateur actors. The exploration of popular themes, including traditional music, rituals and festivals, created an illusion of a popular atmosphere (Tal 2005: 47). These features, together with the use of handheld shooting, mirrored the aesthetics of poverty (aesthetics of hunger), trying to reflect Brazilian

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reality. The handheld camera was indeed a key element in Cinema Novo films and, by extension, in Rocha’s. For the filmmaker, the phrase “uma câmera na mão e uma ideia na cabeça” (“a camera in the hand and an idea in the head”) (Sadlier 2003, 142) encapsulated the essence of the movement. Nelson Pereira dos Santos introduced then the people, “e o povo na frente” (“and the people in front”), specifying to whom they directed their message, and Ruy Guerra would later add “não em festa” (“not only in their festivities”) (Johnson & Stam 1982, 49), which thus defines the committed character of their films. Cinema Novo productions expressed a commitment to both the national and the popular spheres, but their form and content reflect the vision of middle-class intellectuals who sought to engage the masses. Cinema Novo filmmakers understood cinema as a social and political instrument, a way of changing reality. In an interview carried out by Cinzia Bellumori, Rocha explained what political cinema meant for him: We know that a sole film, a sole production does not start a revolution. […] A cultural movement is revolutionary when it takes up the power; when it has effective control over the mass media. We try to create a revolutionary performance. European criticism has adopted, from our point of view, a contradictory position. On the one hand, they impose on us different ideological models—unaware that a different historical situation asks for a different discourse—and, on the other one, they support us. (Bellumori 1975, 7)

In Spain the film industry under Franco’s regime was monitored and supervised by the military forces, the Catholic Church and also by censorship boards or committees, entitled to cut or even prohibit any problematic or inappropriate production. Thus, as Juan F. Cerdá argues, Franco’s dictatorship was “so unthreatened by social pressure that it allowed almost no space for cultural subversion” (2011). This led to the production of expurgated films (rendered morally permissible) which fostered the values imposed by Franco. This is the case of La fierecilla domada, a reworking of Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew directed by Antonio Román in 1955, which praises conservative values in the context of Franco’s Spain. Still, the regime’s ideology was, to some extent, challenged by other productions such as Rocha’s appropriation of Shakespeare’s tragedy.

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Macbeth, Severed Heads and Shakespeare Severed Heads premiered in Spain just a few months after it was recorded. Interestingly, despite its somehow defiant subject matter and, as Ricardo Muñoz Suay argues, because of the complex symbolism of the film and Rocha’s intricate reading, Severed Heads not only deceived and got past the Spanish censorship boards but was also subsidized by the then Spanish Ministry of Culture. This institution designated the production as being of “special interest”, which meant an important subsidy source (1981). In Brazil, two years before the film was produced, the AI-5 (Institutional Act 5) was promulgated; this act “abolished the right of habeas corpus to the ‘enemies of the regime’, that is, mainly but not only, those involved in the armed opposition to the dictatorship, and prohibited any activity that could be considered subversive, be it political or cultural” (Ferreira 2005, 50). The film was prohibited by the Divisão de Censura de Diversões Públicas (Department of Censorship and Public Diversions) because of its “capacity to cause uprisings against the current regime” (“1971-1974” 2008), and it was not until 1978 that Rocha was eventually able to show his movie in his home country. Two of the reasons why Severed Heads made it past the Francoist censors, and paradoxically became an anti-fascist film conceived within a fascist context, were probably the fact that Glauber Rocha was not renowned in Spain at that time (Arbonés 2010, 42-43) and the small number of direct references to Spain in the film. Though finally cut, however, the script did contain many cultural references which easily associated the criticism in the film with Spain and, consequently, with Franco’s dictatorial regime. Although the text makes allusion to different national symbols, such as Spanish Semana Santa (Holy Week) festivities, the two most recurrent cultural reference points were the use of Castilian windmills—which would visibly recall Cervantes’s Don Quixote—and the national fiesta of Spain, bullfighting, as backgrounds. Despite Rocha initially wanted to shoot in La Mancha, Severed Heads was in the end filmed at the Monastery of Sant Pere de Rodes (Catalonia) for economic4 and aesthetic reasons (Muñoz 1981). The change of location also limited the specific references to Spain, which, according to Augusto M. Torres, benefited the production (1970, 80) perhaps in terms of escaping censorship.

4

Catalan critic and distributor Pedro I. Fages offered Rocha $100,000 to shoot a film in Spain with no thematic restrictions (Torres 1970, 68).

