Shakespeare in the New Europe 9781474247566, 9781474285278, 9781474247573

Citation preview

Shakespeare in the New Europe

Shakespeare: Bloomsbury Academic Collections

This Collection, composed of six reissued titles from The Athlone Press, Sheffield Academic Press and Continuum, offers a distinguished selection of titles that showcase the breadth of Shakespeare Studies, ranging from Shakespeare’s view on religion, our understanding of him as an author and director, the work of his contemporaries and how he is taught in the contemporary curriculum. The collection is available both in e-book and print versions. Other titles available in Shakespeare Studies include: The Strengths of Shakespeare’s Shrew: Essays, Memoirs and Reviews, William Empson (Ed. by John Haffenden) Shakespeare for All: The Primary School: An Account of the RSA ‘Shakespeare in Schools’ Project, Ed. by Maurice Gilmour Shakespeare’s Shakespeare: How the Plays Were Made, John C. Meagher Shakespeare, Catholicism, and Romance, Velma Bourgeois Richmond Two Tragedies: ‘Hector’ and ‘La Reine d’Ecosse’, Antoine de Montchrestien (Ed. by C. N. Smith)

Shakespeare in the New Europe Edited by Michael Hattaway, Boika Sokolova and Derek Roper Shakespeare BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC COLLECTIONS

Bloomsbury Academic An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

Bloomsbury Academic An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square London WC1B 3DP UK

1385 Broadway New York NY 10018 USA

www.bloomsbury.com BLOOMSBURY and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in 1994 by Sheffield Academic Press This edition published by Bloomsbury Academic 2015 © Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 2015 Michael Hattaway, Boika Sokolova and Derek Roper have asserted their right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Editors of this work. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. No responsibility for loss caused to any individual or organization acting on or refraining from action as a result of the material in this publication can be accepted by Bloomsbury or the author. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN: HB: 978-1-4742-4756-6 ePDF: 978-1-4742-4757-3 Set: 978-1-4742-4762-7 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress Series: Bloomsbury Academic Collections, ISSN 2051-0012

Printed and bound in Great Britain

Shakespeare in the New Europe

Shakespeare in the New Europe

Edited by Michael Hattaway Boika Sokolova and Derek Roper

ml) Sheffield Academic Press

Copyright © 1994 Sheffield Academic Press Published by Sheffield Academic Press Ltd Mansion House 19 Kingfield Road Sheffield, S l l 9AS England

Typeset by Sheffield Academic Press and Printed on acid-free paper in Great Britain by Bookcraft Midsomer Norton, Somerset

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 1-85075-474-8

CONTENTS

Preface Contributors Introduction

9 11 15

I. THE OLD EUROPE: SHAKESPEARE AND CULTURAL POUCY ALEXANDER SHURBANOV AND BOIKA SOKOLOVA

From the unlove of Romeo andJuliet to Hamlet without the Prince: a Shakespearean mirror held up to the fortunes of new Bulgaria

24

THOMAS SORGE

Buridan's ass between two performances of A Midsummer Night's Dream, or Bottom's telos in the GDR and after

54

II. ROTTEN STATE, NOBLE MIND? MANFRED PFISTER

Hamlets made in Germany, East and West

76

ROBIN HEADLAM WELLS

'The question of these wars': Hamlet in the new Europe

92

III. CONSTRUCTING NATIONS JONATHAN BATE

Shakespearean nationhoods

112

NICHOLAS POTTER

'Like to a tenement or pelting farm': Richard //and the idea of the nation

130

IV. SUBVERSIVE SHAKESPEARE, EAST AND WEST MARTIN HILSKY

Shakespeare in Czech: an essay in cultural semantics

150

Shakespeare in the New Europe

6 MARTA GlBINSKA

Polish Hamlets: Shakespeare's Hamlet in Polish theatres after 1945 TOM HEALY Remembering with advantages: nation and ideology in Henry V

159

174

TERENCE HAWKES

Shakespeare's spooks, or someone to watch over me

194

V. THE NEW EUROPE 1: SPAIN TO UKRAINE RAFAEL PORTILLO and MANUEL GOMEZ-LARA

Shakespeare in the new Spain: or, what you will

208

MARK SOKOLYANSKY

'Giant-like rebellions' and recent Russian experience: Shakespearean irony as an approach to modern history

221

VI. THE NEW EUROPE 2: SHAKESPEARE IN THE BALKANS ODETTE-IRENNE BLUMENFELD

Shakespeare in post-revolutionary Romania: the great directors are back home

230

EVGENIA PANCHEVA

Nothings, merchants, tempests: trimming Shakespeare for the 1992 Bulgarian stage JANJA ClGLAR-ZANIC Recruiting the Bard: onstage and offstage glimpses of recent Shakespeare productions in Croatia

247

261

VII. THE NEW EUROPE 3: LOVE, POWER, POSTMODERNISM HARRIETT HAWKINS

Shakespeare's radical romanticism: the popular tradition and the challenge to tribalism

278

JAMES SIEMON

Terplex'd beyond self-explication': Cymbeline and early modern/postmodern Europe

294

Contents

7

ERICA SHEEN

The Pannonians and the Dalmatians: Reading for a European history in Cymbeline

310

THOMAS SORGE

Tradition and modernization: some thoughts on Shakespeare criticism in the new Europe

321

VIII. PRODUCING AND REINVENTING RICHARD BURT

Baroque down: the trauma of censorship in psychoanalysis and queer film re-visions of Shakespeare and Marlowe

328

MICHAEL HATTAWAY

Shakespeare's histories: the politics of recent British productions Index

351 370

PREFACE

For more than five years the Department of English Literature at the University of Sheffield and the Department of English at St Kliment Ohrinski University, Sofia, have enjoyed a programme of academic exchanges. This book has grown out of the contacts and friendships that thus emerged. The editors would like to thank several organizations who by their generous financial support have made this volume and the conference which originated it possible. Recognition is due to ELTECS Manchester, the British Council's Literature Department, London, and the British Council, Sofia. The beneficent support of two institutions in Sofia, the St Cyril and St Methodius International Foundation and the Open Society Fund, helped bring all contributors together. Thanks are due to the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust, the British Academy, and to Sheffield Academic Press. Unfortunately Terry Hawkes, Martin Hilsky and Janja Ciglar-Zanic were unable to attend the conference, but the editors are pleased to be able to print their papers. One individual needs to be singled out, whose energy, good will, and devotion to the project and all of its details made the intellectual organization of the conference close to perfection, Derek Roper. His encouraging and probing letters to all of the contributors, gently corrective of falsities or stylistic improprieties, could well have made a volume to stand beside this one. Michael Hattaway Boika Sokolova Sheffield September, 1993

CONTRIBUTORS

JONATHAN BATE is King Alfred Professor of English Literature at the University of Liverpool. His books include Shakespeare and the English Romantic Imagination; Shakespearean Constitutions: Politics, Theatre, Criticism 1730-1830; Shakespeare and Ovid; and the Penguin anthology The Romantics on Shakespeare. ODETTE-lRENNE BLUMENFELD is a Professor of English and American Literature at the 'All Cuza University of Iasi. H e r publications include A Guide to American Literature, and Perspectives in the Semiotics and Poetics of the Theatre. She is working on a book to be called Shakespeare: From Text to Performance, a semiological approach to some event-productions of Shakespeare's plays in Romania. RICHARD BURT is Associate Professor of English at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. He is the author of Licensed by Authority: Ben Jonson and the Discourses of Censorship (Ithaca, 1993), co-editor of Enclosure Acts: Sexuality, Property, and Culture in Early Modern England (Ithaca, 1994), and editor of The Administration of Aesthetics: Censorship, Political Criticism and the Public Sphere (Minneapolis, 1994). Professor Burt is currently writing a book on masculinity, cinema, and censorship. JANJA ClGLAR-ZANIC is an Assistant Professor of English Literature at the University of Zagreb, Croatia. Her publications include 'Fatal Fascination or Calculated Choice: T h e Conceit in Seventeenth-century English Poetry'; 'The Appropriation and Some Recent Uses of the Shakespeare Canon (I)'; and 'Shakespeare's Cymbeline as a "Kidnapped" Romance' (an introduction to a new Croatian translation of the play). At present she is coordinating a project examining historical aspects of Shakespeare reception in Croatian theatre, criticism and literature, for a book to be called Shakespeare's Croatian Presences. MARTA GlBINSKA teaches Shakespeare and other English Literature at the Jagiellonian University, Cracow. Her publications include The Functioning of Language in Shakespeare's Plays (Cracow, 1987), and many articles on Shakespeare. Dr Gibinska is now writing a book on eighteenth-century Gothic fiction.

12

Shakespeare in the New Europe

MANUEL J. GOMEZ-LARA is a lecturer of English Literature at Seville University. His publications include Stylistica (1987, 1991), Poemas y canciones de Rafael de Leon (1989), Semana Santa: Fiesta Mayor en Sevilla (1990 a n d 1992) and o t h e r titles on discourse analysis a n d the cultural interpretation of public festivals. He is working on a new book about the rhetoric of cities and the elaboration of social images and performances in a given community. MICHAEL HATTAWAY has been Professor of English Literature at the University of Sheffield since 1984. He is author of Elizabethan Popular Theatre (1982) and of Hamlet: The Critics Debate (1987); and he has edited plays by Beaumont and Jonson, as well as 1-3 Henry VI for the New Cambridge Shakespeare. He is currently working on an edition of As You Like It and a book on drama and society in the early modern period, both for Cambridge University Press. TERENCE HAWKES is Professor of English at the Centre for Critical a n d Cultural Theory in the University of Wales, Cardiff. His publications include Metaphor (1972), Shakespeare's Talking Animals (1973), Structuralism and Semiotics (1977), That Shakespeherian Rag (1986) and Meaning by Shakespeare (1992). He is also editor of the journal Textual Practice. HARRIETT HAWKINS is currently Senior Research Fellow in English at Linacre College, Oxford, and has taught at Swarthmore College and Vasser College. Her publications include The Devil's Party: Critical Counterinterpretations of Shakespearean Drama (1985); the Harvester New Critical Introduction to 'Measure for Measure' (1987); and Classics and Trash: Traditions and Taboos in High'Literature and Popular Modern Genres (1990). ROBIN HEADLAM WELLS is Senior Lecturer at Hull University. His most recent book, Elizabethan Mythologies, was published by Cambridge University Press in April 1994. H e is currently writing a book called Shakespeare on Masculinity. THOMAS HEALY is a Senior Lecturer in English at Birkbeck College, London. He is the author of Richard Crashaw (1986), New Latitudes: Theory and English Renaissance Literature (1992) and Christopher Marlowe (1994), and is the editor, with Jonathan Sawdry, of Literature and the Civil War (1990). He is presently editing the Longman Critical Reader on Andrew Marvell. MARTIN HlLSKY is a Professor of English Literature at Charles University in Prague, and has been Chair of English since 1988. His publications include two monographs in Czech, Anglo-American New Criticism (1976) and Contemporary British Fiction (1992); also about a h u n d r e d articles on British and American literature. Since 1983 he has been translating

Contributors

13

Shakespeare's plays into Czech. The National Theatre, Prague, has so far produced his translations of A Midsummer-Night's Dream, Love's Labour's Lost, As You Like It and The Winter's Tale; Cymbeline and Pericles are to be produced soon. Currently he is working on a long-term project to edit all Shakespeare's plays in modern Czech translations, in separate volumes. The project should be finished by the anniversary of Shakespeare's death in 2016. EVGENIA PANCHEVA is an Assistant Professor of English Literature at Sofia University. H e r doctoral thesis is on Shakespeare's Defences of Art: Renaissance, Mannerism, Baroque. She has published on the spatial structure of Henry V, Hamlet and The Tempest, as well as on the transformations of the pastoral chronotope in Marlowe's plays. MANFRED PFISTER is Professor of English Literature at the Freie Universitat Berlin. His main areas of research are, in historical terms: the early modern period, the fin de siecle, and modern and contemporary literature; in terms of genre: drama and the theatre, poetry and travel writing; in methodological terms: comparative and trans-disciplinary studies. He is co-editor of the Jahrbuch der deutschen Shakespeare-Gesellschaft and author of The Theory and Analysis of Drama (Cambridge, 1988). His current projects include an anthology of British travel writing on Italy from the Renaissance to the present. RAFAEL PORTILLO is a Lecturer in English Literature at Seville University, Spain. His publications include English-Spanish/Spanish-English Dictionary of Theatre Terms (1986), Shakespeare y el teatro de su epoca (1987), Historia critica del teatro ingles (1988) and Abecedario del teatro (1988 and 1992). He is currently working on a project for the staging of supernatural scenes and characters in medieval English pageants. NICHOLAS POTTER teaches English at Swansea Institute of H i g h e r Eduacation. He was educated in Newcastle-upon-Tyne and at University College Swansea. His doctoral thesis c o n c e r n e d the c o n t e m p o r a r y r e c e p t i o n of Thackeray's major novels, and h e has p u b l i s h e d on E.M. Forster, E d m u n d Blunden's war poetry, and Margaret Atwood. He has published on Shakespeare with Graham Holderness and J o h n Turner in Shakespeare: the Play of History (1988) and Shakespeare: Out of Court (1990). ERICA SHEEN is a Lecturer in the Department of English Literature at Sheffield University. She has published on Shakespeare a n d on Hollywood cinema, and is currently completing a study of The Institution of Shakespearean Theatre.

14

Shakespeare in the New Europe

ALEXANDER SHURBANOV is Professor of English Literature at the University of Sofia. His books include Renaissance Humanism and Shakespeare's Lyrical Poetry (1980) and Between Pathos and Irony: Christopher Marlowe and the Genesis of Renaissance Drama (1992). He has translated Chaucer's Canterbury Tales and Milton's Paradise Lost into Bulgarian verse. JAMES R. SIEMON is Associate Professor of English at Boston University. H e is the author of Shakespearean Iconoclasm (1985) a n d editor of Christopher Marlowe's The Jew of Malta (1994). He is currently editing Shakespeare's Richard III for the third Arden edition, and working on a book-length study of dialogue and social distinction in early m o d e r n England and its theatre. BOIKA SOKOLOVA teaches English Literature at the University of Sofia. She is author of Shakespeare's Romances as Interrogative Texts: Their Alienation Strategies and Ideology (Lewiston, Queenston, and Lampeter, 1992). MARK SOKOLYANSKY is a Professor of Comparative Literature at Odessa State University. His publications include books on Henry Fielding and Oscar Wilde, and a monograph on the typology of the eighteenth-century novel. Among his studies of Shakespeare are a dissertation on 'Bernard Shaw a n d S h a k e s p e a r e ' , and many essays in Shekspirovskie ctenija (Moscow, 1977-90) and other periodicals. THOMAS SORGE has been a Lecturer at the Humboldt University of Berlin. His publications include a book on fictionality in early modern England, especially in More, in early Tudor dialogues and in Shakespeare. Owing to the changes in Germany, he has recently been concerned with the role of Shakespeare in the German Democratic Republic.

INTRODUCTION

The idea for the conference that generated this book came to the editors in 1991. At this time the eastern European revolutions had newly displaced the old regimes and there were still euphoric feelings of liberation, visions of a dream come true, glimpses of a redeemed 'New Europe' whose proud citizens we were ready to become. Although the war in the former Yugoslavia had already begun to simmer, we still cherished the illusion that it could not go on, not in this new Arcadia that had emerged at 'the end of history'. That so many of us, in both east and west, should have entertained this optimistic view proves only too well the power of ideology. On the one hand, many intellectuals living in eastern Europe had fallen victim to an inferiority complex that had originated in images of the West as a real but also as an imagined place of 'normality', democracy, and other forbidden fruit. Similarly, many western intellectuals, both those nurtured on horror tales about Stalinist regimes and those who believed that history was on their side and had been telling capitalists for decades that 'the game was up', now had to discard their simplistic polarized notions. The iron curtain, as it turned out, had been made of a much subtler stuff than the Berlin Wall. Impalpable and elusive, spun out of myths and images, out of texts, it is still very much in place. It keeps us burdened with history, the same old history that, pace Fukuyama, has remained ubiquitously in place. As complementary productions from the two Germanies show (Pfister, Sorge), it more resembles Alice's lookingglass than Snout the Tinker's wall. Hence the continuing need for a project like ours. Out of this political turmoil, perhaps because of the image created by the European Community, we had been expecting a new cosmopolitanism to be born. In reality, however, the situation was obviously more complicated, since the end of the political hegemony of the USSR did not and could not immediately give rise to a new economic order. For all of its imperfections, moreover, the EU is based on consent, on dialogic principles, while the erstwhile totalitarian system whose political history ended around 1989 was based upon the suppression of alternative voices. Hence the consequent eruption of nationalisms in the East and the confused struggle among so many kinds of interest and among multiple cultural narratives. What had been marginal and displaced occupied the centre of the stage (Siemon). This determination of the institution of nation by the will of a 'people' should not have taken Shakespeareans by surprise. 'What ish my nation?'

16

Shakespeare in the New Europe

asks MacMorris (Henry VIII.ii.122), thinking about Ireland, colonized by the English, its language destroyed. This outcry has preserved its topicality across the ages and is that of many peoples marginalized or displaced in the postwar years. It was quoted by Seamus Heaney with reference to the situation in modern Ireland, but it resonates from Armenia and Georgia to the Basque country (Gomez-Lara, Portillo). Much of Europe had been living on a volcano: the next few years would see the dissolution of many of Europe's 'nation states' where the fictional communities of the nation were replaced by even more destructive communities of the tribe (Bate, Hawkins, Healy). The reverse process was observed only in the reunification of Germany, where an artificially divided nation came together, not at the overt expense of human lives but at a heavy cost for the economies of its two former parts as well as the rest of Europe. O n e of the great Shakespearean themes is the relationship between truth and reality. The 'history' plays are not concerned just with event and chronicle but with ways of seeing and interpreting. The actions are selfconsciously plotted, the history theatricalized. Precisely because the revolutions of eastern Europe in 1989, unlike the events of 1789, were, on the whole, not bloody, their images, created through the illusionism of television, had, like a play, to be decoded. It is not surprising that this took some time, and that, like spectators at a new play, we had been caught u p in them. Conversely, as Harriett Hawkins pointed out, although we may think we know the plots of drama's classic narratives, we do not know the endings of the historical narratives in which we ourselves play. The conference took place at the House of the Journalists in Bankya, a little resort town near Sofia, from 28 May till 2 J u n e 1993. It had proved difficult to find contributors from the countries where the impact of the events had been greatest. These, we thought, were the countries where the important Shakespearean narratives were being rewritten. We ran into difficulties we h a d n o t expected: we discovered how e m i n e n t Shakespeareans in these places, themselves subjects of history, were having to cope with brute facts of existence rather than with the production of texts—one Russian could not make it and our Croatian contributor was restricted in her materials because of the war that had flared u p in h e r country. T h e r e had been, from the beginning, risks involved, as there existed n o international academic clubs of the type that constitute so many conferences where there are shared sets of concerns, critical approaches, and academic backgrounds. We wrote to people unknown to each other and often to ourselves. We also invited colleagues from the United States, not simply because they were distinguished scholars but because the idea of America is important in the cultural constitution of Europe, an ambiguous token of sexual and political liberation and repression (Burt). In the event, discussions at the conference were enlightening but strenuous— and sometimes moving. Both sides had had images of the other, but the true differences were not those foreseen. Jim Siemon, in a masterly

Introduction

17

extemporized review of what had gone before, quoted Cymbeliner. T would we were all of one mind, and one mind good' (V.iv.205). This, he urged, should not be our motto: our dialogues generated not specious resolutions of difference but new kinds of differentiation and productive analysis. The conference elevated the values of forum above those of the tribunal (Pancheva). All the papers had been completed and circulated to the participants a couple of months before. Accordingly, papers were not read but presented in summary, and our sessions were largely devoted to discussion. Essays have since been revised in the light of these discussions: they are therefore both personal and a product of the shared—or collective—life of those days in Bankya. (We do not include the story of the disco here!) The essays are printed in the order in which they were discussed at the conference. We decided to include Thomas Sorge's supplementary reflections about the problems facing eastern European Shakespeare critics, which were sent around before we met in Bulgaria, and Martin Hilsky's essay, which was sent to the editors after the conference. We had imagined that a reader might be able to map out from the divers contributions a shapely narrative concerning 'event productions' (Blumenfeld) that had taken place since 1989, an exploration of the 'new Shakespeare' that inevitably arose in the 'new Europe'. Under totalizing regimes, theatre had long served as a forum for debate before revolution moved into the Parliament Square. What happened, of course, was that it proved impossible to make sense of the present without chronicling and rethinking the past. As the essays that constitute this volume show, there is a constant dialogue between past and present, and some of the authors have analysed this process (Gibinska, Hattaway, Pfister). When writing any historical narrative there are general dangers of historicism— assuming that history follows a necessary direction—or 'whiggish' historiography: chroniclers will choose those theatrical moments that aligned themselves with those ideological lines of force that were most apparent to the writer or which seem to point in the direction of change and triumph. There are strands of narrative among our chronicles of event productions, but we must always remember those productions that responded to conflict by affirming the value of love (Hawkins) or allowed those who attended them some respite from the agonies of living out historicized roles—even after 1989 (Pancheva, Shurbanov and Sokolova). Odette Blumenfeld, after the conference, wrote from Romania about the way that the presence of Shakespeare after 1989 in the countries of the former eastern Europe primarily on the stage rather than in scholarly work reinforces the appeal of the Shakespearean texts to a society in transition, in search of an identity. In their confusion and chaos, people turn to Shakespeare as a permanence, capable of bringing home to them allusions to the complexity of today's background, thus placing it in a historical perspective,

18

Shakespeare in the New Europe offering reassurance by underlining what is eternally valid in h u m a n experience.

