OuterSpeares: Shakespeare, Intermedia, and the Limits of Adaptation 9781442669369

Table of contents :
Edited by Daniel Fischlin
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Introduction: OuterSpeares: Shakespeare, Intermedia, and the Limits of Adaptation
Part One: “Strange Invention”: Shakespeare in the New Media
YouTube Shakespeare, Appropriation, and Rhetorics of Invention
“Is There an App for That?”: Mobile Shakespeare on the Phone and in the Cloud
Part Two: “These Violent Delights Have Violent Ends”: Shakespearean Adaptation and Film Intermedia
Melted into Media: Reading Julie Taymor’s Film Adaptation of The Tempest in the Wake of 9/11 and the War on Terror
Transgression and Transformation: Mickey B and the Dramaturgy of Adaptation: An Interview with Tom Magill
Part Three: “All the Uses of This World”: TV, Radio, Popular Music, Theatre, and the Uses of Intermedia
Slings & Arrows: An Intermediated Shakespearean Adaptation
Your Master’s Voice: The Shakespearean Narrator as Intermedial Authority on 1930s American Radio
Sounding Shakespeare: Intermedial Adaptation and Popular Music
“Playing the Race Bard”: How Shakespeare and Harlem Duet Sold (at) the 2006 Stratford Shakespeare Festival
Part Four: “Give No Limits to My Tongue … I Am Privileged to Speak”: The Limits of Adaptation?
Patchwork Shakespeare: Community Events at the American Shakespeare Tercentenary (1916)
Upcycling Shakespeare: Crafting Cultural Capital
Beyond Adaptation
Contributors
Index

Citation preview

OUTERSPEARES: SHAKESPEARE, INTERMEDIA, AND THE LIMITS OF ADAPTATION Edited by Daniel Fischlin

For Shakespeare and Shakespearean adaptation, the global digital media environment is a “brave new world” of opportunity and revolution. In OuterSpeares: Shakespeare, Intermedia, and the Limits of Adaptation, noted scholars of Shakespeare and new media consider the ways in which various media affect how we understand Shakespeare and his works. Daniel Fischlin and his collaborators explore a wide selection of adaptations that occupy the space between and across traditional genres – what artist Dick Higgins calls “intermedia” – ranging from adaptations that use social networking, Cloud computing, and mobile devices to the many handicrafts branded and sold in connection with the Bard. With essays on YouTube and iTunes as well as radio, television, and film, OuterSpeares is the first book to examine the full spectrum of past and present adaptations, and one that offers a unique perspective on the transcultural and transdisciplinary aspects of Shakespeare in the contemporary world. daniel fischlin is a University Research Chair in the School of English and Theatre Studies at the University of Guelph.

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OuterSpeares: Shakespeare, Intermedia, and the Limits of Adaptation

EDITED BY DANIEL FISCHLIN

UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO PRESS Toronto Buffalo London

© University of Toronto Press 2014 Toronto Buffalo London www.utppublishing.com Printed in the U.S.A. ISBN 978-1-4426-4785-5 (cloth) ISBN 978-1-4426-1593-9 (paper)

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

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication OuterSpeares: Shakespeare, intermedia, and the limits of adaptation/edited by Daniel Fischlin. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-4426-4785-5 (bound). – ISBN 978-1-4426-1593-9 (pbk.) 1. Shakespeare, William, 1564–1616 – Adaptations.  2. Shakespeare, William, 1564–1616 – Dramatic production.  I. Fischlin, Daniel, 1957–, editor PR3100.O98 2014   822.3'.3   C2014-904024-5

University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial assistance to its publishing program of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council, an agency of the Government of Ontario.

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

In memoriam Kenny Doren But if the while I think on thee, dear friend, All losses are restored and sorrows end.

(Shakespeare, Sonnet 30)

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Contents

List of Illustrations  ix Acknowledgments  xi Introduction: OuterSpeares: Shakespeare, Intermedia, and the Limits of Adaptation  3 Daniel Fischlin Part One: “Strange Invention”: Shakespeare in the New Media YouTube Shakespeare, Appropriation, and Rhetorics of Invention  53 Christy Desmet “Is There an App for That?”: Mobile Shakespeare on the Phone and in the Cloud  75 Jennifer L. Ailles Part Two: “These Violent Delights Have Violent Ends”: Shakespearean Adaptation and Film Intermedia Melted into Media: Reading Julie Taymor’s Film Adaptation of The Tempest in the Wake of 9/11 and the War on Terror  115 Don Moore Transgression and Transformation: Mickey B and the Dramaturgy of Adaptation: An Interview with Tom Magill  152 Daniel Fischlin, Tom Magill, and Jessica Riley

viii Contents

Part Three: “All the Uses of This World”: TV, Radio, Popular Music, Theatre, and the Uses of Intermedia Slings & Arrows: An Intermediated Shakespearean Adaptation  205 Kim Fedderson and J. Michael Richardson Your Master’s Voice: The Shakespearean Narrator as Intermedial Authority on 1930s American Radio  230 Andrew Bretz Sounding Shakespeare: Intermedial Adaptation and Popular Music 257 Daniel Fischlin “Playing the Race Bard”: How Shakespeare and Harlem Duet Sold (at) the 2006 Stratford Shakespeare Festival  290 James McKinnon Part Four: “Give No Limits to My Tongue … I Am Privileged to Speak”: The Limits of Adaptation? Patchwork Shakespeare: Community Events at the American Shakespeare Tercentenary (1916)  321 Monika Smialkowska Upcycling Shakespeare: Crafting Cultural Capital  347 Sujata Iyengar Beyond Adaptation  372 Mark Fortier Contributors  387 Index  393

Illustrations

1.1 1.2 1.3 1.4 1.5 8.1

The Beatles in “Pyramus and Thisbe”  57 “Hamlet is back … and he is not happy”  59 The Nightmare before Christmas  65 Kenneth Branagh, Hamlet 66 Terry Jones in Monty Python’s Hamlet 67 Harlem Duet poster, Karen Robinson (Billie) and Nigel Shawn Williams (Othello)  300 9.1 and 9.2 Caliban’s community participants display their ­gymnastic prowess  326, 327 9.3 Pantomime scene of Hercules and the Sphinx from Caliban 333 9.4 The masked figure representing War in Caliban 339 9.5 Sample pages from the printed program of Caliban by the Yellow Sands 341 10.1 Romeo and Juliet votive holder  359 10.2 Margot Ecke’s The Tragedy of Ophelia (2009)  365 11.1 Kill Shakespeare 383

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Acknowledgments

This book results from many circumstances, not the least of which are years spent developing multimedia and intermedial ways of teaching Shakespeare via some of the technologies deployed on the Canadian Adaptations of Shakespeare (CASP) website. Ongoing work on that site has afforded me a unique opportunity to explore various forms of online intermediality, from multimedia galleries and literacy games through to mobile technologies associated with apps. Along this journey I have encountered many talented individuals in a variety of disciplines, without whom this book would never have happened. These include Mat Buntin, John Campbell, Kenny Doren, Brad Eccles, Darina Griffin, Arni Mikelsons, Max Summerlee, and a host of other media and IT creative thinkers who have broadened my own view of what is possible when thinking through the relationship between new media and older forms of literacy associated with Shakespeare. The specific impetus for the book arose out of an international graduate student conference organized and held at the University of Guelph in November 2011. The conference sought to frame problems of intermediality and Shakespeare in ways that were true to the emerging realities so many of us were experiencing with Shakespeare as a thoroughly mediated site of cultural production. Many people contributed to the success of that conference including Andrew Bretz, Mark Kaethler, Mauricio Martinez, and Jessica Riley, four doctoral students who played key roles in realizing the conference’s aims. The University of Guelph, particularly the Office of the President, the Office of the VicePresident of Research, and the Office of the Dean and Associate Dean (Research) of the College of Arts, contributed a significant amount of resources to the event. I thank President Alastair Summerlee, Dr Kevin

xii Acknowledgments

Hall, and Drs Don Bruce and Stuart McCook for their generosity and their vision in foregrounding and supporting this transdisciplinary research in the arts and humanities. A protracted period of discussion and debate followed the conference, drawing a wider community of participants into the discussion. That discussion and the ongoing work elaborating the ideas that came out of the conference have resulted in this book, the first to examine Shakespearean cultural production specifically through the theoretical lens of intermediality. I’m especially grateful to all the contributors to OuterSpeares: the book went through a significant set of exchanges and edits that reflect their talents and exceptional engagement. Early work on the book was enabled by a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada Standard Research grant – and publication of the book itself was supported by the office of the Vice-President of Research at the University of Guelph and by the President’s Office also at the University of Guelph. The University Research Chair (URC) program at the University of Guelph also helped fund this research. The four external referees for the book provided significant, constructive input on how to refine the manuscript, and their time and effort are deeply appreciated. To my editor at University of Toronto Press, Suzanne Rancourt, a profound thank you for her professionalism, enthusiasm, and commitment through the publication process, as to Judy Williams, who copyedited the manuscript with skill and insight. To Jennie Hissa and Rachel Shoup, my superb research assistants throughout this venture, deep gratitude for your efforts and professionalism. To Martha, Damian, Hannah, Zoë, and Esmé, as always, heartfelt thanks for the creative and loving family space that has supported this work. This volume is dedicated to the memory of Kenny Doren, a longtime collaborator on the CASP site and friend who died tragically in 2012. Kenny was a multimedia artist whose work was instrumental in shaping and influencing many of the ideas found in this volume. He was a brilliant presence in so many ways – as an artist and creative thinker, as a technical, multimedia wizard, and as a theorist and scholar. His light will be sorely missed, and this book is a small token honouring his memory.

OUTERSPEARES

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OuterSpeares: Shakespeare, Intermedia, and the Limits of Adaptation D a n i el Fi sc hl in

Prelude: Intermedia and Co-productive Form The word “intermedia” references a vast, ongoing set of practices associated with how narratives travel in and across media, in and through cultures. Intermedia occur when representation is reconfigured through an array of media and cultural forms that arise out of specific contexts, diffuse histories, technologies, and creative practices. The word intermedia, as cultural theorist Eric Vos describes it, characterizes “artistic phenomena that appear either to fall between established categories or to fuse their criteria” (1997, 325). Whether through being “between” media practices or synthesizing them, intermedial creation generates new forms of syncretic representation. Vos, in a useful discussion of the various definitions associated with the term, breaks these into two forms: the first, definitions that relate to “art works (or even genres),” and the second, definitions that delineate “systems of signs and their qualities” (325). The former is exemplified in art forms that both fuse and diversify their signifying strategies – so, a visual work that makes use of music; a literary work that makes use of film; a theatrical work that uses online technologies – or works that deploy multiple media in concert as part of their signifying strategies. The latter definition references, and here Vos makes use of Claus Clüver’s and Leo Hoek’s work, semiotic structures in which the various media present are inseparable, mutually dependent, interactive, and syncretic, a form of “productive and receptive simultaneity” (326) that arises from the confluence of media that are relationally contingent to each other. The word intermedia, then, addresses co-productive forms of representation that are what

4  Daniel Fischlin

they are as a result of the simultaneous commingling of discursive and technical fields that arise in given historical circumstances. OuterSpeares examines these notions of what constitutes intermediality through the specific lens of Shakespearean adaptations, where Shakespeare is a primary and often contentious site for the production of intermedial representations in both of the senses described above. Besides the perhaps too obvious pun on Shakespeare’s name, the title of this book, OuterSpeares: Shakespeare, Intermedia, and the Limits of Adaptation, addresses the centrality of Shakespeare to dominant modes of exemplary narrative in literary and theatrical terms. But the title also points towards the ways in which adapted forms of Shakespeare are challenging that centrality via tactics that take us from traditional Shakespeare-centric interpretation to the “outerspeares,” the “outer spheres,” the marginal or exploratory sites where non-traditional interpretations of non-traditional forms of the Shakespeare effect are in evidence. These sites are where Shakespeare becomes a radically different entity and an emblem of how intermedial adaptation produces difference and innovative forms of narrative through the interproductive ­simultaneity of diverse media forms. These innovative forms reflect a new economy of relations between and across media. And they force reflection of the power relations that intermedia reveal as they diffuse narratives across new sites in which struggles between centre and margin are renegotiated. It is important to remember, as does performance theorist Philip Auslander, that the analysis of intermedial performances cannot rest on assumptions about the inherent qualities of different media and consequent assumptions about how they may combine with each other, however attractive such assumptions may be. It is not enough, for instance, to suppose that because theatre and film can be seen as representing different parts of the psyche, they can work together as equal partners when that partnership takes place in a cultural context in which film is clearly privileged over theatre, a privileging that is bound to affect audience perception of the hybrid. It is simply not the case that all media have the same cultural presence and carry the same cultural authority, and any consideration of intermediality must take these issues into account. Intermediality must be considered in terms of “cultural economy,” a phrase I use to describe a realm of inquiry that includes both the real economic relations among cultural forms, and the relative degrees of cultural prestige and power enjoyed by different forms. (2000, 3–4)

Introduction 5

In short, the place of Shakespeare in the general cultural economy shifts in relation to the prestige and power of the media through which his presence is diffused. OuterSpeares tells part of this story with regard to how intermedial forms of Shakespearean presence define new economies of relations that are unthinkable apart from the media contexts in which they operate. Early modern scholar Stephen Greenblatt, in an essay entitled “The Interart Moment,” makes Shakespeare a central part of his essay’s narrative, telling us that “If you study Shakespeare … it [is] probably always absurd to treat [his texts] … as a master set of texts, words on a page unrelated to any other form of expression … the plays repeatedly and insistently call attention to the fact that they are not simply being read but being seen, that words and images are conjoined together” (1997, 14). Likewise, the acoustic dimensions of Shakespeare’s texts inevitably point us towards the soundscapes those texts create and on which they rely, as do the stage directions, which indicate movements and gestural forms that are also inextricably linked to how the plays make meaning. Greenblatt argues, and remember he is writing in the late 1990s on the cusp of the massive transformation associated with online media, that “The dominant media of our time – television, film, and popular music – depend, as did the Elizabethan theater, upon the intersection of arts: words, images, music, dance. Our great art forms are for the most part collaborative enterprises that depend upon creators with different areas of expertise talking and working with one another, and it is long overdue that scholars begin to do the same” (15). This book takes its cue, in part, from Greenblatt’s notion that we need to understand how multiple art forms and media conjoin to tell stories, to represent multiple forms of reality in multilayered and deeply sedimented intensities in which the melding of media plays a crucial role. Shakespeare, then, is no longer just textual or theatrical in any conventional sense of the terms. Rather, as Pascale Aebischer and Nigel Wheale argue, “many of today’s Shakespeares appear not in editions and conservative theatrical productions but in a plethora of contemporary formats – novel, horror, screenplay, musical – in foreign performance traditions – kathakali, theerukootu, and kudiattam, for example – and in a bewildering range of media forms, from film via video to DVD, CD-ROM, and the internet” (2003, 4). Aebischer and Wheale also note how Shakespeare is “increasingly decentred” in productions “that use his plays and name as pretexts for cultural and ideological negotiations that are more often relevant to their immediate context than to

6  Daniel Fischlin

Shakespeare’s plays themselves” (3). This decentring is at the crux of the title of this book, with “outerspeares” reinforcing the move from the centrality of Shakespeare in adaptive practices (where his work is the “source”) to the proliferation of differential production as the keynote for such practices in which the adaptation displaces, revisions, and reshapes the source. New forms of representation that arise from new forms of media inevitably require that we develop the literacy to read these representations adequately. Why this matters is complicated. If we take, for instance, the German media theorist Friedrich A. Kittler’s notion of discourse networks, those networks reveal to us who we are and how we create meaning. As David E. Wellbery makes clear in his foreword to the English translation of Kittler’s seminal work, Discourse Networks 1800/1900, “A notation system, or as we have chosen to translate, a discourse network has the exterior character – the outsideness – of a technology. In Kittler’s view, such technologies are not mere instruments with which ‘man’ produces his meanings … Rather, they set the framework within which something like ‘meaning,’ indeed, something like ‘man,’ become possible at all” (1990, xii). Or, as Geoffrey WinthropYoung puts it in his book on Kittler and the media, “the crux of the matter is that media-historical resonance has a profound cognitive impact” (2011, 108). Given this profound cognitive impact, it follows then that the uses of media to make meaning are profoundly tied to notions of intermediated subjectivity and agency that are increasingly the central questions of the contemporary moment. The impact of narratives that mutate through intermedial filters and fusions produces resonances that do indeed matter for how they translate identity, history, and story into telling representations that are an aspect of the creative self-­ innovation at the core of what it means to be human. The “outsideness” of new forms of technology associated with discourse networks in turn reveals new potential forms of interiority and cognition. In the case of OuterSpeares, because much of the scholarship is Canadian, and because my own experience working across multiple media has been via the Canadian Adaptations of Shakespeare (CASP) website, it is a key feature of this book that in addition to being the first to address Shakespeare through a specifically intermedial theoretical framework, it also does so with significant attention to Canadian adaptations, thus perhaps adding to the book’s uniqueness. So, indeed, yes, there are any number of collections on Shakespearean appropriations and adaptations by many media, but none with this specifically