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Still, the film keeps a number of references which may link Rocha’s work to Spain. For instance, Díaz’s madness and dishevelled appearance are probably influenced by Cervantes’s hidalgo. Also, there is a character called Dulcinea, a virtuous country woman Díaz tries to marry at the end of the film, whose name is clearly taken from Cervantes’s novel. Severed Heads too mirrors Columbus’s egg and the discovery of America in a scene filmed at Cap de Creus, in which Díaz holds a clock, which recalls Dalí’s The Persistence of Memory. Francisco Goya’s Burial of the Sardine is also present in the film, and several critics argue that Severed Heads recalls the works of authors such as Ramón del Valle-Inclán (Tyrant Banderas), Federico García Lorca (Blood Wedding) and the magical realist literature of Gabriel García Márquez (Cardoso 2007, 113). One of the sources for the script of Severed Heads was León Felipe’s 1954 paraphrasical adaptation of Shakespeare’s play, entitled Macbeth o El asesino del sueño (Macbeth or the Murderer of Sleep). In one of the copies of the script we have had access to, the name “León Felipe” is handwritten on several pages; besides, one of the two direct references to Macbeth that remained in the script and were finally filmed is clearly inspired by León Felipe’s text: Díaz II states that “ningún hombre que nazca del cántaro materno puede matarme” (“no man born of the maternal pitcher can kill me”) and, similarly, León Felipe’s adaptation reads: “nadie que haya nacido por la boca del cántaro materno podrá matar ni herir a Macbeth” (“no one born from the mouth of the maternal pitcher can kill or harm Macbeth”) (1983, 94). The use of the words “cántaro materno” (“maternal pitcher”) in both cases leaves no room for doubt in this respect since, as far as we know, this expression cannot be found in any other Spanish version or translation of Macbeth. As for the second quotation from Shakespeare’s tragedy, found at the end of the film, Macbeth’s “Tomorrow” soliloquy (5.5.19–28), however, Díaz’s words do not correspond to León Felipe’s periphrasis—they are, actually, much closer to the original text, which indisputably proves that the scriptwriters had not only read León Felipe’s adaptation but also Shakespeare’s original play. Rocha, in fact, stated that he had read all the plays by Shakespeare before making the film, paying special attention to Macbeth and The Tempest (Pierre 1996, 63).5 Severed Heads is structured in two different blocks, one of them being the memories of the power Díaz has lost, now remembered with melancholy 5

Although his reading of Macbeth is clearly reflected in the film, we can only find some general points in common between this and The Tempest, such as the portrait of the main character as an exiled old man, the idea of colonization, or the use of magic.

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(narrated by Glauber Rocha [Cardoso 2007, 144]), and the other being the premonition of his own death, which lies in wait for him. According to Spanish critic Augusto M. Torres, the plot, narrated in a chaotic style, takes place primarily in the protagonist’s mind, with the exception of a couple of scenes which are based on reality—the two in which Díaz holds a conversation on the telephone (1981, 11). As Rocha stated: “The film takes place in a realm of delirium, of interiority, in the territory of my own madness: the movie [...] was filmed in fourteen days. It’s like shooting a dream” (2006, 331). As John Arthos has observed, “Macbeth is a tragedy of the inner life, …in which the authority for morality and the claims of divinity are restricted to the narrower scene of the nature and mind of men” (1964, 51). Along these lines, Severed Heads takes place mainly in the mind of Díaz, the deposed satrap, consumed by a sense of guilt which gradually clouds his judgment. This is the reason why, as Mauricio Cardoso points out, the storyline seems to be fragmentary and the transition connecting the scenes sharp and obstructing. Instead of a clear narrative development, the different sequences are connected by conceptual links, by Rocha’s obscure imagery, which both prevents an immediate reading of the events (Cardoso 2010) and, at the same time, serves to echo Díaz’s apparent insanity. The severed heads of the title may refer to those of Greek statues, symbolizing reason and alluding to Greek thought. One of these heads appears in the mud: the ties to rational knowledge have been severed to give way to madness and the subconscious (Gerber 1980). The symbolically imaginary and allegorical character of the production places Severed Heads within the tradition of Surrealism. For Rocha, Buñuel was “the best film-maker of all time”, and he considered that in Buñuel’s works we can find “the origin of Cinema Novo, of free cinema, of auteur cinema” (Gatti 2009). Although Buñuel declared himself an admirer of Cinema Novo and is said to have been much impressed by Rocha’s 1964 Black God, White Devil (Deus e o Diabo na Terra do Sol) (Torres 2005, 69-70), apparently he did not like Severed Heads, and there is the anecdote that when he saw it at a cinema in Madrid he spent the whole screening criticizing the film out loud—“This is rubbish! It makes no sense!” (García Garzón 2004, 298). According to Rocha, Severed Heads is “a film against dictatorships, and the funeral of dictatorships” (“Cabeças Cortadas” 2008). Ricardo Muñoz Suay, producer of Severed Heads, recalls how, after Franco’s death, he received a phone-call from Rocha, who was “determined to prove that in our film there was a beating premonition of the transition from Francoism to monarchy”. Though Muñoz Suay considers Rocha’s