In 1991, with the collapse of totalitarian regimes in the East, it was inevitable to ask how those critical projects that had been based on what was understood as Marxism in both east and west would appear when the eastern versions of the socialist experiment had so obviously and catastrophically failed. 'What price your Marxist or materialist criticism now?' was a question asked belligerently by the smug western student, sceptical of the leftist inclinations of her or his middle-aged teachers, or sympathetically by those who realized that 'liberation' from the excesses of authoritarian regimes, the replacement of monologue by dialogue, also involved m u c h destruction of institutions that were pragmatically acceptable, the dispersal of climates of opinion and value systems within which individuals could acquire a sense of purpose and order. Dogmatic Marxism could be replaced by dogmatic liberalism, triumphalist new governments could be 'too legitimate' as Richard Burt remarked. The pax Americana may not be the alternative that was envisaged. Conversely, those post-structuralist approaches that, having postulated an absolute priority for language, almost deny the reality of the external material world, seemed painfully irrelevant to the cataclysmic events of the wars of nationhood (Headlam Wells, Ciglar-Zanic). 'The element of high indeterminacy in the Shakespearean text, the impossibility of recreating its original staging intact, has led many directors to approach it by using new signifiers to be found in their own cultural codes' (Blumenfeld). One of the first truths of which we all became aware is that there is not a categorical difference between native-speaking Shakespeareans and those who work in non-English speaking cultures. The process of translation, we learned, need not create 'inauthenticity' but can give new life to a text and thus enable directors to harvest new sense from their productions (Hilsky). Looking at Shakespeare as his texts span various cultures, we found ourselves concentrating as much on form as on content. A non-illusionistic production could itself contest doctrines of socialist realism (Gibinska). As we talked of problems of translation and theatrical realization we were r e m i n d e d that the words we use for a cognate activity, interpreting and interpretation, are words that we use when we think that we are working within o n e linguistic or cultural domain. T h e realization of a Shakespearean text within cultural forms and intertextual matrices of the present, a text that had been written in the early m o d e r n period, changes the 'original' in ways often as radical as when a text is translated from one language to another. All acts of reading, of 'history' or of 'culture', in the study or in a playhouse where texts are materially re-produced, are acts of interpretation, a kind of translation (Sheen, Blumenfeld). The theme of the conference did not in any way lead to an exclusive

Introduction

19

concentration on 'political Shakespeare'. It was shown how Hamlet, for example, has not served just as a tablet on which public ideas had been inscribed but as an instrument for probing the nature of thought and identity, the shadowy line between truth and seeming (Gibinska). In a time of rapid political change, paradoxically perhaps, the finding of new socially constitutive notions of individual identity is less important than the carving out of a private space in which to live. Romeo and Juliet was prominent not only in periods of political repression in Bulgaria, when it was used to open such private spaces, but also in the whirlwind of the dissolution of the old system when the old spaces were obliterated (Shurbanov and Sokolova). At all times there may be the need for relief from crudely politicized life—celebrations of the individual which are, of course, themselves political but which western marxisant liberals might write off as mystificatory or reactionary. In the West, too, productions and critical readings of the histories and tragedies swung away from sociological definition of character towards more individualistic and autotelic views (Hattaway, Potter). We found we could agree with Ben Jonson that Shakespeare was 'not of an age but for all time', since Jonson did not say that for all time he would have the same meaning. In fact each group which worships the Shakespearean icon for its trans-historical and trans-cultural values tends to appropriate it for its own immediate political purposes. His own high rhetoric allows for the fabrication of a golden age of the past that can be invoked by any regime with an eye to its own future. 'Shakespeare' has been notoriously appropriated by those who want to invoke 'order and traditional moral values' (Pfister). As Harriett Hawkins reminds us, however, Shakespeare's reputation rests upon his artistry and innovative ideas and not simply on his place within ideological frameworks. Shakespeare stopped being an exclusive English property long ago—the Germans speak of 'nostrification' (Pfister). The Russians appropriated the traditions of German Romanticism and these, after the October Revolution, became the kernel out of which grew the doctrine of the new man, the hero of the people and for the people (Sokolyansky, Shurbanov and Sokolova). In this context the conference spent time unpacking the ways in which Shakespearean texts, which have always served as a register and touchstone for social and political change, have, in Brecht's formulation, never offered reflections of contemporary realities but always reflections upon them. The 'entertainment' they offer is instructive and their ethical insights need to be accommodated within a political frame. On his texts have been inscribed values and narratives by which individuals, groups, even nations, have found their own identities. For nations and cultures, as Simone de Beauvoir wrote of women, are not born but made (Healy, Potter, Bate). We can analyse this historically by inspecting the modern phenomenon of the migration of Shakespearean cultural icons, tracked as directors and theatre companies, critical ideas,

20

Shakespeare in the New Europe

and aesthetic styles move from country to country. What was the other becomes the proximate, and the proximate becomes incorporated into what seemed to be comfortably autochthonous or consensually authentic by virtue of being familiar. The dynamics of the relation between intercultural migration and intra-cultural process is described in Richard Burt's account of a 'Shakespeare' refracted not only through film but through cultural frames that include Americanized images of European experience. In fact there is a two-way traffic between culture and ideology on the one hand and narrative and theatre on the other. In his essay, Jonathan Bate reminds us that Shakespeare is 'not just an icon of various European nationhoods but a voice of what we now call multi-culturalism'. He goes on to see in versions of The Tempest a discourse which transcends both nation and race, a cri de coeur from 'the ravaged earth itself, an intimation of eco-politics. Ideologies of patriotism, nationalism, and tribalism (Ciglar-Zanic) are obviously used to construct playtexts and critical readings. However, particular narratives also (Hamlet, conspicuously) have been used to construct national identity: history may create culture but culture may equally create history. The play about the Danish prince is almost 'the set text' of the modern debate on identity, a focus for the changing sociopolitical and cultural constructs on the sharp turns of the historical destinies of Europe (Gibinska, Headlam Wells, Pfister, Shurbanov and Sokolova, Sokolyansky, Sorge). Whether in Germany, Poland, Bulgaria, or the USSR, Shakespeare's tragedy became the arena for all major debate, political, aesthetic, and psychological. Henry V, on the other hand, from some perspectives an attempt to create English nationalism and ratify British imperialism (Hattaway) or to create a national enterprise based on commercial transactions (Healy), remained an English commodity which proved difficult or impossible to export. The 'great mechanism', as it is defined by Jan Kott, is manifest not just in tragedies and histories, which obviously set the private in opposition to the public, or in the tragicomedies or romances, so concerned with Europe at one end of the hegemonic scale and Africa at the bottom (Bate), but in comedies as well. We explored ways to move from the master narratives to the production of Shakespearean comedies, concerned as they are not only with renewal, but with wars, with 'noting', and with spying (GomezLara and Portillo, Hawkes, Pancheva, Sorge). Endings of Shakespearean texts are seldom conclusions: in the romances and comedies there is so often a solitary figure left out of the dance, in the tragedies virtue or justice may well be sacrificed to convenience. The ways in which, in the real world, endings, like those of old regimes, prove to be beginnings turned out to be one of the major themes of the conference. The communities of age give way to the communities of youth or, having purged themselves of those whose inflexibility got in the way of living, societies find it necessary to define themselves without

Introduction

21

the opposition of the 'other', the 'evil empire' found in the demonologies of Star Wars and Ronald Reagan. Evgenia Pancheva and Thomas Sorge spoke of what had to be remembered and the realities of self-imposed political amnesia. Forgetfulness can get us off the hook as a kind of forgiveness and can also help in the reconstitution of personal and national identities. Remembering and forgetting: in some ways these determine the art of the theatre director who, out of a welter of detail, must construct a reading that is contained, coherent, cogent. Sometimes the theatre was used to reinforce an established order: at other times its role was oppositional: we heard so often of ways of using Shakespeare for these purposes in the contexts of societies where totalitarian discourses impose an exclusive view of social reality (Gomez-Lara and Portillo, Shurbanov and Sokolova, Sokolyansky) that we wondered how univocal readings of the texts could ever hold sway in a society which calls itself democratic and pluralist. And yet we were reminded constantly of the intractability of Shakespeare's art, the negative capability that from within deconstructs any totalizing reading, the necessary evasiveness of the directorial eye, the unpredictability of the theatrical effect. This instability is inherent not only in what is seen but in those who see it. For what audiences will read into a particular production varies not only from age to age, but from nation to nation, class to class, individual to individual. Plurality of reading is in fact a Shakespearean theme, and, sometimes, this plurality can be disturbing. Terry Hawkes wrote of 'one of the most upsetting entities that a culture can confront: a plural text from which unitary, coherent, totalizing verbal truth has abdicated, and in which competing meanings, competing truths, battle for supremacy.' These meanings are indicative of a restlessness which often disguises the occupation of positions of power by certain groups (Sheen, Shurbanov and Sokolova). Moreover, the fact that Shakespeare is such a conspicuous cultural icon may deter popular audiences, just as a production which is univocally oppositional may exclude the disadvantaged and people who are status-oriented (Gomez-Lara and Portillo). The nature of the seeing eye may also be gender-specific. Political productions may well be those that address themselves not just to the politics of the state but to the politics of sexuality and gender roles (Burt, Hawkins, Headlam Wells). For those from the East, however, sexuality is not a prominent theme at this moment of history. We felt present in Bankya in 1993 at a confluence of history, theory, and culture; we shared a commitment to both the reverent and irreverent in the field of Shakespeare studies, to re-reading, re-working and re-producing his texts. Concordia discors fetibus apta est. our discussions, grounded on difference, had engendered an experience that nevertheless seemed to be something of great constancy. There was, however, a world beyond that green world of ours, and we knew that, although some stability had emerged in the new Europe, the new maps are just new texts, the reading of which must remain provisional.

I THE OLD EUROPE: SHAKESPEARE AND CULTURAL POLICY

F R O M THE U N L O V E OF ROMEO AND JULIET T O HAMLET W I T H O U T THE P R I N C E : A SHAKESPEAREAN M I R R O R H E L D U P T O THE FORTUNES OF N E W BULGARIA 1

Alexander Shurbanov and Boika Sokolova

I Ever since the national revival in the latter half of the nineteenth century Shakespeare has been a dominant presence in the Bulgarian theatre. The received idea of his genius as belonging to all nations is one of the elements in the creation of the modern Bulgarian cultural identity as part of Europe. Until 1947 Bulgarian Shakespeare moved in the orbit of current European interpretations. This was the year of the complete takeover of power by the Communist Party and the quick imposition of the Soviet model on each aspect of national life. A 1946 pamphlet, dedicated to the 330th anniversary of the Bard's death, displayed an amazing variety of viewpoints and approaches by a number of authors. 2 By 1949, however, the dogmatic Stalinist version of Marxism had already become the norm for all intellectual life in the country. It was in that year that several fundamental 'theoretical' articles appeared in the press to postulate the true framework within which Shakespeare's work should be considered. 3 They are closely modelled on normative Soviet aesthetics which upheld the idea of the class character of all art. The value of literary or any other creation depends on its association with the progressive forces of society and, in the final analysis, with 'the people'. This often mythical entity, impersonal as it is, becomes the measure of the truthfulness of artistic expression. All personal cravings and aspirations ought to be subjected to the common good—individualism is equated with egoism and is branded as a deadly sin. Class struggle is the force which drives society forward to

1. The authors would like to thank Mr Vasil Mavrodiev, for many years Chief Librarian of the Higher Institute of Drama, who has dedicated his professional life to collecting the annals of the Bulgarian theatre. The catalogue compiled by him is an invaluable source of information about productions, actors and dramatists. Our thanks are also due to the Rector of the Institute for his permission to use the catalogue. 2. UleKcnup, Co(J>Mfl, IOHM 1946 r. 3. See for instance: KpiCTbo TeHOB, "'XaMAem' B MapKCMnecKO ocBeTJieHMe", B. ynumeACKa 6op6a, 6p. 15, 7.4.1949 r.; MHJIKO TpMropoB, "KaK e nocraBeHa 'PoMeo u JKyAuema' B PyceHCKMH HapofleH Tea-rap", B. JJumepamypen (fipohm, 6p. 29,19.3.1949 r.

SHURBANOV AND SOKOLOVA A Shakespearean

Mirror

25

its ultimate classless perfection. In the name of an abstract love for the masses it generated a lot of concrete hatred. In the sequence of ever-advancing social formations, works of art and literature are regarded as the product and reflection of the particular stage to which they belong, 'socialist realism', as an expression of the highest phase of this progress, is the most perfect method of artistic creation. Its meaning had first been formulated by the Congress of Soviet Writers in 1934 and entered into their constitution as the only acceptable method in literature and criticism. They required from the artist 'a truthful, historically concrete, representation of reality in its revolutionary development', which 'serves the purpose of the ideological remodelling and education of working people in the spirit of socialism'. In order to do so, it was expected to bring together realism (of a typified kind) with romantic heightening. This oxymoronic combination was supposed to foster an optimistic vision of the world and humanity's place in it. The new socialist hero was seen as an active fighter for justice and uncompromising transformer of reality. He is the epitome of the most progressive class in history, the proletariat, and everything is within his reach. This makes him superhumanly strong of body and spirit. Side by side with a long and spirited ground-clearing article entitled 'Hamlet in the Light of Marxism',5 a 1949 pedagogical weekly reviewed the newly published translation of Boris Polevoy's Story of a True Man, one of the most prominent Soviet wartime propaganda novels, about a grounded military pilot who loses both his legs and yet manages to return to normal professional life. The reviewer points out that the basic features of the new socialist hero are his love of life, a life active and full, devoted to the strengthening and the defence of his motherland; his courage in overcoming the hardships of living; his affirmation of man and socialism. These 'True Men' never give way to any difficulty or obstacle, they do not accept that any pain or suffering may be unconquerable. Of course, some critics admit that we cannot expect pre-socialist literary heroes to be of the same superhuman cast, but they should at least come close to it. 'The hero of classical literature was plunged in a tragically irreconcilable contradiction with the surrounding social conditions. These conditions oppressed him and generated in his soul yearnings for a different world in which harmony, peace, beauty and justice would become real. The characters of the past that can live up to this model of perfection are not many, but some of Shakespeare's protagonists are certainly among 4.

JIumepamypHbiu9HiiUKAoneduHecKuucAoeapbt MocKBa, CoBeTCKaa 3Hu,MKJioneflHH, 1987 r.,

crp. 414. 5. See note 3 above. 6. 7.

BopMC IIojieBOM, IJoeecmb o HacmosiuieM nejioeeice, MocKBa, 1947. CeBejiMHa TbopOBa, 'Teposrr", en. CenmeMepu, 6p. 4 , 1 9 6 4 r., crp. 2 1 1 .

26

Shakespeare in the New Europe

them. A newspaper article dedicated to the four-hundredth anniversary of the dramatist's birth makes this abundantly clear: The tremendous power of Shakespeare's tragedies resides in his heroes' fighting spirit. Shakespeare is not content with statement, castigation and protest. He fights, campaigns, sacrifices his most cherished heroes. 8 The author of such exceptional works has to be exceptional in a similar way: his biography is touched u p so as to foreground his belonging to the lower classes of his day, the reduced circumstances of his father's family, his intimate acquaintance with the life of 'the people', etc. A person of such pedigree cannot but be a 'progressive humanist' and a 'great realist'. Thus Shakespeare is elevated to the rank of those exempt from all blemish, biographical or artistic. On the pages of Bulgarian newspapers his portrait appears side by side with that of Lenin, the birthdays of the two falling close together, and the panegyrics devoted to them are difficult to tell apart. In the Narodna Kultura weekly of 25 April 1964 we read the following: O u r people turns a grateful gaze to the work of the great writer, because it has given wings to its inspiration from the Revival down to our own day, because we are living through a historical period when, as in Shakespeare's time, a social formation is doomed to die, so that another one should triumph, the most just, the most h u m a n e in history—Communism. 9 Shakespeare was canonized as an integral part of the literature that models the New Man a n d was accordingly reprocessed. From a m o n g his tragedies Romeo and Juliet and Hamlet held the place of honour in the postwar age. Each refracts in its specific way the ideological pressures of the times that no work, old or new, could hope to escape. Although the period u n d e r review is possessed of a relative h o m o geneity in the whole Soviet bloc, it exhibits a series of more or less distinct stages, each of which affects the history of the reception of these plays and can thus serve as a necessary frame of reference throughout the ensuing analysis. These are (1) the years 1944 to 1947, still largely democratic and pluralistic, though the shadow of intolerant dogmatism is already noticeable; (2) 1947 to 1956, characterized by the massive and brutal imposition of Stalinist power in all areas of life; (3) 1956 to 1964, the unsettled and unsettling Khrushchev era, now promising a more open kind of society and then taking the promise back; (4) 1964 to 1979, the deeply hypocritical Brezhnevian settlement which reconciles the people to the obvious discrepancy between reality and appearance through a mass dissemination

8. r.ToHneBa, "BeJiMK H 6e3CMT>pTeH xyMaHMCT. 400 roflMHM OT poacaeHiieTo Ha YMJIHM IHeKCimp", B. ynumeACKO dejio, 6p.33, 24.4.1964 r. 9. BjiaflMMMp KapaKauieB, "HleKcrwp M Hue", B. Hapodna KyAmypa, 6p.l7, 25.4.1964 r.

SHURBANOV AND SOKOLOVA A Shakespearean Mirror

27

of philistine values; (5) 1980 to 1989, a decade of gradual disintegration and the last desperate attempt (in the case of Bulgaria) to save the d o o m e d system through an obvious reformist pretence; (6) 1989 to the present day, a general painful dismay at the ruins of the old order and uncertainty as to what the future holds. 1 0 T h e only significant Bulgarian divergence from this overall pattern of the Soviet bloc was perhaps the short but eventful rise to power of the national Number One's daughter, Ludmila Zhivkova, who in the late seventies became Minister of Culture and strove to promote the strange idea of making everyday life comply with the laws of aesthetics, thus obliterating the borderline between art and reality. In the context of the ordinary Bulgarian's daily existence this ambition verged on the ludicrous and the insane. Madame Zhivkova died unexpectedly and mysteriously in 1981 and all pretences of creating an earthly paradise were soon abandoned, to be replaced by a general cynicism and disorientation. The collapse of the entire system was inevitable, yet somehow impossible to imagine or predict. The officially established theatre expert Vladimir Karakashev provides a convincing illustration of this. In 1989 he visited the Berliner Ensemble and saw a production of Coriolanus which made him think condescendingly of Shakespeare's 'historical blindness', of his 'despair in the face of the chaos of time'. And in the audience, he concludes triumphantly, it is we who are sitting now, the people of the new epoch, who know well that history is always optimistic. We are sitting in the Berliner Ensemble theatre, within just a few h u n d r e d metres of the Brandenburg Gate and the Reichstag, where humanity has had one of its greatest victories over the forces of darkness and despair. 1 1 A couple of months later an ominous grey wall would collapse on that very spot and leave the 'people of the new epoch' of Karakashev's kind utterly befuddled. Historical blindness indeed, but whose? T h e moral of the story seems to be that it is not safe to find fault with Shakespeare even when you think you are well insured. The faults it is most useful to find in him are our own.

n Two great poems stand at the fountainhead of modern Bulgarian literature. Both are love poems, and both focus on the powers that destroy love.

10. The chronology offered here is the work of the authors, and has no claims to historical authority. 11. BnaflMMMp KapaKauieB, CAOBO U ci^ena ("EpexT cpeury IHeKcnMp"), IIJIOBAMB, 1989 r., crp. 261-267.