Introduction 7

intermedial approach and theoretical framework coming out of a specific set of scholarly practices and research methodologies located in, but not exclusive to, a specific national site. Given the new technologies available (and in the making), concepts of presence, virtuality, liveness, intermediation, and even performance need to be rethought when addressing what constitutes an adaptation of a Shakespearean play, or any other work, for that matter. Today, as perhaps never before, content and narrative forms are created across multiple platforms, sometimes simultaneously. With the new trans- and intermedia come real challenges to both adaptations and adaptation theory that this volume addresses through its theoretical excursions and its wide range of case studies. In the latter, “Shakespeare” becomes a mobile, even disruptive, global cultural brand, the site of cultural as well as technological intermediation, and an unavoidable site where many of these intermedial energies are gathered and laid bare for better or for worse. A key precept throughout is that media are themselves always already cultural – they embed and embody symbols, values, aspirations, imagination, narrative, semiotics, and technologies that arise from specific sets of circumstances: “culture is indeed multimodal as it makes use of technology as well as symbolic forms that employ simultaneously several material-semiotic resources” (López-Varela Azcárate and Zepetnek 2008, 66). Moreover, intermediality in such an expansive context, and echoing Greenblatt’s sentiments discussed earlier, “can be defined as the ability to read and write critically across varied symbol systems and across various disciplines and scholarly as well as general discursive practices” (López-Varela Azcárate and Zepetnek 2008, 66–7). Necessarily, the production of new media relies on antecedent practices, wherein adaptive strategies and new technologies combine to create a new medium, a new set of symbologies and semiotic practices that are culturally present, active, and meaningful. The case of mobile devices and the software applications that serve as portals for specific functions, like reading texts (think Kindle or Kobo), experiencing our geophysical relationship to the planet (think Google Earth), or interfacing with music in new ways (think iTunes or SoundCloud), all point to how new interpellations of older forms rely on adaptation to platforms unimaginable in past circumstances. In this sense adaptation cannot be discussed without addressing intermodal relations and transpositions in which media and genre are key defining elements in the revisioning process. Julie Sanders notes how “Adaptation can be a transpositional practice, casting a specific genre into another generic mode … yet it can also

8  Daniel Fischlin

be an amplificatory procedure engaged in addition, expansion, accretion, and interpolation” (2006, 18). Using French literary theorist Gérard Genette’s notion of hypertextuality, Sanders argues that adaptation is “frequently a specific process involving the transition from one genre to another: novels into film; drama into musical; the dramatization of prose narrative and prose fiction; or the inverse movement of making drama into prose narrative” (19). Intermedial adaptations, in which multimodal forms of narrative fuse in spaces that radically remediate traditional narratives, challenge critics to go beyond genre as the defining determinant of what it means to adapt. In this sense, intermedial adaptation is a form of hyper-adaptation, especially so when multi- or intercultural contexts are also foregrounded as part of the multimodal approach to revisioning. The Québécois director and dramaturge Robert Lepage and his production company Ex Machina are a compelling example of how theatrical production makes manifest this principle. Lepage’s project entails not only a multicultural context in which adaptation or recycling (frequently of Shakespearean texts) is evident, but also multiple forms of performance practice synced with new technologies in startling new ways. Which is to say, his work is thoroughly intermedial for how it collides cultures, antecedent cultural forms, and new technologies in contexts in which adaptation and recycling are all key features. Thus Lepage’s 2011 version of Shakespeare’s The Tempest saw him working in an outdoor intercultural setting of the First Nations (Huron-Wendat) village Wendake with the Huron-Wendat nation supplemented by ­sophisticated sound and lighting technologies that blurred the distinction between the stage and the “natural” setting of the village as it was intermediated by Lepage’s vision. The allegory of colonial first contact plays out in Lepage’s version of the play in ways that depend on the actual cultural setting in which the play is staged and on the range of old and new technologies and dramaturgical devices brought to bear on the production. Lepage deployed Huron-Wendat actors dressed in traditional garb and speaking their language in the production. Steeve Wadohandik Gros-Louis played King Alonso of Naples, as an instance of this multicultural mix-up, and Gros-Louis’s well-known dance troupe, Sandokwa (meaning “eagle”), played a key role in the production, an intervention remarkable for how it made spectacular the cultural spaces being intermediated. Further, Lepage’s production was

Introduction 9 inspired by a Joseph Légaré painting (c. 1826), “Edmund Kean Reciting Before the Hurons,” that depicts Edmund Kean (1787–1833), the famous English actor, performing Shakespeare in Wendake in the 1800s. Kean, who in 1823 had been the first actor of his period to perform King Lear with its original tragic ending (thus undoing the adaptive work of Nahum Tate’s revisioning, which saw Cordelia marrying Edgar and Lear retaking his throne), was much admired by the Hurons who made him an honorary chief and gave him the name “Alanienouidet,” meaning “strong wind in drifting snow.” (Windspeaker 2011)

The through-line from Kean and his connection to English productions of Shakespeare, to Légaré’s visual depiction of Kean in a multicultural (French Canadian and First Nations) Canadian context, to Lepage’s contemporary restaging in light of all these antecedent cultural collisions via various media tells a remarkable story about how narratives travel. Lepage’s production, in short, mixed media, languages, and cultural contexts in ways that made it profoundly intermedial. That The Tempest also dates to the approximate founding of Lepage’s hometown, Québec City, further amplifies how culture and media interface to produce sedimented new relations that intermedial representations can heighten and amplify. And this is but one example from many such revisionings, adaptations, and devisings in which Shakespeare is implicated as an object of intermedial refashioning. Another example from a very different cultural context would be the work of Chinese director Lin Zhaohua, described by Marcus Cheng Chye Tan as “China’s most significant and prominent director of the post–Cultural Revolution age” (2012, 92). Tan’s analysis of Lin’s 2001 production of Richard III identifies its modes as intercultural, intermedial, and postmodern forms of Shakespearean adaptation. For Tan, “Lin’s notion of interculturality is not a mutual ‘exchange’ of cultural forms and performance practices; it is neither hybridity nor an excavatory interculturalism of Chinese forms for a contemporary concern. Instead Lin’s practice … [is] an ‘unconscious’ relation of cultural texts that further accentuates his characteristic style of ‘no-style.’ It is an ­appropriation of a ‘global’ text for a ‘local’ concern – unintentional or otherwise” (93). In this example, cultural transposition figures as a key aspect of the form intermediality takes. That Lin’s glocal (both global and local) adaptation plays with unconscious relations in ways that are  not immediately transparent but that are nonetheless part of the

10  Daniel Fischlin

interpretative schema of the production tells us something about how intermediality and diffused intentionality are now part of the framework in which adaptations occur. Often audiences exposed to this form of adaptation have no necessary knowledge of the source text, much like high school students who watch the 1999 romantic comedy Ten Things I Hate about You without necessarily knowing anything about its derivation from The Taming of the Shrew. Intermediality refigures in powerful ways that obscure, intentionally or not, these originary relations. It does so by foregrounding the medium as opposed to the source, with the medium more definitive of the narrative than the source text. This is yet another form of the “outerspeares” effect associated with the distancing that occurs between source and adaptation as the former is intermediated. This volume, then, asks a number of questions about intermedial adaptation through its focus on Shakespeare as a crucial site where these practices are intensely present. How effective are intermedial adaptations in addressing interpretive nuances and forms that shape and alter meaning with such efficacy? Can a tweet possibly compare to a theatrical monologue? A Facebook posting to a witty stichomythic exchange? A chat-room conversation to a conventionally published essay? A visual mashup to a DJ sample? A photonovel to a computer game or video installation in which different narrative forms are transmediated?1 How does intermediation effect emplotment strategies in which different forms of narrative are at stake? What are the reception effects, the cognitive impacts of the aesthetics of intermedial representations by comparison with more traditional forms? How do the intermediations across a range of texts, media, and cultures lead to new productive and creative forms that redefine how representation and signification work in and across these new forms? How does the struggle between conventional orthodoxies of interpretation and challenging new approaches manifest itself via intermedial adaptations? This book provides a varied range of answers to these sorts of questions and does so through an exceptional assortment of case studies that expand the breadth of what has traditionally been meant by intermedia. Thus, the book features work on YouTube and mobile computing Shakespeares along with work on Shakespeare on radio and TV, on Shakespeare and popular music, on the Shakescrafting movement and patchwork Shakespeare, and on Shakespearean film as understood through the filters of intermedial theory, among multiple other sites of intermediation. The through-line in all these sites consists not

Introduction 11

only of Shakespeare as a fetishized site of cultural devising and revising but also of how collided intermedia inflect meaning in ways that profoundly influence how we apprehend our always already mediated realities. “The Earlier Revision Has Been Revoked”: Shakespeare Goes Intermedial Sometimes a little Shakespeare goes a long way. Suzanne Collins’s blockbuster trilogy The Hunger Games ends its first book with a compelling apocalyptic scenario where the “star-cross’d lovers,” Katniss Everdeen and Peeta Mellark of District Twelve, are about to commit onscreen suicide before an enormous televisual audience that has bought into the instantly recognizable Shakespearean situation. Throughout the book there are repeated references to Katniss and Peeta as memes of the “star-cross’d lovers,” that is, as signifiers of a deeply embedded cultural figuration, of the Romeo and Juliet trope, itself a familiar narrative structure with a long history that precedes Shakespeare. Katniss and Peeta’s identification with the lovers of yore translates into higher media ratings for the Hunger Games, what the blurb on the back of the novel calls “a fight to the death on live TV” involving male and female contestants between the ages of twelve and eighteen picked by a lottery system. The Romeo and Juliet meme provides an identifiable storyline that the media audience watching the Hunger Games can buy into. The meme also furnishes Katniss and Peeta with a survival mechanism: they “play” star-crossed lovers in order to outlast the other contestants by getting sponsorships associated with their popularity, which is enhanced by the Shakespearean roles they enact, mutatis mutandis. The meme also provides a recognizable literary origin for The Hunger Games’s adapted storyline, piggybacking Collins’s work of pop culture onto the canonical status associated with Shakespeare. As Katniss says about the “star-crossed lovers” trope, “They eat that stuff up in the Capitol” (2008, 136). Later in the book, more explicitly, she says: “If I want to keep Peeta alive, I’ve got to give the audience something more to care about. Star-crossed lovers desperate to get home together” (261). The familiar Shakespearean trope, then, is at the core of the plot machinations by both the characters in the novel, strategically manipulating their own storyline for survival, and by Collins, the author of the novel, inflecting the novel with an unmistakable core narrative associated with Shakespeare.2

12  Daniel Fischlin

As the novel draws to a close and Katniss and Peeta face the cynical interference of Seneca Crane, the Head Game Master, who changes the rules from the last two people left standing from the same District being able to survive to only one person making it out of the Games alive: “The earlier revision has been revoked. Closer examination of the rule book has disclosed that only one winner may be allowed” (2008, 342). The storyline device is meant to generate even more tension for the media audience and to boost ratings for the Hunger Games as the ultimate embodiment of the parallels between the Capitol’s hegemony over the Districts and the ideology of live TV. Further, the device is a realpolitik manoeuvre to put an end to the potentially revolutionary energies that Katniss and Peeta emblematize as they fight for survival against the brutally totalitarian social engineering of the Capitol. As a revision of a rule that has already been revised, the change in rules signifies the arbitrariness of set principles, origins, and fixity in the name of expediency. This arbitrariness serves, in a larger context, as a reminder of what “governs” adaptation, which is to say expediency in the face of what the Game Master decides is needed to satisfy his live TV audience. But Katniss and Peeta reach a unique, spontaneous solution that replays the dénouement of The Tragedy of Romeo and Juliet. Both choose suicide. One dystopia echoes another in this climactic moment in the book, as the inexorable Shakespearean logic that leads to Romeo’s and Juliet’s deaths seems about to be replayed. Just as Katniss and Peeta are about to ingest the Nightlock’s poison berries in defiance of the rule change, and thus deprive the Games of any victor at all, “the frantic voice of Claudius Templesmith shouts above them. ‘Stop! Stop! Ladies and gentlemen, I am pleased to present the victors of the Seventy-fourth Hunger Games …’” (2008, 345). The moment decisively adapts the Shakespearean original, showing that indeed the “earlier revision has been revoked” and that adaptation to changed circumstances is the ultimate key to survival. The suicidal deaths of Romeo and Juliet are refashioned in Katniss’s and Peeta’s non-end. And, it must be emphasized: the power of media to intervene is what stops the supposed lovers from following through on their pact. It is unthinkable that the Games not have a victor and that such a scenario should play out on live TV before an expectant audience. So a disembodied voice interposes; the live audience enamoured of the pair is spared an unimaginable ending; and the power of media as a means of  reshaping reality is reaffirmed. The moment encapsulates a very

Introduction 13

specific set of circumstances governing how Shakespearean adaptation and intermediality intersect, a topic this book explores in a range of interventions that tells us how widespread, if not how long-standing, this protean form of adaptation is. To place the scene described above in perspective: The Hunger Games entails a mass audience reading the novel that in turn imagines a mass televisual audience as a key component in the live reality TV show scenario of the Games themselves. The latter scenario is replayed visually in the filmed version of The Hunger Games (dir. Gary Ross, 2012), which restages this complex intermediation of audience watching audience watching audience as Collins rewrites and manipulates the Romeo and Juliet meme in a way that is instantly recognizable and a key structuring device in her plot. Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet is intermedially present in multiple ways in this example: as a global brand around which certain expectations regarding youth culture and tragedy are present and easily translatable to the televisual, to film, to live reality TV, to text, and so forth; as a plot backdrop across these multiple media that lets Collins spring the clinamen, the swerve away from the expected outcome, which allows her heroes to perdure; and as a trope for the endlessly malleable adaptive power residing in deeply embedded cultural narratives, the powerful structure of memes circulating across cultural and intermedial contexts in unexpected ways. In The Hunger Games, indeed, a little Shakespeare goes a long way: the trope of the “star-crossed” lovers (used six times throughout the first book in the trilogy)3 is given an alternative twist, and the certain death of the lovers is transmuted into anarchic life. Peeta and Katniss’s willingness to die for each other, paradoxically, gives them life – a trope of adaptation’s complex relation to source. Infidelity in that relation potentially activates the adaptation’s own capacity to become autonomous, if imbricated in an unavoidable relationship to a source that is not necessarily stable.4 Shakespeare’s “original” ending, then, is revoked and the power of revision, which is to say the power of adaptation to do things to texts in and across multiple media, is evoked. All the world is indeed a televisual stage, and Katniss and Peeta, as canny youth, know how to play to that stage in sophisticated, spectacular ways that make them avatars ­perhaps of today’s youth culture, thoroughly embedded in a media web  where media interventions across multiple traditional and non-­ traditional platforms (from TV and radio through to online social

14  Daniel Fischlin

networks) produce new forms of identity through convergence, revision, and adaptation. Shakespeare is ineluctably situated in that web as an effect subject to ongoing interventions that are as much a function of the media in which “he” appears as those media are a function of the diverse forms of culture that find expression across an increasingly wide array of media platforms. Media diversity necessarily entails intermedial adaptations, with even the transposition of a familiar story from one medium into another leading to adaptive changes that derive from media culture. The Hunger Games is far from unique. A 2012 Thai film adaptation of Macbeth entitled Shakespeare Must Die was banned for telling the story of a theatre company working in a fictional country (resembling Thailand) doing a production of Macbeth. One of the key characters in the production is a dictator named Dear Leader, based on the Thai leader Thaksin Shinawatra, who was overthrown by a military coup in 2006. The film makes use of a famous photo from the 1976 student uprising in Bangkok depicting a demonstrator being lynched and uses a range of referents to make its politics obvious to viewers. These include “the attire of a murderer in the film, who wore a bright red hooded cloak – the same colour worn by the pro-Thaksin demonstrators known as the ‘Red Shirts’” (Doksone 2012). The transposition of Shakespeare into film media that reflect meta-theatrical, and highly politicized, contexts shows the signifying flexibility of such adaptive intermediations. Censorship happens here because the intermedium is so powerful, so charged with potential to activate and disseminate not only Shakespeare’s iconic, global brand but also the range of symbologies to which that brand can be put to use in intercultural contexts. A 2012 Romeo and Juliet, staged at the National Theater in April 2012 in Baghdad, shows how artfully such intercultural transpositions can occur, with the modulation from Shakespeare’s “star-crossed lovers” to the Iraqis’ “doomed cross-sectarian love affair” being a key distinguishing feature of the adaptation. Tim Arango’s coverage of the production notes how It is not poison or a dagger that takes the lives of the young lovers, but a suicide bomb. The Montagues and Capulets are divided not just by family, but also by religious sect. And the dialogue in the Iraqi adaptation of “Romeo and Juliet” is sprinkled with references to Blackwater, Iranians, and the American reconstruction effort … Its story line of a doomed crosssectarian love affair manages to touch on nearly every element of the recent collective Iraqi experience. (Arango 2012)

Introduction 15

With the Capulets represented as Sunnis via the red-and-white keffiyeh worn by Juliet’s father, and the Montagues as Shiites via Romeo’s father’s black-and-white scarf, the adaptation recapitulates the binaries of religious strife even as it imagines an Iraq that has gone beyond colonial exploitation, dictatorships, war, invasion, and attempts at reconstruction. As Arango reports, Sarwa Malik, the actor who plays Juliet as a Sunni, is herself Shiite and Kurdish, and someone who married across religious lines (her husband is Sunni). These sorts of contextual and cultural reworkings are a key component in how adaptations do their work in the world. Crossing borders, imagining alternatives, reinscribing histories – these are all techniques that adaptation activates in intercultural contexts that play with the tension that exists in familiar Shakespearean storylines remade in new contexts. Remaking in this way is both an act of defamiliarization to the Shakespearean original and an act of refamiliarization to the audience that sees itself newly represented in the adapted context. Shakespearean culture, in short, intermediates between and across cultures to produce new meanings. The Iraqi example reminds us that intermedial adaptation is as much about technologies of representation as about the content and cultural contexts that are translated from one performance space to another. A 2012 adaptation of Hamlet in Toronto, Hamlet Live, proposed a “live performance without boundaries” (Hamlet Live n.d.) involving live streaming of the play, but also a chat room where audience members could interact as the play was unfolding live on the stage and the internet.5 The Hamlet Live site explains: The Hamlet Live team mean[s] to take this classic, and most famous of stories, and broadcast it to anyone with the desire to watch, whenever, and wherever they want. Not only do they want to bring this tale to anyone anywhere, but they want to do it with the highest possible quality: they want multiple cameras, multiple angles, and an editor, live on the job, editing as they go! They want this to be the most widely viewed performance of Hamlet … in history. (Hamlet Live n.d.)