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affirmation excessive, he admits that scenes like the one in which the tyrant is washing his feet in blood with Sant Pere de Rodes Monastery and traditional Catalan music in the background were “an invitation to tyrannicide” (1981). Rocha “made two mistakes he never corrected: utopian thinking and radicalism”. These are both notions intrinsically connected to every dictatorial regime that Rocha engaged with in Severed Heads, through the extreme portrayal of his idea of political revolution. As said above, the main character of the film is Díaz, an “abhorred tyrant” who has lost all his power and goes to Spain in exile, struck by the memories of his past at Eldorado (Torres 1981, 10). Neither the character of Díaz nor the setting of the film is original, for Rocha had already included them in Terra em Transe (1967), in which, according to Torres, the root of Rocha’s anarchic style starts to be envisaged (1981, 11). As Bellumori argues, through a series of flashbacks, Díaz revisits the stages of his infamy when he was the governor of the legendary land of Eldorado. These stages represent different phases of the history of, and relationship between, the Third World and Spain: from colonization of Latin America to the Spanish Civil War. The ruler aims to redeem himself and win back the esteem of his people by creating, with the fortune raised during his dictatorship, a cultural foundation that will prolong his memory (Bellumori 1975, 112). But the situation of the nation is different now. The community formerly oppressed by Díaz has grown strong, thanks to the help of a mystical shepherd who makes them react and, at last, regain their freedom. The shepherd can be regarded as the hero in the film. This character, who threatens the memory of Díaz through his influence over the people, has two readings. First, he is connected with magic and the forces of nature and rural life and, second, he is the shepherd who guides his flock to a better future, to salvation. The death of the tyrant at the hands of the oppressed, embodied in the figure of the shepherd, is foreseen in the title, which also makes reference to the people killed during Díaz’s dictatorship. This easily relates to the end of Shakespeare’s play in which Macbeth’s head is brought to Malcolm by Macduff, who says: Hail, king! for so thou art: behold, where stands The usurper’s cursed head: the time is free: I see thee compass’d with thy kingdom’s pearl, That speak my salutation in their minds; Whose voices I desire aloud with mine: Hail, King of Scotland! (5.9.20-24)

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Not in vain, the film was originally to be called Macbeth 70 (Torres 1970b, 71) and, although Rocha’s production is not strongly or immediately connected to Shakespeare’s play, the film script provides numerous references to Macbeth, some of which were eventually omitted in Severed Heads. In the very first lines of the script, there is a direct reference to Shakespeare’s tragedy (which does not feature in the film), in which the character of Díaz, initially called King, cries “My name is Macbeth!” The script also contains several allusions to Macbeth’s killing the monarch, which were also cut. The text reads, for instance, that “Macbeth killed his king…and put on his [own] head a bloody crown”, and that “Díaz stabs the king in the back and, while the king is falling, King [that is, Díaz], with his other hand, removes the crown from his head”. Still, Rocha did keep one of these incriminating references: “I killed the king…for the future and progress of my country”. Díaz admits the crime, in a state of mental agitation, when he asks a doctor what the cause of his pain is, wondering whether he thinks him insane or not. The reaction of the doctor (omitted in the final cut of the film) openly makes reference to Macbeth’s crimes and guilt: “It is not insanity but remorse; when my Lord sleeps and dreams of the souls of the people he killed, he suffers”. The film also contains the prophetic visions of the Three Weird Sisters. But in Severed Heads there are no apparitions; it is Díaz who proudly claims that no one of woman born will kill him and that, unlike armies, forests cannot move, clearly mirroring the premonitions in Act 4 Scene 1. There is, nonetheless, the character of a gypsy woman who reads Díaz’s palm but, instead of foretelling his future, she recalls his past as a man of power. As Mateus Araújo and Mauricio Cardoso suggest, though this scene would take place before the events shown in the film, we can infer that she was also the author of the prophecy that Díaz would repeat in order to convince himself of his invulnerability (2008, 165-166). In one of the deleted scenes, which could provide a clearer understanding of the film and its connection with Shakespeare’s tragedy, the shepherd recites the following lines: Lady Macbeth was the one to blame Poor Macbeth had no ambition He was a faithful vassal of the King But Lady Macbeth had dreams of grandeur And with her charms she awakened in poor Macbeth’s heart The wish to become a King.

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As Stephen Booth holds, “the play keeps giving the impression that Lady Macbeth is the source of ideas and the instigator of actions that are already underway” (1983, 94). In Severed Heads, Doña Soledad, a character clearly inspired by Lady Macbeth, is also (with nuances) the one to blame. In exile and with no authority over the people, she cannot help but look down on her husband. “I helped you rise to power, and now I will see your misfortune”, she coldly says, reproaching Díaz in spite of his efforts to recover her affection. In one of these failed attempts Díaz even sings a love song to his wife, Sabor a mí (literally “a taste of me”), a 1959 Mexican bolero, in which he expresses a submissive attitude towards her and tries to show how noble his character is.6 Yet, it is noteworthy that the accounts portrayed in Severed Heads take place at some point after Díaz both ascended to, and was removed from, the throne, which, unlike Shakespeare’s Macbeth, does not clarify whether the old monarch was actually responsible for the crimes committed prior to this enthronement. For Rocha, one of the most important contributions of Shakespeare’s plays was their portrayal of the “câncer na cama de ouro” (“cancer in the golden bed”), that is, the way they showed the moral degradation of those in power and the consequences of their tyrannical behaviour: hypocrisy, betrayal, murder, and remorse (Araújo & Cardoso 2008, 170-171). Macbeth’s strong sense of guilt makes us sympathize with him in spite of the brutality of his acts, something that does not happen with Díaz, who explicitly states that he has no regrets: “I don’t feel sorry for anything,” he says. In a lecture on Shakespeare’s Macbeth, A. C. Bradley maintains that “[Macbeth’s] passion for power and his instinct of self-assertion are so vehement that no inward misery could persuade him to relinquish the fruits of crime, or to advance from remorse to repentance” (2008, 184), which also applies in the case of Díaz. Nevertheless, we can infer from his behaviour that his paranoia is not only the result of his loss of power, but also the consequence of an unconscious sense of self-reproach and remorse. The tyrant’s attitude also reminds us of Lady Macbeth: though he refuses to admit it, his guilt is subconsciously expressed through his madness, which becomes much geater than his ambition. Probably because of this, and also because of his fear of being killed, Díaz often wonders how people see him. In one scene, for instance, in an attempt to capture and celebrate the memory of his old days as the ruler of Eldorado, Díaz commissions a portrait of himself and asks the artist in charge of the work: 6