28

Shakespeare in the New Europe

The first of them, Stoyan and Rada (1840), by Naiden Gerov, 12 takes u p the t h e m e of love destroyed by family prejudice. T h e other p o e m , The Fountain of the White-Footed Maiden, by Petko Slaveikov, 13 was composed in 1873, the most tragic year for the Bulgarian revolution betrayed in the process of its preparation, and five years before the liberation of the country as a result of the Russo-Turkish War of 1878. The poem marks an important stage in the process of self-analysis of the national consciousness and suggests that a society, capable of defending itself from its enemy through a magnificent display of its power to love, is yet unable to curb its own destructive impulses. The emphasis on the destructiveness of society to a great extent foreshadows the future of the love theme in the literature of the new times, which in 1873 were still unforeseeably distant. Romeo and Juliet made its first appearance upon the amateur Bulgarian stage in 1856, before all other Shakespeare plays, to stay, in times of need, as a political text. Its very choice by the then nascent theatre was surely motivated by political considerations. Theatrical performances h a d a strong influence on awakening the national consciousness, and the Turkish authorities mistrusted them. This explains the preference for love plays, which were easier to pass as being of general human interest. And yet the radical needs of the times demanded plays that could yield radical suggestions. Romeo and Juliet could not offer any specific allegorical-political readings and was very rarely performed. The pre-liberation stage was d o m i n a t e d by J o h a n Ludwig Tieck's sentimental r o m a n c e Siegfried and Genoveva, in which virtue triumphs over the forces of evil and usurpation. The theatre, always political, here chose a text that would adequately translate into allegories the problems of the society in which it developed. The Bulgarian audience discovered in Tieck's play allusions to the Turkish domination and the hopes of liberation connected with Slavic Russia. Romeo and Juliet could not meet the demands of the revolution, but its place in Bulgarian culture was firmly established as soon as the new state began to formulate a new image for itself as 'European'. The textbooks for the national system of schools, that were to instil this notion in the minds of several generations to come, included ancient Greek and Latin authors, French, German and Russian classics as well as Shakespeare's Hamlet, Othello, Macbeth, King Lear and Romeo and Juliet. These defined the context in which Bulgarian culture envisaged its own existence. Judged on the grounds of the various adaptations and imitations, the last play must have had a particularly strong impact. From 1895, when its stage history in the professional theatre began, to the end of the Second World War, which brought about a radical change in all spheres of social 12. HaMfleH TepoB, Crnom u Pada, Ofleca, 1845. 13. IleTKo CnaBeftKOB, "M3BOpi>T Ha SenoHoraTa", Cmuxomeopeuusi 1870-1893, CO4>MH, 1965 r.

SHURBANOV AND SOKOLOVA A Shakespearean Mirror

29

life, Romeo and Juliet was among the most popular of Shakespeare's plays. By contrast, in nineteenth-century Russia it was the least popular of the tragedies. 14 Such differences locate the places of tension which recipient cultures define as meaningful. In this context it might be interesting to mark the prevalence of productions of the love play over those of Hamlet in the period 1944-1980. Viewed from the angle of political resistance, the greater number of appearances of Romeo and Juliet might indicate that the Bulgarian reaction to the new social order was not as strong and defiant as in Poland or Hungary. This is indeed true. From a different perspective, however, it seems to suggest that a particularly painful operation was taking place in a society which traditionally had used the love theme in an obliquely political way, a society whose still powerful patriarchal structures were giving way to a change. And the change was radical in a way unknown in previous history, for it demanded the negation of all traditional attitudes. The principles of the new aesthetics were posited as normative in the interpretation of the play. The much-acclaimed Soviet novel How Steel Was Tempered, by Nikolai Ostrovsky, written in the mid-thirties when the Stalinist grip tightened, suggests among other things that any sacrifice in the name of the revolution is justifiable and that 'true' love can only exist within the class. The propagandist effort involved in naturalizing the inhabitant of the most perfect of societies brought forth the monstrous figure of Pavlik Morozov, the boy who betrays his father because he would not embrace the ideas of the revolution. 16 The message that none of the old emotional and familial loyalties were any good as compared to those of the class and revolution was spelled out in bold type by the propaganda of the times. In 1956 the Bulgarian counterpart of Pavlik Morozov appeared in a play called Katerina Comes to Us, by Mikhail Velichkov. After some internal struggle Katerina turns in her brother to the authorities because he intends to defect to the West. This is the act by means of which she comes to 'us'—positive characters and, implicitly, the audience—to whom life under the new system is an 'obvious' blessing. The other theme, of 'true' love, possible only within the class, can be gleaned even from a random reading of the journals of the 1950s. The March issue of the women's magazine Zhenata Dnes for 1950 14. lOpHft JleBMH, UleKcnup epyccKOu Aumepamype XIX eeica, JleHWHrpafl, 1988 r., cTp. 242243. 15. HHKOJiaii OCTPOBCKMM, Kate 3aKcuisuiacb cmaAb, MocKBa, 1934 r. 16. Pavlik Morozov, a schoolboy in a Soviet village, and his younger brother were killed by their cousin after having reported to the authorities the illegal activities of their father and thus contributed to his arrest in 1931. Official propaganda used the story to show that loyalty to the Party came before family ties. A monument to the young hero with a dedicatory inscription by Maxim Gorki was erected in a Moscow park. (See AjieKcaHflp JIKOBJICB, Tluonep IJaeeA Mopo3oe, MocKBa-JleHHHrpafl, 1936 r.). 17. MuxaMJi BejiHHKOB, Kamepuna udea npu nac, en. Tearmp, 6p.6, 1954 r., crp.3-36.

30

Shakespeare in the New Europe

yields a characteristic example. The front cover features a photograph of a huge rally of women, carrying children and placards with the slogans 'Long Live March 8th', and 'Stalin in All Languages Means Peace*. Inside, in a gesture of easy rewriting of history, a poem brings together the Nazi concentration camps and the intentions of American imperialism. T h e militaristic hysteria of the imperialist world is opposed to ' o u r ' serene peace, where 'Stalin's humane voice resounds continuously'. In this tense, embattled atmosphere appears a love play, which defines the new principles of love's truth. Happiness, by Ivan Vasilev, creates an instructive love triangle consisting of Stoyan, a young Communist and a tractor-driver, Rada, his fiancee, daughter of the richest man in the village, and Yana, a pupil at the school for tractor-drivers, apparently with a working-class background. The message is simple and put forward without any deviousness: a rich man's daughter would always prefer the Sunday dances to the socially useful activity of repairing a tractor. The girl from the class would stick to the job; she is, in fact, the 'true' love found. Immediately u p o n its r e a p p e a r a n c e on the stage after the war, Shakespeare's play was re-cast in this ideological mould. The production of 1949 at Ruse, directed by Georgi Georgiev, came under heavy fire from the influential cultural weekly Literaturen Front in a lengthy critical article which served as a blueprint for many in the years to come. It begins with an exposition of the function of the theatre for the re-education of the working masses, declares the necessity of making it loyal to the new order, and defines the notion of 'true' art. The latter, unlike bourgeois art, is not 'marred by abstractness, formalism and decadence'. The next move comprises the establishment of a flimsy historical parallel between the critic's own age and Shakespeare's as periods of transition, characterized by a high intensity of class struggle. The language is that of warfare: all the virtues of the new socialist hero are destined to triumph over 'conservatism', 'prejudice', etc. The attitude which marks the rift between the old doomed world and the new victorious one is hatred. This bi-polar pattern establishes the stable framework which, for all its modifications, was preserved as the dominant critical structure in the assessment of the achievement or failure of directors. The characters of the play were neatly grouped in two warring camps, which can be entitled 'powers of progress and humanism' and 'powers blocking the way of progress'. The first consists of Romeo and Juliet, Mercutio, Benvolio, Father Laurence, 'the people' and, less committedly, the Prince of Verona. The focus of intensive critical spite is Tybalt, followed by the Capulets and Prince Paris. The critic of the Ruse production distinguishes 'the people' as a character possessing the power to hate. 'The people hates the feud between the two families which has caused it 18. 19.

MBaH BacMJieB, Padocm, en. ^Kenama duec, 6p.3, 1950 r., CTp.14-16. See note 3 above.

SHURBANOV AND SOKOLOVA A Shakespearean Mirror

31

great sorrows. This means that it hates medieval prejudice.' Following the logic of this framework, the 'truly Shakespearean' Juliet becomes a heroic fighter against conventions, an 'apotheosis of the new w o m a n . . . w h o throws off the trammels of scholasticism [?!] and the middle ages'. It is a bit more difficult, however, to squeeze Romeo into the heroic mould, for there are considerable stretches in the play where he is given to despair, lamentations, and other such unheroic actions. Yet the need is that he should be 'courageous and brave throughout to become the destroyer of Tybalt, the epitome of prejudice and the dying social order'. The director is seriously reprimanded for not being able to create either character along the correct lines. Romeo has been cast as a 'sentimental lover who lacks straightforwardness', while Tybalt, 'this most hateful rigid supporter of prejudice' needs re-casting so as to r e n d e r 'in more glaring terms his hatred for the Montagues'. Instead of being a 'humanist philosopher', Mercutio has been shown 'as a garrulous knight': a completely wrong way of seeing him, for Shakespeare, according to the critic, m e a n t him as a 'remarkable representative of the new times, ready to sacrifice himself in the name of truth'. Similar is the problem with Father Laurence, who is presented as a 'cleric, rather than a New Man of the epoch of the Renaissance'. Enviably certain of Shakespeare's support for his interpretation, the critic plays his most powerful card: 'this serious historical tragedy has been treated formalistically and purely theatrically'. T h e director 'has narrowed the expression of socially meaningful issues, obliterated the sharp social conflicts, and used the entire theatrical arsenal to underline the formal side [sic] by expanding the emotional motives of the characters'. The production was soon taken off the stage, to be renewed only three years later by the then young director Vili Tsankov, who in the following decades was to become one of the best and most controversial Shakespeare directors in Bulgaria. The year was 1953, and the political and cultural climate strictly in accordance with Stalinist r e q u i r e m e n t s . N o art remained unaffected. Music was also streamlined in accordance with the new aesthetics. There was a massive output of cantatas and other forms, yet always u n d e r some heroic title—'Pioneer Suite', 'Youth Suite'. The Musical T h e a t r e was disparaged for its repertory of Lehars and von Kalmans. It was in this atmosphere that Romeo and Juliet appeared in six different productions during the 1950s, as opposed to only one of Hamlet. As in the time of the Turkish domination, love plays seemed to go down more easily with the authorities. The already mentioned Ruse production of 1953 is an early example of the strategies of evasion which began to appear in the theatre. The most characteristic among them became the tendency to 'displace' the heroic message by the use of the grotesque and by interruptions in the flow of scenes. The young director was praised for having created 'a bright,

32

Shakespeare in the New Europe

optimistic tragedy, a hymn of victory over the dying tradition of feudalism, shining like a bright dawn, foreshadowing the brilliant day of the coming Renaissance'. From the review, which is a good example of the period's verbosity, it is quite impossible to glean any concrete detail as to what exactly was done on the stage. Yet we learn that 'the sugary sentimentalism has gone, as has the false pathos'. This, however, is true of other extremes in the rendition of passion as well; hatred was toned down through the aestheticized presentation of the scuffles of the young; the Capulets and Montagues seemed ready to abandon the old strife, had it not been for 'the false understanding of h o n o u r ' . 2 0 The director had highlighted the social scenes and at the same time subverted them through stylized gestures and postures, a distance-generating technique. T h e profile of love was also lowered, a feature which would become permanent in productions of the play in the following decades. Still, these were the first steps of a young director. But before they could be followed up, came the exemplary disparagement of Stefan Surchadjiev's production for the National Theatre in 1954. Two diametrically opposite comments appear on the same page of the central evening paper Vecherni Novini in its issue of 31 March 1954. The first, a small note, tells of the great success of the previous night's performance of Romeo and Juliet; the second is a page-long demolishing review of the same production. 2 1 The three key-words that establish its tone are 'struggle', 'hatred', 'people'. T h e critic Stefan Karakostov approaches the play from class-and-party positions and reproduces the earliest model of its postwar appraisal. There is no end to his discontent with the insufficient dose of hatred infused in the production. According to him, Tybalt is a 'mad feudal lord', 'a preying wild cat', 'a warmonger, full of hatred'. Finally, the critic claims that the audience experiences contentment at the death of this tyrant without explaining how he has come to know this. Given the tone and method of this sort of criticism, the assessment of the audience reaction derives simply from the customary equation between the critic a n d Shakespeare, which eventually explains the audience response as unified and legible by virtue of its inhabiting the same system of values. The totality of the pressure for presenting hatred (in the characteristic lexis of Cold War propaganda) enriches the camp of evil characters with the Prince of Verona. We hear that 'his intention is to ride on the back of the people' and that his function in the play is to suggest that 'to forgive the m u r d e r e r s is t a n t a m o u n t to becoming a m u r d e r e r yourself. The director has apparently not been able to see that, nor the fact that Father Laurence is not a quiet, well-meaning cleric but a profound 20. HMKona Bo3flyraHOB, "PoMeo u JKyAuema Ha cueHaTa Ha PyceHCKwa HapoaeH TeaTbp", JJynaecKa npaeda, 6p.30, 5.2.1953 r. 21. CTeaH KapaKocTOB, "PoMeo u IKyAuema B nocTaHOBKa Ha CTe(J)aH ObpHajpKMeB", B. Benepnu Hoeunu, 6p.76, 31.3.1954 r.

SHURBANOV AND SOKOLOVA A Shakespearean Mirror

33

philosophical creation of Shakespeare's genius. The star actor Apostol Karamitev is reprimanded for being deficient in heroic spirit in overcoming the difficulties. A similar Analysis' appeared in the organ of the Communist Party, which adds to the alleged inadequacies of the director the fact that he dwells too much on 'the banal idea of love'. 22 At the other end of the spectrum were the more professionally oriented reviews: these were overwhelmingly positive. Thus the production lived for several seasons in. the meaningful chasm between the criticisms of the ideological watchdogs and the warmest acclaim of the audience. In spite of all, the play remained the most successful production of the theatre over several seasons and a real cornucopia of theatrical fulfilment. Scenes from it were revived as late as 1964 for the Shakespeare celebrations. Three different casts of actors and actresses left a remarkable trail of achievement in it. In the context of the times it stood as a bold gesture in the face of the cultural establishment, as an assertion of the right of the theatre to express more than mere ideological schemes, and of the right of love to be shown as a more powerful human emotion than hatred. This was the last attempt to hold to traditional ways. After it, slowly, in its protean way, the theatre began to turn its face to its own day to give a painful but true diagnosis of its state. Thus we come to the 1960s, when the processes of domestication of the play began to take shape. From an ideological battlefield on which ideas were enforced from without, Romeo and Juliet became a political play in its own right. In the light of the Hungarian revolution of 1956, or the events in Czechoslovakia of 1968, this might be considered an insignificant reaction. However, on their own ground, and in the framework of the culture that modelled them, the low-profile subversive tendencies signalled the end of the Stalinist era. In the 1960s, the theatre began to return to its audience the reprocessed image of 'the people', and of love left without a sphere for its expression. In 1966 Vili Tsankov, older but not wiser, again directed Romeo and Juliet, this time for the Youth Theatre in Sofia. The year was marked by an enhanced sensitivity to 'modernism', the latest target for disparagement by criticism. Tsankov's production conveys the feeling of a society that is unreal, incoherent, mixed, made of parts that do not hold together. His Romeo is a 'Teddy boy', the old Capulet a character out of Moliere, Father Laurence a pimp, Mercutio a jester. 'The people' is a motley crowd, and life in the play is shown as a theatrical performance without any other sense of direction and meaning than the presentation of an all-pervasive deformity. In this incoherent, parodical, uncomfortable world, Romeo and Juliet's love is not the inspired feeling that brings down barriers, but a cocoon in which the two characters seek escape. By giving the hero and 22. CBo6oaa BiMBapoBa, "PoMeo u JKyAuema Ha cijeHaTa Ha HapoflHMH Tearbp "Kptcno Capa(J)OB'\ B. PadomnmecKo dew, 6p.290,17.10.1954 r.

34

Shakespeare in the New Europe

heroine the aspect of characters out of a fairy tale and by isolating them, Tsankov underlines the abyss gaping between them and the grotesque, absurdly discordant and deformed society that surrounds them, an eerie place, impersonal and ugly, a parade of Erasmic fools. The two critics whose articles have been used to reconstruct the production are unequivocal in their condemnation. Both make the point that this is neither Shakespeare, n o r has it anything to do with the world they inhabit. O n the pages of Otechestven Front of 22 April 1966, Ilyana Droumeva declares: This is an 'attempt' to render Shakespeare's immortal tragedy, an attempt that repudiates all notions about it. The characters' names and the text are preserved, but the meaning of these characters and text are different. What is it, more precisely? Is it true that in the context of the modern concept of love a Romeo would not love his Juliet to the end? Is there anything standing in the way of their love? 23 From the pages of Plamuk, April 1966, Georgi Saev adds indignantly: All we see on the stage is r e d u c e d to an unreal everyday existence through the total parody of things beautiful and ugly. Spectacle for its own sake has been raised to a c u l t . . . Spectacle serves as an excuse for the medley of styles, the deformity, the illogical behaviour of characters, the avoidance of tragedy, even the foul language. 2 4 Suffocating in their righteous indignation, the critics refuse to see even a shadow of likeness between the world of the stage and the one that surrounds it. For them, what has been shown is unreal, unconnected with 'life', and certainly with the life of socialist society. The 'foul language' also presents us with a difficulty. The majority of the critics cited so far exhibit a glaring disregard for Shakespeare's text by overlaying u p o n it their bowdlerized notions of what the Bard could have possibly written. So it becomes hard to j u d g e whether the 'foul language' has been added by the director, or whether parts of the original text have been performed so as to become prominent in a way unexpected by the critics. Two one-act plays based on Shakespeare's appeared in 1968. Pancho Panchev's Romeo, Are You Still Alive? is a rare example of a play about the fine romantic feelings of young people, much praised for presenting 'the spiritually wholesome nature of contemporary youth'. 2 5 Ivan Radoev's Romeo and Juliet shows two students who come together for a night and 23. MjiwaHa flpyMeBa, "KaKBo e TBopnecKOTO Kpeflo?... PoMeo u jKyAuema B HapoflHMH TeaTtp 3a MJiaaexTa", B. OmenecmeeH (fiponm, 6p.6725, 22.4.1966 r. 24. TeoprM CaeB, "IIpeflnoHHTaM HleKcnup", en. TlAOM'bK, 6p.4, 1966 r., cTp. 110-111. 25. IlaHHO IlaHHeB, PoMeo, HUMCI oiye jicueeeui, COaH OraHHeB, "B 3amMTa Ha HleKcnup", en. KUHO U qjomo, 6 p . l 7 , 1 9 4 9 r., cnp.8. 36. IlaHTeJieft 3apeB M ap., JIumepamypa 3a 9 miac Ha o6u\oo6pa3oeameAHume mpydoeonoAumexHmecKu yniuiuuia, CO4>HH, 1978 r., cnp.134.

41

SHURBANOV AND SOKOLOVA A Shakespearean Mirror

his discovery of the disparity between the lofty humanist ideal and the baseness of the actual world of his day, as well as to his realization that he will not be able to transform this world by a sheer act of the will. Bourgeois critical thought, it was argued again and again, had amply shown its inability to account for the causes of Hamlet's tragedy. Its chief methodological weakness lies in its attempt to look for these causes in the protagonist's psychology rather than in the social conditions which have shaped it. Marxist criticism was called upon to extricate Hamlet, as well as all other immortal figures of human magnificence, from the spell of petty misinterpretations, and make them as effective as they deserve to be. It is against the background of these assumptions that two film versions of Hamlet, Laurence Olivier's and Grigori Kozintsev's, were assessed by the Bulgarian press in 1949 and 1964 respectively. The earlier one was taken to task quite severely for its 'anti-historical, anti-social and anti-aesthetic' position in presenting the prince as inactive, irresolute and moody, inhabiting no definite land or age, divided between himself and the world. The remaining personages in the film, it was said, cease to be what Shakespeare intended them to be—the bearers of social evil—and are shown in a much more favourable light, so that Hamlet's environment can be freed of its repressive exploitative and misanthropic characteristics and his indignation can be deprived of motives. The director was unmasked as a tool of the interests of his class, who has dealt the hero a mortal blow with his 'poisoned rapier'. 3 The Soviet film, of course, is another matter. Though this may puzzle some people, Hamlet is not a doubter at all. He sees clearly into his time and even into his complex fate. The purpose of his existence is well-defined: it is the irreconcilable struggle against the world of evil. Kozintsev, said a critic, undertakes the extremely brave attempt to raise a classical tragedy to the level of modern consciousness. So, in these two imported versions of Hamlet, we are offered instructive examples of what we should shun and what emulate in our approaches to the play. One of the few Bulgarian productions from the period prior to 1964 has merited some critical attention. The tragedy was staged by Vili Tsankov in Varna in 1956. It is contemporaneous with a Polish milestone production, described by Jan Kott in the following way: The Hamlet produced in Cracow a few weeks after the Twentieth Congress of the Soviet Communist Party...was .. .limited to one issue only. It was a political drama par excellence... 'Watch' and 'inquire' were the words most commonly heard from the stage. In this performance everybody, without exception, was being constantly watched... Everything at Elsinore has been 37. 38.

OrecfraH OraHHeB, "B 3am,HTa Ha IIIeKcnMp", CTp. 8-9. BnaflHMMp CBMHTMJia, "XaMAem Ha Ko3MHU,eB", B. Hapodna

17.10.1964 r.