In yet another riff that links Shakespeare with a dystopian, post-­ apocalyptic future, the producers of the show imagine that In 2080, the world is quite a different place. Violent solar flares in the early 21st Century triggered an unparalleled nuclear meltdown across the globe, leaving vast quantities of land desolate – and dangerous. Some of

16  Daniel Fischlin the more organized nations, Denmark among them, were able to produce the effort and resources necessary to prevent their reactors from melting down, only to have to rush to their own defense against dislocated and desperate populations seeking new homes. A brutal war, replete with every kind of atrocity, the fuel of nightmares, ensued, engulfing what habitable parts of the world that were left in implacable death. Only now, thanks to mass slaughter and the efficient and remorseless measures of a handful of generals has the war finally come to a close. Denmark has done well under the martial leadership of King Hamlet, though his sudden passing at the very height of his glory has left a nation in mourning. His brother, Claudius, with the voice of the people at his back, has stepped forth and assumed the imperial mantle and married the former King’s Queen, Gertrude. It is during this transition that we find the young Hamlet, the son of the late King, a warrior prince and imperial candidate by his own right, puzzling over the grief in his heart. “The time is out of joint,” he remarks; it is only when his father comes to him as a ghost and accuses his uncle of murdering him that Hamlet realizes just how out of joint the time is and “That ever [he] was born to set it right.” Now Hamlet “with wings as swift/As meditation or the thoughts of love” must “sweep” to his revenge. And vengeance will be had. (Hamlet Live n.d.)

The adaptation replays Hamlet within this newly reimagined apocalyptic context, using new media techniques to represent the live play on a live streaming internet site, while also being live-edited and responded to in the moment by the variously embodied audiences via chat-room technology. Intermedial interventions abound in this adaptation and they deploy an array of techniques that give new meaning to the spectacle of spectacle. In addition to YouTube channel dissemination, and the creation of accounts on social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter, the Hamlet Live team used the online IndieGogo funding platform to help underwrite their transmedia, digital broadcast vision of Hamlet involving stationary and roaming cameras, a simulcast control room director live-editing the show, and even a social media manager. All these digital techniques and adaptive interventions reinforce Christopher Baugh’s observation that “The possibilities for the creation and manipulation of the stage image that the computer provides is [sic] becoming, essentially, a new source of spectacle that may well prove to be analogous to the Renaissance discovery of the perspective scene” (cited in Darroch 2007, 98).6 The play of the play literally out- or overreaches its imagined physical limits with live-streaming, to cite the case

Introduction 17

of the Hamlet Live production, yet another example of the kind of “outerspeares” practice this volume examines. In so doing, Hamlet Live invited an instantaneous potentially global audience into an embodied performance where no more than a few hundred people can physically be present. Virtuality confers interpretative permeability. The irreducible text – vessel for content never previously imagined, vessel for intermedial representations yet to be invented – becomes that much more irreducible, that much more open to interpretive reshaping, adaptive rescripting. Instant response techniques like live chat-rooms during a play’s performance, or streaming Twitter accounts used by performers and audience alike, radically change the nature of the multiple forms of interaction that a traditional staging proffers. These new forms of interactivity via social networking and virtual presencing are profoundly adaptive of (and challenging to) traditional notions of embodied performance. But at the same time they remind us of the degree to which the work of the imagination takes multiple forms both embodied and virtual. A reader silently reading a Shakespeare play in a forgotten corner of a library is engaging in an intimate, difficult-to-know, virtual relationship wherein the embodied text by the writer and the embodied act of reading transmute and interweave, ineluctably leading us back into the disembodied acts of imagination that lie behind both the creation of the work and its reception. Which is to say that the space in which the reader’s reception of the text and the text’s signifying range intermix is a virtual space. As critic Yong Li Lan makes clear, digitized performances of Shakespeare thrive on the absence of aura. Yet if we trace the displacement of the auratic backwards, from the digital image to the photographic record of the actor, to the actor’s body, we are faced with an even deeper paradox of liveness as bringing-to-life (i.e. the performance), of a role, a character. The original Macbeth is a virtual character, not an actual one: he is created by the representation, or personation, of the actor. It is … the pleasure of the acting as well as the acted that the audience enjoys, and precisely the incomplete fusion, the double presence, of actor and character in the theatre that is asserted by film theorists as the incompleteness of representation in the theatre as compared with film. The virtual image of the actor cannot be simply opposed to his “reality” on the stage, which as Deleuze suggestively puts it always has “one part of itself in the virtual into which it [is] plunged as though into an objective dimension”; instead, it presents itself

18  Daniel Fischlin as part of a chain of productions by which an original is constituted as “there.” Virtuality, like the degree of transparency revealed in the image, which the software adjusts, is intrinsic to the performance. (2003, 58)

In such a context the “original Macbeth” or the “original” of any other Shakespearean character is always predicated on virtuality. It is the “chain of productions” that produces the “original” as an always already overwritten, contingent entity. And if virtuality is always intrinsic to the performance, so too is it intrinsic to the reception of the performance and to the media of the performance. Performance, medium, and reception interweave their relations through a combination of material embodiments and intertextual hauntings and inflections that remain fundamentally irreducible. Jean-Marc Larrue argues, “on peut difficilement prétendre aujourd’hui que la présence et le direct sont la nécessité ultime … qui peut, hors de tout doute, caractériser la pratique théâtrale et fixer son identité” (2008, 28) [“we cannot easily pretend today that presence and liveness are the ultimate requirement … that can, without any doubt, characterize theatrical practice and fix its identity”]. Presence and liveness acquire new meaning as they are intermediated. In this sense, intermediality reconfirms how virtual all forms of theatrical representation are in terms of their disembodied ­embodiments of thoughts, ideas, emotions, characters, histories, and so forth. Intermedial adaptation reinforces the fundamentally mysterious and enigmatic ways in which representations take shape imaginatively. These constructions are disseminated through multiple, frequently overlaid imaginaries in which meaning gathers force as it remains unsettled and always already potentially in the process of being remade. Intermedial adaptations push the virtual boundaries of physical texts via their technologies, thereby reinforcing and reinscribing the imaginary as a site that holds to limits with the greatest of difficulty. In discussing digital performance, Kurt Vanhoutte argues that the “embodied self is extended, hybridized and delimited through technologies” (2011, 46). But what remains unsaid in this formulation is that the technology is in a sense always a pale reflection of the imagination that creates it, deploys it, or uses it to try to replicate the irreducible acts of imagination that generate digital or embodied artefacts. The extended self that uses technology as a prosthetic is, in this sense, always less than the virtual imaginary out of which both arise, both are made possible – the creative non-self that refuses easy containment or definition. This idea is a key to understanding adaptation in general as an irreducible

Introduction 19

principle of how the imaginary creates possibility in new and unexpected ways, or in wholly conventional predictable ways. The continuum of what the imagination is capable of producing is far too vast to reduce down to formulaic notions of authentic sources being adapted according to fidelity tropes that are easily fractured by the power of the imagination. Similarly, the potential embedded in imaginative acts is far too great to predict with any accuracy how those acts will shape themselves within a supposedly proscribed set of theoretical limitations. The essayists in this book show how quickly and unpredictably the transformation of Shakespeare via intermedial means has led to a remarkable range of adaptive content-creation across multiple platforms, many of which no one could have predicted (from film, radio, and television through to the internet and mobile media platforms like touchscreen tablets and cellphones with a range of messaging features and softwares). The creative self improvises new forms as surely as it replicates old clichés. There is no certainty around how this process works, nor is the process necessarily predictable when it comes to what any one act of the imagination may produce in a given set of contingent circumstances. Canadian theatre critic Bruce Barton argues, in specific relation to intimacy and intermediality, that in the intermedial space, with its insistence on momentary intensity and complete attention, intimate interaction is unavoidable. Within the intermedial space the informed spectator anticipates the heightened self-disclosure of increased visibility, engagement, perhaps even interactivity. Intermedial intimacy is, thus, not generated through the portrayal of shared cultural attitudes and beliefs (a relationship that reinforces “timeless” and “universal” values), but rather through the performance of shared perceptual frames and dynamics (interaction that posits ambiguity and de/reorientation as the constants of contemporary existence). (2011, 46)

Similarly, essayists in this volume show, via ample close readings and case studies, that “ambiguity and de/reorientation” in intermedial Shakespearean adaptations are almost always at stake in complex and sometimes discomfiting ways. Intermedial adaptation proffers new forms of visibility, intimacy, self-disclosure, interactivity, and performativity – and with these come new expectations having to do with reception and interpretation. Both the Thai and the Canadian examples cited earlier challenge us to rethink how intermedial adaptations,

20  Daniel Fischlin

transmuted via new media, generate the potential to challenge radically our sense of what constitutes the limits, if any, of adaptation. In both examples, as in The Hunger Games example, culture and media intersect as the crucibles that intermediate adaptation. From this understanding it is possible to formulate a sort of McLuhanesque notion of media as an expression of culture, culture as an expression of media in which the medium is the message, but the message, too, is the medium. Marshall McLuhan’s notion that “The effects of new media on our sensory lives are similar to the effects of new poetry. They change not our thoughts but the structure of our world” (1995, 273) is here readily applicable. New media reconstruct realities, adapt them to new circumstances, and in turn reshape the cultures that deploy them. Intermedial adaptation in a new media context changes perceptions, and is as much about cultural transformation as it is about deploying new technologies. Media and culture, then, as the essayists in this book make clear, are indissociable. And as they shapeshift under the pressures of ideology, commerce, aesthetics, the imagination, technological innovation – and any number of other factors for that matter – new cultural forms emerge in ways that extend, ambiguate, and reorient the relation of source text to its adaptations. Dialogue no longer suffices between original and remake. Polylogical and diverse intertexts haunt this basic relationship with the possibility of interpretative fragmentation, recombination, and convergence disrupting the one-to-one correspondences traditionally thought to govern how an adaptation relates to its source. The fact of the matter is that adaptation is an inconvenient trope for doing things to other things: it inevitably entails play and change, imagination and reformulation. Or, as Linda Hutcheon puts it, “Transposition to another medium, or even moving within the same one, always means change or, in the language of the new media, ‘reformatting’” (2006, 16). But reformatting changes more than just the format. Reformatting changes meaning, charges it with new valences, creates new signifying potential, new ways of reception that all impact ultimately on the web of meaning in which any cultural artefact is implicated. The relations of presence and virtuality that Hamlet Live playfully attends to, like the politico-cultural resonances of recent Thai politics in Shakespeare Must Die, point to an adaptation effect that Diana Brydon and Irena Makaryk (2002) have called in specific relation to Canadian adaptations, borrowing from Coriolanus, “a world elsewhere.”7 This “elsewhere” is culturally determined, a function of the intersection

Introduction 21

of any range of factors from nation and ethnicity through to internet, ­techno-sphere, and intermedial presencings. Makaryk’s online essay “A World Elsewhere”8 concludes by referencing the global reach of the World Wide Web in relation to the Sanders Portrait of Shakespeare and how its rediscovery became the nexus for a rich set of nested intermediations all adding meaning to the elusive issue of Shakespearean identity in a particularly Canadian context: A presence since the eighteenth century in theatricals, in satires and parodies, adaptations and other re-writings, Shakespeare today is the property of both high and low culture, stage, classroom, text, intertext, and webtext. Thoroughly permeating all aspects of Canadian culture, Shakespeare is a ready-made, immediately recognizable source of meaning for any number of endeavours, but especially as a symbol of English studies … The question of a distinctly Canadian Shakespeare, shaped by tensions between English and French, by its [Canada’s] relations to the First Nations, to new immigrant groups, and to its elephantine neighbour to the south, is now locked into the global context of the World Wide Web. Numerous Canadian web-sites and chat groups contribute to the global reach of the Shakespeare industry. The image of the recently discovered so-called Sanders portrait, purportedly of Shakespeare, in the family of a retired Ontario engineer was instantly transmitted across newspapers and Internet sites, giving rise to new speculation about the face of genius, the authority of the Bard, and our relationship to him. His authority and centrality assisted by the combined forces of his entrenchment in the canons of high and low culture, of academia and techno-sphere, Shakespeare – like Hamlet’s Ghost, here, there and everywhere – both reigns supreme in Canada’s multiple, transitional spaces, and still continues to elude us. (Makaryk n.d.)

The rediscovery of the Sanders Portrait of Shakespeare was quickly followed by a book (Stephanie Nolen’s 2002 Shakespeare’s Face) and later (2008) a movie, director Anne Henderson’s Battle of Wills. The film, in addition to unravelling some of the story behind the authentication process, addresses the politics of representing and controlling the supposedly “authentic” image of the Bard, especially when long-­established vested interests like those of the National Portrait Gallery in London in its Chandos Portrait are faced with a challenger that has undergone significantly greater scrutiny in terms of scientific and genealogical research. Hence a film about an image of Shakespeare that was widely

22  Daniel Fischlin

broadcast in North American markets took on a freight of its own, becoming in its own way yet another intervention in the Shakespearean canon in which adaptation and intermediality are notably at stake. And underlying the remarkable story of the Sanders Portrait of Shakespeare as it has played out in the media is the significance of the “image” as an indicator of Shakespeare’s global brand status, as if the “real” image of Shakespeare adds meaning to what we already know about the Bard through traditional textual means. The desire to know the Bard in this way reflects on a broader desire to make meaning intermedially, that is, through the range of technologies and media forms available in the here and now. Makaryk’s nuanced read of how Shakespeare and new technologies intersect (in a specifically Canadian context) shows us that meaning is always in transition as a function of new media. Spaces of meaning are “transitional” and elusive – they are a by-product of a rich sphere of interwoven, nested contexts that defy reduction. The global reach of the Shakespeare brand inevitably intersects with the global reach of sophisticated new communications technologies and media. Intermedial adaptation revisits the relationship between the virtual and the present – between what is represented via means other than live embodiment and the materiality of physical spectacle. It asks that we attend to the “world elsewhere,” the elusive otherness that arises out of a fundamental relation between source text and adaptation, the two being mutually “elsewhere” to each other even though they are also ineluctably connected. This paradox of connection and disassociation lies at the vexatious heart of figuring what adaptation’s supposed limits are and how those limitations are often imagined in terms of intertextual and intermedial conventions that are unstable and  irreducible. The essayists in this volume consistently point to Shakespearean intermediations’ mobility, resistance to fixed meaning, and uncertain potential to disrupt and ambiguate received wisdom and orthodoxies of interpretation. The limits of adaptation in such contexts are virtually impossible to delimit or circumscribe, especially as new technologies intermix with new interpretive possibilities in hitherto unforeseen ways. “Brave New World”: Essays in Intermediality and New Frontiers for Adaptation Studies Shakespeare’s writing and storytelling are so embedded in the cultural fabric of global literature that when media technologies change and

Introduction 23

evolve, new ways of relating to the Bard follow closely behind. The essays in OuterSpeares: Shakespeare, Intermedia, and the Limits of Adaptation generally depict a globalized, digitized media environment that has truly become, in Shakespearean terms, a “brave new world.”9 The wellworn phrase from The Tempest (5.1) has a rich history of adaptive use that includes, in one genealogy, the Canadian First Nations theatre group De-ba-jeh-mu-jig’s 2000 production New World Brave.10 Since its inception in 1986, De-ba-jeh-mu-jig has staged over thirty productions by well-known aboriginal playwrights, including Drew Hayden Taylor, Tomson Highway, and Shirley Cheechoo. De-ba-jeh-mu-jig is located in the Wikwemikong Unceded Indian Reserve No. 26, which is situated on the eastern side of Manitoulin Island, the largest lake-island in the world, and stretches across both Georgian Bay and Lake Huron in Ontario, Canada. The company was established to give Native youth the opportunity to see themselves and their lives reflected on the stage, in the characters, in the stories, and in the experiences portrayed. New World Brave, which has nothing directly to do with The Tempest save for its punning alteration of the one key trope from the play, is a collective creation (like several others in De-ba-jeh-mu-jig’s repertoire), which takes the problem of envisioning a future for aboriginal culture and addresses key issues facing aboriginal communities across Canada. It is, in short, a cultural intermediation. Haunted by the Shakespearean trope and its invocation of colonial and power relations of dominance and alterity, New World Brave marks a space where the spectre of adaptation is to be found in the details of how cultures recycle and repurpose clichés and outworn tropes. But New World Brave fits into a larger genealogy of adaptations relating The Tempest to First Nations and aboriginal cultures. The adaptation of this single line traverses another key adaptive text, Aldous Huxley’s dystopian novel Brave New World (1932) set in 2540 CE, which itself has an important connection to aboriginal culture. The central character, John, “is the result of an accidental contraception failure. His parents [Thomas, the director of the Central London Hatchery and Conditioning Centre, and Linda] were visiting a ‘savage reservation’ when his mother got lost; she was stranded inside the reservation and gave birth to him there. He grew up with the lifestyle of the Zuni Native American tribe and a religion that is a blend of Zuni and Christian beliefs. The culture shock which results when the ‘savage’ is brought into regimented society provides the vehicle by which Huxley points out that society’s flaws” (“Brave New World” n.d.). James V. Spickard