The song reads “no pretendo ser tu dueño/no soy nada, yo no tengo vanidad/de mi vida doy lo bueno/soy tan pobre, que otra cosa puedo dar” (“It’s not my intention to be your owner/I’m nothing, I don’t have any vanity/I always give the best of my life/Because I’m so poor, what else could I give?”).

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“Would you paint me as a criminal or as a saint?”. Along these same lines, assuming the weaknesses of mankind and showing, to a certain degree, a sense of self-consciousness, Díaz also wonders if people are judged for their crimes or rather for their good deeds, and excuses his own behaviour by saying, “I killed the king, but the king was weak. I did it all for the future and progress of my country”. Díaz does not think he deserves the tragic end which is in wait for him since, like many other tyrants fearing reprisals, he presents himself as a victim. Apart from Macbeth, Rocha’s film also bears something of Shakespeare’s King Lear. By the end of the film, in a scene that recalls Act 1 Scene 1 of Shakespeare’s play, Díaz has to decide which of his three children—one of them by his now deceased first wife, Beatriz—will be his sole heir. Díaz decides to pass on his inheritance to Beatriz’s son, despite the fact that, apparently, neither of them is very fond of each other—just as Lear leaves his kingdom to Goneril and Regan, his two ungrateful daughters, disowning young Cordelia. At the very beginning of Severed Heads, Díaz mentions the fact that Beatriz’s most beloved child was the people. Indeed, the actor who plays the role of Díaz’s and Beatriz’s son is also the one who plays the role of the shepherd. Both characters seem to merge into one at the end of the film and, therefore, Díaz’s heir turns out to be the people he had oppressed for so long. This symbolic union expresses what Rocha wished to see happen in Brazil. As said before, Cinema Novo members wanted their people to recover their lost power, the power that tyrants like Díaz or Macbeth had snatched from them. In addition to the shepherd and Díaz’s heir, there is another character in the film who also represents the oppressed: the beggar, who, along the lines of Rocha’s “An Esthetic of Hunger”, claims: “I’ve been hungry for so long that I can’t even remember what it is to be hungry”. The beggar, blind and paralyzed, eventually recovers his sight and manages to walk, thanks to the shepherd’s magic. His recovery from blindness and paralysis could be read as a metaphor which, in some way, reminds us of Kurosawa’s Throne of Blood (Pearlman 2002, 258). The people, the anonymous victims of Díaz (or any other despotic ruler), with their eyes wide open, are now aware of their situation and finally, being able to move, dare to act, to trigger a rebellion against the dictator. The film script also contains a direct reference to Hamlet, specifically, to the play-within-a-play devised by Hamlet to unmask his uncle. The script reads that a group of gypsies enter “to perform a play as in Hamlet”. It seems to be directed by the shepherd, the avenging hero in Severed Heads, who claims “we’re going to listen to a true story”, in an attempt to

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expose the real self of the ruler. In this play-within-a-film, which was finally cut, Hamlet and Macbeth merge in the words of the shepherd: The son of the King understood everything from the ghost of his father, who, one night, appeared before him [...] and said: “My beloved son, your uncle, who was my loyal vassal, betrayed me with your mother and, instigated by her, killed me in order to heir the crown. But the crown is yours, my beloved son, you must avenge me!”

Apart from the role of revenge and the presence of the usurper, the link between Hamlet and Macbeth here seems to be the character of Gertrude, who, in the script, is the source of the idea of killing the king. The character of King Hamlet’s wife in the film clearly resembles that of Lady Macbeth in Shakespeare’s tragedy, although the conspiratorial nature of the latter is certainly blurry in Severed Heads. Yet, the idea of a tyrant who unlawfully holds the sovereign power is still there. Also, the dramatic recourse to Shakespeare’s most famous tyrant, King Richard in Richard III, finds a place in the scene prior to Díaz’s death. Similarly to Richard, who tries to marry young Elizabeth to secure his claim to the throne, Díaz, as mentioned earlier, tries to avoid death by marrying Dulcinea. Díaz and the people, who at first are two independent realities, finally merge when the ruler aims to wed Dulcinea (Torres 1970b: 10). At the end of Richard III, Richmond, the Lancastrian rebel leader, announces that the king, “the bloody dog” (5.5.2), is dead and promises to marry Elizabeth, the Yorkist heiress. Richmond not only sets Elizabeth free, but also their alliance means the end of the Wars of the Roses, for their marriage will unite the houses of York and Lancaster and save the country. In Severed Heads, it could be argued that the shepherd takes the role of Richmond, as he thwarts Díaz’s plans and frees the woman. Finally, he kills the tyrant, becomes the heir of Eldorado and crowns Dulcinea as his queen consort. Though Severed Heads is indisputably based on Shakespeare’s Macbeth, not much criticism connecting the film to Shakespeare is available. The film has not attracted much academic interest, perhaps because of the obscurity of the plot and its bizarre nature. The bad reviews it received in its own time might also be responsible for that. Severed Heads is probably Rocha’s most cryptic film, and those who did not describe it as a mere chaos had to cling to the theory that creative cinema does not necessarily have to be intelligible. The production was elected to represent Spain at the 18th edition of the San Sebastián International Film Festival, which was also the chosen venue for its first public screening, “a big mistake that marked the beginning of its end” (Torres 2005, 83). The