KyAtnypa,

6p.42,

42

Shakespeare in the New Europe corroded by fear: marriage, love and friendship... Politics hangs here over every feeling, and there is no getting away from it. All the characters are poisoned by it. The only subject of their conversation is politics. It is a kind of madness. To the classic question, whether Hamlet's madness is real or feigned, the Cracow production gave the following reply: Hamlet feigns madness, he puts on, in cold blood, a mask of madness in order to perform a coup d'etat, Hamlet is mad, because politics is itself madness when it destroys all feeling and affection. 39

The orientation of the Cracow production is characteristic of the now growing east European tendency to make Hamlet suggest things about the system we have to live in, which cannot be expressed directly. This is a tendency that started developing quite soon after the above-mentioned congress, at which Nikita Khrushchev made devastating revelations about Stalin's atrocious rule in order to plead for a radical reform of the political order. By this very act, of course, he cast grave doubts on the hitherto unquestionable Communist ideal, insisting at the same time that it remained as sacrosanct as ever and, therefore, above criticism. The Varna production of 1956 took a different, though n o less significant, way of diverging from the official view. O n e reviewer of the time asks in bewilderment: 'How could it happen that Hamlet failed to inspire us with his anticipation of a future world, in which the better part of mankind would share his belief and carry on his fight?'40 Another complains in a similar vein: Hamlet does not pass on the torch of humanism to Horatio. H e locks it u p in his own breast to die with it. Hamlet's personal tragedy does not grow into a formidable social problem. We are sorry for the good, intelligent and noble lad, but we are n o t indignant at his death. The humanist protest, the optimistic drive of the tragic catastrophe does not come through and, consequently, the m o d e r n repercussions of the production are all lost. 41 The m o d e r n repercussions are hardly lost, though they are not what the establishment would like them to be. Neither are they of the Cracow kind. What the Varna production did, much to the disgust of censorship, was to reintroduce the methodically exorcized picture of Hamlet as a private person, a sad and hopeless sufferer in an evil social environment. This individualistic refusal to participate is certainly no less damning to the political set-up than the Polish option of the coup d'etat. It was precisely during those disturbing years of Khrushchevism between 1956 and 1964 39. Jan Kott, Shakespeare Our Contemporary (New York, 1964), p. 59. 40. P. TepoH, "HoBaTa nocraHOBKa HaXaMAem", B. Benepnu HOBUHU, 6p.l768, 19.4.1957 r. 41. HHKOJiaw IlapyineB, "IIpoflT>JixaBaMe pa3roBopa 3a nocTaHOBKaTa Ha XaMAem", B. Hapodna KyAmypa, 6n.l5, 4.5.1957 r.

SHURBANOV AND SOKOLOVA A Shakespearean Mirror

43

that a number of books appeared in Bulgaria—and elsewhere in eastern Europe—which for the first time after the war dared concentrate on the lives of social misfits and lonely, frustrated sufferers rather than the True Men' of yore. Parenthetically, it might be suggested at this point that the Polish and Bulgarian Hamlet productions of 1956 foreshadow the specifically national lines of dissent in the two countries that would develop in the subsequent decades, the line of militant opposition and that of noncooperation. The authorities could not tolerate such attitudes for long. Towards the end of Khrushchev's rule with its nauseating * thaws' and 'freezes', and especially after the succession of the much more Claudian Brezhnev era, Soviet and east European Communist ideologists made a concerted effort to rally all forces behind the Party line. Important speeches were delivered at congresses and meetings, and dozens of publications appeared in the press about the need to fight against the blight of de-heroization in art and literature, a blight that had infiltrated from the degenerate West and infected some of the younger artists at home. It was made clear that the hero of socialist realism can only be the strong-willed, single-minded builder of new life. The features of tiredness, uncertainty, alienation, spiritual morbidity and intellectual disintegration are foreign to our contemporary, who is engaged in constructing the most vital society ever, that of Communism. 42 This is a paraphrase of Khrushchev's own words. A Bulgarian novelist, Ivan Martinov, is reported to have said the following at a conference of artists and trade-unionists in 1964: Our hero cannot be—as with some writers—a small, insignificant person, but rather one who is ahead of the rest, inflamed by our socialist romantic fervour. 43 If we try to apply these renewed injunctions to the literature of the past again, as we obviously must, Marlowe's Tamburlaine would probably comply with them more easily than Shakespeare's Hamlet, but—where there's a will there's a way. However, there was to be less and less will of the desirable kind among directors and commentators from now on. Overt criticism of the regime was out of the question, so oblique allusions to domestic problems had to serve as a substitute. The technique was that of Aesopian language. And it started permeating more and more thoroughly all interpretations of the classics. During the 1964/65 theatre season, Leon Daniel, a director whose work had already made a stir or two, thrilled the audience again with his new version of Hamlet. As we gather from contemporary reviews, 42. 43.

"H.C.XpyniMOB 3a JiMTepaTypaTa M M3KycTBOTo", en. CenmeMspu, 6p.4,1964 r., erp.18. C.Kp., 'TjiaBHMsrr repoM onaKBa", B. Hapodna icyAmypa, 6p.28,11.7.1964 r.

44

Shakespeare in the New Europe This is an updated treatment of the play, directed against imperialism and the hang-over of the personality c u l t . . . A number of characters put us in mind of current dictatorial institutions ... Osric testifies to the time of fear—he is the bureaucrat guarding monarchic order...The indifference, the withdrawal from the anxieties of the spirit, the resignation, the petty selfseeking, the self-isolation within the circle of personal security found in many of the personages, are the true source of power for the Claudian tyrannical regimes. Philistinism is the proper soil for such toadstools as Guildenstern, Rosencrantz, Polonius, etc. The one mentioned last is among the good fathers and subjects who never distinguish between good and evil... Hamlet is no longer the proud spirit, the immensely intelligent, sad and noble human being. He suffers with bared nerves the violations of his environment, often giving in under the pressure and experiencing its deforming impact. This young man, who is about to enter the world of the grown-ups, discovers that he must accept or reject the lie on which the whole of society rests. Daniel's Hamlet is a far cry from the familiar portrait of the well-mannered sceptic and wit, the forerunner of the new age. He is more like a neurotic. And how could it be otherwise in this abnormal, brutal environment? He rattles away almost unintelligibly through the speech about man being 'the beauty of the world' and emphasizes its obverse side, the revolt, the outcry. It is painful to find out that those nearest to you have been betraying you. And for no good reason at all. The utmost Hamlet does in the production is to defy tyranny, to show his disrespect for it, to challenge it. He probably realizes that he will be unable to achieve anything against the power of Claudius and his like. He just tries to make them unmask themselves of the appearance of tolerance and virtue. For an enemy who has lost all patience is less dangerous. He comes out into the open and thus facilitates the formation of a united front of antagonists, who will now fight together and, therefore, can be confident of victory. Hamlet's own historical predicament, however, is that of a member of the Claudian society. He is the heir presumptive and his only meaningful struggle can be for the throne that has been usurped. 44

The reviewer from whom we have been extensively quoting ends his analysis of Daniel's production with the obligatory shibboleths about the evils of class society laid bare by Shakespeare's play, 'which are organically averse to the most humane and noble ideal of our time, Communism'. He makes the familiar point that Hamlet, who is opposed to

44. HaBAap Ao6peB, "Pe^KMCbopCKM npo6neMM B eflHa nocraHOBKa Ha XaMAem", M3eecmusi na MHcmumyma 3a u3o6pa3umeAHu u3Kycmea. Bmpocu na mearmpa u Kunomo, T . I X , 1966 r., CTp.97-115.

SHURBANOV AND SOKOLOVA A Shakespearean Mirror

45

that decadent society, is our contemporary in spirit and an ally of the builders of socialism. However, we should not miss a very important statement at the beginning, that the production attacks not just the usual enemies, capitalism and imperialism, but also the vestiges of our own Stalinist past—the 'personality cult*. Most of the figures surrounding Hamlet are inimical but egoistically prudent and cautiously inactive rather than aggressively vicious. One wonders whether such an environment, in a time of fear, is not the only natural result of the strategy of passive resistance or non-cooperation that was the central reaction to despotism a decade earlier. Hamlet himself, in Daniel's interpretation, is the honest and impatient youth we know, but he has been reduced to a neurotic who is trapped in the vicious circle of his society, perpetuated by general inertia. He finds all big words suspicious, because they are only used to conceal an abominable lie that has become obvious to all. Our 1964 Denmark is a quagmire in which there is no foothold for an active hero. So, Leon Daniel's production manages to combine containment and subversion in a truly Shakespearean manner. It was thus able to survive on a carefully monitored stage and start a new trend in the reception of Hamlet in the Bulgarian theatre. The strategy of the reviewer, Chavdar Dobrev, it should be noted, is similar to that of the director. The subsequent fifteen years, however, did not see any new production of Shakespeare's first mature tragedy that is worth mentioning: the Elsinore of opportunism seems to have tucked away the nuisance of Hamlet's questioning voice. Yet it was in the mid-seventies, when Brezhnevism had reached its peak of complacent philistinism, that Bulgaria was visited by two east European companies with their remarkable versions of Hamlet. One belonged to the Romanian Constantin J. Nottaro Theatre, and its vision was irredeemably gloomy, an interpretation registered by having the performance open in almost total darkness. An unusual insight of this production was that the ghost, whose revelation begins the whole action, was a fake: it was a man dressed up, and that man was none other than the noble Horatio, who was plotting against Hamlet with the aim of putting Norwegian Fortinbras on the Danish throne. The ghost's appearance was stage-managed by Horatio, who also played the role of the apparition in order to lead his credulous friend straight into the trap. Thus director Chernesku treated everybody, without a single exception, as Hamlet's enemies, aggressive and ruthless. This is the officially prescribed 'hostile environment' with a vengeance. The allusions to the general atmosphere of mutual suspicion and uncertainty characteristic of the region as a whole and of Ceaucescu's nightmarish regime in particular were inescapable. The tables had now been ironically turned on those who had originally designed the black-and-white pattern for their own ends. It is important to stress that the ubiquitous presence of treachery and

46

Shakespeare in the New Europe

plotting, suggested already by Daniel's production as the norm of the community under dictatorship, and the resulting utter loneliness of the individual, which thwarts all his actions and dooms him to a maddening despair, has become the very focus of Chernesku's version. The other production was the celebrated Soviet one staged by Youri Lubimov at the Taganka Theatre. The unforgettable Vladimir Visotsky gave us a prince with a guitar, who could be readily empathized with by any young person in an east European audience. He was surrounded by a disgusting crowd of mediocrities invested with power, and his decency and probing intelligence prompted him to grapple with them in word and action at every opportunity. This treatment again seems to be following the official scheme of radical opposition down to the minutest detail. The catch is that one was made to suspect, as contemporary reviews show, that Lubimov's Elsinore has been modelled on something much closer to home than the evil capitalist West. The critical eighties saw at least four Bulgarian Hamlets that brought this 'domesticating' tendency to a head. Poet and director Nedyalko Yordanov staged the play in Burgas in 1981. An enthusiastic review appeared at once in the most influential central weekly, Narodna Kultura. It was written by Koprinka Chervenkova, a prominent journalist who later became one of the most outspoken opponents of the official Party line and was ostracized shortly before the 1989 revolution. She wrote: The most salient aspect of this production is its sociopolitical framework... The entire construction is reminiscent of the sinister cycle of power struggle characteristic of the chronicleplays. The hero's behaviour is free of the abstract craving to set the time right, he is faced with a much more actual and horrific problem: in order to fulfil his potentialities he should become part of the system of new reality. Hamlet is reluctant to accept its rules and methods, because he does not want to be identified with his environment. The alternative for him, however, is to withdraw into the posture of a helpless and frustrated onlooker. [The third option of an open conflict is not even considered—it is ruled out by the circumstances.] In this age of brutality and uniform mediocrity a Hamlet can have no actual existence. Such is the core of his tragedy. But it is simultaneously the tragedy of his time: by destroying its heroes it sentences itself to destruction. 45 This most penetrating analysis, together with the production it focuses upon, can be seen as an oblique yet quite transparent indictment of a dictatorial regime whose very nature must bring it logically to a catastrophe. Hamlet's dilemma, as outlined by Chervenkova, had truly been the 45. KonpuHKa *IepBeHKOBa, "EypracKHHT jjpaMaTHHeH Teartp B Cocfwsi XaMAem", B. Hapodna KyAtnypa, 6p.l8,1.5.1981 r.

SHURBANOV AND SOKOLOVA A Shakespearean Mirror

47

burden whose weight crushed generations of young people, and was certainly experienced as a personal drama by both the reviewer and the director, who had chosen the compromise path of survival without fully relinquishing their individualities. Vili Tsankov, who had already directed Hamlet in Varna in 1956, did so again in 1983, this time in Sofia, and the new production prompted several critics to analyse its message at considerable length. One of these, Lada Paneva, was especially thorough and suggestive, so the following account will be based mainly on her observations supplemented by a few others. 46 First of all, it is noticed by the reviewers that the play has declined from tragedy, not just to the overtly political chronicle drama, but to a kind of tragic satire or grotesque. All the inhabitants of Elsinore look tired, as if after a carnival but before the masks and costumes have been taken off. The characters form a mass of benumbed, evil, soulless automata moving around without a thought of their own and propelled only by animal instincts. Their gestures are those of puppets, their intonations are affected, their behaviour fully ritualized. Only the shell of words has remained in their minds—words primarily associated with court etiquette and meant to freeze all motion or change. The techniques of the eastern theatre are quite appropriate here. The overall atmosphere is shaped by two basic factors, which at first sight may seem incompatible: (1) everybody is afraid and suspicious of everybody else—an attitude which is reinforced by the invariable presence of the mysterious guards dressed in black, a secret police keeping a close watch on everyone all the time; (2) feasts are incessantly held in the palace with an ostentatious bravura, which must convince the public that the throne is secure and raise the king's own dampened spirits. Claudius, a puppet like the rest, only bedecked with the greatest number of trinkets, is of particular interest as the centre of this grotesque circle. His reign, as Paneva argues, is not seen by the director as a deviation from the normal course of history but rather as a mere link in a millennial dictatorial tradition which, by the way, will be certainly continued by Fortinbras. Denmark has always been and will always remain a prison. What is special in this case is that the king is a low-browed fellow of primitive views and base ambitions. Having appropriated the machinery of power created by more able monarchs, he is using it with exceptional cruelty. He is an absolute dictator, who is none the less constantly aware of his inadequacy to this position and is therefore divided between a rather thin show of self-assurance and buoyancy and the much more real and constant animal fear of treason, of revenge, of the unexpected blow. The secret warriors are naturally in his service, but one gets the feeling that they will continue to sniff and kill even when he is gone. 46. Jlafla IlaHeBa, "Xduuem-caTHpHHHaflpaMa!",en. TIpoSAeMU na u3Kycmeomo, 6p.l, 1984 r., CTp.45-48.

48

Shakespeare in the New Europe

In this setting, Hamlet's critical faculty can be of little material use. From the very first, the prince appears with his hair cropped down to the skin, reminding the spectators of a madman, a military recruit or a prisoner. His wasted half-naked body invites associations with the labourcamp. It is difficult to know whether he is in his right mind or is one of the inmates of the great madhouse of Elsinore. However, his neurotic state is quite understandable. From a thinker and a fighter he has been reduced by circumstances to a hopeless sufferer, who is constantly on the defensive, forced into an absolute loneliness, continually spied upon by the guards and torn between the instinct of self-preservation and the no less urgent need to spit out the truth in the face of the oppressors. His mask in the general post-carnival entertainment, then, is that of the Fool. The problem for us in the audience is that Tsankov's Hamlet will not take off this mask even for the briefest moment, even for our sakes. It may be that he does not trust anyone, including us; but whatever the reason behind it, his mask, through constant wearing, has come to be his face. Feigned madness becomes real. The unnatural social mechanism has managed to absorb even its most formidable opponent, the clear-minded dissident. The finale is especially eloquent in this respect. Hamlet is forced to join one of the many ceremonies of the court, which happens to be the ceremony of his own physical destruction. The duel is staged as a carefully designed though grotesque ballet, and Hamlet obediently performs the steps prescribed for him by the choreographer. Murderer and victim become interchangeable in this weird dance. The dissident as the tyrant's fool—as the tyrant's tool perhaps? A thought that, together with that of the frightening resilience of the secret guards, has most awfully plagued our post-totalitarian years. One of the most courageous critics of the ancien regime in Bulgaria, the poet Konstantin Pavlov, has recognized his—and not only his—inclusion in the great show of yesteryear in a recent poem employing the theatre metaphor and entitled accordingly: THEATRE APPEAL47 We shall now take our leave, the old actors, Both these and those. From our multiple self-repetition: 'Remember how I killed you?' 'Remember how you killed me?' Murder becomes theatre: the dead are given the floor. But!—

47. KoHCTaHTMH IlaBJioB, "TeaipajieH npM3MB", AZOHUO cAadica, CO4>MH, 1991 r. (A literal translation of the poem in English has been made by the authors of the paper for the nonce.)

SHURBANOV AND SOKOLOVA A Shakespearean Mirror

49

no harsh words for the murderer! We don't need such a play. So I appeal: Let the negative characters show mercy to their positive brethren. There's no other way out, such as Revenge And, in general, this theatre is no longer ours. Let's take up our own bodies: Both these and those. Without tears and without theatricality Farewell all. Lada Paneva concludes her review in the following way: The closing scene is important for the completion of the theme of Tsankov's production: having arrived against the background din of military trumpets, with a determined step and an iron hand, Fortinbras gives a silent order that Horatio's blabbing mouth be gagged. The new dictator has decided to cover up his predecessor's bloody trail in order to secure his own reign. 48 This is but a thinly veiled allusion to Brezhnev's strategy of covering the Stalinist past with oblivion. Thus it is proved, the reviewer goes on, that suffering, moaning, the odd spontaneous gesture, the waving of an unexpected dagger in the air are not the proper means to overthrow a dictatorship. What is necessary is a continuous struggle. The play is a call for concerted action against a social order that is immensely dangerous for the individual as well as for the society itself. All characters in contact with this authority are morally crippled. The young become its victims. The ones who adapt to it—like Rosencrantz and Guildenstern—perish, and so do the others who reject it—like Hamlet and Laertes—or those who have not been able to find themselves yet—like Ophelia. Youth is being destroyed systematically, and this very fact becomes a verdict. 49 The Yordanov/Chervenkova thesis about the self-destructiveness of despotism is obviously elaborated upon by Paneva. Hers is, of course, not a political pamphlet but a theatre review. Yet, it must be repeated, political discourse in those days was of necessity oblique, Aesopian, and Hamlet could serve its purposes as well as any other classical work of literature. It

48. 49.

Jla^a IlaHeBa, "XoAuem-caTMpMMHa apaMa!", crp.47. Jla^a IlaHeBa, "Xflut/iem-caTMpimHa flpaMa!", cnp.47.

50

Shakespeare in the New Europe

was approximately at the same time that the present-day President of Bulgaria, Dr Zhelev, published a socio-philosophical book entitled Fascism, which was allegedly a study of that historical p h e n o m e n o n but was in fact meant to show how much it had in common with the system in which we were then living and which was supposed to be its opposite. The true message of the book was, of course, promptly recognized by the ideological police, the unsold copies were destroyed, the staff of the publishing house were severely purged and the author was persecuted until he became a leader of the growing nationwide dissident movement. T h e remaining two productions need not detain us. O n e , staged by young director Ivan Dobchev in 1988 far from the capital in the southern city of Khaskovo, continued Vili Tsankov's line of turning Hamlet into a sadly ridiculous clown, deprived of his traditional dignity, wrapped up in disgusting rags, and utterly crushed by the ruthless social machine. The other one, of the previous year, put on in the prestigious National Theatre and featuring one of the most popular film actors, Stefan Danailov, in the title role, was a fruitless attempt to create a timeless Hamlet, which tried to strike roots in the age-old theatre tradition rather than in any contemporary concern. This is an interesting proof of the confusion of official cultural institutions in Bulgaria on the very eve of the Grand Collapse, leading t h e m to the very kind of escapism which they had most vehemently denounced as decadent bourgeois aesthetics a quarter of a century earlier. The choice for the part of Hamlet of an actor who was nearly fifty and had achieved everything in a Claudian kind of society is indicative. If we are to try and draw some conclusions about the stage history of Hamlet in Communist Bulgaria, it should perhaps first be pointed out that the massive and relentless pressure of ideology managed, for better or worse, to turn Shakespeare's immortal tragedy into a largely sociopolitical rather than psychological or philosophical drama. It did not quite succeed in turning Hamlet himself into the single-minded and clear-headed warrior of historical progress who would pass the torch of revolution to Horatio and so on—on a par with the new socialist hero—but it did establish an irreconcilable opposition between him and his environment. The fact that it proved impossible to cure Hamlet of his individualistic and doubting disposition, even after he had been forced to join dejectedly the ritual of his own death, is the most positive lesson to be drawn from the whole long and painful experience. This intractability of the material gave the theatrical discourse around Hamlet the energy to carry on its own struggle for a m o r e h u m a n e society—exactly what the official ideology had wanted it to do in the first place. That the high priests of this ideology eventually came to regret their earlier insistence cannot be blamed on any subsequent change in the play itself. O n e thing seems abundantly clear and it has already been expressed 50.

>KejieB, Xejiio, Qaiuu3MT>m, COCJMH, 1982 r.