24  Daniel Fischlin

argues that “Ruth Benedict featured [the Zuni] in Patterns of Culture, perhaps the most famous anthropology book of all time – a book based as much on her critique of modern life as it was on Zuni reality. At about the same time, Aldous Huxley used the Zuni as the paradigmatic, primitive Other to the Whites’ Brave New World. Each projected a later era’s Euro-American concerns on a Zuni world” (Spickard n.d.). The projection of the “savage” into the space of so-called civil society is a key feature in the way in which The Tempest has been adapted, especially in relation to Caliban as a symbolic register of the collision between different cultures. Significantly, this adaptation has usually been accomplished from the point of view of settler or European culture, something that New World Brave importantly reverses and something that is implicit in the underlying message of Huxley’s Brave New World. When the Warden describes the Reservation it is in the familiar racist terms associated with the “brave new world”: “about sixty thousand Indians and half-breeds … absolute savages … no communication whatever with the civilized world … no conditioning … monstrous ­superstitions … Christianity and totemism and ancestor worship … extinct languages, such as Zuñi and Spanish and Athapascan …” (Huxley 2000, 103). Further, in Huxley’s dystopia, the Savage, John, has been deeply shaped by Shakespeare (he has only read The Complete Works of William Shakespeare and he quotes Shakespeare with ease), “which sets him further aside from the vast majority of humanity in Huxley’s dystopia … [where most] are illiterate, and Shakespeare’s works are banned and unknown in this society to everyone but the World Controllers” (“Brave New World” n.d.) – the latter being a projected outcome that Huxley saw in the industrialization of American society by Henry Ford. In Huxley’s work, then, the theme of aboriginal “place,” the use of Shakespeare as a cultural signifier, and the problems of dystopic (American industrialized) modernity are all addressed. New World Brave similarly takes on these issues, however indirectly – and one might even argue that this indirection is the way in which Native culture writes itself back into the cultural narrative, thus reclaiming its centrality even as it is depicted as  marginal. And, ironically, New World Brave does so by making Shakespeare marginal to its own focus on aboriginal issues, even as the play’s title makes a point of reinscribing Shakespeare within the newly mediated contexts of First Nations culture. The adaptive transformation of the Shakespeare line effected by New World Brave, then, may appear barely significant but holds enormous

Introduction 25

symbolic power in relation to the work of the play, which seeks healing through theatrical creation. As I’ve already indicated, no other, implicit or explicit reference to Shakespeare occurs in the play. Nonetheless, the intertextual overwriting of Shakespeare’s line is suggestive of a reclamation of language and culture from the distorting gaze of European, settler culture, of the ways in which even faint echoes have a role in shaping meaning into new forms. I dwell on this example from The Tempest for a number of reasons. First, it reinforces how intermedial adaptation is not solely a function of technologies. Cultural intermediations produce new meanings as surely as do new technologies. Second, it reminds us that the genealogy of adaptations is often nebulous and spectrally intertextual, a web of meaning waiting to be made out of convergences and unthought relations that continue to be created and identified across multiple spaces and times. Third, in its particular attention to a key trope from Shakespeare’s The Tempest, these readings remind us that Shakespeare’s last play features a powerful magician, Prospero, who has the power to change reality, whether through his magic (symbolized in his staff) or through his knowledge (symbolized through his books). The play presciently addresses the very nature of intermediated realities via technologies (books, magic spells, and so forth) that come about as the result of unanticipated convergences and new forms of knowledge and interpretation. Shakespearean scholar Mark Fortier’s essay “‘In No Recognizable Way’ The Tempest” recounts his experience watching a summer park production in Toronto of The Tempest set in the Queen Charlotte Islands, one that “explicitly addressed the power of the white man over native people in the new and third worlds” (1994, 67). As he watches the play, a 747 flies overhead, obscuring the words being spoken on the stage. The interruption, or what Fortier calls the convergence, leads him to reflect, The Tempest and the jet had a more overdetermined relationship. If serendipity was at work that night, so were many other forces, some of which are hardly chance at all, but historical propulsion such that The Tempest and the 747 were sure to run across each other sometime, and to have the timbre of their convergence marked in particular ways. (1994, 60)

The technology of the 747 intervenes in a Shakespearean play adapted to First Nations’ contexts in which precisely such technological

26  Daniel Fischlin

interventions allow for the island’s Native cultures, embodied in Caliban and Ariel, to be subjugated. Hence, in the readings above, we have three very different contexts for reworking The Tempest. Yet all address colonial relations involving settler and aboriginal cultures; all do things to the original Shakespearean text (i.e., in the most expansive sense of the term, they are adaptive of it); and all deploy different forms of intermediality – some determined by the aesthetic form chosen (novel) by a creator, some cultural (First Nations adaptation), and some the “historical propulsion” imagined by Fortier that brings together unpredictable convergences. Intermedial refashionings occur in relation to all these factors. Such influences, in multiple interwoven contexts, contribute to the proliferation of meaning that is so frequently at stake in (and a product of) adaptive reworkings. Moreover, they push at the so-called limits of adaptation by articulating new ways of doing things to the precedent text. The three texts in play here are but one short strand in the incredibly rich and diverse play of Shakespearean reworkings and productions globally across many different media and cultures. It is worth remembering that there are significant, cumulative aesthetic and market economies that arise from such adaptations across much vaster webs of production and intertextuality. How much money in how many different markets has Huxley’s Brave New World generated – especially in light of the fact that it was ranked by the Modern Library as fifth “on its list of the 100 best English-language novels of the 20th century” (“Brave New World” n.d.)? How much money have the various radio, film, and TV adaptations of the novel in turn generated? How much money is involved if one totals up every production and every adaptation of The Tempest ever made from Shakespeare’s moment to the present? As I say at the beginning of this essay, sometimes a little Shakespeare goes a long way. Since the publication of Freda Chapple and Chiel Kattenbelt’s Intermediality in Theatre and Performance in 2006, the first book to use an intermedial approach to study theatrical discourses,11 there has been a growing sense that the intersection of new media and theatre is producing radical new forms of expression. That this is also the case for theatrical adaptation, in and of itself a long-established genre, is also evident. In light of these emergent forms of aesthetic exploration, this book explores how generations of what have been called “new” media are changing (and have changed) the ways we understand Shakespeare and, in the process, the ways we are transforming (and have transformed) our un-

Introduction 27

derstandings of history, culture, and media itself. The global branding of Shakespeare as an icon of literary achievement and master narratives (often deemed “universal”) has made Shakespeare a natural target for new media transpositions. This targeting has produced a rich and varied set of Shakespearean adaptations, intertexts, transpositions, translations, devisings, and mutations, across multiple media and ­multiple platforms, all of which are subsumed under (and in relation to) the Shakespeare effect, which I define elsewhere as a “function of Shakespeare’s cultural pervasiveness, in which echoes, resonances, and direct integration of that effect are in evidence in a given play” or adaptation or cultural artefact (2002, 335). A focus throughout the book, then, is Shakespearean adaptation and the limits, or lack thereof, when Shakespeare is mediated through radical new contexts and forms to produce the Shakespeare effect. Adaptation is a defining mode of being “in” language and culture – but it is also a slippery and protean process firmly tied to multiple, diverse forms of imagining how stories mean and how stories relate to each other in and across multiple contexts, voicings, histories, and the media platforms by which these get transmitted. As I have argued earlier on, attempts to limit adaptation’s signifying potential will ultimately fail because to do so unnaturally restricts the underlying nature of unsettled and unsettling acts of the imagination that shapeshift across a wide continuum ranging from convention (fidelity) to anarchy (infidelity and spectral presencing). The new media have consistently and across a range of historical contexts refigured Shakespeare. This book is particularly interested in the still understudied notion of how adaptation and “intermedia” intersect. The latter is a concept employed in the mid-1960s by Fluxus artist Dick Higgins. In “Statement on Intermedia,” a 1966 essay first published in the Something Else Newsletter, Higgins drew attention to the interdisciplinary, border-crossing activities and forms that occur between and across genres and diverse forms of artistic expression – music, theatre, painting, new media, and so forth. Conceptual fusion is a key aspect of intermedia in Higgins’s sense, exemplified in concrete poetry, “which fuses text and visual art” (1994, 72), or sound poetry, which fuses soundscapes, music, and text. Ken Friedman describes how “Higgins coined the term ‘intermedia’ to describe the tendency of an increasing number of the most interesting artists to cross the boundaries of recognized media or to fuse the boundaries of art with media that had not previously been considered

28  Daniel Fischlin

art forms. With characteristic modesty, Higgins noted that Samuel Taylor Coleridge had used the term over a century and a half before he  himself independently rediscovered it” (2005, 51). These border-­ crossing explorations of media became prevalent in the 1960s but have since exploded as the result of dramatic shifts in the role new media – like social networking, the internet, Cloud computing, mobile devices, and the like – play in the day-to-day lives of people with access to these forms of technology. Higgins understood in 1966 the breakdown of media boundaries as having political, activist valences and a social utility that fused art, aesthetics, and the potential for change in the world. For the last ten years or so, artists have changed their media to suit this situation, to the point where the media have broken down in their traditional forms, and have become merely puristic points of reference. The idea has arisen, as if by spontaneous combustion throughout the entire world, that these points are arbitrary and only useful as critical tools, in saying that such-and-such a work is basically musical, but also poetry. This is the intermedial approach, to emphasize the dialectic between the media. A composer is a dead man unless he composes for all the media and for his world. Does it not stand to reason, therefore, that having discovered the intermedia (which was, perhaps, only possible through approaching them by formal, even abstract means), the central problem is now not only the new formal one of learning to use them, but the new and more social one of what to use them for? Having discovered tools with an immediate impact, for what are we going to use them? (1996, 729; emphasis mine)

Higgins clearly understood intermedial creation as having a social utility, and one might well ask what the social utility of new, hybridized forms of expression can be used for beyond simply telling a story in more intensely mediated ways. In that light, Higgins’s brief “Statement on Intermedia” ended with the following admonition to further thought and action: “Simply talking about Viet Nam or the crisis in our Labor movements is no guarantee against sterility. We must find the ways to say what has to be said in the light of our new means of communicating. For this we will need new rostrums, organizations, criteria, sources of information. There is a great deal for us to do, perhaps more than ever. But we must now take the first steps.” Higgins’s comments remind us that adaptation is never a neutral activity, and especially not when it occurs as a function of powerful new communications technologies. The battle against sterility and the need to create new sources

Introduction 29

of information lie at the heart of intermedial theory in this ur-moment in its history. And what is clear is that adaptation, and in particular Shakespearean adaptation, using intermedial techniques has had an impact on making familiar stories work in radically new contexts, some of which I discuss earlier on. In short, adaptation has played and continues to play a role in transmitting information across boundaries that would not normally be crossed. For Higgins, confronting social issues like militarization or labour inequality via these new aesthetic means seemed an obvious direction to take with regard to the uses of intermedia. But, as many of the essayists in this book show, the politics of intermedial adaptation are never so unidirectional, never so easily directed towards simply social justice issues. Deploying intermedial adaptive techniques within a Shakespearean framework is fraught with problems. Competing interpretive interests are often split between those ready to applaud intermedial interventions as a brave, new, and inevitable direction to follow and those horrified at how these techniques bastardize the imagined purity of the source texts and the nuanced effects they are capable of generating. As Hutcheon reminds us, “the critical truisms that particularly beg for testing – not to mention debunking – are those concerning how different media can deal with elements like point of view, interiority/exteriority, time, irony, ambiguity, metaphors and symbols, and silences and absences” (2006, xv). New media read in light of Hutcheon’s admonition to test truisms about them need to be understood in relation to their historical location, the specific contexts out of which they arise and without which they would not be thinkable. The essays in OuterSpeares: Shakespeare, Media, and the Limits of Adaptation offer a wide perspective on how media shift and change over time. Essays explore “historical” notions of Shakespeare via the different media with which he has come to be associated. They do so via the concepts of intermedia and interculture, which the book generally posits as theoretically interrelated terms. As I outline earlier, media is a form of culture, and culture expresses itself through diverse media. The two are thoroughly, necessarily interconnected and contingent. When new media hybridize platforms for storytelling there is an axiomatic intercultural relationship that is also being worked through: media cultures clashing are just that – a form of intercultural expression where the very platform is itself an aspect of a wider set of cultural convergences that may include ethnicity, language, religion, historical circumstance, and so forth.

30  Daniel Fischlin

The book is especially interested in how media change and what the effects of those changes are in specific relation to Shakespearean adaptation. And it does so because Shakespeare’s iconic place in global culture makes how his work is adapted using techniques associated with intermedia a key, hyperactive site for understanding how intermedia and intercultural expression operate. Diana E. Henderson notes how “The digital revolution and its multimedia consequences … have allowed new production possibilities and have prompted allied explorations of print culture and the circulation of information” (2008, 6). Moreover, she argues that “awareness of new media as one dimension of a radically changing culture has also led to historically nuanced ­reconsiderations of old media and of Shakespeare’s locations more generally in a ‘pre-literate’ culture” (6). These considerations are worth noting because they outline the feedback loop that occurs as media evolve over time, transposing content to new platforms in ways that reshape the “original” content while also remaining in relation to that “origin” as an inevitable outcome of how stories travel intermedially. This phenomenon of the feedback loop is not necessarily new. Stephen Orgel, for instance, studies the ways in which eighteenth-­ century illustrations affected how Shakespeare circulated in that historical moment, concluding: “The market for Shakespeare had become a market for theatrical stars. But it had become a market for artistic innovation as well. Paradoxically, depictions of Shakespeare also moved increasingly away from the stage, towards creative realizations of the dramatic action unconstrained by actors or theatres” (2007, 74). This movement away from the theatre as the sole or even dominant form of conveying Shakespearean narrative has a long history associated with adaptation, and perhaps an equally long history associated with how adaptation makes use of new and alternative media to tell stories.12 So, even in eighteenth-century illustrative practices, shifts in the contexts and technologies associated with Shakespearean meaning were creating new forms that were at once linked to the theatre but moving away from its contexts via new forms of representation and dissemination. A more recent example from a rich field of potential examples dates from April/May 2010, when the Royal Shakespeare Company collaborated with the Mudlark Production Company to present a version of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, called Such Tweet Sorrow. During the five-week performance, actors portraying the six main characters of the play (Romeo, Juliet, Friar Laurence, Tybalt, Mercutio, and the Nurse – given the name Jess) submitted improvised, real-time updates on the

Introduction 31

social networking site Twitter to express how their characters’ thoughts and feelings were progressing. Actors responded to each other and the audience, as well as to events going on in the world. Others forms of social media, as with Hamlet Live, were used (such as YouTube) to upload pictures, music, and video. The online audience was able to “follow” the characters and watch the story unfold on their computer screens. Although the performance is now over, the Live Timeline has been posted onto the RSC website for the world’s continuous viewing pleasure and as a reminder that Shakespeare now lives in and across multiple forms of media. The Mudlark site took pains to note the relations between the intermedial technologies and platforms they used and the adaptive gestures that ensued for this version of Romeo and Juliet. Thus, Such Tweet Sorrow played out on Twitter and other online social platforms, reaching a global audience of thousands and receiving coverage all over the world … The audience were able to engage with the characters via “@” messaging them on Twitter, or finding them elsewhere on the Web. For example, Romeo’s XBox gamertag was discovered and people queued to speak to him (or shoot him in a Call of Duty deathmatch). Where this Twitter-play differed from other similar attempts at using the micro-blogging medium as a storytelling platform was in its narrative structure. Celebrated online storyteller Tim Wright and playwright Bethan Marlow collaborated on a story “grid” where the character’s lives were mapped out over the five weeks. There was no direct use of Shakespeare’s words. No “wherefore art thou @romeo.” The characters tweeted as normal people would do. Juliet’s tweets were quick and often, her elder sister “Nurse” Jess more mature and reflective. (“Such Tweet Sorrow” n.d. )

Shakespeare, in such a context, is resolutely intermedial, and this intermediality reflects on significant cultural shifts redefining how Shakespeare gets “done” across a vast range of new sites. Hence, the “brave new world” of virtual realities, post-/transnational identities, and unprecedented constructs of communication and meaning that shapeshift interculturally across different media cannot be ignored. These new constructs are having a profound influence on how Shakespeare’s presence in these economies is being reshaped. And they demonstrate the effect of the feedback loop that occurs when familiar stories are retold intermedially across new platforms and with new forms of reception and interaction possible.