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audience at this festival, known for being particularly critical, felt cheated by Rocha’s production, and the projection almost turned into a “pitched battle” (Torres 2005, 83). Francisco Rabal, who was attending the festival, decided to leave the theatre before the end of the film, alarmed by the angry protests of the public (Martínez Tomás 1970). As one might expect, bad reviews did not take long to come out. Spanish film critic Antonio de Obregón wrote: “It is a mediocre film, full of hesitations, grandiloquence, and facile symbolism. Francisco Rabal, as the rest of the performers, becomes [Rocha’s] victim, since it is hard to give life to [...] the main character of a Shakespearean play without Shakespeare” (1970a) and suggested to Rocha “that he replace the title ‘Severed Heads’ with ‘Crazy Heads’ and, if he does so, he can include us in the cast, as we went crazy after viewing the film at the Victoria Eugenia Theatre” (1970b). A. Martínez Tomás (1970), in one of the harshest critiques the film received, wrote: The first film to represent Spain and, as one might fear, the first disappointment. Those who perform this selection process in Spain should be charged with criminal responsibilities […] For my part, I declare, as a taxpayer and citizen, that, if this film represents Spain, I do not feel represented but, rather, aggrieved…. The whole film comes down to incoherent and almost indecipherable allegories…. These symbolisms are so absurd that they neither entertain, nor move, nor please. They only produce disgust, nausea, boredom…. The whistling and booing of the audience [during the first screening] was very considerable, but not as strong as the unhappy monstrosity deserved.

Only a few days after this unfortunate première, Rocha wrote a short note for La Vanguardia Española, in which he tried to make it clear that “the important thing about the film is not its plot but the plasticity, sound, or dramatic value of each scene” (1970). The critics, in any case, did not understand Rocha’s proposal, and Severed Heads was still branded “an anti-artistic farce” (Obregón 1970b) or a “disjointed, deliberately incoherent film” which does not take into account “the respect an audience deserves” (Torres 1970a) after subsequent screenings. At the end of the film, right after his wife’s suicide and breaking the boundary between fiction and reality, the screen and the audience, imposed by the fourth wall, Díaz looks directly towards the camera and quotes one of the best-known soliloquies from Macbeth, singing (or rather, yelling) the lines, which makes his insanity evident: “This is a tale without rhyme or reason, full of fury and sound, sung by an idiot, signifying nothing”. Though we can assume Rocha’s intention with these words was

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not “exactly” to describe the film, the audience attending the première did think they condensed the senselessness of the production.

Conclusion Severed Heads testifies to Shakespeare’s role in the construction of identity under tyrannical governments. Rocha’s productions are not conclusive but instead open new discourses (Bellumori 1975, 56), and his appropriation of Shakespeare’s works certainly reflects his unconformity with the Brazilian political situation of the 1960s, turning his particular vision of Macbeth into a form of condemnation. Because of this, the censorship mechanisms of the Brazilian government at that time did not favour its distribution. However, it is remarkable that Spain not only allowed its release in 1970 but also fostered its dissemination. In Severed Heads Rocha tells a story of oppression and injustice which takes place half way between Brazil and Spain, and he does so through Shakespeare. The polyvalent political character of the playwright’s works makes it possible to use them to describe, favour or criticize different types of government, including tyrannies. The human thirst for power has led, and will probably continue to lead, to new oppressive and dictatorial governments again in the future, allowing this story to be retold. A. L. Rowse argues that: “in our time we have seen Macbeth’s fearful nightmare re-enacted in the highest place on the public scene” (cited in Aravindakshan 1976, 41)—and also, as seen here, in the fictional land of Eldorado.

Works Cited “1971-1974.” Tempo Glauber. Last modified 29 July, 2008. http://www.tempoglauber.com.br/b_06.html. “Aesthetic of Dream.” Tempo Glauber. Last modified 29 July, 2008. http://www.tempoglauber.com.br/english/t_esteticasonho.html. Araújo Silva, Mateus and Mauricio Cardoso. 2008. “Glauber Rocha leitor de Shakespeare: da tragédia de Macbeth à farsa de Cabezas Cortadas”. In Diálogos Lusófonos: Literatura e cinema, eds. Anabela Branco de Oliveira et al., 157-177. Vila Real: Centro de Estudos em Letras. Aravindakshan, V. 1976. “Shakespeare’s Treatment of Tyranny”. Social Scientist 4: 38-44. Arbonés, Jordi. 2010. “El misteri de Cabezas Cortadas”. Revista de Girona 258: 42-46. Arthos, John. 1964. The Art of Shakespeare. London: Bowes & Bowes.