SHURBANOV AND SOKOLOVA A Shakespearean Mirror

51

by Jan Kott: 'Hamlet is like a sponge. Unless produced in stylized or antiquarian fashion, it immediately absorbs all the problems of our t i m e / 5 1 The ideologists learned this lesson too late. IV With the establishment of the Communist Party as an unrivalled political power in Bulgaria in the late 1940s, the newly created ideological machine tightened its grip on the theatre and prescribed the one acceptable interpretation of Shakespeare. In spite of the pressure put on it, the theatre succeeded in carrying on some of the lines of the pre-war liberal tradition, and by the mid-1950s more p r o m i n e n t signs of a subversive strategy based on it start appearing. This consists in what was denounced as the 'abstract', 'unhistorical' approach to the plays. Very soon there began a process of debunking of the previous romantic conception of the heroes in defiance of the official requirement to fashion them after the True Man type. Gradually, the theatre turned to the growing problems of the new social order and addressed them in the only possible, indirect, allusive way, to which the already canonized 'classical' texts lent themselves particularly well. Romeo and Juliet established a permanent presence on the stage, while Hamlet achieved a peak only in the critical eighties after an almost complete absence during the stagnant seventies. The more even and consistent stage history of the love play during the totalitarian period is probably due to its ability to present a tamer political appearance to the authorities. Criticism, which is at first obtrusively officio\is and prescriptive, undergoes i n n e r differentiation. Some reviewers become more analytical in defining the hidden political implications of the most interesting productions, thus helping them realize their subversive potential. Shakespeare's dramas participate in the ideological deconstruction of socialism, reflecting critically upon each stage of its development, anticipating and then adumbrating its final collapse. The fact that this particular author was singled out to play such an important political role is first of all due to his prestigious status as a great writer, but also to the particular n a t u r e of Renaissance drama, which has been defined by J o n a t h a n Dollimore as interrogative rather than transcendent. 5 2 Both directors and reviewers made the most of this characteristic in order to discuss the hot issues of the day. The discontinuity of Jacobean dramatic characters 5 3 enabled them to shift the accents of interpretation subtly and meaningfully to suit the needs and preoccupations of each particular period. In the last analysis, 'Shakespeare our contemporary' as a slogan of the new 51. Kott, Shakespeare Our Contemporary, p. 64. 52. Jonathan Dollimore, Radical Tragedy (Brighton, 1986), p. 8. 53. Dollimore, Radical Tragedy, pp. 59-63.

52

Shakespeare in the New Europe

ideology became ironically true. The ideological machine backfired. The discordant world of totalitarian eastern Europe, artificially held together, abruptly came to an end after the fall of the Berlin Wall. The year 1989 brought about the collapse not only of a political system but, for millions of people, of the very notion of order. Romeo and Juliet became again the first play of Shakespeare's to be staged after the changes, in a symptomatic production. Almost symbolically, its first performance took place on the stage of the Student Centre in Sofia, where the company of the Youth Theatre had been performing for several seasons, evicted by an endless 'reconstruction' from its home. The homeless troupe presented to the young a post-modern, post-totalitarian version of the play. Almost a pantomime, with only a few of the 'high' speeches preserved, placed in an absurdist setting of collapsing plaster columns and dummies, dismembered and assembled on the spot, performed with a breathtaking tempo, the play reached its end in a bemused, helpless 'Why?', spoken by Juliet. Both she and Romeo, as well as all other characters, were no more than dummies themselves, constantly replacing parts of their bodies by those of the real dummies. As one critic remarks, for the young director T. Moskov 'playing is the element of characters. But is it the only possibility?' 54 Where the critic seems to have doubts, the director does not. His stage is a world where language has ceased to be a way of communication, where chaos has displaced existing meanings. Stage and life have completely merged. At the end of the Turkish domination, in The Fountain of the White-Footed Maiden, Slaveikov had brooded upon the destructive forces in Bulgarian society. Some hundred years later the productions of Shakespeare's love play suggest a painful moral and social disintegration. 1993 opened with the first post-totalitarian Hamlet, put on in Sofia by another young director, Alexander Morfov, with the troupe of the First Private Theatre. It is a celebration of the new sense of absolute freedom. And, at the same time, of absolute disorientation. Shakespeare is, of course, again 'deconstructed'. Scenes are reshuffled and reshaped in the most unexpected ways. The clown who opens the spectacle laughs at the very idea that the author has been deemed a genius. All is words, words, words, he says. When they are spoken too often they become no more than a series of sounds signifying nothing. As soon as Hamlet enters the stage, he makes sure that we do not come to like him. The prince is obviously a raving maniac, like everybody else in Elsinore. Dressed in a black great-coat, top unbuttoned in a fashion reminiscent of anarchism, like everybody else he is deadly serious and awfully tedious. In the world of the Danish court, drowned in darkness, his rebellion is reduced to chain-smoking in near stupor, under deafening hi-fi music, sharing the 54. HMKona BaHflOB, "CMMCJIM M OTJIOMT>I;M OT PoMeo u jKyMiema" B. KyAmypa, 29.3.1991 r.

6p.l3,

SHURBANOV AND SOKOLOVA A Shakespearean Mirror

53

wine bottle with his comrades Horatio and Marcellus, while Claudius the usurper, unperturbed, treats himself to a classier flask of whisky in an illuminated alcove upstage. Claudius finds the tactics of non-cooperation unimpressive. Hamlet's disposition is definitely murderous but ill-advised. His first and only deed of valour is to stab to death the blabbering and giggling grave-digger, who makes too much indecently merry noise from the grave. The rustic's foul mouth is stopped, but the laughter that Hamlet's world cannot bear erupts with much greater force as soon as the players arrive in their gay motley costumes. The stage is at once suffused with light and colour and clamour. Hamlet and the rest of the dramatis personae are swept off and forgotten. Before us unfolds an ingenious comedy, which turns the tragic plot into a hilarious rollicking farce which goes on and on. The play does not end until the clown of the prologue chokes with laughter. At last we have been offered a Hamlet without the prince. And we have seen that it is good. Though there is one little thing that remains in the back of our minds in the midst of all the gaiety: this is, of course, not Hamlet. And one wonders whether there will come a time when we shall be ready to see Shakespeare's great tragedy again. Will our trust in words ever return after they have been prostituted for so long? Will high seriousness ever be restored to its age-old possessions? The owners of the first private theatres in eastern Europe 55 will not be keen to see that happen too soon. They would rather keep the public well entertained and not provoked into thinking—at least until they have established themselves as the new masters of the said public. The latter is so tired of living in the sombre world of Elsinore that it enjoys the carnivalization of all reality and is willing to sacrifice Shakespeare for a respite. How long this willingness will last only Merlin can tell.

55. The First Private Theatre in Bulgaria is sponsored by one of the newly established companies. In the emerging market economy in eastern Europe and the drastic reduction of government support for the arts, it is feared that private business organizations, some of them perhaps laundering the old regime's money and turning it into perfectly respectable capital, will step in to finance and eventually control the media.

BURIDAN'S ASS BETWEEN TWO PERFORMANCES OF A MIDSUMMER NIGHT'S DREAM, OR B O T T O M ' S TELOS IN THE GDR AND A F T E R

Thomas Sorge

As c u r r e n t Shakespeare criticism almost habitually starts out with an anecdote, it may n o t seem totally outrageous to begin this p a p e r by recounting some impressions both anecdotal and highly subjective. In 1969, when I attended the annual Weimar Shakespeare Festival for the first time, most of the critical discussions on the subject of the conference, 'Cultural Heritage—the Present—Prognostications', 1 centred around a production of A Midsummer Night's Dream by the Deutsche National theater, Weimar. Participating myself in a students' performance of Gammer Gurton 's Needle, I was particularly interested in the function and status- allotted to amateur productions at the time. The most memorable remark on that point, in fact the only one I have retained, was by a m e m b e r of a workers' amateur theatre, who summed up the efforts of his group in the sentence: 'We have recognized ourselves in the mechanics'. The response to this was a mixed one: while some of the roughly 300 participants in the session seemed to be mildly embarrassed, the majority answered with approving smiles, benevolent laughter, even applause. I myself, as far as I can recollect, felt embarrassed while applauding, too: as a m e m b e r of an amateur group I thought that my colleague had applied the wrong standard, that is, that of professional theatres. But as a young citizen of the GDR, which was just embarking on the celebrations in h o n o u r of its twentieth anniversary, I felt that our own group had done well in contributing to a festive, communal occasion; consequently, I was inclined to identify both with Shakespeare's fictional mechanics, who had at least tried to contribute their share to the play's wedding finale, and with the real amateur actor's recognition of his own role within a larger social event. Not that this tiny, but perhaps symptomatic, contradiction between selfdetermination and political identification has been a constant thorn in the flesh ever since. O n the contrary, I only remembered this episode twentythree years later when the Deutsche Nationaltheater, Weimar, presented its first post-GDR version of A Midsummer Night's Dream to an electrified 1. 'Erbe—Gegenwart—Prognose'; cf. Amin-Gerd Kuckhoff s introductory paper in Shakespeare-Jahrbuch 106 (1970), pp. 29-62.

SORGE Bottom's Telos in the GDR and After

55

all-German audience. Quite embarrassed (but eventually applauding), I recognized myself again in Shakespeare's mechanics. The difference, however, could hardly have b e e n m o r e m o m e n t o u s . While Fritz Bennewitz's 1969 production of the Dream was aglow with all-inclusive rays of social harmony, getting stronger and stronger as the play moved towards its comic denouement, Alexander Haussmann's 1992 version of the play left n o r o o m for a comic compromise between the aristocratic A t h e n i a n s / W e s t G e r m a n s and the m e c h a n i c s / E a s t G e r m a n s . T h e former production had endorsed an optimistic view of the process of history over against its bleaker 'terrorist' or futile 'Abderitist' alternatives that Kant had already pointed out in his Contest of Faculties. As the dramatic narrative moved from conflict to reconciliation, so history at large was seen to find its telos (a term which did not belong to my critical arsenal then) in the GDR as part of the new social formation that was about to inherit the globe (and had, for that matter, already manifested this within the theatrical microcosm of a successor of the Globe). In 1969, the mechanics were shown to represent the most vigorous, most committed, and most conscientious social group of the whole of Athens. The future of Athens was seen to be largely connected with their own development. Clearly, they were on their way in. In 1992, however, Quince and his depraved followers in their already threadbare garments Made in GDR tried to ingratiate themselves with a suddenly accessible, glossy society that could not care less for them. Their engaging sloppiness, their chummy sense of solidarity which more than anything else branded them as outsiders, got lost when they staged the play within the play to an audience accustomed to be so much embroiled in their egocentric affairs of love and property that they had not taken notice of anything else, but had virtually died of boredom and surfeit. Here, clearly, the mechanics were not only on their way out, they had simply gone astray. And while Haussmann's newly-married lovers, before falling petrified from their drawing-room chairs, went t h r o u g h several versions of a Dance of Death, Bennewitz's lovers had revealed an affinity to the mechanics' concluding Bergomask dance (V.i.347): T h e impact of the dance testified to what we earlier called the capacity for resolving contradictions of process in a general sense. T h r o u g h o u t the production, the lovers remain more or less aloof from the mechanics. This evokes contradictory emotions in the audience: for you are shown how individuals who made progress in controlling their fate do not prove equally progressive over against other people. But when confronted with the dance a change becomes visible, or at least the hint of a possible alternative sympathetic attitude. Notice the exit of the lovers: their looks and emotions are, perhaps despite themselves, 2.

Cf. I. Kant, Der Streit der Fakultaten (Leipzig, 1984), pp. 80-1.

56

Shakespeare in the New Europe

captured by the mechanics' dance. Although finally exiting, they nevertheless remain affected and influenced by the play [within the play] and by the dance. The varying intensity with which different characters react points once more towards perspectives and developments even if...they are not explicitly manifest in the following course of the action.3 Curiously, the critique of the aristocratic sphere by means of a mechanical world of play and commitment does not seem to have been the only major objective of the 1969 project. Bennewitz himself, providing a kind of directorial introduction to the Weimar Dream by means of his keynote lecture to the 1969 Festival, called upon the audience to locate the four lovers 'in the centre of our play' and to realize that 'midsummer night does not obscure but illuminate the day'.4 Harmony was the key-word. Harmony achieved through social activity and integration was the message. From such an angle it now becomes possible to stand the preliminary anecdotal impression on more solid ground. Thus, it can be ascertained that the remark 'We have recognized ourselves in the mechanics', found its benevolent authorization in the annual report of the Deutsche Shakespeare-Gesellschaft, Weimar. And its author can now be identified as a member of the workers' theatre group VEB Waggonbau, Gotha. The nature of this authorship, however, appears to have been much more in the way of imitatio rather than inventio. Already in 1964, in connection with Shakespeare's quatercentenary concurring with the GDR's fifteenth anniversary, amateur actors were said to have regarded themselves as 'descendants of Peter Quince'. This notion of emulating the professional theatres as well as Shakespeare and other 'classic' dramatists or, more generally, the Dichter und Denker, had gained considerable momentum in the sixties because it provided a useful, seemingly non-ideological pattern on which people in the GDR could fashion themselves, or could be fashioned, into the people of the GDR and of its underlying social-political system. I have discussed this subtle surface phenomenon of a power discourse at length elsewhere. In this paper, however, I should like to draw attention to the topos of artistic metamorphosis not just as a disguised expression of a dominant ideology, but as a contested site on which various interests tried, however unconscious of any subversive purpose, to 3. R. Rohmer, 'Beitrage zum Kolloquium uber das Thema ERBE—GEGENWART— PROGNOSE', in Ibid., p. 67. 4. F. Bennewitz, 'Ein Sommernachtstraum am Deutschen National theater Weimar', in Ibid., p. 28. 5. Cf. 'Die Deutsche Shakespeare-Gesellschaft im Geschaftsjahr 1969', in Ibid., p. 273. 6. Cf. T. Sorge, 'The Sixties: Hamlet's Utopia Come True?', Litteraria Pragensia 1 (1991), pp. 33-44. Cf. also, in a more extensive context, M. Pfister, 'Hamlet und der deutsche Geist: Die Geschichte einer politischen Interpretation', Shakespeare Jahrbuch (West) (1992), pp. 13-38.

SORGE Bottom's Telos in the GDR and After

57

assert themselves. In fact, the dominant objective is probably only the most easily recognizable feature of what was a very complex situation then. The state and its controlling institutions chose to represent their relationship to the general population in the starkly patriarchal image of a father and his eagerly learning children, or of a master and his assiduous apprentices. Summing up a meeting of amateur actors and actresses in Dresden, for example, the * amateur players' zest for learning' was seen to be located in a 'propitious climate of general learning in all walks of GDR life': The pleasure of organizing meaningful spare-time activities is added to the self-confidence instilled by a satisfying occupation in the production of material or intellectual goods. More than 300 amateur theatre groups regularly cooperate with professional artists. Besides, for a long time there has already been a system of beginners' and advanced courses lasting three years, during which far more than a thousand amateur directors... acquired skill and knowledge. Of course, we have not yet reached the required profundity everywhere. Nevertheless, the amateur players' general and specialist knowledge [Bildung] has been growing continuously and systematically. The Shakespeare anniversary provided the occasion to proceed on our way towards a common possession of the arts and towards the Educated Nation [gebildete Nation] ? On the one hand, this late appropriation of the concept of the perfectibility of humanity received its sanction from an already accomplished political vanguard that in turn managed to don a Promethean guise borrowed from the artistic vanguard of classical German culture, including its admiration of Shakespeare. On the other hand, the amateur's emulation of the professional artist, which was ideally to achieve such a high standard that there was nothing 'separating [left between] the actors of the Globe Theatre and Peter Quince', 8 can also be read as a Utopian overcoming of the growing differentiation within GDR society brought about by the wellknown pressures of modernization. Art, especially the cooperative project of staging plays, was the implicit proof of an organic social fabric jointly woven by individuals situated on all levels and dispersed across diverse sub-systems. Despite the strong political motivations of such ideological representations—the authorization of an enlightened party leadership and the legitimization of an alternative social model to that of West Germany, especially after the building of the Wall in 1961—we should beware of restricting the analysis to such explanations. Otherwise we would be unable to account for the relative appeal the pattern had had after all. For beneath the by now overt political coordinates there is the hidden 7. S. Schneider and K. Horning, 'Die Nachfahren des Herrn Peter Squenz. Shakespeare im Laientheater der DDR', Shakespeare Jahrbuch 104 (1968), pp. 266-7. 8. Schneider and Horning, 'Die Nachfahren', p. 268.

58

Shakespeare in the New Europe

romantic agenda of far longer standing: an attempt which tried to come to terms with the anxieties and convulsions of an industrialized modernity. The works of the artist as manifestations of non-alienated, self-determined work were certainly m e a n t to represent palpable, (seemingly) already existent examples of what a socialist Germany had in store for everyone if only everyone abided by its rules. And the self-determined collectiveness of an amateur theatre group was certainly insinuated to be the litmus test for what individuals might feel free to do in the social macrospace, represented as a homogeneous totality in which people's activities achieved their ends undistortedly and received unmitigated gratification. But at the same time and, as it were, as a material consequence of those ideological representations, there were the subsidized amateur groups for which so many locales had been opened up. The cultural practices of these groups often went beyond the political expectations bestowed upon them. In fact, the call for harmony mentioned above can partly be seen as a reaction to the very success of amateur theatre groups or of lay artists in general, who had (with the firm intention of helping socialism on its way forward) been concerned with the representation of real contradictions rather than illusory harmonies. This trend, by the way, was n o t only found within the amateur drama movement. The GDR leadership had invested considerable sums to establish a national (i.e. East German) culture; but the success of those investments was accompanied by a growing critique of GDR life from the very cultural organs that they had sponsored—a development which soon resulted in the notorious Eleventh Plenary Session of the Central Committee of the ruling party in December 1965, when drastic decisions were taken to stem the tide of critical films, books, poems, plays, etc. But even as early as 1963, officially sanctioned voices were worried about the general state of dramatic art, which was allegedly too down-toearth, too oblivious of the laws of history underlying events and actions. Thus an article called 'How timely are our plays?' criticized an ideologically doubtful use of dramatic language and advocated a return to a more elevated 'classical' style: [T]he so-called common people do not 'call a spade a spade' as can still often be found in the literature [of the GDR], but they speak ceremoniously, full of great dignity. They have high 9. Similar totalizing cultural policies can by no means only be found in Germany, or in socialist systems. The 1919 Newbolt report, for example, with its Carlylean/Arnoldian stress on cultural values, may be assessed as an attempt to counter acute social conflicts in Great Britain. On a deeper level, it can be regarded as one of the less successful strategies to provide a stable identity within the disturbing process of modernization. 10. Cf. H.G. Huttich, Theater in the Planned Society: Contemporary Drama in its Historical, Political, and Cultural Context (Chapel Hill, NC, 1978), pp. 132-40.

SORGE Bottom's Telos in the GDR and After

59

views of life, of living together, of the world and of politics. Disorderly and formless colloquial speech, which can be found in many of our plays and which is ultimately but a vehicle for promoting the action (and which the dramatists would love to do without if the plot could be staged without dialogue) is totally unfit for revealing the prospects of characters, their genesis and t h e i r d e v e l o p m e n t , the b a c k g r o u n d of the r e p r e s e n t e d e v e n t s . . . For an artist, who is able to survey the world and people, and who possesses an ordered view of life [Weltbild], a disorderly, disorganized language, that sets the essential on a par with the contingent, is useless. 11 T h e subsequent canonization of classical drama, with a 'classically' conceived Shakespeare in the forefront, can thus be seen as a struggle for the control of a newly-emerging cultural terrain, including that of amateur theatres. While demanding an ideal self-determination, it inadvertently paid respect to the incipient real self-determination of the theatre groups. Of course, the production of overtly critical plays both on professional and on amateur stages became increasingly difficult. But the repression of a certain representational content, though clearly demarcating the limits of theatrical self-determination and e n h a n c i n g the awareness of the imposition of ideological blinkers, by no means turned the theatres into obedient tools of conformity. While the rise in the production of classical plays on the professional stage led to attempts at using them cunningly, later glaringly, for subversive interventions, amateur groups t e n d e d to sharpen their own perception in the course of rehearsing a 'classic'. Thus a young actor from the said workers' theatre in Dresden commented on the mechanics in A Midsummer Night's Dream that they needed 'much circumspection, which challenged all their strengths, in o r d e r to avoid giving offence at the court of Theseus'. The actor went on to ask whether the fear of the gallows expressed by the mechanics (I.ii.70-76) was justified. If not, the mechanics would lack an important motivation, comparable to a Hermia without the serious threat of either being killed or sent to a nunnery if she disobeyed her father. It was also observed, with a reference to Romeo and Juliet, that Bottom suddenly gave meaning to the dramatic action of the play within the play when he stressed that 'the Wall, having separated the fathers up to now, was torn down'. The writers of the article reported how these thoughts started a lively discussion because the young actor had 'discovered something which enabled those present to identify with Shakespeare's characters, something which made a special m e a n i n g shine t h r o u g h the e n c h a n t i n g fabric of the fairy tale...' Even the observation of a certain affinity between Shakespeare and Quince—Puck in his epilogue begging for the audience's approval of 11. 12.