32  Daniel Fischlin

American theatre scholar W.B. Worthen has argued, “Despite the analogies between print and digital media as technologies of dramatic storage, Shakespeare’s participation in a digital global monoculture is not participation in a culture of signification or performance, but in a culture of information” (2008, 61). From the perspective of intermedial studies, this statement both is and is not accurate. Digital cultures, as in the example just cited, and as in case studies throughout the book, can and do convey both performance and information, as if the two are distinguishable or so easily separated conceptually. Intermedial theory might argue that performance is a form of information and that the intermedial presentation of information is a form of performance: both require “spectacle” conceived of in the widest senses of the term in its etymological sense of a specially prepared or arranged display, or as something to be viewed. Performance takes on new modes of representation and signification in a digital context, where display and viewing occur as a result of new platforms that literally perform information in new and unpredictable ways. It is worth remembering that information is indeed transmitted via these novel intermedial platforms. Dramatic storage, too, occurs – but in radical new forms whose accessibility and diversity are considerably different from print media. Think, for instance, the search-ability of a Google Books as opposed to a card-indexed physical library. Think the Cloud, with its multiple forms of data integrated across many media, as opposed to stand-alone databases. That said, in the context of understanding new media, as in an ongoing revisionary relationship and feedback loop with precedent media, we must remind ourselves that similar arguments were being made about print media when it first appeared, with accessibility and the potential for a diversity of (mis)interpretations key concerns of those struggling to theorize its effects, especially in relation to the Bible. As Elizabeth Eisenstein notes, “It was printing, not Protestantism, which outmoded the medieval Vulgate and introduced a new drive to tap mass markets. Regardless of what happened in Wittenberg or Zürich, regardless of other issues taken up at Trent; sooner or later, the Church would have to come to terms with the effect on the Bible of copy-editing and trilingual scholarship on the one hand and expanding book-markets on the other” (1979, 353). Monocultures give way to fractured and sometimes fractious subcultures, as the history of Reformation and Counter-Reformation Europe shows, and as the history of Shakespearean adaptations also shows

Introduction 33

when source texts intermingle with the new media technologies made possible by the digital revolution. Similar questions and concerns arise with new digital performance events like Such Tweet Sorrow. How does one come to terms with the literary and dramatic mediation of tweeting a Shakespearean play? What does a YouTube synopsis of such a play reveal about new forms of being spectacular in the digital world? What information gets conveyed to what markets when media convergences translate traditional print media and theatre to diverse digital platforms? Again, Higgins’s observations prove prescient, especially in regard to how intermedial forms subvert sterile, ossified notions of aesthetic process and interpretation. These new forms that adapt and revise older media platforms generate impure (from an orthodox point of view) but fertile new grounds for making meaning. Hybridization and intermingling become the intermedial norm, recapitulating, if you will, the ways in which intercultural exchange moves from the supposed ideal of pure source culture to the so-called impure hybridization that results from border crossing. Early modern and postcolonial scholar Ania Loomba has argued that “At a very obvious level, every culture can be said to be hybrid – in fact even ‘authentic’ identities are the result of ongoing processes of selection, cutting and mixing of cultural vocabularies. In practice, hybridity and authenticity are rarely either/or positions” (1998, 146–7). Shakespearean discourses emerged as, at least, a partial response to the hybridization that imperial and colonial cultures in Europe had inevitably produced over an extended time frame in relation to Europe, Africa, the Middle East, and the Far East. As colonial and imperial cultures in Europe sought to renew themselves via the exploitation of the Americas, further forms of hybrid interminglings were sure to happen. These forms of border-crossing hybridization, by the time of Shakespeare, already had extensive histories. Such histories also apply to the various “new” media that were generated, as successive iterations of media platforms reshaped themselves in relation to new technologies, new interpretive paradigms, and new imaginings of making meaning adaptively. In the current globalized and digitized media environment, then, the concepts of “intermingling” and “hybridization” speak not only to a distant past but also to postnational and increasingly virtual futures, defined by the ongoing collision of cultures (intercultures) and media (intermedia).13

34  Daniel Fischlin

As conceptions of the world have changed, so has Shakespeare a­ ccommodated new attitudes to culture, cultural negotiations, and emergent forms of expression. This accommodation is something Shakespeare has always done, a role he has always played, as Fischlin and Fortier point out in their argument that “Shakespeare’s writing practice was based [in part] on borrowing from earlier materials” (2000, 9). Shakespeare, in other words, has always intermediated other forms of expression, other intertexts. Those intermediations are a defining aspect of what continues to demarcate Shakespeare’s iconic presence in and across a variety of media. As with the key line from The Hunger Games used as an epigraph to the second part of this introduction, earlier revisions are always up for revocation. Wild Adaptation Revisited: Intermedial Refashioning Shakespeare’s continual, pervasive adaptation across an array of cultural contexts and media platforms, then, necessitates consideration of the ways meaning is assigned to literary texts, and how meaning is located in the particulars of these cultural events. Transcultural, intercultural, multicultural, and cross-, mixed-, or trans- and intermedia adaptations of Shakespeare reconfigure the relationship between textual autonomy and historical particulars, pushing beyond conventional understandings of the literary event and the complexities of historical time. In this rich context of shifting strategies for making meaning, OuterSpeares focuses on the intermedial refashioning, the radical reshaping that multiple forms of media sampling engage to produce new forms of knowledge associated with what Mark Fortier identifies as “wild adaptation,” a form of anarchic “engagement with prior texts that cannot be policed and refuses containment by reductive definitional paradigms” (2007, n.p.). The book is organized around two central axes: the first addresses new media and the implications of new media for Shakespeare studies in relation to adaptation; and the second speaks to a range of different older (formerly “new”) media in which intermedial effects associated with adaptation are evident. Within these two broad areas of inquiry, OuterSpeares’ four parts include a first part that examines new digital media with especial attention to YouTube and mobile computing forms related to apps; a second part on film adaptations of Shakespeare that reference post-9/11 tropes as well as radical forms of dramaturgy that pursue social justice outcomes (in specific reference to Mickey B,

Introduction 35

Northern Irish actor, director, and dramaturge Tom Magill’s filmic prison adaptation of Macbeth); a third part on older forms of media still with us – television, radio, popular music, and theatre – in which Shakespeare’s insistent presence continues to be felt; and a final part that opens up debate on questions relating to the limits and uses of adaptation in a range of historical contexts. In no way can a single book do justice to vast range of adaptive, intermedial practices associated with Shakespeare. Nonetheless, the book does try to make clear, within the contexts of what I have already argued throughout this Introduction, that intermediality has played and will continue to play a significant role in testing what we mean by Shakespearean adaptation – and that the proliferation of meaning via this form of intervention produces startling, unsettling ways of understanding the Shakespeare effect. The opening section of the book, “‘Strange Invention’: Shakespeare in the New Media,” addresses some of the radical shifts that have occurred in early twenty-first-century intermedial forms associated with digital media, social networking, and the rise of mobile devices. Christy Desmet’s lead essay examines the proliferation of Shakespeare within the contexts of the massively successful video-sharing site YouTube, created in 2005 by three former PayPal employees (Steve Chen, Chad Hurley, and Jawed Karim) and now owned and operated by Google (who acquired the company in 2006 for $1.65 billion). A site of intermedial mashups, video calls and responses, citation, amateur intervention, and a range of adaptive responses to Shakespearean source texts (from unsophisticated school projects through to the Second City Network Sassy Gay Friend meme), YouTube adaptations of Shakespeare include, as Desmet’s wide-ranging essay shows, ample paratexts that further intervene in the process of adapting Shakespeare to this new medium. The layering of visual culture on literary and theatrical culture also includes, thanks to the format in YouTube that allows for responses to uploaded videos, the potential for commentary that further complicates the representations of Shakespeare found in this medium. And as Desmet concludes, Shakespearean reinvention and adaptation using YouTube’s remarkable archive of Shakespearean materials allows for a radically new form of adaptation in which mashup and sampling culture are foregrounded. The YouTube mashup becomes a trope for intermediality in the digital age, with convergence and the role of amateur creation playing key roles in how conventional notions of adaptation are reinscribed in this intermedium.

36  Daniel Fischlin

Similar to Desmet, Jennifer Ailles describes in sharp relief the massive shifts in how Shakespearean meaning is created via digital means. Ailles’s focus is on mobile devices (phones, tablets) that function in relation to Cloud computing, an intermixture of software/application, platform, and infrastructure that allows for remote computing and storage of massive amounts of data for end-users who need not be tethered or stationary to access data. Shakespeare has itinerant, nomadic presence in the software and data structures of the Cloud. Moreover, as Ailles cogently argues, mobile Shakespeares are transformative of traditional boundaries between the Shakespearean text and its audience. The implications for this mobile form of Shakespearean intermediality are significant, and especially so for adaptation theory. What do these new forms that allow for highly fluid intermedial mashups disarticulated from conventional notions of space and time mean for theories of adaptation predicated on a source text’s seemingly stable relation to its epigone? Part two of the book, “‘These Violent Delights Have Violent Ends’: Shakespearean Adaptation and Film Intermedia,” features two essays with somewhat unconventional takes on the already well explored topic of Shakespearean film adaptations. Both essays identify violence as a key trope in two film texts that have a great deal more to tell us about the uses of Shakespearean adaptation generally. Don Moore’s nuanced reading of Julie Taymor’s film version of The Tempest in light of visual tropes associated with 9/11 takes a not terribly successful film and reads it against the grain of global struggles to reimagine discourses of hegemony and resistance. Unabashedly tackling the politics of representation, Moore’s essay reminds us that both the medium and the message can be intensely political and subject to the nuances and pressures that artful close readings of intermedial texts provide. His essay situates Taymor’s post-9/11 adaptation in relation to what he calls “melted” media, a form of allusive intermedial representation in which multiple narratives converge and, in this particular case, do so in specific relations to global structures of hegemony diffused through Shakespearean adaptation. In that sense Moore’s essay is a timely reminder that the very choice of intermedial adaptation as a form has a purpose and a function that require deciphering. By contrast with Moore’s more global reading, the essay/interview involving Daniel Fischlin, Tom Magill, and Jessica Riley studies the very specific localized case of Mickey B, Magill’s filmic prison adaptation of Macbeth. With particular attention on how theatrical dramaturgy

Introduction 37

translates to the screen, and on how the violent offenders who star in the film and who played key roles in shaping the radical adaptive gestures the film makes are represented, the essay/interview understands intermediality as a function of both cultural and contextual crossovers – from lifers in a notorious maximum security prison who become Shakespearean actors and inflect the Shakespearean source with their own unique identities through to Boalian dramaturgical techniques deployed in a film context that carries forward the social justice agenda of the Theatre of the Oppressed in the fraught contexts of Northern Ireland. Intermediality for Magill functions via cultural crossovers, which in turn shapeshift how the medium represents meaning. The extended interview with Magill gets at much material not available anywhere else, including stories about Magill’s own past as a youth offender, his extended relation to Augusto Boal (as his representative in Northern Ireland), the conditions under which Mickey B was made, and a range of other reflections that Magill is generously making available here for the first time. Throughout there is a clear sense that artistic interventions in discourses of violence and oppression can produce meaningful change, forge new alliances, and build constructive strategies for overcoming cycles of violence and oppression in the worst of circumstances. Magill’s intermedial adaptation of Shakespeare, then, operates in this wider context of theatre pedagogy, dramaturgy, and social activism as means to empowerment and transformation. Part three of the book, “‘All the Uses of This World’: TV, Radio, Popular Music, Theatre, and the Uses of Intermedia,” takes on intermedial adaptation associated with older forms of “new” media, exploring televisual adaptation, radio, popular music, and theatre. The express purpose of this section is to show the feedback loop that exists between intermedial expression (even in older forms of media) and the creation of new meaning as a function of adaptation. Kim Fedderson and J. Michael Richardson’s essay studies television adaptation from the point of view of pedagogy. Taking the acclaimed Canadian TV series Slings & Arrows (2003–7) as their point of departure, Fedderson and Richardson argue that the Bardolatry it deploys depends on the audience’s capacity to make connections between source and adaptation in ways that reinforce conventional relations to Shakespeare that are closely tied to the Stratford Festival’s conflicted investment in Shakespearean tradition: as a mark of that conflicted relationship between tradition and new modalities, the Stratford Festival in 2012 took “Shakespeare” out of its official name after having reinserted it in 2008.

38  Daniel Fischlin

Fedderson and Richardson see Slings & Arrows as “pedagogically useful” because the series redeploys Shakespearean conventions in a contemporary medium. Intermedial adaptation, in this context, resuscitates the Shakespearean oeuvre, closing the distance between the medium and the source text, thus making that oeuvre more readily available for pedagogical purposes. The pedagogy of using contemporary popular culture media to reintroduce classical texts is not without its problems, and, as Jennifer Hulbert, Kevin Wetmore, and Robert York make clear, “the youth culture industry looks to Shakespeare for source material” even as the “education industry looks to the youth-culture industry for pedagogical tools” (2006, 16). Fedderson and Richardson’s essay places key issues of effective pedagogies in relation to debates in which intermedia play a crucial role. By contrast, Andrew Bretz explores radio adaptations of Shakespeare in the 1930s, arguing for how radio adaptations drew their authority from other media like the theatre and the phonograph recording, part of a complex intermedial exchange in which the legitimation of radio as  its own independent form was at stake. Bretz’s claims situate Shakespearean adaptations in the story of how radio’s intermediality was constructed, and the ways in which the radio medium established an authoritative voice for itself. Moreover, Bretz’s focus on the use of the intercessory narrator, a kind of disembodied choric presence, to ­mediate Shakespearean radio makes a powerful intervention into understanding precisely how intermedial radio adaptations produced meaning in relation to the Shakespeare effect. The story of how new forms of media like radio sought to gain a measure of authority for themselves involves Shakespearean adaptations, which transferred the cultural capital of Shakespeare into the new medium as part of an elaborate dynamic of empowerment and dissemination. My essay on popular music and Shakespearean adaptations theorizes intermediality in relation to adaptation and provides a range of close readings of popular music’s adaptation of Shakespeare, from rap and hip hop through to jazz, Broadway, and movie musicals. The essay shows how both Shakespeare and popular music coexist as collided entities in a global context, mutually generating meaning for each other in the crucible of contemporary popular cultures. The essay also pays close attention to historical antecedents from Shakespeare’s own moment when emergent forms of intermediality were already part of the texture of theatrical representations. Situated in a vast and nebulous field of musical activities associated with alternative, mass, and

Introduction 39

popular cultures, Shakespeare has an ongoing presence and multiple functions in determining how youth make meaning via popular song in which Shakespeare’s presence is persistently present. The last essay in part three examines the reception contexts of African Canadian playwright Djanet Sears’s Harlem Duet, an awardwinning adaptation of Othello with a fascinating, complicated stage history. James McKinnon’s essay asks that we rethink the notion of the intermedial in terms of marketing and reception contexts that influence how meaning gets made in relation to Shakespearean adaptation. McKinnon “does not analyse Harlem Duet as Djanet Sears’s response to Shakespeare. Rather than viewing the play as the product of the adaptive work of a particular author or auteur … [he considers] the continuing and diffuse process of adaptation, which neither begins nor ends with a particular author, but permeates the play’s reception.” McKinnon’s argument adds a new, important theoretical twist to thinking about intermediation. In this context the marketing/advertising of theatre deploys intermedial techniques that in turn influence the ongoing work of adaptation, the unsettled process of creating new contexts that transmute the source. In the case of the racial and ethnic identity politics associated with the first play by an African Canadian playwright to be staged at the Stratford Festival in its more than fiftyyear history, the creation of meaning via means, like advertising, that exceed the play itself make McKinnon’s readings especially pertinent, more so in the context of understanding the massive economies in which advertising is implicated (in the US alone advertising revenues were estimated at some $153 billion [Wayne Friedman n.d.]). Intermediality, here, becomes a trope for reception and marketing contexts that generate their own adaptive effects, their own economies in which the racial politics of a play like Harlem Duet are implicated. The essays in this section reinforce – in contradiction to Hamlet’s notion of the unprofitability of “all the uses of this world” (1.2.337–8) – how re-­ examination of older media as well as the new contexts in which they appear, inflected by their relation to mass media, advertising, and new reception contexts, yields valuable new insights into the multilayered structures of meaning associated with Shakespearean adaptation. The last part of the book, “‘Give No Limits to My Tongue … I Am Privileged to Speak’: The Limits of Adaptation?,” poses the question of what adaptation means in the varied intermedial contexts in which it occurs, and what forms of cultural capital circulate as a function of the answer to that question. Monika Smialkowska reads American