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Asquith, Clare. 2005. Shadowplay: The Hidden Beliefs and Coded Politics of William Shakespeare. New York: Public Affairs. Bellumori, Cinzia. 1975. Glauber Rocha. Florence: La Nuova Italia. Bentes, Ivana. 1999. “Tirando Glauber da caixa preta”. Jornal do Brasil, 14 March. Booth, Stephen. 1983. King Lear, Macbeth, Indefinition, and Tragedy. New Haven and London: Yale University Press. Bradley, Andrew Cecil. 2008. “’Lecture IX: Macbeth’ and ‘Lecture X: Macbeth,’ from Shakespearean Tragedy.” In Macbeth, ed. Harold Bloom, 172-220. New York: Bloom’s Literary Criticism. “Cabeças Cortadas.” Tempo Glauber. Last modified 29 July, 2008. http://www.tempoglauber.com.br/english/f_cabecas.html. Cardoso, Mauricio. 2010. “Le cinéma tricontinental de Glauber Rocha: politique, esthétique et révolution (1969-1971)”. Plural Pluriel. Revue des cultures de langue portugaise 7. (http://www.pluralpluriel.org/index.php?option=com_content&view=a rticle&id=283:le-cinema-tricontinental-de-glauber-rocha-politiqueesthetique-et-revolution-1969-1971&catid=77:numero-7-langue-voixcultures&Itemid=55) —. 2007. “O Cinema Tricontinental de Glauber Rocha: política, estética e revolução (1969-1971)”. Doctoral dissertation. Universidade de São Paulo. Cerdá, Juan F. 2011. “Filming The Taming of the Shrew in Franco’s dictatorship: La Fierecilla Domada (1956)”. Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 6. (http://www.borrowers.uga.edu/782772/display) Estevam, Carlos. 1982. “For a Popular Revolutionary Art”. In Brazilian Cinema, eds. Randal Johnson & Robert Stam, 58-63. Rutherford: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press. Felipe, León. 1983. Macbeth o El asesino del sueño: paráfrasis de la tragedia de Shakespeare. Madrid: Júcar. Ferreira da Rocha, Roberto. 2005. “Hero or Villain: a Brazilian Coriolanus during the Period of the Military Dictatorship”. In Latin American Shakespeares, eds. Bernice W. Kliman & Rick J. Santos, 3753. Madison: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press. García Garzón, Juan Ignacio. 2004. Paco Rabal: aquí, un amigo. Madrid: Algaba. Gerber, Raquel. 1980. “Morte do patriarcado. Política e ética.” Filme e Cultura 34: 32-41.

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Guntner, J. Lawrence. 2007. “Hamlet, Macbeth and King Lear on Film”. In The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare on Film, ed. Russell Jackson, 120-140. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hernández. Rubén. 2008. “Las dos muertes de Glauber Rocha. El cine brasileño entre la estética del hambre y la dietética del espectáculo”. Revista de Occidente 321: 74-89. Johnson, Randal & Robert Stam. 1982. “The Shape of Brazilian Film History.” In Brazilian Cinema, eds. Randal Johnson & Robert Stam, 15-52. Rutherford: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press. Martínez Tomás, A. 1970. “San Sebastián: Una abominable película justamente protestada”. La Vanguardia Española, 9 July. Moreira Alves, Maria Helena. 1985. Estado e Oposição no Brasil (19641984). Petrópolis: Vozes. Muñoz Suay, Ricardo. 1981. “Locura y lucidez de un cineasta”. El País, 3 September. Murley John A. & Sean D. Sutton. 2006. Introduction to Perspectives on Politics in Shakespeare, eds. John A. Murley & Sean D. Sutton. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books. Obregón, Antonio. 1970a. “Cabezas Cortadas”. Diario ABC, 31 October. —. 1970b. “Un esperpento socio-político de Glauber Rocha”. Diario ABC, 7 July. Oubiña, David. 2010. “Building at the Margins: Trajectories of New Independent Cinema in Latin America”. In The Film Edge. Contemporary Filmmaking in Latin America, ed. Eduardo A. Russo, 33-46. Buenos Aires: Editorial Teseo. Pearlman, E. 2002. “Macbeth on Film: Politics.” In Shakespeare and the Moving Image, ed. Anthony Davies & Stanley Wells, 250-260. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Pierre, Sylvie. 1996. Glauber Rocha: Textos e entrevistas com Glauber Rocha. Campinas: Papirus. Rocha, Glauber. 1982. “An Esthetic of Hunger”. In Brazilian Cinema, eds. Randal Johnson & Robert Stam, 68-71. Rutherford: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press. —. 1970. “Cabezas Cortadas”. La Vanguardia Española, 17 October. —. 2006. O Século do Cinema, ed. Ismail Xavier. São Paulo: Cosac Naify: Cinemateca Brasileira. Sadlier, Darlene J. 2003. Nelson Pereira dos Santos. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Shakespeare, William. 2011. The Arden Shakespeare Complete Works, eds. Richard Proudfoot, Ann Thompson & David Scott Kastan. London: Methuen Drama.