H. Kahler, 'Stehen unsere Stucke in der Zeit?', Theater der Zeii 18 (1963), p. 11. Schneider and Horning, 'Die Nachfahren', p. 265.

60

Shakespeare in the New Europe

the Lord Chamberlain's Men as a parallel to the mechanics' anxiety about the reception of their own play—was not just an insight induced by the status of any amateur group at any time, but rather a sensitive response to the ambivalent reaction of the authorities in the sixties: amateurs were massively state-supported while at the same time receiving increased attention (which often amounted to supervision, however mediated) from governmental institutions. Thus, the remark of an actress on Bottom's role is not at all innocuous under the then prevailing circumstances: He was to play the authorities' ass because they were bored and had quarrelled amongst themselves. Other people were only objects of their wiles, even if they grandiloquently chose to shower bliss down on them. 1 3 Given a widespread view of A Midsummer Night's Dream that was still influenced by Max Reinhardt, this discovery of power relations in the play is all the more significant. Of course one might argue that a heavygoing * materialist' approach to literature in schools and higher education, with its stress on the sociological definition of characters, may have had more bearing on the perception of Bottom's relationship with the Athenian aristocracy than had the problems of amateur actors. But it should be borne in mind that the critical eye was only allowed to look for power relations in texts as long as it concurred with another eye, which firmly beheld the tenets of the philosophy of history: that is, contradictions and power relations were only to be recognized as long as they could be hermetically sealed off in the past or, which was virtually the same thing, safely located in a social system dissimilar from socialism. A conflictual reading of, for example, the Dream was considered to be of nutritional value only if the conflicts could be clearly seen to have their roots in a semi-feudal, semi-capitalist society. Such assignations were not difficult to secure in forums of literary criticism: the classroom, the lecture hall, in journals and books (in fact, my own critical practice had been informed by this pattern for a long time). But representing a conflictual reading on stage was quite a different matter, because theatrical discourse is incomparably less controllable, much more prone to give rise to all sorts of unwanted associations, originating not least in the dual existence of actors and actresses, whose representing acts and real bodies have the same ontological status as that of the audience. This constant intrusion of the actual present into the fictional representation of the past is perhaps even more noticeable in amateur groups, whose members are usually well known by the audience, who derive part of their pleasure from the knowledge that the mimes are 'really' their colleagues, friends, relatives, etc. As a consequence, the ever-repeated demand in so many documents on the cultural politics of the time, namely that classical plays be per13.

Schneider and Horning, 'Die Nachfahren', p. 265.

SORGE Bottom's Telos in the GDR and After

61

formed essentially in order to make the audience see historical conflicts from the perspective of their solution under socialism, had been highly illusory because it posited a point of view which the nature of theatrical discourse could hardly guarantee. The animosities against modernized, even colloquial Shakespeare translations such as Maik Hamburger's Hamlet, or against modern costumes (though the latter phenomenon appeared only a few years later), are not just expressions of a traditional taste but are at least equally indicative of a wish to make the past quite unmistakably and unambiguously look like the past. To be sure, the desire to render classic plays meaningful in terms of an optimistic version of the philosophy of history did not promote a strictly historicist attitude. Based on Lukacs's tenets from the thirties, it was at pains to make historical progress visible within the fictional action of texts. It looked for characters, or traits in characters, that were both involved in the conflicts of the past and represented a kind of epiphany, a radiant enclave that anticipated the better world to come and, by extension, legitimizingly pointed towards the GDR present in which those values, attitudes, traits had found their more durable and comprehensive realization. As a result, the desired attitude of the audience was one adopted in the comedic genre: even in performances of tragedies, the onlookers were supposed to watch the conflicts with a view to their future harmonization. Such a construct necessarily led to a weakening of the historical/ conflictual over against the anticipatory/harmonious. Although the latter was imagined to emerge from the former, it threatened to occupy increasingly the fictional representation. This 'harmony creep' may be seen, first, as a consequence of the desire to ensure a certain message within the dramatic fiction as opposed to the unpredictable and all but uncontrollable theatrical discourse. Secondly, it runs parallel to a macrosocial 'harmony creep' in the GDR of the sixties towards the much-lauded socialist Brotherhood of Man (Menschengemeinschaft), as a consequence of the attempt to camouflage real contradictions and shortcomings in East German society as well as to smother up a critical movement that wished to draw attention to those flaws. The social macrotext was thus equally characterized by a tension between history and Utopia, with the latter increasingly wishing to prove its existence in the former. The Weimar Dream of 1969 was fissured by that tension. Armin-Gerd Kuckhoff, reviewing the production with a sharp awareness of desired trends with regard to Shakespeare on GDR stages, praised its attempt to 'represent the poetic nature of the work in a comprehensive image as the essential part of its message, its effect, its harmonious unity with respect to the development and overcoming of conflicts'. But he objects to the mechanics' confinement to separate spaces of play, which amounted even to small separate stages (trusses, scaffolds, an enlarged Thespian cart). Those contraptions, according to Kuckhoff, thwarted the 'idea of a unified stage'; instead, they made for an 'isolated, special position which had to be

62

Shakespeare in the New Europe

suspended again and again by both actors and audience'. On the other hand, the reviewer strongly commended a conceptual change that had taken place since the first night's performance. While the mechanics originally behaved quite timidly, having in mind 'success before [an aristocratic] audience' rather than 'their own play', later performances saw them as 'equal partners of the courtiers' with the latter being 'no longer the centre of all their endeavours': They felt they were occupying their own position over against the court. They placed confidence in themselves, a confidence that could not be shaken by the courtiers' condescension or contempt . . . They want to act, they do not want to be ' a c t o r s ' . . . T h e more aloof the court is from the nature of their project, the more defiantly the actors defend their play and its underlying idea. 1 4 What Kuckhoff actually describes here is, from the point of view of the whole play, a growing disharmony issuing into a virtual rift between the aristocratic and the mechanics' world. The division of the stage into several loci is therefore no more than a visualization of this state of affairs. The reviewer's seemingly paradoxical rejection of this separation, while at the same time he condones the antagonism on which it rested, poignantly testified to his irresolute interlarding of two not easily compatible objectives: that of launching a class-based critique and that of ultimately conveying an image of finally achieved harmony. Director Fritz Bennewitz himself drew attention to the changed function of classical plays, when he remarked in his keynote lecture that there was a growing necessity to 'develop above all the social imagination [Phantasie] next to education [AujklarungY, and he goes on to place the latter in the perspective of the former: Hitherto we had stressed the fundamental social and historical causalities in order to make the individual u n d e r s t a n d and decide in favour of socialism. Today, with this decision having taken place, we will have to show the vast opportunities the socialist community offers to individual men . . . 1 5 For the purposes of the Dream, this means that it was far from sufficient only to show that the Athenian aristocrats treated their children as property and all but ignored individuals from other classes. Neither was it sufficient to represent the subservient behaviour of the mechanics as it was imposed upon them by their social standing. All this would quite properly belong to the task of Aufkldrung, to the knowledge of historical causalities to be conveyed. But beyond this, omens and potentialities would have to be revealed to such an extent that the metamorphosis of those contradictions 14. A.-G. Kuckhoff, 'Shakespeare uf den Buhnen der DDR im Jahre 1968', Shakespeare Jahrbuch 106 (1970), pp. 212-13. 15. Bennewitz, lEin Sommernachtstraum\ p. 13.

SORGE Bottom's Telos in the GDR and After

63

towards a state of harmony became feasible. It was thus of p a r a m o u n t importance that not only the mechanics, as it were by dint of their historical role, were shown to embark on a Hegelian course of self-realization (Selbstverwirklichung), but also and above all the four lovers, by emancipating themselves from their fathers' restraints and successfully struggling for their love. Only then could be unity of the play and its motif—harmony or disturbed harmony—be consummately implemented: We can call the process of self-realization a process of harmonization, because harmony is not a static condition but a movement. And the motif of disturbed harmony is, in a most variegated manner, the content of both the history[!] and the stories of the summer night. Disturbed harmony as a stimulus for the overcoming of disturbance. 1 6 The new quality of performances of the Dream was essentially determined by how much space certain characters were given to unfold and express their capacity for harmony. A Leipzig production of A Midsummer Night's Dream of the same year, for example, was criticized because it contrasted the alienated, ossified world of the aristocracy too exclusively with the vigorous, resourceful worlds of the wood and of the mechanics, thus leaving n o r o o m for the lovers to work out harmonious relationships amongst themselves: Such an approach makes a genuine incorporation of the two pairs of lovers difficult. From the point of view of their origin and upbringing they belong to the world of the court; but they have not yet succumbed to it. They are young—therefore[!] they are still susceptible to h u m a n sentiments and impulses. Their love relationships, above all the development of their love, are proof of t h i s . . . It is not easy, however, to find room for such differentiations in the Leipzig production which is based on contrasts. Now and t h e n . . . [the lovers'] affiliation to the world of the court seemed more determining than the other features of these characters. 1 7 It is one of the ironies of the cultural policy of the GDR that this new stress on harmony, while stigmatizing conflict-conscious art like that of Stefan Heym, Christa Wolf, Volker Braun, H e i n e r Muller, Wolf Biermann, Werner Braunig, etc., nevertheless inadvertently contributed to produce awareness of possibilities of change well beyond the boundaries circumscribed by the iron laws of history. To be sure, the shift of emphasis from objective social-historical relations to the power of individual resources was meant to enlist everyone to the services of the system; but at the same time it asserted the importance of individual decisions and activities. It may now, after the collapse of the GDR, seem pointless to insist on the 16. Bennewitz, 'Ein Sommernachtstrawri', p. 13. 17. Kuckhoff, 'Shakespeare uf den Buhnen der DDR im Jahre 1968', p. 211.

64

Shakespeare in the New Europe

difference between a strategy that asked people to abide by the laws of history leading inevitably toward socialism and a strategy that m a d e the building-up of socialism dependent upon the cooperation of strong, self-conscious individuals. The latter concept, however, h a r b o u r e d the chance of change for the better, that is for a more democratic society, by means of that very cooperation. Certainly, it did not find favour with the severer critics under late Stalinism. But it provided an area of compromise for a considerable number of all those who were willing to play according to the rules with the hope of changing them. It was of special importance for a younger generation who saw both the whole world and Germany hopelessly split into two power blocs, and who were on the whole neither prepared to risk, as it then seemed, a futile all-out confrontation with the ruling authorities nor to simply perpetuate the dominant structures. For them, the new concept provided an officially sanctioned discourse in which their voices mattered and through which their own ideas and intentions might gain m o m e n t u m . Of course, they were faced with a thoroughly patriarchal dispensation which reproduced its dominance by encouraging 'the young ones' to become more and more self-confident. But it was a dispensation that even by its very success could not function ad infinitum, because it necessarily sharpened the contradiction between self-confidence and its containment. From the point of view of artists like Fritz Bennewitz the said concept, which he supported with productions such as A Midsummer Night's Dream (and with The Tempest and Goethe's Faust, among others), was not just a tool for the maintenance of party power, either. With its desire to make everyone familiar with the cultural heritage, with its stress on 'good' literature, painting, and theatre as a prerequisite for self-confident (socialist) individuals, it opened up a vast arena for the 'self-fulfilment' of the artist in the first place—a self-fulfilment that was to be at the same time a landmark for everyone else. The programme that propagated social harmony and the unfolding of the individuals' capacities thus promised to overcome the ancient confrontation of mind versus power (Geist und Macht) on the one hand, and to transcend the equally ancient fringe position of the artist over against the Volk on the other. The political vanguard had entrusted the task of cultural education to (at least part of) the artistic vanguard. The latter now had the Promethean chance of moulding the people in their own image. Although the paternalist character of this attempt is undeniable, it nevertheless made the artist h o p e to exert a kind of influence which might eventually r e n d e r the whole system more creative, more tolerant, more dramatic—in short, more 'enlightened' in the best sense of the word. Here, the interests and yearnings of artists met with the hopes especially of the younger generation in the sixties. Today, it may be easy to grin at the naivety with which not inconsiderable parts of the GDR population connected their aspirations with a concept that was after all an instrument of the dominant ideology. I maintain,

SORGE Bottom's Telos in the GDR and After

65

however, that its medium and long-term effects have been far from negligible. For the trust the authorities claimed to invest in the self-confidence of individuals made the contrast to the realities only all the more glaring. What a number of DEFA films had tried to show until such productions were prohibited in 1965—the problems committed men and women encountered the very moment they meant to make the system more flexible—soon returned in an aggravated form in the lives of those who were promised the free range of the Brotherhood of Man but whose wings were cut whenever they wanted to spread them and fly. The Utopian idea revealed its cynical underside and increasingly became more of a liability than an asset for the ruling forces. Consequently, it did not come as a surprise that within only a year of the publication of Bennewitz's Weimar keynote lecture there was a change of cultural policy in the wake of the ousting of Ulbricht by Honecker: the harmonious concept of the Brotherhood of Man was abrogated because it did not exactly square with the given historical conditions. In fact it had proved counterproductive, causing all sorts of economic and political problems. 18 Instead of reducing awareness of conflicts, it found it had promoted them. The beginning of the Honecker era was thus marked by a drastic toning down of the normative stress on 'high' cultural values connected with the said idea of brotherhood. The massive reassertion of material cultural standards, in housing for example, and in multi-faceted recreational activities 'down' to rock music and to the rehabilitation of the traditional pub that Ulbricht had emphatically tried to replace by the Kulturhaus, may have been partly a reaction to the rapidly rising living standard in West Germany, but it was primarily a strategy of lost or forbidden alternatives. The first alternative, namely to build a certain brand of socialism aseptically on its own ideological terms, had just failed; the second one, which would have entailed the permission (or even the support) of a cultural glasnost avant la lettre, was shied away from (if only because of the example of the Prague Spring). What was left was therefore a rather incoherent pragmatic approach which tried to keep the population calm by a policy of instant gratification—far exceeding economic resources, while still unable to reach the West German level of consumption. Cultural policy itself wavered between, on the one hand,

18. The concept of the Brotherhood of Man was also linked to the efforts of the Ulbricht leadership to maintain a semi-independent (ultimately reluctant) standing over against a Soviet foreign policy that was embarking on what was later called the Helsinki process. Furthermore, the claim that GDR society was no longer marked by conflicts and contradictions found its expression in a political language strongly analogic to cybernetics and information theory; organizing social life was thus seen in technocratic terms rather than in terms of interests, struggle, conflict and compromise. In the economic area itself, the attempt at systematically bringing about a kind of technological 'great leap' had proved disastrous.

66

Shakespeare in the New Europe

Honecker's claim of ' n o taboos in art and literature in 1971 along with a breathtaking increase of financial gains and privileges for artists, and on the other the ideological clampdown on and extradition of dissenting voices, for example in 1977. The volteface from idealism to pragmatism shortly after 1970 left nowhere all those who had connected the hope for an alternative to the values of consumer capitalism with notions of cultural self-determination and self-fulfilment. This is not the place to describe the life strategies they employed in the seventies and eighties—from desperately trying to open u p cultural spaces to withdrawing into one of the niches in an overall climate of growing b o r e d o m and mediocrity. But even today, a considerable n u m b e r of those who had their ideologically formative years in the GDR of the sixties may not be among the last to welcome alternatives (whether ecologically-based or from the point of view of a global community) to a late industrial society responsible for ecological catastrophes, for economic N o r t h / S o u t h imbalances and, last but not least, for an atmosphere in which supra-individual values and meanings find themselves hard-pressed. This somewhat extensive detour into social-political generalities may seem justified if attention is once again drawn to my point of departure: that a certain dominant cultural policy cannot have only the intended effect on the groups of people it is meant to influence. While it would be apologetic, or conducive to the formation of a new myth, if the critique of the dominant purpose was left out, it would be devastating to underrate the capacity of 'target' groups to re-mould the character of the ideological thrust that weighed upon them, especially if its ideological representations were in themselves contradictory. The ideological sea-change after 1970 can be seismographically traced in two productions of the Dream in Halle and Magdeburg. In fact, Maik Hamburger's article on the 'New Concepts of Staging A Midsummer Night's Dream1 (a modified and updated 1988 version of a paper presented to the 1981 World Shakespeare Congress) began by discussing these productions, leaving Bennewitz's Weimar project u n m e n t i o n e d beyond, as it were, the threshold of the new state of affairs. He adumbrates, however, the m o r e general case for a changed view on Shakespeare's comedy. Observing guardedly that the most striking productions of the sixties 'were the stagings of tragedies and histories, in which self-fulfilment of the individual was e q u a t e d with a political objective of some kind', h e attributed the new productions to a basic change of historical perspective: At the turn of the 1970s a shift of interest began to make itself felt. People who had experienced the upheaval of war and social restratification gradually became aware that in all probability n o more social eruption would occur within their lifetime .. . T h e m e s 19. E. Honecker, 'Rede auf dem 4. Plenum des ZK der SED', Neues Deutschland, 18 December 1971.

SORGE Bottom's Telos in the GDR and After

67

involving questions of individual happiness, of personal selffulfilment within a given social structure, began to gain significance. 2 0 T h e h i d d e n agenda of this abbreviated account certainly includes the presence of Soviet tanks in Prague in the summer of 1969, demonstrating the futility of any hope for a democratic change of the dominant system. But it does not, in its tantalizing brevity, sufficiently discuss the ambivalent and contested nature of 'personal self-fulfilment, at the time. The Halle version of the Dream (spring 1971) located the lovers' selffulfilment within the familiar harmony-through-disharmony pattern but at the same time slightly modified it. The change was a very subtle one, so that Armin-Gerd Kuckhoff practically did not see anything different from what he had seen in the Weimar production. He only very mildly criticized the lovers' 'lack of intensity of emotion'. 2 1 The couples' state of disharmony in the wood, however, was only superficially a necessary transitional stage for the benefit of these characters' comprehensive development. Rather, the wood was a territory where passions devoid of any cathartic or educative purpose were permitted to rage. Christoph Schroth's Halle production thus makes a mockery of the idea of a linear progress towards harmony, with the anarchy of the wood being just the negative counterpart to the rigidly ordered court of Athens. And where Hamburger perceives harmony to be re-established for reasons of expediency ('Titania and Hippolyta accept their situation in deference to political necessity, in order to restore harmony to nature and to the state'), 2 2 Kuckhoff saw nothing more than the 'grace of mercy, alleviating and overcoming the rigidity of merciless law:...a truly Shakespearean idea, a fine inspiration of the production with his spirit'. 23 The differing attitudes of the two critics testify to the thin divide between the continuation and the subversion of an important concept of the sixties. Werner Freese's Magdeburg version of the Dream (autumn 1971), however, left little room for ambivalence. Both H a m b u r g e r and Kuckhoff acknowledge the presence of a well-known topic, as was made explicit in the programme notes: 'The theme of Midsummer Night's Dream is not harmony b u t the overcoming of disharmony'. T h e lovers' drive for selffulfilment, however, is mainly directed towards the satisfaction of sexual desires. This idea may have been borrowed from Peter Brook's Stratford version of the play (1970). It may also have been an attempt to move away 20. M. Hamburger, 'New Concepts of Staging A Midsummer Night's Dream', Shakespeare Survey 40 (1988), p. 51. 21. A.-G. Kuckhoff, 'Sommernachtstraum oder wirklichkeit? Zu Inszeniergungen von Shakespeare's Ein Mittsommemachtstraum in Halle und Magdeburg', Theater der Zeit 27.4 (1972), p. 14. 22. Hamburger, 'New Concepts of Staging', p. 53. 23. Kuckhoff, 'Sommernachtstraum', p. 13.

68

Shakespeare in the New Europe

from Max Reinhardt's ethereal representation of love relationships. But the decision in favour of the one model rather than the other was primarily due to the recurrent stress on harmony, on the harmonious solution of contradictions, on the affirmation of the non-conflictual throughout much of the sixties. By accentuating the physical aspect, the production revealed the fictitiousness of all those endeavours that aimed to link the harmonious ordering of (GDR) society with rational and emotional self-ordering as an essential part of individual self-fulfilment. In a way, such a reading can also be taken as an unexpected proof of the new pragmatism sketched out above: as the Utopian idea of the individual's ability to fashion his or her social relations receded, other interests incompatible with the laws and ideals of the social whole surfaced. Consequently, hitherto suppressed or stigmatized voices, sounds, motions and attitudes gained ground. It is thus no wonder that the production included rock music and hippy dress—elements of a counter-culture against which the theatre, along with the whole amateur movement emulating 'serious' art, had been mustered in the sixties. But instead of replacing the phenomena of Western (largely Anglo-American) mass or youth culture, the theatre was now itself invaded by the latter. Ironically, what Honecker had both vilified and grotesquely exaggerated in 1965 when taunting the literature of the time—'Brutalities are depicted, human behaviour is reduced to sexual desire' 24 —was cropping up again the very moment that Honecker assumed full power as the new party leader. The majority of onlookers were teenagers who filled the Magdeburg theatre to the last seat every time the Dream was staged. Apart from the attraction of fashionable music and costumes, the audience identified with characters whose drive for self-fulfilment no longer aimed at social reintegration, at a merger of the individual horizon of expectations with the larger social one. Their desires, though not asocial, were no longer gravitating towards some dimly felt dream of perfectibility. Rather, they were comparable to Hobbesian passions with their edges aesthetically blunted. The way they were given free range might have made the audience feel uneasy, but in fact caused amazement against a background of social experiences dominated by deferred gratification. And when the lovers finally took up their positions in the society of Athens, there was nothing but cynicism (directed against the mechanics) left: re-integration as selfdistortion instead of self-fulfilment. And there was no chance of defusing this impression by historicizing it, that is, attributing it to a late feudal society which thwarted the endeavours of early bourgeois individuals: if only because of the music and the costumes, the represented situation could not be mistaken for anything else but a commentary on the GDR present. Moreover, from the point of view of literary criticism, the Magdeburg 24. E. Honecker, 'Bericht des Politburos auf dem 11. Plenum des ZK der SED', Neues Deutschland, 16 December 1965.