40  Daniel Fischlin

celebrations of the tercentenary of Shakespeare’s death in 1916 via the multiple forms of media that were deployed to showcase Shakespeare’s cultural presence in that historical moment. What Smialkowska calls “patchwork Shakespeare” references the astonishingly wide variety of ways in which Shakespeare was remade in the name of his tercentenary, and reminds us that playing in and across media via structures of adaptation is something that has been going on in relation to Shakespeare for a very long time. Smialkowska’s argument replays many of the theoretical enigmas discussed throughout the book in relation to later manifestations of intermedial adaptation and prompts us to remember that intermedial adaptation has a long history and is not unique to our current historical moment. By contrast with Smialkowska’s case study of the 1916 Shakespeare Tercentenary, Sujata Iyengar reads Shakespearean adaptation through the lens of the cultural capital produced through what she calls the “Shakescrafting movement,” in which the Shakespeare brand, a kind of all-purpose aesthetic public commons site, is intermediated by both academics and craft workers to create alternative economies. Iyengar’s inquiry extends to “Shakescrafts,” which use Shakespearean texts, stories, and quotes to produce intermediated versions of the brand in ways that travel between the high and low culture divide. For Iyengar, Shakespeare is the source of an “inexhaustible vein” closely related to a key lexical intervention that Iyengar makes in expanding the theoretical notion of adaptation. Iyengar identifies much of what is done to  Shakespeare as “upcycling,” a concept coming out of the work of William McDonough and Michael Braungart. In “upcycling” the diminished value of sources is remade into something of greater value, rather than being “downcycled,” or made worth less than what these sources began as. Iyengar’s essay unpacks the feedback loop discussed earlier in this Introduction between source and revision – between old and new media, between valued and unvalued artefacts – and addresses the aesthetic utility of that dialectic in ways that make explicit how cultural capital and equity are constructed via the ceaseless remakings of adaptors and intermediators. The final essay of the volume sees Mark Fortier taking on the problem of what it might mean to go “beyond adaptation.” Fortier’s contrarian and theoretically provocative insights set the tone for the book’s conclusion, which argues for an unlimited field of adaptation in which nothing can ever truly be wholly new. Using the analogy of Darwin’s finches, Fortier opines that adaptation is governed by situational speci-

Introduction 41

ficities and by modes of adaptation that follow general principles. The argument advocates at once for the unlimited play of adaptation even as that unlimited play is defined by context-specific determinants that make each case its own particular version of a revision. Fortier’s reading of the graphic novel series Kill Shakespeare, itself an intermedial adaptation, at the end of his set of epigrammatic reflections on adaptation generally, concludes that we cannot escape adaptation when we speak “of or through” Shakespeare. To which we might add that so long as we speak of Shakespeare it will be in the particular languages, technologies, historical contexts, and reception economies out of which meaning is made and remade. As a result it is impossible to escape beyond adaptation when adaptation is always already the mode by which the Shakespeare effect is intermediated as part of an ongoing process of call and response to other such intermediations. OuterSpeares: Shakespeare, Intermedia, and the Limits of Adaptation is unique, then, in being the first book explicitly devoted to Shakespeare and intermedial adaptations. Previous Shakespearean scholarship has attended to film adaptation (see Boose and Burt 1997, Crowl 2007, and  Rothwell 2004, for instance), theatrical adaptation (see Fischlin and  Fortier 2000, Kidnie 2009), national adaptation (see Brydon and Makaryk 2002, Johnson 1996, and Kishi and Bradshaw 2005, for example), and various aspects of Shakespeare’s relations to other media (Hansen 2010 and Sanders 2006 and 2007).14 None, however, encompasses the particular range of case studies and theoretical reflections to be found here, written in the aftermath of a radical transformation of media and their convergence brought on by the so-called digital revolution. Michèle Willems asks, “How far does [film] influence horizons of expectation and lead spectators to accept and expect intertextual (or intermedia) references in new representations of Shakespeare?” (2007, 45). Willems’s comment suggests that there is a nascent awareness in recent scholarship of the importance of intermedia to Shakespearean intertexts and to adaptation writ large. Film is perhaps the most obvious, traditional site where intermediation between image and text occurs. But, as this book makes clear, there are many other forms of intermedial Shakespeare than those associated solely with film. That said, no book currently available explicitly examines the boundary interfaces that are shaping meaning across multiple forms of media in which Shakespeare is present. In this context of emergent and not fully realized scholarship, OuterSpeares: Shakespeare, Intermedia, and the Limits of Adaptation makes a distinct intervention in an area that has only been

42  Daniel Fischlin

examined fragmentarily or not at all by current scholarship. It does so in a way that, while far from comprehensive, constructively maps out some of the key terrain in which Shakespeare intermediates and is intermediated, in the name of being made anew as the limits of adaptation fall away before the technologies of the imagination, the imagination of technology. Indeed, sometimes a little Shakespeare goes a long way. NOTES 1 For further examples of interart/intermedial forms see Karin Wenz’s (n.d.) discussion of transmedialization. Wenz’s examination of Friederike Anders’s “Woman in White” notes how it is an “example of a video installation transferred to the WWW [World Wide Web] and thereby transformed into a hypertext. The work consists of a photonovel, a narration in images and words and two databases connected to this novel: the identilador, which gives information about the possible identities of the woman and the eventilador, which is an archive of events. These databases connected to image and video databases are at the center of the online version of the ‘Woman in White.’” 2 The phrase appears in the Prologue to The Tragedy of Romeo and Juliet and is spoken by the Chorus: Two households, both alike in dignity, In fair Verona, where we lay our scene, From ancient grudge break to new mutiny, Where civil blood makes civil hands unclean. From forth the fatal loins of these two foes A pair of star-cross’d lovers take their life; Whole misadventured piteous overthrows Do with their death bury their parents’ strife. The fearful passage of their death-mark’d love, And the continuance of their parents’ rage, Which, but their children’s end, nought could remove, Is now the two hours’ traffic of our stage; The which if you with patient ears attend, What here shall miss, our toil shall strive to mend. (Emphasis mine) Of note is how so many of the tropes active in the Chorus’s Prologue, besides that of the “star-cross’d lovers,” readily transfer to The Hunger Games, including notions of “new mutiny,” “civil blood,” “parents’ strife,” and “death-mark’d love.”

Introduction 43 3 See Collins 2008, 135–6, 165, 247, 261, 281. 4 The Hunger Games is hardly beholden to only Shakespeare for its key sources. A key precedent movie text to the novels is the Japanese constellation of novels and films, set in a Japan that is part of a totalitarian Republic of Greater East Asia. Battle Royale, the best-selling novel written by Koushun Takami (1999), replicates the story of youth compelled to fight each other to the death as a means of terrorizing the general population and making insurgency against the totalitarian regime unthinkable. The narrative of failed adult culture punishing youth via war games that turns them into terrorists or freedom fighters is common to both Battle Royale and The Hunger Games, and an obvious riff on The Tragedy of Romeo and Juliet’s depiction of the alienation between youth and adult cultures. Many other parallels exist between Collins’s epigonic work and Takami’s, including various aspects of the Romeo and Juliet plot leitmotif focusing on the two survivors Shuya and Noriko and the notable adaptive turnaround that sees the two lovers surviving the “games.” Battle Royale the novel also followed a similar intermedial path as The Hunger Games into film, with two films based on it coming out in 2000 and 2003: Battle Royale and Battle Royale II: Requiem (directed by Kinji Kenta Fukasaku). Other intermedial adaptations of the Battle Royale narrative include manga and Filipino theatre versions. 5 I am indebted to doctoral student Cynthia Ing for this reference and for having been able to read an in-progress essay she is writing on this production and new forms of theatre intermediality. 6 The comment is in line with other researchers who argue similar sorts of things about theatre specifically. In a 2006 editorial for Canadian Theatre Review, Catherine Graham discusses Peter M. Boenisch’s notion that intermedial theatre fulfils a similar function to ancient Greek theatre, which, as argued by Derrick De Kerckhove, “[promulgates] the cognitive strategies for a newly literate culture” (Graham 2006, 4). Graham cites Boenisch’s view that theatre “has been a genuinely intermedial form of art from the start … [and] today once more functions as a ‘training centre’ for new modes of perception,” which Graham situates in “an increasingly interactive universe” (4). These comments echo Linda Hutcheon’s more general observation regarding technology and adaptation: “Technology, too, has probably always framed, not to mention driven adaptation, in that new media have constantly opened the door for new possibilities” (2006, 29). Similarly, Michael Darroch’s extended reading of Marie Brassard’s work relies on McLuhan’s observation that “‘Artists in various fields … are always the first to discover how to enable one medium to use or to release the power of another.’ In accordance with his belief that new media will

44  Daniel Fischlin engender a new form of orality, thereby rupturing the predominance of visual media since the advent of print, sound media have reinstated orality into the theatrical process, as practiced by Brassard” (Darroch 2008, 111). 7 The phrase appears in Coriolanus 3.3 and ends Coriolanus’s famous speech upon being banished from Rome: You common cry of curs! whose breath I hate As reek o’ the rotten fens, whose loves I prize As the dead carcasses of unburied men That do corrupt my air, I banish you; And here remain with your uncertainty! Let every feeble rumour shake your hearts! Your enemies, with nodding of their plumes, Fan you into despair! Have the power still To banish your defenders; till at length Your ignorance, which finds not till it feels, Making not reservation of yourselves, Still your own foes, deliver you as most Abated captives to some nation That won you without blows! Despising, For you, the city, thus I turn my back: There is a world elsewhere. [Exeunt CORIOLANUS, COMINIUS, MENENIUS, Senators, and Patricians] 8 Makaryk’s essay appears as both the Introduction to Shakespeare in Canada: A World Elsewhere (co-edited by Makaryk and Diana Brydon) and as a stand-alone essay archived on the Internet Shakespeare Editions site hosted at the University of Victoria. There are interesting variations between the two versions of the essay and here I cite from the online version. 9 Miranda’s famous lines (4 of her total of 49 in the play) are spoken in 5.1, when Alonso reunites with Ferdinand: O, wonder! How many goodly creatures are there here! How beauteous mankind is! O brave new world, That has such people in’t! 10 Much of the material that follows, mutatis mutandis, is taken from my short note on “New World Brave” found on the Canadian Adaptations of Shakespeare Project (CASP) site: http://www.canadianshakespeares.ca/ spotlight/s_p_nwb.cfm. 11 Larrue states that Chapple and Kattenbelt’s book “marquait ainsi une première percée majeure de l’intermédialité auprès des théoriciens du théâtre

Introduction 45 et confirmait … l’urgence de revoir le fonctionnement du théâtre et son histoire” (2008, 29) [“marked the first major intervention in intermediality by theatre theorists and confirmed … the urgent need to reexamine the function of theatre and its history”; translation mine]. 12 Douglas Lanier offers an intriguing summary of more recent developments in relation to mass media and Shakespeare: “The advent of modern mass media in the early twentieth century (particularly film and radio) led to the displacement of the stage as the dominant popular performance medium. The theatre was the medium closely identified with Shakespeare and served in many ways as the basis for his claim to popularity, and its move from a dominant to a residual form within the panoply of pop ­cultural offerings precipitated a decisive shift in the meaning of the Shakespeare trademark in popular culture, a meaning which accentuated nascent tensions and contradictions in the field ‘Shakespeare.’ This shift in significance was played out against the backdrop of the disciplinary institutionalization of English in the academy (with Shakespeare at its symbolic center), the cult of the modern with its narratives of technological progress and fears about dehumanization and urbanization, and concerns about newly dominant forms of popular culture which, so critics feared, presaged the fall of traditional artistic canons and the rise of workingclass, immigrant, and (particularly in Europe) American cultural clout” (2007, 95). 13 It is useful to situate these comments in the context of Katerina Krtilova’s brief synopsis of intermedial relations writ large: “Intermedial relations have always been part of our culture: images and texts, for example have interacted from ancient times until today. Religious practice always involved different ‘media’ – a Catholic mass, for example, can be considered an intermedial event par excellence. On the other hand, intermedia can only be analyzed as ‘(inter)media’ from a certain theoretical perspective that is only a few decades old. It is true that media have always existed, but it is also true that there weren’t any ‘media’ before media theory. This ambiguity about the subject matter of media theory is essential for media theories based on philosophies of poststructuralism, deconstruction, Foucauldian archaeology, or systems theory, summed up in the notion of media or ‘the medial’ as in between (the German Dazwischen): something in the middle, at the same time means and mediation (Mitte, Mittel, and Vermittlung)” (2012, 37). 14 I would note that in addition to these works there are many other contributors to the rich critical literature on Shakespeare in and across specific media and on Shakespearean adaptation. These would include Richard

46  Daniel Fischlin Burt’s Shakespeare after Mass Media (2002) as well as his Shakespeares after Shakespeare (2006–7); Douglas Lanier’s Shakespeare and Modern Popular Culture (2002), and the collectively written book Shakespeare and Youth Culture (2006) by Jennifer Hulbert, Kevin J. Wetmore, and Robert L. York. The literature on Shakespearean appropriations and adaptations in popular culture is large and ever-expanding, and readers might well take note of how these works form part of an ongoing attempt to address how the Shakespeare effect continues to travel and mutate as a function of different media.

WORKS CITED Aebischer, Pascale, and Nigel Wheale. 2003. “Introduction.” In Remaking Shakespeare: Performance across Media, Genres and Cultures, ed. Pascale Aebischer, Edward J. Esche, and Nigel Wheale, 1–17. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Arango, Tim. 2012. “Montague and Capulet as Shiite and Sunni.” New York Times, 28 April. Accessed 22 June 2012. Auslander, Philip. 2000. “Liveness, Mediatization, and Intermedial Performance.” Degrés: Revue de synthèse à orientation sémiologique [Belgium] no. 101 (Spring): 1–12. Battle of Wills. 2008. Dir. Anne Henderson. InformAction. Battle Royale. 2000. Dir. Kinji Fukasaku. Toei Company. Battle Royale II: Requiem. 2000. Dir. Kenta Fukasaku and Kinji Fukasaku. Toei Company. Barton, Bruce. 2011. “Intimacy.” In Mapping Intermediality in Performance, ed. Sarah Bay-Cheng, Chiel Kattenbelt, Andy Lavender, and Robin Nelson, 46. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press. Bay-Cheng, Sarah, Chiel Kattenbelt, Andy Lavender, and Robin Nelson, eds. 2011. Mapping Intermediality in Performance. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press. Boose, Lynda E., and Richard Burt. 1997. Shakespeare, The Movie: Popularizing the Plays on Film, TV and Video. London: Routledge. – 2003. Shakespeare, The Movie II: Popularizing the Plays on Film, TV, Video and DVD. London: Routledge. “Brave New World.” N.d. Wikipedia. Accessed 12 May 2012. Brydon, Diana, and Irena R. Makaryk, eds. 2002. Shakespeare in Canada: A World Elsewhere? Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Burt, Richard. 2002. Shakespeare after Mass Media. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

Introduction 47 – 2006–7. Shakespeares after Shakespeare: An Encyclopedia of the Bard in Mass Media and Popular Culture. Vols. 1–2. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press. Chapple, Freda, and Chiel Kattenbelt, eds. 2006. Intermediality in Theatre and Performance. Official Publication of the International Federation for Theatre Research. Amsterdam, Editions Rodopi. Collins, Suzanne. 2008. The Hunger Games. New York: Scholastic Press. Crowl, Samuel. 2007. Shakespeare and Film: A Norton Guide. New York: W.W. Norton and Company. Darroch, Michael. 2007. “Intermedial Theatre: ± Technology?” Canadian Theatre Review 131 (Summer): 96–9. – 2008. “Digital Multivocality and Embodied Language in Theatrical Space.” Intermédialités: histoire et théorie des arts, des lettres et des techniques/ Intermediality: History and Theory of the Arts, Literature and Technologies no. 12: 95–114. Doksone, Thanyarat. 2012. “Thailand Bans ‘Macbeth’-Based Film over Anti-Monarchy Tones.” The Toronto Star/thestar.com. 4 April. Accessed 22 June 2012. Eisenstein, Elizabeth. 1979. The Printing Press as an Agent of Change: Communications and Cultural Transformations in Early-Modern Europe, Volume 1. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Fischlin, Daniel. 2002. “Nation and/as Adaptation: Shakespeare, Canada, and Authenticity.” In “A World Elsewhere?”: Shakespeare in Canada, ed. Diana Brydon and Irena Makaryk, 313–38. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. – “New World Brave.” N.d. Canadian Adaptations of Shakespeare Project (CASP). http://www.canadianshakespeares.ca/spotlight/s_p_nwb.cfm. Accessed 12 May 2012. Fischlin, Daniel, and Mark Fortier. 2000. “General Introduction.” In Adaptations of Shakespeare: A Critical Anthology of Plays from the Seventeenth Century to the Present, 1–22. New York: Routledge. Fortier, Mark. 1994. “‘In No Recognizable Way’ The Tempest.” In Negation, Critical Theory, and Postmodern Textuality, ed. Daniel Fischlin, 59–88. Dordrecht: Kluwer. – 2007. “Wild Adaptation.” In Canadian Shakespeares, ed. Daniel Fischlin. Special Issue of Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 3.1 (Fall/Winter): n.p. http://www.borrowers.uga.edu/ cocoon/borrowers/request?id=781535. Accessed 12 May 2012. Friedman, Ken. 2005. “Intermedia: Four Histories, Three Directions, Two Futures.” In Intermedia: Enacting the Liminal, ed. Hans Breder and PeterKlaus Busse, 51–62. Dortmund: Dortmunder Schriften zur Kunst.