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Singlemann, Peter. 1975. “Political Structure and Social Banditry in Northeast Brazil.” Journal of Latin American Studies 1: 59-83. Tal, Tzvi. 2005. Pantallas y revolución: Una visión comparativa del cine de liberación y el Cinema Novo. Buenos Aires: Lumiere. Torres, Augusto M. 1970a. “Cabezas Cortadas”. La Vanguardia Española, 25 October. —. 2005. Buñuel y sus discípulos. Madrid: Huerga y Fierro. —. 1970b. Glauber Rocha y “Cabezas Cortadas”. Barcelona: Cuadernos Anagrama. —. 1981. Glauber Rocha. Huelva: Festival de Cine Iberoamericano, D.L.

NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

Elena Bandín lectures in English at the University of León, Spain. She has done extensive research on the reception, translation and censorship of Renaissance English theatre, devoting particular attention to Shakespeare. She is a member of the research projects “Shakespeare in Spain within the Framework of his Reception in Europe” (University of Murcia) and “Translations Censored (TRACE 1939-1985): Studies on Catalogues and Corpus” (University of León). Her recent publications focus on the translation and performance of Shakespeare’s plays under Franco’s dictatorship: “Performing Shakespeare in a Conflicting Cultural Context: Othello in Francoist Spain”, SEDERI Yearbook, 2011; “Censoring Metaphors in Translation: Shakespeare’s Hamlet under Franco”, Cognitive Linguistics (forthcoming). Katalin Ágnes Bartha (Ph.D., Babeú-Bolyai University) was born in Sf. Gheorghe, Romania, 1978. She is a researcher at the László Szabédi Museum in Cluj and visiting lecturer at the Department of Hungarian Literary Studies, Babeú-Bolyai University, Cluj-Napoca. Her research interests are 19th century Transylvanian theater history and culture, the reception of Shakespeare’s works and Hungarian literary culture in Romania after 1918. Her publications include Shakespeare Erdélyben. XIX. századi magyar nyelvĦ recepció [Shakespeare in Transylvania. The Hungarian Reception of Shakespeare’s Works in the 19th Century] (Budapest: Argumentum, 2010). Mário Vítor Bastos has taught English and American Literature since 1986 at the the University of Lisbon. Over the years he has researched extensively into Anglo-American modernism, with special emphasis on themes such as place and exile, and on intercultural and interartistic relations. He has written already about Shakespeare (about his presence in the work of the American modernist Louis Zukofsky), and his renewed interest in the Bard derives mainly from the challenging readings made by the Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa and other modernists, as well as from the Shakespeare’s increasing influence in film and other contemporary media. At present, he teaches an inter-arts seminar at the University of Lisbon with Shakespeare as its main topic and centre.

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Michele De Benedictis holds a PhD in Comparative Literature from the Università degli Studi di Cassino, Italy (2010). His main research interests include Renaissance drama, early modern literature in Europe, comparative studies, history of science, court studies and interdisciplinary approaches to dramatic literature. Relevant publications include essays in periodicals and books about suicide in The Rape of Lucrece; ekphrasis in The Winter’s Tale, Ben Jonson’s 1616 Folio and the use of allegory in Stuart masques. He is currently completing a book chapter on the aesthetics of violence in Titus Andronicus from Shakespeare to Taymor’s film version. Nicoleta Cinpoeú joined the University of Worcester in 2007. She teaches Renaissance Literature, is Course Leader for English Literary Studies and co-director of Worcester’s Early Modern Research Group. She is the author of Shakespeare’s Hamlet in Romania 1778-2008: A Study in Translation, Performance and Cultural Appropriation (Mellen, 2010) and of the open-access website, “The Jacobethans” (www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac. arts/ren/Elizabethan_jacobean_drama). Her work has appeared in Theatrical Blends, Shakespeare Bulletin, StudiaDramatica and Shakespeare in Europe: History and Memory. In the theatre, she has worked in several capacities —from that of dramaturge to assistant director and translator. Currently, she is editing Doing Kyd: A Collection of Critical Essays on The Spanish Tragedy for Manchester Unicersity Press and collaborating on a new Romanian translation of Shakespeare’s Complete Works, writing introductions to Hamlet (2010), Titus Andronicus, Measure for Measure, The Merchant of Venice, and The Comedy of Errors. Rafik Darragi is Emeritus Professor at the University of Tunis and, as Shakespeare scholar, an Executive Committee Member of the International Shakespeare Society (ISA). He is currently based in Paris as a writer and literary critic. For a full list of his scholarly articles, as well as his various literary and artistic reviews, published in La Presse de Tunisie and Jeune Afrique, consult his website at http///www.rafikdarragi.com. Hywel Dix is Lecturer in English and Communication at Bournemouth University. He completed a doctorate on Raymond Williams and the break-up of British consensual identity at the University of Glamorgan in Wales in 2007. He is the author of After Raymond Williams: Cultural Materialism and the Break-up of Britain and Postmodern Fiction and the Break-up of Britain. His chapter on “Cymbeline and the Display of Empire” is part of a larger research project entitled “Reading, Writing and Republicanism in Britain”.