SORGE Bottom's Telos in the GDR and After

69

version was a nightmare for even vulgarized forms of sociological interpretations^—the conflicts and contradictions of characters and actions were carefully identified and even accentuated, but they could no longer be safely contained as horrors of the past because their vanishing point—a better future on a different social basis—was gone. With the teleological dimension out of sight, the theatrical representation assumed the urgency of the present. In this context, it should be born in mind that a whole generation born in the first decade of the GDR had been more than amply trained to take issue with the deficiencies and antagonisms of the rivalling capitalist system. And it had been inculcated with a high sense of moral superiority over capitalism. Now, ironically, this very generation was about to size up its own social conditions with a comparable moral temper. Kuckhoff, quick to grasp the momentous implications of the Magdeburg Dream, did not fail to notice that Freese and his company confined themselves to the discordant ways and means while ignoring the ultimate objective of harmony. In other words, Kuckhoff perceived the disappearance of the telos, leaving both audience and play with the grim conflictual residue. Therefore, he questioned the validity of the programme notes which claimed to show the movement of disharmony to harmony. Even where the performance allowed for ordered relationships, such as those eventually brought about by Oberon in his omnipresent, omnipotent position from a kind of flying-machine, they were not indicative of a 'harmony of equal elements... but of a subjection to a ruler... [T] hen order does not result from harmony but from coercion and blind submission.'25 The new perspective on Shakespeare could not help affecting the representation of protagonists as examples of a humanist image of man (humanistisches Menschenbild). The dismantling of the ideal hero that haunted Shakespeare performances in the GDR ever since Hamburger/Dresen's Greifswald production of Hamlet in 1964 was by no means restricted to this tragedy but loomed large in the Magdeburg Dream as well. Freese continued this trend in the next Shakespeare production at the same theatre in 1973. Although Hamlet is not a subject of this paper, I should like to draw attention to the fact that Shakespeare or Shakespeare adaptations were in the centre of critical discussions in the early 1970s. As the writing of new plays had become most problematic since the Party plenary session in 1965, there was a scarcity of current drama which was not so easily overcome by the relatively liberal cultural policy during Honecker's first years. Furthermore, ideological restrictions on performances of current plays did not simply vanish in the face of a liberalism that was at best half-hearted. Thus, Shakespeare, Schiller, and Goethe—the 'classics'—remained the field on which many of the cultural controversies of the time took place. For example, Theater der Zeit, the 25.

Honecker, 'Bericht des Politburos auf dem 11', pp. 10, 12.

70

Shakespeare in the New Europe

highly influential (and only) theatrical journal of the GDR, provided the arena for extensive discussions on the general importance of the dramatic heritage in connection with Heiner Muller's adaptation of Macbeth (1972 in Brandenburg) and with four Hamlet productions (Halle, Leipzig, Magdeburg, Weimar in 1973) , 26 Without wanting to describe at length the discussions about the various Hamlet versions, it may be said that the conclusion which Liane Pfelling, of the Institute for Social Sciences of the SED Central Committee, drew notably from the Magdeburg and Schwerin productions might just as well have been gathered from the Magdeburg Dream. After praising their refreshing tempo, their inventiveness concerning scenic actions, their richly expressive details, Pfelling raised some fundamental objections: On the other hand, it cannot be overlooked that the productive departures of the Magdeburg and Schwerin stagings violate the humanist core of the poetic work [Dichtung]. Behind an extreme actionism, behind the sociologizing tendencies, behind the radical dismantling of many characters, there are attitudes hardly compatible with the Marxist-Leninist view of the [cultural] heritage and of the progress of history in general. Above all, this is ultimately due to the influence of ultra-leftist or pessimistic views on Shakespeare. The objective, ancient law of social and human progress is actually jeopardized... There is a real danger that the classicists lose their function as teachers of important actor-personalities[!] ...the great historical continuity with which the idea of progress moves through the centuries towards our time.27 This is strong stuff, and the journal must have felt uncomfortable enough to place a mollifying answer by one of its leading journalists next to Pfelling's taunts. Martin Linzer's reply was cautious and conciliatory. But he addressed the central problem none the less, though not without taking

26. J. Gleiss, 'Vier aus zwanzig. Shakespeare-Inszenierungen in Potsdam, Radebeul, Rostock und Zittau', Theater der Zeit 27.7 (1972), pp. 19-23; M. Linzer, 'Historische Exaktheit und Grausamkeit. Einige Notizen zu Heiner Mullers Macbeth und zur Urauffuhrung in Brandenburg', ibid., 22-3; A. Schlosser, '"Die Welt hat keinen Ausgang als zum Schinder"/Ein Diskussionsbeitrag zu Heiner Muller's Macbeth', Theater der Zeit 27.8 (1972), pp. 46-7; W. Heise, 'Macbeth im Gesprach. Notwendige Fragestellung', Theater der Zeit 27.9 (1972), pp. 45-6; F. Dieckmann, 'Heiner Muller und die Legitimitat', ibid., pp. 46-7; K. Zschiedrich, 'Klassik und Jugend', Theater der Zeit 28.5 (1973), pp. 27-8; L. Pfelling, 'Viermal Hamlet—und viele Fragen offen', Theater der Zeit 29.4 (1974), pp. 24-9; M. Linzer, 'Hamlet und kein Ende', ibid., 29. G.Jurgons, G. Begrich/W. Freese, A. Schlosser, lHamlet -2. Akt. Ein Debattenfragment% Tfoater d*r Z*i* 29.7 (1974), pp. 28-32. 27. Pfelling, 'Viermal Hamlet', pp. 28-9.

SORGE Bottom's Telos in the GDR and After

71

recourse to Wolfgang Heise, a respected authority in the field of aesthetics: 28 Professor Wolfgang Heise has stressed that the dismissal of Utopian illusions of a perfect harmonization of our social reality cannot help bearing upon our relationships to the [cultural] heritage ... The theory of anticipation, which assumes that the dreams and desires of mankind articulated in the old works have come true today, appears to reach its limits where the 'profound content of the heritage is being reduced to the merely extant state of affairs excluding the elements pointing towards our future' (Heise). Such a static notion of humanism necessarily leads t o . . . static, counterproductive, ultimately unattractive solutions in our theatres... A mere theatrical actionism, on the other hand, is no alternative either... [I] n my opinion, all problems may be gathered under the general problem of the dialectic of historicity (the historically concrete representations of effective social forces in their class-determined form within old texts) and actuality (the embodiment of overarching humanistic ideas related to our present affairs). Of course, this seems to be the easy task that is so difficult to be carried out. 29 Indeed, Linzer suggested the squaring of the circle when he deemed the application of a somewhat less outspoken philosophy of history indispensable to dramatic representations, while at the same time demanding vigorous theatrical productions without any normative encumbrances. Inadvertently, his construct was analogic to the general stalemate in the country: the ruling forces would have dared to permit invigorating democratic elements if only those very elements did not threaten the authority and legitimacy of the ruling forces. In another issue of Theater der Zeit, the directors of the Magdeburg and Schwerin productions entered the discussion. Today, the defensive tone of their arguments, then considered bold positions, seems quite out of fashion. But they too were witnesses for a strategy which employed the terms of the dominant concepts while at the same time subverting them. Gert Jurgons (Schwerin) fell back on Adolf Dresen's reading that the play itself was optimistic while the protagonist himself was a fatalist: 4 "Shakespeare wakes up the audience precisely where Hamlet opts for s l e e p " \ 3 0 Jurgons took up the catchphrase of the 'dialectical unity of 28. Cf. Heise's lecture at the 20th Erich-Engels-Seminar for dramaturges [published as 'Bemerkungen zum "Erbe"', Material zum Theater 36 (1973)] in which he claimed that theatre people were in the process of ridding themselves of 'Utopian illusions, of images of ideal harmonization'. 29. Linzer, 'Hamlet und kein Ende', p. 29. 30. Jurgons, op. til, p. 30. The quotation is from A. Hetterle, A. Dresen et al., 'Zur Rezeption des klassich-burgerlichen Erbes auf dem Theater', Weimarer Beitrdge 20.1 (1974), p. 118.

72

Shakespeare in the New Europe

historicity and actuality' and tried to counter the Pfelling challenge by saying that he had actually rather more rigorously historicized the play than less: after all, late feudalism was brutal and had no historical perspective, while it was impossible to endow the 'fallacious ideals—though honourable in themselves—of bourgeois or early bourgeois opponents (Hamlet) with the mild glow of belief in general progress'. 31 Of course, this seemingly strict historicization can be read, especially if enacted on stage, as a comment on the illusory Brotherhood of Man in the sixties. Gisela Begrich and Werner Freese argued along similar lines: 'Questioning the character of Hamlet is not equivalent to questioning historical progress. But on the whole they were more inclined to stress the 'actuality' of their approach to classical plays, reasserting the necessity of modern allusions and associations in order to make old texts meaningful. Significantly, they took a good many of their examples not from Hamlet but from A Midsummer Night's Dream. Thus they explained the stress on physical desire as a deliberate appeal to the predilections of the younger generation in the seventies. This reading of plays against their historical grain, a method they slyly termed 'Humanism for today', must be considered as, in effect, another rupture of the continuous flow of history from the past to the present, tMt is, an implicit but by no means admitted suspension of the concept of historical linearity. While the squabbles about and around these productions of A Midsummer Night's Dream and Hamlet were still conducted in a veiled form by the respective directors, Heiner Muller's approach to Shakespeare was much more outspoken. In the sixties, both his down-to-earth plays about the building up of socialism in East Germany and his slightly later plays based on Greek mythology always had a strong tendency to foreground the hardships and casualties incurred by the progress of humanity. Rather than rendering starry-eyed dramatic accounts of success, he stressed the neverending toil of humanity, which made the ideal of a harmonious society appear quite colourless and hardly capable of exerting any dramatic momentum. It is thus no wonder that Muller had been severely criticized for such a position. By the early seventies, Muller started to adapt Shakespeare along these lines with a Macbeth remake that was first performed in Brandenburg (1972, directed by Bernd Bartoszewski). Here, the desired historical perspective, to which Shakespeare's seems to lend itself so well (Duncan = feudalism; Macbeth = dissolution of feudalism/advent of early bourgeois egotism; Malcolm = socially relatively unspecified promise of an area of peace and prosperity), was efficiently deflated by the adaptation, especially with regard to Malcolm as a bearer of hopes for better times. The production caused a scandal that only remained a minor 31. 32. 33.

Ibid., p. 30. Begrich/Jurgons, op cit., p. 30. Huttich, op. cit, especially pp. 59-84.

SORGE Bottom's Telos in the GDR and After

73

one because the public impact of the small Brandenburg theatre was not very strong. One article, written by a prominent Shakespearean, was headlined T h e World has no other End but the Knacker's' 34 —a line from the adaptation perceived to be the most glaring deviation from Shakespeare's text as well as the scandalous message of the remake. Again, the defence mustered up in favour of Muller was couched in a familiar language: Wolfgang Heise, an aestheticist who adroitly managed dominant discourses in support of the cultural phenomena they were originally meant to suppress, tried to rehabilitate Muller's play by attributing the represented atrocities to class societies: Muller... finds a more general sujet in the contingent, historical subject-matter shaped by Shakespeare: the raw, dehumanizing violence of exploiting classes... as a signum of the pre-history[!] of man. Thus, he aims at the continuing, mostly disguised and rationalized barbarism of more civilized figures... He did not write a historical play but a historical-philosophical o n e . . . We see neither the sequence of violation, destruction and restitution of a just order, nor historical progress, but a circle of violence reproducing social relations of domination, a circle which in itself only admits of repetition instead of a way out. But this onslaught on a certain optimistic variant of the philosophy of history on its own field was precisely the scandal. At least on the level of dramatic representation there was nothing which might have guaranteed the road to harmony. To be sure, Heise did not fail to underline the theatrically foregrounded nature of a history that repeated itself: 'By being poetically represented, [this circle] becomes an object for denunciation, for assessment and condemnation—and thus for a possible change.' 35 The theatrical discourse offered by this kind of dramaturgy, however, did not function along the principles of affirmation and consolation, but was challenging, disquieting, alarming instead. The audience may, especially in view of the then escalating war in Vietnam, have understood the represented actions as belonging to societies different from their own. But it certainly did not provide them with the reassuring feeling of living in a secluded sanctuary of peace. During the eighties it became almost impossible to divide the globe into a fallen, that is, capitalist, and a redeemed, that is, socialist, world. As a result, dramatic representations of power and dominance could, as far as their ideological implications were concerned, no longer be sealed off as belonging to the history of an alien system. Muller's Anatomy Titus: Fall of Rome is a case in point, which was admirably taken up by Wolfgang Engel's Dresden production (1987). Here, the represented manslaughter, already present in Shakespeare to an almost unbearable extent, was not 34. 35.

Schlosser, op. cit. Heise, 'Notwendige Fragestellung', op. cit., p. 45.

74

Shakespeare in the New Europe

safely tucked away as incidents of an alien prehistory marked by factional strife in a class society. Instead, the place of action was a GDR classr o o m in which adolescents learnt a history lesson. But the process of learning, the appropriation of history by redistributing roles and performing the story of the Andronici, did not lead to cathartic liberation—that is, to a process of assessing and discarding a brutal chapter of the history of humanity—but to a barbarization of the whole class: the actors a n d actresses had vanished into their functional characters. T h e dramatic roles had become real. A series of didactic drawings that h u n g from a classroom wall from the very beginning accentuated the dismissal of a once powerful historical master-narrative: these pictures visualized the all too familiar progress from primeval times through slavery, feudalism, capitalism, socialism to a social state of affairs that was, however, ominously demarcated by an empty space, a framed blank, a terra incognita instead of a harmonious Utopia. Now, the future was no longer assured, it had become unstable. There was no place for optimistic master-narratives because the children repeated the sins of their fathers. Heiner Muller's production of Hamlet/Machine, the last Shakespeare production of the Deutsches Theatre (Berlin) before German reunification, was equally marked by the absence of any notion of historical progress. The tragedy of Hamlet was set in a scenic world already heavily affected by ecological destruction driving unchecked towards eco-death. The view was that humanity was still entangled in petty squabbles (like the killing of a king) unaware of the colossal magnitude of the real dangers threatening the whole h u m a n civilization. Heiner Muller's adaptations of Titus Andronicus and Hamlet can thus be seen to originate in a long-standing ideological debate within the GDR about the question of historical progress and the various political appropriations of its answers. At the same time, they can be said to have transcended the narrow limitations of the political geography of the GDR (and of West Germany, for that matter). With Miiller, 'Shakespeare and the GDR' had become 'Shakespeare and Europe' (if one does n o t like the somewhat grandiose, and at the same time punning, phrase 'Shakespeare and the Globe'). In a way, Leander Haussman's Weimar Dream (1992) is quite close to the spirit of the two Shakespeare/Muller productions. By giving u p their identity, the mechanics were able to turn into actors after all; but they performed before an on-stage audience that was already dead or dying. Like most of the latter-day GDR citizens, they had believed in a (now nonCommunist) telos that ceased to be alive the very m o m e n t they thought themselves capable of reaching it. This certainly does not leave a total blank, an unscarred territory on which to constitute new social relations. But it maintains that the old pattern of integration as such will not suffice. Perhaps the mechanics will feel compelled (or tempted) to fill the widened place of action with their own ideas, too...

n ROTTEN STATE, NOBLE MIND?

HAMLETS M A D E IN GERMANY, EAST AND W E S T

Manfred Pfister

I Once upon a time, in the autumn of 1989, a world came to an end in East Germany, in the whole of Germany, in Europe, and in the world at large. While this happened, while the Wall and the iron curtain came down and the first free elections were held in East Germany, the prestigious Deutsche Theater in the capital of what was still the German Democratic Republic was rehearsing over half a year its new Hamlet, an eight-hours spectacle, as long and demanding as a full working day. T h e choice of this particular play and the lavish treatment extended to it projected a sense of the theatre trying to rise to the historical occasion. This was underlined in a n u m b e r of interviews by the translator, co-author and director of the production, Heiner Muller: Was ware jetzt ( . . . ) ein aktuelles Stuck in der DDR? Da fiel mir nur der Hamlet ein. Ein Stuck, das mit Staatskrisen zu tun hat, mit zwei Epochen u n d einem RiB zwischen den Epochen. In dem RiB steht ein Intellektueller Spagat, der nicht genau weiB, wie er sich verhalt: Das Alte geht nicht mehr, das Neue schmeckt ihm auch nicht. 1 With this production, Heiner Muller, perhaps unwittingly, brought to a close the Hamlet-frame r o u n d the history of the German Democratic Republic, whose * democratically renewed' theatre had o p e n e d in 1945, in what was then the Soviet Occupied Zone, with a Hamlet directed by Gustav von Wagenheim. 2 Once again, a dramatic m o m e n t in the history of the German nation was celebrated with a prominent stage appearance of the Prince of Denmark, carefully made in Britain—even if this time 1. 'What could right now (...) be a topical play in the GDR? The only thing that came to my mind was Hamlet. A play that deals with crises in the state, with two epochs, and with the fissure between them. This fissure is straddled by an intellectual, who is no longer certain how to behave and what to do: the old things don't work any more, but the new ways aren't to his taste' (my translation here as elsewhere), Badische Zeitung, 24/25 March, 1990. 2. Celebratory attention was drawn to this fact in a Shakespeare Jubilee retrospect of 1964 by A.-G. Kuckhoff; cf. Das Drama Shakespeares (Schriften zur Theaterwissenschaft, 3/1; Berlin, 1964), p. 668.

PFISTER Hamlets Made in Germany, East and West

77

the celebration was a deeply ironic and ambivalent one. To quote Heiner Muller again: 'So eine richtige Beerdigung muB schon wirklich gefeiert werden. So schlecht war die DDR nun auch wieder nicht, daB sie nicht eine anstandige Beerdigung verdient hatte.' 3 And one wonders, where was the Gunter Grass of the late eighties, who would have dedicated a play of his own to commemorate this noteworthy occasion, in which a 'Boss' ('Chef) rehearses Shakespeare while, outside the theatre, the plebeians are rehearsing the insurrection. Muller's Hamlet rehearsals, in the course of which he was heckled, along with a number of other intellectuals and writers, at a mass rally on 4 November, a few days before the fall of the Wall, by 'das Volk', are indeed no less noteworthy and problematic than the Coriolanus rehearsals of the 'Chef, Muller's early model Bert Brecht, during the Berlin Uprising of 17 June, 1953: the one is as much 'Ein deutsches Trauerspiel' as the other!4

n Hamlet has always been a crucial play for the Germans—always, that is from the late eighteenth century onwards, when German writers began to exalt Shakespeare as a model for German literature and to see themselves mirrored in Shakespeare's fictions. In the course of this German 'nostrification' of Shakespeare (as one of its protagonists, the theatre director Franz Dingelstedt, called it in a blatant gesture of cultural

3. 'A proper funeral has to be properly celebrated. After all, the GDR was not so bad that it doesn't deserve a decent funeral,' Deutsche Volkszeitung. Die Tat, 30 March, 1990. A detailed description of Heiner Muller's Hamlet production is offered by Maik Hamburger, the dramaturge of the Deutsche Theater, in 'Theaterschau', Shakespeare Jahrbuch (East) 127 (1991), pp. 155-68, here 161-8. 4. My reference is, of course, to the play by Gunter Grass, Die Plebejer proben den Aufstand. Ein deutsches Trauerspiel {The Plebeians Rehearse the Insurrection. A German Tragedy) (Neuwied, 1966). Incidentally, the political slogan with which the East Germans rose up against their petrified 'Volksrepublik', 'Wir sind das Volk', is, again perhaps unwittingly almost verbatim, a quotation from Shakespeare's Coriolanus: T h e people are the city' (III.i.200). 5. Cf. H. Daffis, Hamlet auf der deutschen Buhne bis zur Gegenwart (Berlin, 1912); HJ. Luthi, Das deutsche Hamletbild seit Goethe (Bern, 1951); T.J.B. Spencer, 'The Decline of Hamlet', in Hamlet (ed. J.R. Brown and B. Harris; Stratford-upon-Avon Studies, 5; London, 1963), pp. 185-99, here 188-95; W. Muschg, 'Deutschland ist Hamlet', Shakespeare Jahrbuch (West) (1965), pp. 32-58; W. Habicht, 'Shakespeare in Nineteenthcentury Germany: The Making of a Myth', in Nineteenth-century Germany. A Symposium (ed. M. Ekstein and H. Hammerschmidt; Tubingen, 1983), pp. 141-57; K.P. Steiger, "Hamlet, or What You Will', in Die Geschichte der Shakespeare-Rezeption (Stuttgart, 1987), pp. 128-76; cf. also my own 'Germany is Hamlet: The History of a Political Interpretation', New Comparison 2 (1986), pp. 106-26 and 'Hamlet und der Deutsche Geist: Die Geschichte einer politischen Interpretation', Shakespeare Jahrbuch (West) (1992), pp. 13-38, to which the present essay is indebted for most of its material.