48  Daniel Fischlin Friedman, Wayne. N.d. “Magna Global Revises Ad Forecast, Dips to 3.1% Growth in ’13.” MediaDailyNews. http://www.mediapost.com/­ publications/article/188286/magna-global-revises-ad-forecast-dips-to31-gro.html#axzz2NYUkrSfw. Accessed 3 December 2012. Graham, Catherine. 2006. “Editorial. Liveness and Mediatized Performance – Beyond Contradiction.” Canadian Theatre Review 127 (Summer): 3–5. Greenblatt, Stephen. 1997. “The Interart Moment.” In Interart Poetics: Essays on the Interrelations of the Arts and Media, ed. Ulla Britta Lagerroth, Hans Lund, and Erik Hedling, 13–18. Amsterdam: Rodopi. Hamlet Live. N.d. “Our Hamlet.” http://www.hamletlive.com/our-hamlet/. Accessed 22 June 2012. Hansen, Adam. 2010. Shakespeare and Popular Music. London: Continuum. Henderson, Diana E. 2008. “Introduction.” In Alternative Shakespeares, Volume 3, ed. Diana E. Henderson, 1–13. New York: Routledge. Higgins, Dick. 1984. Horizons: The Poetics and Theory of the Intermedia. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press. – 1996. “Statement on Intermedia (August 3, 1966).” In Theories and Documents of Contemporary Art: A Sourcebook of Artists’ Writings, ed. Kristine Stiles and Peter Howard Selz, 728–9. Berkeley: University of California Press. Hulbert, Jennifer, Kevin J. Wetmore, and Robert L. York. 2006. Shakespeare and Youth Culture. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. The Hunger Games. 2012. Dir. Gary Ross. Lionsgate. Hutcheon, Linda. 2006. A Theory of Adaptation. New York: Routledge. Huxley, Aldous. 2000. Brave New World. New York: Rosetta Books. Johnson, David. 1996. Shakespeare and South Africa. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Kidnie, Margaret Jane. 2009. Shakespeare and the Problem of Adaptation. New York: Routledge. Kishi, Tetsuo, and Graham Bradshaw. 2005. Shakespeare in Japan. London: Continuum. Kittler, Friedrich A. 1990. Discourse Networks 1800/1900. Trans. Michael Metteer and Chris Cullens. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Krtilova, Katerina. 2012. “Intermediality in Media Philosophy.” In Travels in Intermedia[lity]: ReBlurring the Boundaries, ed. Bernd Herzogenrath, 37–45. Hanover, NH: Dartmouth College Press. Lan, Yong Li. 2003. “Shakespeare as Virtual Event.” Theatre Research International 28.1: 46–60. Lanier, Douglas. 2002. Shakespeare and Modern Popular Culture. New York: Oxford University Press.

Introduction 49 – 2007. “Shakespeare™: Myth and Biographical Fiction.” In The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare and Popular Culture, ed. Robert Shaughnessy, 93–113. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Larrue, Jean-Marc. 2008. “Théâtre et intermédialité: une rencontre tardive.” Intermédialités: histoire et théorie des arts, des lettres et des techniques/Intermediality: History and Theory of the Arts, Literature and Technologies no. 12: 13–29. Loomba, Ania. 1998. “‘Local-Manufacture Made-in-India Othello Fellows’: Issues of Race, Hybridity and Location in Post-Colonial Shakespeares.” In Post-Colonial Shakespeares, ed. Ania Loomba and Martin Orkin, 143–63. London: Routledge. López-Varela Azcárate, Asunción, and Steven Tötösy de Zepetnek. 2008. “Towards Intermediality in Contemporary Cultural Practices and Education.” Cultura, Lenguaje y Representación/Culture, Language, and Representation, Revista de Estudios Culturales de la Universitat Jaume I/Cultural Studies Journal of Universitat Jaume I 6: 65–82. Makaryk, Irena R. N.d. “A World Elsewhere.” Internet Shakespeare Editions. http://internetshakespeare.uvic.ca/Library/Criticism/shakespearein/ canada8.html#toc2. Accessed 12 May 2012. McLuhan, Marshall. 1995. Essential McLuhan. Ed. Eric McLuhan and Frank Zingrone. Toronto: Anansi Books. Nolen, Stephanie. 2002. Shakespeare’s Face. Toronto: Alfred A. Knopf. Orgel, Stephen. 2007. “Shakespeare Illustrated.” In The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare and Popular Culture, ed. Robert Shaughnessy, 67–92. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Rothwell, Kenneth S. 2004. A History of Shakespeare on Screen: A Century of Film and Television. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Sanders, Julie. 2006. Adaptation and Appropriation. New York: Routledge. – 2007. Shakespeare and Music: Afterlives and Borrowings. Cambridge: Polity Press. Shakespeare Must Die. 2012. Dir. Ing Kanjanavanit. Shakespeare, William. 1974. The Tragedy of Romeo and Juliet. In The Riverside Shakespeare, ed. G. Blakemore Evans, 1055–99. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company. Spickard, James V. N.d. “Zuni and the American Imagination – Book Review.” Business Library. http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0SOR/is_2_64/ ai_104733018/. Accessed 12 May 2012. “Such Tweet Sorrow.” N.d. Mudlark. http://www.wearemudlark.com/­ projects/sts/. Accessed 12 May 2012. Tan, Marcus Cheng Chye. 2012. Acoustic Interculturalism: Listening to Performance. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

50  Daniel Fischlin Vanhoutte, Kurt. 2011. “Embodiment.” In Mapping Intermediality in Performance, ed. Sarah Bay-Cheng, Chiel Kattenbelt, Andy Lavender, and Robin Nelson, 45–6. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press. Vos, Eric. 1997. “The Eternal Network: Mail Art, Intermedia Semiotics, Interarts Studies.” In Interart Poetics: Essays on the Interrelations of the Arts and Media, ed. Ulla Britta Lagerroth, Hans Lund, and Erik Hedling, 325–36. Amsterdam: Rodopi. Wellbery, David E. 1990. “Foreword.” In Friedrich A. Kittler, Discourse Networks 1800/1900, trans. Michael Metteer and Chris Cullens, vii–xxxiii. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Wenz, Karin. N.d. “Transmedialization: An Interart Transfer.” http://www .netzliteratur.net/wenz/trans.htm. Accessed 14 March 2013. Willems, Michèle. 2007. “Video and Its Paradoxes.” In The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare on Film, ed. Russell Jackson, 35–46. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Windspeaker, Marie White. 2011. “Huron-Wendat Village of Wendake Stage The Tempest.” AMMSA (Aboriginal Multi-media Society). http://www .ammsa.com/publications/windspeaker/huron-wendat-village-wendakestages-tempest. 29.6. Winthrop-Young, Geoffrey. 2011. Kittler and the Media. Cambridge: Polity Press. Worthen, W.B. 2008. “Shakespeare 3.0: Or Text Versus Performance, the Remix.” In Alternative Shakespeares, Volume 3, ed. Diana E. Henderson, 54–77. New York: Routledge.

PART ONE “Strange Invention”: Shakespeare in the New Media

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YouTube Shakespeare, Appropriation, and Rhetorics of Invention Christy Desm e t

Shakespeare-themed videos are plentiful on YouTube, where a rich range of offerings – clips ripped from commercial DVDs, actors’ audition videos, serious amateur art films, clever mashups, and irrepressible teen parodies – circulate constantly.1 Despite the many differences among them, YouTube creations tend to be derivative, citing liberally from one another and from Shakespeare’s plays in other media, a clear indication of the intermedial contexts that YouTube makes possible. Some, adhering to a hacker belief that “information wants to be free,” preface their work with a cheery “No copyright infringement intended!” Many, although by no means all, could be considered as part of Lawrence Lessig’s “amateur culture” (2006), in which casual borrowing is matched with joyful invention. As such, the site seems virtually to breed appropriation as an artistic practice, even an Aristotelian habit of mind. Getting inside those habits of mind is no easy task, however. Videos on YouTube come to us equipped with ample paratexts. Authors add descriptions and choose meta-tags to guide user searches; viewers add their own comments or begin a dialogue with the author; new artists post video replies; and the YouTube interface classifies videos according to subject matter (groups), creator (channels), and communities. Copiousness of information, although typical for Web 2.0 applications, nevertheless fails to provide reliable insight into the invention processes practised by YouTube Shakespeare artists. The disembodied comments attached to videos are of uncertain provenance, often off-hand, and sometimes sparse; in some cases, both videos and comments date several years back, making communication with either authors or ­commenters untenable.2 Because YouTube’s audience for Shakespeare

54  Christy Desmet

adaptations skews young, furthermore, many efforts are school projects that profess a certain degree of ideological naïvety: typically, these school-sponsored efforts either thank the teacher effusively or strike a pose of self-deprecating cool (“We put this video together in only two hours”). Other efforts, which take a more traditionally “serious” stance towards their art, offer the opaque filmic surface and stylistic polish of commercial production. The Long Zoom, or a Focus on Genre A formalistic reading of the videos themselves can provide internal evidence of invention, but the emphasis on individual artists and videos in most extant criticism of YouTube Shakespeare (and other new media) works against the structural logic of the database that informs Web 2.0 applications.3 This essay, instead, begins with popular science writer Steven Johnson’s discussion of innovation in Where Good Ideas Come From. “Good ideas,” Johnson observes, “are not conjured out of thin air; they are built out of a collection of existing parts, the composition of which expands (and occasionally, contracts) over time” (2010, 35). Inventions therefore do not spring fully formed from the heads of individual geniuses, but are the (often dispersed) product(s) of an environment that contains “a wide and diverse sample of spare parts” and encourages “novel ways of recombining those parts” (41). Johnson’s paradigm for such environments is the city, and what he imagines as the virtual city of YouTube is one of his principal examples. This model for invention as taking place in an environment that encourages novel combinations among copious pre-existing parts suggests, furthermore, the need for a different critical approach, what he calls the “long zoom” perspective. This essay seeks such a perspective by examining not merely individual artists and videos but the (de)formation of genres to focus on the collective why and how of YouTube Shakespeare as a phenomenon. To a large extent, a “long zoom” or generic focus on YouTube invention works against the narrower sense of “intermediality” at play in the scholarly literature, which often emphasizes its kinship with the structuralist concept of “intertextuality” and so frequently works to unravel semiotic references between and among specific artistic entities in different media.4 To this extent, it might be said that invention in YouTube Shakespeare highlights the “limits” of intermediality as a concept and analytic practice.

YouTube Shakespeare  55

Genre, as I am thinking of it in this essay, is less a taxonomy or catalogue of traits than a form of praxis, what Lisa Gitelman (2006) identifies as a collection of “social protocols” associated with a particular technology (passim). Genre, according to Carolyn Miller (1984), is akin to Kenneth Burke’s “symbolic action,” a strategy that evolves to encompass the situation in which it arose. Genre as symbolic action depends heavily on context, offering readers or users a way of “acting together” (Miller 1984) to create the kind of implicit, ad hoc, and often transient communities familiar from social media. Genre as symbolic action also requires sizeable economies of scale and speed. In Miller’s formulation, “Genre is a conventional category of discourse based in large-scale typification of rhetorical action” (1984, 163); these “typified rhetorical actions” take place as well in “recurrent situations” (31; emphases mine). Finally, as John Frowe argues, genre presupposes mediation: a genre is a “mediating structure between texts and the situations in which and on which they operate” (2007; emphasis mine). To summarize, genres take shape in recurrent situations (such as repeated uploadings to YouTube of videos on common subjects); genres operate on a large scale, as YouTube certainly does; and genre, like a Web 2.0 interface, acts as a mediating structure between individual videos and the YouTube database. In the sections that follow, I sketch out the beginnings of a rhetoric of invention for YouTube Shakespeare by identifying and analysing two prominent and complementary genres, curating and mashup, that satisfy broad cultural motives within the YouTube community. In each case, I move between the long zoom perspective and a shorter focus, relying on genre’s function as mediator between “private intentions and social exigence” that connects “the private with the public, the singular with the recurrent” (Miller 1984, 163). Curating the Bard Built on a capacious database, YouTube stores videos of all kinds quickly and easily. Like many Web 2.0 phenomena, YouTube also mixes scholarship with creative art. Not surprisingly, then, a good bit of energy within YouTube Shakespeare, as within the application generally, is devoted to curation as a genre. YouTube archivists collect and catalogue relevant materials that previously have been difficult to access or that just catch someone’s fancy. Many of the examples are comic and a fair number come from the TV era of the 1960s and 1970s.

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Just as fifty-something men upload and comment on recordings of their favourite songs on archaic 45’s, so too do Shakespeare aficionados upload footage ranging from the Gilligan’s Island Hamlet episode and Moonlighting’s The Taming of the Shrew to the Beatles’ version of  “Pyramus and Thisbe” (“Gilligan’s Island Clips [Hamlet]” 2010; “Moonlighting Taming of the Shrew” 2006; and “Around the Beatles rare Apr-28-64” 2010). As the most basic form of participation in Shakespeare YouTube culture, curating the Bard might hardly be considered invention at all. Uploading an existing video is either simple appropriation (theft) or pure mimesis (copying) – in either case a replication of pre-existing objects, often multiple times. Within YouTube, however, encounters between users and database by way of the application’s interface involve a “filtering action.” Filtering, at least in institutional contexts, involves conscious choice on the part of curators, decisions about what to include and exclude, where and how to display artefacts, and so forth (Graham and Cook 2010, 45). Even in the most de-centred forms of curating new media art, the audience-as-curator is not a completely random collection of users. User-curators of avant-garde new media art tend to be friends and collaborators, or at the very least, like-minded patrons who have chosen to visit a certain exhibit or museum (Graham and Cook 2010, 268–75, passim). The ethos of the dispersed YouTube Shakespeare community, by contrast, is strongly influenced by contingent factors, the simple reality of who has collected Shakespeareana of what kinds and is motivated to share it. Nevertheless, the collected acts of curating Shakespeare do create an “exhibit” of sorts. YouTube’s Secret Sharers While YouTube Shakespeare may well qualify as an audience-curated space, there are also a number of other “actors” at work that influence the filtering process in this Web 2.0 application. Take, as an example, the Beatles’ 1964 “Pyramus and Thisbe” sketch, which has been available steadily since 2006 in copies of varying quality (“Around the Beatles rare Apr-28-64” 2010). The first peripheral set of “participants” are viewer comments and the user-generated metadata or tags that help YouTube categorize ­videos and thus provide the application with the data necessary to suggest related videos and push advertisements to individual users. For 4  February 2012, here are the first three sample sets of metadata

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1.1  The Beatles in “Pyramus and Thisbe” (“Around the Beatles” 2010)

that come up on a search for “beatles pyramus and thisbe,” as filtered by “relevance.” Based on the relationship between time of upload and page views, the three samples of “Pyramus and Thisbe” seem to attract viewers at a roughly steady rate. (The third example has by far the fewest views, but was uploaded most recently.) A general paucity of tagging within the first two examples suggests an amateur stance, in Lessig’s sense of the amateur as an artist who appropriates and/or remixes others’ work (2006); although a generous number of appended comments signals the existence of like-minded antiquarians, the authors seem unworried about promoting their selections in the YouTube universe. The third example, although offering a substantially larger body of tags from far-flung domains, nevertheless places itself outside mainstream media and culture. The tag “macca” (a nickname for Paul McCartney in the British tabloid press) takes viewers to the poster’s site on deviantart.com, which turns out to be a Beatles fan site starring four cross-dressed adolescent German girls, who play the Fab Four in historically correct costume and strike authentic postures in their tribute videos. Again, however, the video’s general ethos is amateur; there is more authorial self-display at work here, but as in the previous two

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Title Upload date Views Category Tags

Example 1

Example 2

Example 3

“The Beatles perform Shakespeare, in colour” 3 August 2008 228,528 Entertainment pyramus and thisbe, thuhisabee, midsummer night’s dream

“Beatles Shakespeare” 19 March 2006 370,183 Comedy the beatles, Shakespeare

“The story of Pyramus and Thisbe! John/Paul Music Video ♥” 5 October 2011 208 Comedy Beatles, John Lennon, Paul McCartney, Macca, Johnny, Paulie, Ringo Starr, George Harrison, Slash, Love, Shakespeare, Pyramus and Thisbe, Romeo, Julia, Juliet, Kissing you

examples, also a sense of participation in some larger, and in this case rather esoteric, community. Another, partially occluded actor in every instance of YouTube Shakespeare invention is the site’s bureaucracy. Videos are flagged and removed because of direct complaints from copyright holders or for reasons of obscenity.5 When I was attending closely to YouTube Shakespeare in 2007–8, YouTube aggressively disabled Shakespeare videos that used copyrighted video footage and, even more often, popular music tracks. The saga of one particularly beautiful and clever mashup, purportedly originating in Turkey, engaged Shakespeare fans vigorously with YouTube’s policing mechanisms. “Hamlet is back … and he is not happy” featured Arnold Schwarzenegger as Hamlet and drew substantially on clips from his performance in the young boy’s imaginary remake of that play in Last Action Hero; Arnold and his action film are then remixed with other material to create an imaginary James Cameron epic (“Hamlet Is Back” 2008). Although a nearly seamless blending of short clips from a wide range of sources, the video was repeatedly removed for copyright violation. While YouTube Shakespeareans rarely get involved in internet politics, in this case there was a collective expression of outrage and a concerted effort to keep the video circulating by way of repeated uploads. The most mysterious actor in YouTube invention, however, is its algorithm, or the mathematical formula for linking and ranking videos that is employed by the YouTube administration. In the commercial world, users often try to “game” the YouTube algorithm – for instance,