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Jacek Fabiszak teaches the History of English Literature at the Faculty of English, Adam Mickiewicz University, PoznaĔ, Poland. His research interests include English Renaissance theatre and drama and their stage, televisual and filmic transpositions. He has published and given papers at conferences on both Polish and English-speaking versions of Shakespeare’s plays. One of his major publications in this area is Polish Televised Shakespeares (PoznaĔ: Motivex, 2005). He has also tried to apply linguistic and sociological tools to the analysis of literature, especially drama, which resulted in the publication of Shakespeare’s Drama of Social Roles (Piáa 2001), a book that attempts to interpret Shakespeare’s last plays in light of the theory of social roles and speechact theory. Furthermore, he has helped popularize the Bard’s works in Poland, co-authoring Szekspir. Leksykon [Shakespeare. A Lexicon] (Kraków, 2003) and co-editing Czytanie Szekspira [Reading Shakespeare]. He has also written on Christopher Marlowe, both his plays (focusing on imagery) and their screen versions (especially Edward II). Francisco Fuentes is a PhD candidate at the University of Murcia (Spain). He is currently working on the reception of Shakespeare in Europe and his commemoration in the 20th and 21st centuries, particularly in 1964, the year of the 400th anniversary of the playwright’s birth. He holds a BA in English Studies and in Translation and Interpreting, as well as an MA in Comparative European Literature. Since 2009 he holds a bursary from the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation, allowing him to prepare his PhD dissertation on the celebration of Shakespeare on postage stamps. His research interests include Shakespeare, early modern drama, and studies on commemoration, nostalgia and memory. He has also participated in seminars and presented papers in conferences such as SEDERI and ESRA. Keith Gregor lectures in English and Comparative Literature at the University of Murcia, Spain. For the last six years he has led the international research project “Shakespeare in Spain within the Framework of his Reception in Europe” and has published widely in the field of Shakespeare’s European, specifically Spanish, reception. His most recent publications in the area include two critical editions of Spanish neoclassical renderings of Jean-François Ducis’s adaptations of Hamlet and Macbeth, including some hitherto unpublished translations, and a monograph on Shakespeare in the Spanish Theatre: 1772 to the Present (Continuum, 2011). He has also contributed to The Oxford Encyclopedia of Theatre and Performance and the forthcoming Cambridge World Shakespeare Encyclopedia.

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Denis Poniž is Professor and former Head of the Department of European and Slovenian Drama at the University of Ljubljana, Slovenia and a member of the University’s Academy for Theatre, Film, Radio and Television. He is also a Visiting Professor at the universities of Klagenfurt and Vienna (Austria), Göttingen, Gießen and Bielefeld (Germany), Metz (France), Prague and Brno (Czech Republic) and Ferrara (Italy). He has done extensive research and published widely in the fields of Slovene poetry, essays and drama, the semiotics of literature, numerical aesthetics and literary computing. From 2008 to 2012 he headed the research project “Censorship and Self-censorship in Slovene Drama and Theatre 19451990”. As well as his scholarly publications, which number some 25 books and book chapters and 600 articles, papers and research reports, he is a practising poet and dramatist, as well as a translator of novels from both Serbian and Croatian. Francesca Rayner is Assistant Professor at the Universidade do Minho, where she teaches Theatre and Performance at undergraduate and postgraduate level. She is a member of the international research project “Shakespeare in Spain within the Framework of his Reception in Europe”, coordinated by the University of Murcia, and a member of the European Shakespeare Research Association. Her research centres on the cultural politics of Shakespearean performance in Portugal, with a particular interest in questions of gender and sexuality. She has published articles in national and international journals such as the Luso-Brazilian Review, Portuguese Studies and the Shakespeare International Yearbook and has just co-edited a Portuguese anthology on Gender, Visual Culture and Performance with Ana Gabriela Macedo. She is currently working on a book about Shakespearean performance in the post-revolutionary period and editing two books for the national theatre, the Dona Maria II. Veronika Schandl is Associate Professor at the English Department of Pázmány Péter Catholic University, Hungary. Her main research interests are Shakespeare in performance and 21st-century European theatre. Her recent book entitled Shakespeare’s Plays on the Stages of Late Kádárist Hungary—Shakespeare Behind the Iron Curtain was published in 2009. Currently she is working on two projects: on Tamás Major, a controversial socialist Hungarian director of Shakespeare, and on contemporary Shakespeare burlesque productions.

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Noemí Vera is a PhD candidate at the University of Murcia, where she obtained an MA in European Comparative Literature in 2011. She has done graduate research at the Shakespeare Institute, King’s College, London, and the University of Utrecht. Her research focuses on Spanish biographies of Shakespeare and the study of Shakespeare as a fictional character in Spanish literature. She has recently published the article “Shakespeare as Character in Two Works by José Carlos Somoza” (coauthored with Ángel-Luis Pujante) in Critical Survey 25.