78

Shakespeare in the New Europe

appropriation), Hamlet in particular was turned into a 'mirror held up to— the German—nature' and was made to fulfil the Variable service' of either accounting for, idealizing or castigating what was perceived as a rift in German culture between its political weakness and its philosophical and artistic potency, between the visionary power and metaphysical ingenuity of its intellectuals and their incapacity for decisive political action. Like Coleridge, the Germans discovered a 'smack of Hamlet' in themselves, but with a political vengeance. For the generation of 'Storm and Stress' Hamlet still managed to resolve the conflict between ideals and actions and to combine sensibility and melancholic Weltschmerz with heroic activism; and, seen as the aristocratic hero fighting against the corruptions of a feudal society, he became for them a national surrogate figure—the model for a reform of feudalism from within, which was so sadly lacking in the political reality of the time. With Goethe's reading of Hamlet, however, the critical focus shifted towards seeing Hamlet's story as one of tragic failing. His Hamlet is of too pure and noble a soul to fulfil the tasks imposed on him, and his very failure to cope with the political reality engulfing him is the mark of grace, of a noble nature and beautiful soul. This reading proposed nothing less than a justification, even glorification of political inactivity or failure in the face of sordid Realpolitik. As such it touched the vital nerve of the Romantic generation of the Schlegels, for instance, and of Hegel, who recognized and accepted in the image of Goethe's Hamlet the fruitlessness of its own vague and idealistic political aspirations in an age of counter-revolution and restoration, its own retreat into a world of dreams, visions and philosophical abstractions. In the context of the war of liberation against Napoleonic rule, the national-patriotic activities of the Burschenschaften (student fraternities) and the struggle of the liberal or revolutionary intellectuals of 'Young Germany' working towards a republican and unified Germany in the revolution of March 1848, this romantic self-image of Germany as a Hamlet-like 'Volk der Dichter und Denker' ('people of poets and thinkers') was turned polemically on itself. When Ferdinand Freiligrath in his famous poem 'Hamlet' (1844) explicitly identified Germany with Hamlet ('Hamlet ist Deutschland!'), this equation had a critical and self-critical thrust to it. His and Heine's, Borne's, Gutzkow's or Herwegh's denigration of Hamlet as a pathologically introverted philosophizer, dreamer and talker is part of their criticism of a Germany which produces endless political theories without, however, bringing about a revolution. And even when, after the failed March Revolution, Germany came under an ever more self-confident Prussian supremacy, waged a successful war against France and achieved a militant national unity in the anything but liberal Kaiserreichy the use of Hamlet as a mirror of the German national character and its historical destiny remained still part of the 6.

Studien und Copien nach Shakespeare (Pesth, 1858), p. 5.

PFISTER Hamlets Made in Germany, East and West

79

political rhetoric, albeit in the negated form of 'Germany is not Hamlet'. With this formula the American scholar Horace Howard Furness in 1877 congratulated the German people upon their newly gained strength and unity in his dedication of the New Variorum Edition of Hamlet to the Weimar Shakespeare Society. And similarly, a n u m b e r of German critics began to see the Realpolitiker Claudius or the man of action Fortinbras as the new model for German emulation. Needless to follow here the further fortunes of these 'Hamlets made in Germany', down to the Germanic and heroic man of destiny stalking the stages of wartime fascist Germany. It should be clear by now that from the late eighteenth century onwards Hamlet in Germany has not been a play like any other, but a screen on which to project the changing constructions of German national identity. Nor has Shakespeare been a foreign dramatist like any other. His 'nostrification' involved much more than mere translation, interpretation or idolization; in its fully-fledged form it meant the claim that Shakespeare is essentially ours, essentially German. In their most blatant form, such claims were p u t forward most often during periods of particularly strained German-British relations. Thus, in the war year 1915, the German dramatist Gerhart H a u p t m a n n proudly presented a German Shakespeare in the scholarly pages of the ShakespeareJahrbuch: Es gibt kein Volk, auch das englische nicht, das sich ein A n r e c h t wie das deutsche auf Shakespeare erworben hatte. Shakespeares Gestalten sind ein Teil unserer Welt, seine Seele ist eins mit u n s e r e r geworden; u n d wenn er in England geboren u n d begraben ist, so ist Deutschland das Land, wo er wahrhaft lebt. 7

m In the Germany—or rather, the Germanies—after World War II, these topoi of a German Shakespeare and a deeply and intrinsically German Hamlet have, at first sight, become history already, just good enough to be reconstructed as a part of German Geistesgeschichte, to be remembered nostalgically or ridiculed as a curiosity of the past. And yet there has hardly been one important phase in German postwar history which was not discussed in terms of the Hamlet myth or reflected in interpretations and productions of Hamlet—be that the wasteland situation of 1945 or the task of 7. 'There is no people, not even the English, which can with more justification claim Shakespeare as their own than the German people. The characters he created have become part of our world, his soul has become one with ours. And even if it was in England that he was born and lies buried, Germany is the country where he truly lives' (G. Hauptmann, 'Deutschland und Shakespeare', Shakespeare-Jahrbuch 51 [1915], p. xii).

80

Shakespeare in the New Europe

Vergangenheitsbewdltigung ('mastering of the past'), the estrangement of the intellectuals from the moral, economic and military rearmament of the Adenauer era, or the question of the complicity of left-wing professors with the political terrorism of the sixties and seventies; or, turning to the other part of Germany, the project of building a socialist society, its crises, the dubious role of its literary intelligentsia and its eventual collapse. And to the extent that the two German cultures began to distinguish themselves one from the other, they also began to stake rival claims upon Shakespeare and Hamlet. Where the nineteenth-century scenario of conflict had been one between Germany as the 'true homeland' of Shakespeare and England as his merely incidental birthplace, now it turned into politically heated infighting between the two parts of Germany about which was the better host to Shakespeare and contributed more to an understanding of his works in literary interpretations and theatrical performances.8 The Shakespeare Jubilee of 1964 made this rift dramatically apparent, when the German Shakespeare Society, one of the last still-functioning all-German cultural institutions, broke apart into the East German association, which continued to be centred at Weimar, and the West German one, newly founded in Bochum. This schism or secession was commented upon, deplored and justified with great rhetorical furore on both sides, and it will, perhaps, never be possible to find an unambiguous answer to the question of 'Whodunnit'. One thing, however, seems certain to me: the official West German view of things, according to which the secession was necessary to prevent the political appropriation of a nonpolitical scholarly association by the East, was grounded in self-delusion and a too narrow conception of what is political.9 The West German construction of Shakespeare and the West German view of the tasks and functions of a Shakespeare Society were no less political than those held in Weimar, but political in a different way. Was it, for instance, not a political act, that the volumes of the Jahrbuch der Deutschen Shakespeare-Gesellschaft had been—with one exception—kept carefully uncontaminated by Marxist approaches? And was not the election of Dr Werner Schutz, a politician much more than a philologist, as president of the Shakespeare Society politically provocative? He, at any rate, saw the study of Shakespeare as a political task when, as Minister of Education for Northrhine-Westfalia, he attended the Society's annual general meeting in 1959 and demanded 'Shakespeare fur die politische Formung der Jugend fruchtbar zu m a c h e n ' . 1 0 And was it really free of all political implications that a 8. Cf. R. von Ledebur, Deutsche Shakespeare-Rezeption sett 1945 (Frankfurt, 1974), which covers the first three decades in a thoroughgoing and well-balanced review. 9. This view was officially put forward in a Festschrift celebrating the centennial of the German Shakespeare Society, Shakespeare in Deutschland. 1864-1964 (Bochum, n.d.), published by the new Deutsche Shakespeare-Gesellschaft West. 10. 'To make Shakespeare fruitful for the political education of the young people'; quoted from Ledebur, Deutsche Shakespeare-Rezeption, p. 128.

PFISTER Hamlets Made in Germany, East and West

81

veritable Cardinal, the impressively humane and amiable Joseph Frings, served as patron to the Society? His view of Shakespeare, which he frequently put forward in his welcoming addresses to the annual assembly, was clearly part of a conservative political vision of order and traditional moral values. And at two of these occasions he held up Hamlet as a mirror to recent German history, using Hamlet analogies to plead for a more charitable manner of Vergangenheitsbewaltigung, of dealing with the crimes, criminals and connivers of the Nazi past,11 or reading Hamlet as a cautionary tale for a Europe and Germany that are in danger of being corroded by scepticism and the lack of a shared and stable Weltanschauung: 'Das scheint mir der Spiegel zu sein, den Shakespeare im Hamlet unserem Jahrhundert vorhalt'.12 IV The 'GDR-Hamlet', which only began to take a clear and distinctive shape in the years after the building of the Berlin Wall and round the Shakespeare Jubilee of 1964, was, to begin with, a considerably more German Hamlet than his brother in the West.13 With the reduction of English teaching at secondary schools in favour of Russian, Shakespeare and his Hamlet had disappeared from the English curriculum and survived only in translations within the German curriculum, where they were studied as part of the German literary heritage. This in itself privileged a perspective which related Hamlet to the history of German Shakespeare appropriation and to the current political situation in Germany. The appropriation of Shakespeare from the Sturm and Drang to the Vormdrz, as sketched out in my second section, came to be set up programmatically as a model for the appropriation (Aneignung) of the heritage (Erbe) of bourgeois-humanist culture by the nascent sozialistische Nationalkultur. The Hamlet that would result from this was first officially presented by Alexander Abusch, then vice-president of the GDR Ministerrat, in his address to the Weimar Shakespeare assembly of 1964. Its protagonist is a heroic fighter against a corrupt feudal system, and his tragedy is the consequence of the 'lahmende Zwiespalt zwischen der GroBe seiner Aufgabe, die Welt, die aus den Fugen ist, wieder einzurenken, und der Unzulanglichkeit der Wirklichkeit'. 14 Hamlet's humanist vision of the 11. That seems to me to be the mirror that Shakespeare in Hamlet holds up to our century', Shakespeare-Jahrbuch 95 (1959), p. 9. 12. Shakespeare-Jahrbuch 84-86 (1950), pp. 15-16. 13. For the Shakespeare reception in the GDR cf. L. Guntner and A. McLean (eds.), Redefining Shakespeare: Literary Criticism and Theatre Practice in the German Democratic Republic (forthcoming) and T. Sorge, 'The Sixties: Hamlet's Utopia Come True?', Litteraria Pragensia 1 (1991), pp. 33-44. 14. 'The paralysing contradiction between the greatness of his task of having to

82

Shakespeare in the New Europe

greatness of man—'What a piece of work is man' (II.ii.321)—transcends even the most advanced position of a bourgeois consciousness in the Renaissance, and thus anticipates the socialist humanism about to be realized in the GDR.15 This interpretive model proposed by a cultural bureaucrat was then further elaborated by a man of the theatre, the director general of the municipal theatre of Karl-Marx-Stadt (Chemnitz), Hans Dieter Made. Exposing the slant of his own production of Hamlet to the Weimar Shakespeareans in 1965, he too put Hamlet's 'What a piece of work is man' at the centre of his interpretation, and saw the main tragic contradiction as that between Hamlet's ideals and the actual social and individual situation. His failure implies no criticism of these ideals; he fails, because he is 'geschichtlich zu fruh gekommen' ('historically premature'). The present task, therefore, was to defend these Utopian ideals as an anticipation of a socialist-humanist consciousness against the detractors of idealist thinking, and to give them a new vitality in a society at last liberated from all antagonisms, the society of the GDR.16 Hamlet as a revolutionary—even if a revolutionary avant la lettre, historically premature and therefore necessarily failing—has, of course, the people on his side. This was emphasized again and again in the pages of the Weimar Jahrbuch and also in Armin-Gerd Kuckhoff s authoritative study Das Drama William Shakespeares (1964), that was to set the guidelines for GDR Hamletology for some time to come. Hamlet in his closeness to the people was seen as striving towards a position beyond the conflict between the crown and the gentry, a tragic precursor of the regicides of 1649, who was bound to fail because the progressive forces of the time were too weak to support him. And what could be a more valid model for the young people of the first German Arbeiter- und Bauernstaat (State of Workers and Peasants) than such an 'aktiver, ringender Hamlet'? A third pillar of this official construction of a GDR-Hamlet rested upon the theory of socialist realism. Again it was Abusch who issued the password when he interpreted Hamlet's speech to the actors—'to hold as 'twere the mirror up to nature' (III.ii.21ff)—as an anticipation of the Marxist Widerspiegelungstheorie (reflection theory) and as a 'Bekenntnis des realistischen Kiinstlers' Shakespeare. Anselm Schlosser, for instance, set right a world out of joint and an inadequate reality.' 15. A. Abusch, Shakespeare: Realist and Humanist, Genius der Weltliteratur (Berlin, 1964), pp. 19-21. There is no place in this reading for ironies and ambiguities in Hamlet: the interpretive model of anticipated Socialist Humanism rigorously deletes the grim bathos with which Hamlet at the end of his speech deflates the humanist pathos. An awareness of such self-undermining ironies had to wait until the very end of the history of the GDR; cf. G. Seehase, Shakespeare-Jahrbuch (East), 102 (1990), p. 15. 16. H.D. Made, 'Hamlet und das Problem des Ideals', Shakespeare-Jahrbuch (East) 102 (1966), pp. 7-22. 17. 'An active and striving Hamlet': Kuckhoff, Das Drama William Shakespeares, p. 234. 18. 'A confession, a manifesto of the realist artist' (Abusch, Shakespeare, p. 8).

PFISTER Hamlets Made in Germany, East and West

83

dedicated a whole article 'Uber Hamlets Schauspieltheorie und deren Verwirklichung im Hamlet' to this idea; and Willi Schrader's essay in the same 1975 volume of the Weimar Jahrbuch, 'Was ist uns Hecuba?' ('What's Hecuba to Us?'), applies Hamlet's question 'auf die immer neu zu beantwortende Grundfrage, was uns das Erbe bedeutet'. 19 To set up a certain image of Hamlet as normative and canonical always involves setting it apart from other, rivalling images. Thus the construction of Hamlet as a revolutionary and a social realist was accompanied by polemical attacks on West German and Western Hamlets in general. Abusch had quoted with horrified scorn a programme note of the Schauspielhaus Bochum, according to which Shakespeare had anticipated the modern insight into the absurdity of life; 20 and Kuckhoff, surveying the theatre situation in 1973, gave short shrift to all those fashionably decadent, nihilist, and disorientated Hamlet-Playboys of the Western World, who reflect nothing but an 'allgemeine Verunsicherung der Lebensgrundlagen', 'die Hoffnungslosigkeit einer Welt ( . . . ) , die Shakespeares antizipierenden Glauben an die Zukunft des Menschengeschlechts nicht ertragt'. 21 Re-reading such tirades these days, one is less put off by the ideological analysis in itself, which is, after all, not so wide of the mark; one is rather put off by the self-righteous conviction with which these critics set themselves up as the only guarantors of all human and humane values, living happily ever after in the safe haven of the harmonious and humanist GDR. However, this canonical GDR-Hamlet did not remain unchallenged in his own home; he had to be defended with increasing frequency and urgency against corruptions and distortions in the GDR itself. An early instance was Adolf Dresen's and Maik Hamburger's Greifswald Hamlet of 1964, which was quickly suppressed because the new translation by the two directors was too saucily vernacular to fit the image of Hamlet as a hero of socialist humanism. 22 And attacks on such deviant Hamlets in the very GDR were to punctuate the pages of the 'Theaterschau' (Theatre Survey') of the Weimar Jahrbuch. The Schwerin Hamlet of 1973, for instance, drew upon itself the particularly harsh criticism of having drowned the 'humanist core of the poem' in action, tempo and aggressiveness. And, even worse, it was seen, together with the Magdeburg Hamlet of the same year, as indistinguishable from the fashionable West German Endgame

19. 'To the fundamental question, that has to be answered again and again, what the [cultural] heritage means to us', Shakespeare-Jahrbuch (East) 111 (1975), p. 35. 20. Abusch, Shakespeare, p. 36. 21. 'A general destabilisation of all the foundations of life', 'the hopelessness of a world (...) which cannot share and bear Shakespeare's anticipatory belief in the future of humanity', Shakespeare-Jahrbuch (East) 109 (1973), pp. 189-98. 22. Cf. T. Sorge, 'Unsere Shakespeares—Nachdenken uber einen Wegbegleiter', Shakespearejahrbuch (East) 126 (1990), pp. 24-40, here 25-8.

84

Shakespeare in the New Europe

Hamlets. In this context Kuckhoff quotes Anselm Schlosser, who, in an issue of Theater der Zeit (7, 1974) dedicated to the problems of staging Hamlet, lamented the fact that the play in this form betrayed 'den Begriff des positiven Erbes' ('the concept of the positive heritage') and was thus a most unsuitable birthday present for the twenty-fifth anniversary of the GDR. 24 At that time, however, such attacks had already become a rearguard action, even if a rearguard action that continued to be pursued well into the eighties. 25 In the meantime, not only the occasional theatre but also some of the leading Shakespeare scholars and critics of the GDR had dissociated themselves from the official construction of Hamlet. In the wake of Robert Weimann's research, particularly his seminal study Shakespeare und die Tradition des Volkstheaters (Berlin-East, 1967), the English theatre of the Early Modern period came to be seen as too complex a medium of communication to allow for a reading of Hamlet that would reduce it to one homogeneous perspective or one unambiguous message. This also had a liberating effect on the theatres of the GDR, with which he and his fellow researchers kept up a lively contact. They were no longer bound by an inhibiting interpretive model and could explore with greater freedom the whole range of dramaturgical possibilities, from realist mimesis to an anti-realist shattering and foregrounding of illusion. Weimann's discussion of Benno Besson's 1977 Hamlet at the Berlin Volksbuhne is characteristic of his approach. He not only criticized the too orthodox conception of Hamlet as a plebeian hero in full sympathy with his audience, a conception that involved a 'Verflachung seiner geistigen Physiognomie' ('reduction of his intellectual physiognomy'); he also appreciated that in the scene with the actors Hamlet was no longer the mouthpiece of the alleged realist Shakespeare. Instead, the performance highlighted the tension between the First Actor as a practical theatre worker and Hamlet, the dilettante theorist and aristocratic patron of the theatre. 26 Seven years later Weimann was to return to the problem of realism in Hamlet, insisting on the contradictions in which Hamlet's mirror metaphor is entangled within the dramatic context of the play. What had been read within the canonical construction of Hamlet as an unambiguously affirmative 23. A.G. Kuckhoff, 'Theaterschau', Shakespeare-Jahrbuch (East) 111 (1975), pp. 173-4. For the Magdeburg Hamlet and the discussion it provoked see above, pp. 69-72. 24. Kuckhoff, Theaterschau', pp. 177-8. 25. Cf., for instance, A. Schlosser, 'Uber das Herangehen an den Hamlet', Shakespeare-Jahrbuch (East) 120 (1984), pp. 103-33, which defends the canonical GDR-Hamlet against revisionist productions and insists on the 'ArbeiterKlassenstandpunkt' ('the political position of the working class') as the orientating perspective in the 'Dschungel pluralistischer Interpretationswillkur' ('jungle of pluralistic and arbitrary interpretation') (p. 112). 26. R. Weimann, 'Eigenes und Fremdes im Hamlet', Shakespeare-Jahrbuch (East) 114 (1978), pp. 87-91, here 88-9.

PFISTER Hamlets Made in Germany, East and West

85

anticipation of the Marxist reflection theory was now, in 1985, felt to raise 'einige dringende, bislang ungeloste Fragen' ('a number of urgent and as yet unresolved problems'), which could only be clarified with the tools of modern international science and theory. 2 These currents of change had their somewhat belated reverberations even in the 'Theaterschau' of the Weimar Jahrbuch. The Potsdam Hamlet of 1983, which presented a Hamlet struggling against an Orwellian state in many ways similar to the GDR, was still taken to task for its 'flache Vordergrundigkeit des Aktualitatsbezugs', its 'bedenkliche Einseitigkeit' and 'Aufhebung der Dialektik'. 28 And as late as 1988, the Weimar Hamlet of 1986 was severely rebuked for sacrificing the political implications of the plot to an absorbing interest in private and family relationships. 9 The change came late, but it came emphatically, when Maik Hamburger took over the