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1.2  “Hamlet is back . . . and he is not happy” (“Hamlet Is Back” 2008)

tagging a video with the term “porn” in order to draw more views, even though the tag has nothing at all to do with the video’s content. YouTube’s administrators respond by adjusting the algorithm, and blogs, in turn, record hackers’ research into YouTube’s silent adjustments in an effort to stay one step ahead of “the man.”6 The amount of “buzz” surrounding the face-off between hackers and YouTube imbues the site with an aura of secrecy, making the unreadable algorithm a focus for conspiracy theories.7 The algorithm is nevertheless an important factor for invention on YouTube generally and for curating in particular. As Kevin Slavin shows in his TEDGlobal talk (2011), algorithms in our culture are quickly achieving the status of computerized persons; they use math “to decide stuff,” “talk” primarily to one another, and are, in effect, unreadable by most humans: “we are writing code we can’t understand, with implications we can’t control,” he warns. The algorithm, then, is every YouTube participant’s, every video’s secret sharer.8 Invention as Linking Curating Shakespeare as a collective form of invention on YouTube involves not one individual or even many individuals in different places

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– the phenomenon of crowd-sourcing – but the kind of distributed cognition described by Edwin Hutchins (1993) in the navigational systems of large ships. The knowledge needed to run the ship is distributed in ever-shifting patterns across a team of navigators, and careful coordination among members is essential. When navigating a large ship, creating knowledge is a matter of linking information, agents, and actions with one another. On YouTube, by analogy, the action of curating the Bard also is distributed across many actors: in the case of the Beatles’ “Pyramus and Thisbe,” the Fab Four themselves, the team that produced their video, the original person who uploaded the video to YouTube, subsequent uploaders, the viewers and commenters who affect the video’s page rank, each video’s meta-tags, the YouTube bureaucracy – and, finally, that shadowy, posthuman agent that is the algorithm. Linking as social action informs curation as a YouTube Shakespeare genre. Linking has, from the start, been fundamental to the web. Nicholas Barbules (1997) notes how hyperlinks can function rhetorically as metaphors, linking dissimilar things to raise a potential similarity between them. Through repetition, metaphorical linkage can become metonymic, based on a tacit and eventually conventional association between one sign and another. With metonymy, in particular, what might look like a random assemblage of data (e.g., web pages) makes sense when the common element that guides their association clicks into place; Barbules offers the example of a page on “vacation spots” that is linked to one on “how to avoid pickpockets.” What Barbules does not observe in his discussion of Web 1.0 linking, which is seen as being governed by the choices of either the author (who makes the hyperlinks) or reader (who chooses whether and in what order they will be followed), is just how easily virtual tropes can devolve into chaos in the multi-agent ­invention of Web 2.0. Metonymy is just one step away from accidental collision, metaphor always faced with the possibility of blank incomprehension. For an example, we can return to the Beatles’ “Pyramus and Thisbe.” In rhetorical terms, a search engine works primarily through metaphor or analogy, a hierarchical or vertical linking of items that prompts a recognition of similarity between them. Thus, a search on “beatles Shakespeare” on 10 February 2012 yielded nine copies, one with Spanish subtitles, plus a small string of less relevant videos. A search on “beatles pyramus and thisbe” gave similar results, with a few other performances of A Midsummer Night’s Dream 5.1 thrown in for good

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measure. These linkages are metaphoric. Metonymy, the complementary trope by which only partial, conventional, or strained links are registered, is encountered before we leave the first page of related videos. At number 30, a clip of the prime minister’s stirring speech from the 2003 film Love, Actually does contain “beatles” and “Shakespeare” among its tags, which refer to this eloquent riff from the PM: “We may be a small country but we’re a great one, too – the country of Shakespeare, Churchill, the Beatles, Sean Connery, Harry Potter, David Beckham’s right foot. David Beckham’s left foot, come to that.” But it is far more difficult to comprehend why these same two search terms, along with “beckham,” would be attached to “Top 10 Curious Facts about the British Royal Family,” a video that has nothing to do with any of these three subjects but garnered 936 comments, many of them vituperative and many subsequently removed. Perhaps gaming the algorithm was among the author’s motivations. While, in rhetorical theory, metaphor and metonymy are set against one another in a binary that often proves slippery, on YouTube the difference between them becomes more granular and may be construed as a matter of degree more than of kind. For the Beatles’ “Pyramus and Thisbe” sketch, in seventh position among the related videos we find another relic of 1960s pop culture, Peter Sellers imitating Laurence Olivier as Richard III; in this parody, Sellers muses no longer that “Now is the winter of our discontent” but – substituting for Shakespeare another text from the Beatles – “It’s been a hard day’s night.” Sellers’s imitation of Olivier’s deportment and delivery is perfect. Both skits date to 1964, Sellers’s performance having taken place on the television show “Music of Lennon and McCartney.” The appearance of these two videos on YouTube, at least judging by the oldest remaining copies, is also roughly contemporaneous; “Pyramus and Thisbe” was uploaded on 19 March 2006 and the Richard III parody on 6 September 2006. There are usually about the same number of copies available for both skits, and both elicit copious, appreciative, and generally intelligent comments from viewers. Other evidence, however, suggests that the Beatles’ performance grabs more viewer attention than the Sellers “Richard III.” The “Pyramus and Thisbe” episode has been re-uploaded steadily since 2006, most recently on 25 April 2013. The Sellers piece was uploaded most recently three years previously; it remains available for discovery, but is not actively generating archival work. One user comment on “Richard III,” which reveals that the poster is a secondary school

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student who failed to understand the parody created through Sellers’s “poetic” delivery, suggests that A Midsummer Night’s Dream is simply better known as a Shakespeare play than Richard III – perhaps, in part, because of the former’s traditional place in the US literary curriculum. Finally, the broadest conceptual link between these two antiquarian videos is not Shakespeare at all, but what the category tags suggest is the posters’ primary interest: comedy and entertainment. “Pyramus and Thisbe” thus gains cultural capital by association with the Beatles, rather than the reverse. In the same vein, Sellers is appreciated as a comic in his own right, at least according to the comments, but he too acquires attention less because of his own fame than because of the Beatles’ enduring popularity among music fans and impersonators. In a final twist of algorithmic fate, the two pieces may become associated with one another simply because Sellers performed his imitation for a Beatles television special; thus, descriptions appended to the videos naturally triangulate the terms “Beatles,” “Shakespeare,” and “Sellers.” For all of the reasons examined above, cause and effect relations are muddied, as knowledge of Sellers seems to depend on knowledge about the Beatles, and knowledge of Shakespeare on the pop culture icons, rather than the reverse. This analysis contradicts one of the tacit assumptions of appropriation studies, which is that Shakespeare’s cultural capital inspires pop culture parodies.9 Zooming out from the archived video to a generic perspective thus complicates and compounds the motives for curating Shakespeare as an artistic/scholarly activity. Shakespeare Mashups Roman Jakobson (1971) famously showed how metaphor and metonymy complement one another as master tropes through which the world may be experienced. If curating works through metaphor, or vertical analogies, on YouTube, the Shakespeare mashup, which exploits the large cache of ready-made materials and examples for imitation available there, works primarily through metonymy. A mashup is created from one or more video clips rolled over a soundtrack from a different, usually discordant, source. When classic mashups are working at their best, there are moments of perfectly timed ironic disjunction between what is going on in the video and soundtrack. These moments coalesce into a multimedia narrative in which the soundtrack – both aurally and conceptually, by virtue of its source – supports an inverted reading of the original film’s ethos.

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Within the mashup, we see distinctly the operations of intermediality in the more constricted sense articulated by Irina Rajewsky: as a critical category for the “concrete analysis of specific individual media products or configurations – a category that of course is useful only in so far as those configurations manifest some form of intermedial strategy, constitutional element, or condition” (2005, 62). Rajewsky defines intermediality in these terms: as a transposition of material from one medium to another; as an artistic combination of media; and as self-conscious reference to a semiotic entity in another medium (as when a film refers rhetorically to novelistic technique or vice versa). Most of all, by implication, intermedial artefacts must achieve a delicate balance between self-conscious reference to another medium – a kind of technical quotation – and maintaining what Rajewsky call the “illusion of another medium’s specific practices” (55). YouTube Shakespeare generally and the mashups in particular exhibit to a high degree both the self-conscious citation of artworks in other media and the commitment to an illusion of another medium; the ability to rip and burn from DVDs, in particular, preserves the illusion of a seamless transfer from one medium to another (i.e., YouTube’s flash video format). Paradoxically, while taking the generic “long view” of YouTube Shakespeare highlights the “limits” of intermediality as a concept and practice, zooming in on Shakespeare mashups shows clearly the dynamics of intermedial production and reception. YouTube Shakespeare both does and does not epitomize intermediality as a phenomenon. A hybrid artefact, the mashup stands midway between curating (filtering, framing, and replication of others’ material) and what we consider individual creativity (making an “original” art object) and so tends to reflect self-consciously on its artistic status. Mashups are prominent in the world of YouTube Shakespeare and, over time, have developed into a less precise form in which an array of clips, sometimes from many sources and sometimes from just one, are mixed to create a new narrative. Many early examples fell victim to copyright complaints, but in the wake of the unsuccessful Viacom copyright suit, Shakespeare mashups are making a comeback.10 Results from a 10 February 2012 search on “Shakespeare mashup” revealed a predominance of Hamlet examples, while a more refined search on “Hamlet mashup” produced a still smaller subset, including a  venerable, four-year-old copy of Cathead Theatre’s enactment of Hamlet’s first meeting with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. Within this

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group, we find several on the theme of “To be or not to be” that display high production values, access to a wide range of professional Hamlets available on DVD, and knowledge of less familiar pop-culture appropriations of Shakespeare. A quite recent arrival on the YouTube scene, Geoff Klock’s “Hamlet Mash Up” (2011) is an expert piece of appropriation. Offering no description and minimal tags (oddly, to People & Blogs), the video remixes nearly sixty different clips featuring brief lines from Hamlet, organized roughly according to the play’s plot. The filmmaker’s cleverness resembles that of Eric Faden in “A Fair(y) Use Tale” (2007), a ten-minute lecture-parody on fair use and copyright that is constructed entirely out of snippets – single words to a phrase – gleaned from Disney cartoon sources. On his blog, Klock, who lays claim to an Oxford DPhil, discusses appropriation and its discontents; he compares, for instance, Quentin Tarantino’s “repurposing” of materials from movies to John Milton’s recycling of epic poetry. The final credits to “Hamlet Mash Up” carefully list all sources with dates and episode numbers, not only providing a proper bibliography but also inviting viewers to “identify that clip.” “Hamlet Mash Up” is, in the end, as much a piece of scholarship as of art. Adhering to mashup aesthetics, the video keeps the play’s storyline moving briskly, providing smooth transitions from one clip to another, maintaining high-quality audio and video and unifying the whole with a common texture and colour saturation. While the sequence roughly follows the chronology of Hamlet’s events, there is a certain amount of lingering over “To be or not to be,” so that the video’s rhythm becomes contrapuntal, echoing particular lines and circling back to previous sections of the speech. The video also offers a critique of – or perhaps just a riff on – Shakespeare’s place on the border between high art and popular culture. In one particularly striking instance, the video juxtaposes a shot of cartoon character Jack Skellington from Tim Burton’s The Nightmare before Christmas (1993), who sings, “And since I am dead, I can take off my head, to recite Shakespearean quotation,” with Kenneth Branagh in the graveyard, intoning, “Yorick. I knew him, Horatio.” Jack’s insouciance punctures Branagh’s high seriousness while simultaneously insisting on the animation’s own artistic status. In this way, “Hamlet Mashup” meditates on, even as it represents, appropriation as a YouTube practice and on relations among different registers of film and television.

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1.3 The Nightmare before Christmas (“Hamlet Mash Up” 2011)

Sampling and Combining as Invention While the basic function of linking has been endemic to the Web from its inception, other rhetorical operations have become important for Web 2.0, in which the application’s interface mediates between an underlying database and the featured utterances, narratives, and objects that form its public face. In some ways, the mashup mirrors in little the operations of YouTube as a whole. One of its principal rhetorical moves is sampling – or “selection according to a criterion,” as John Unsworth (2000) puts it – that is most familiar to users from the common search engine. Sampling or synecdoche, in rhetorical terms, is at the heart of the genre, beginning in the age of film (as in Last Action Hero’s appropriation of Laurence Olivier’s Hamlet) and continuing in Shakespeare 2.0 (as in “Hamlet is back … and he is not happy,” which appropriates Last Action Hero and through it, the Olivier film). This can be illustrated by a second Hamlet mashup, which followed Klock’s by six months. “Hamlet – the Mashup!!!” (2011) draws on much of the same material as the former video; while the second does not respond overtly to the first by using YouTube’s “video response” function, there

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1.4 Kenneth Branagh, Hamlet (“Hamlet Mash Up” 2011)

is an economy of invention created through their reliance on a common “archive” of Shakespeare sources from television and film. Both Hamlet mashups, for instance, draw on The Simpsons to mock Shakespeare’s canonical stature, although they work with different clips from the same episode and use them to different ends. The possibility that the second filmmaker appropriates material from as well as takes inspiration from Klock is suggested, although by no means confirmed, by the fact that both videos conclude with exactly the same clip of Sesame Street’s Cookie Monster rhapsodizing over Danish princes and pastries. Repeated sampling creates a repertoire of video clips that is readily available to subsequent artists and, as a side effect, begins constructing a mini-canon of Shakespearean appropriations. For mashup, the art lies in combining and recombining these elements into new configurations. While Klock’s compositional style is musical, the second mashup works more directly by ironic juxtaposition, mocking high art pretension with commentary from popular sources. For instance, the video opens with Monty Python’s Hamlet on the psychiatrist’s couch, complaining that “All anyone wants me to say is ‘To be or not to be,’” until Terry Jones’s Hamlet in a blond wig and crown is succeeded by an equally blond Kenneth Branagh reciting the speech in front of a mirror.

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1.5 Terry Jones in Monty Python’s Hamlet (“Monty Python – Hamlet” 2011)

Adam Long of the Reduced Shakespeare Company avers that the “To be or not to be” speech “just weakens” Hamlet’s “character. It makes him wishy-washy”; Long’s pronouncement is followed by Monsterpiece Theater’s Hamlet, in which Muppet Elmo commiserates with Mel Gibson’s emo-Hamlet, who weeps over “words, words, words.” (To be fair, this Hamlet is emotionally volatile, moving from happiness to ­sorrow to rage in short order.) Jones’s Hamlet, in a return to the Monty Python episode, professes to his shrink a desire to do “something ­different” – become a “private dick”; his commentary is succeeded by a glimpse of Arnold Schwarzenegger from Last Action Hero, cigar in mouth and automatic weapon in hand, deciding “Not to be” and then creating mayhem. Through the interplay of sampling and combining, the second Hamlet video responds to the first by deforming and reforming the mini-genre of “To be or not to be” mashup. By “zooming in” to a pair of videos on the same theme, I have constructed the narrative of their relationship in terms of artistic imitation, as if filmmaker 2 were directly stealing from, modelling on, or answering filmmaker 1. Keeping in mind the number of secret sharers at work in the formation of genres on YouTube, however, ascribing choice and intention to one video just because it is uploaded after another video

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may be just a version of the post hoc, ergo propter hoc fallacy. As Lauren Shohet has discussed, “YouTube works as the dark double of other archives: its principles of selection are determined entirely by users and uses” (2010, 73). The second video therefore is “answerable” to the first only in Mikhail Bakhtin’s sense of that term, as being dialogically engaged with a language that is already “half someone else’s” (1990; 1981, 293). For as the examination of curating YouTube Shakespeare suggests, inventing YouTube involves distributed cognition at all levels, including canon or archive formation. Methodological Reflection The analysis offered here applies specifically to the videos discussed in the essay and the YouTube genres to which they may be traced. A study of invention in YouTube Shakespeare therefore can be neither for all time nor for all places. If, as anthropologist Michael Wesch (2008) has suggested, ethnography is the native science of Web 2.0, then ethnographies of YouTube Shakespeare must honour the limitations on that practice recommended long ago by Clifford Geertz, who argued that in “thick description” of culture as an “acted document” (1973, 10), theory needs to “stay rather closer to the ground than tends to be the case in sciences more able to give themselves over to imaginative abstraction” (24). The same might be said for the fluid genres emerging from YouTube and their vicissitudes over time and digital space. YouTube Shakespeare genres will come, and they will go. What is happening in that corner of the application, furthermore, may differ radically from what is happening at another YouTube site. As Geertz cautions, in thick description “theoretical formulations hover so low over the interpretations they govern that they don’t make much sense or hold much interest apart from them. This is so, not because they are not general (if they are not general, they are not theoretical), but because, stated independently of their applications, they seem either commonplace or vacant” (25). And so, a thousand YouTube ethnographies can, will, and must flourish, with no definitive end in sight so long as the application may last. Conclusion Steven Johnson, implicitly responding to the activist mantra “Information wants to be free,” writes that “Good ideas may not want to be

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free, but they do want to connect, fuse, recombine. They want to reinvent themselves by crossing conceptual borders” (2010, 22). Information acts in much the same way in YouTube Shakespeare; through repeated acts of sampling, linking, and combining, genres of YouTube appropriation emerge that satisfy varying motives and provide different strategies for a wide range of circumstances. That reinvention is central to YouTube and to the forays of its users into Shakespearean territory is suggested by an earlier Hamlet mashup, uploaded in 2008. “Hamlet ‘To Be or Not to Be’ Mashup” (2008) is a demonstration piece that shows off the potential of YouTube as a hermetically sealed repository of Shakespeare-related clips that can readily be combined and recombined with one another. While many YouTube artists take their clips from DVDs (some ripped in an inexpert way), “Hamlet ‘To Be or Not to Be’ Mashup” presents itself as “an exercise to demonstrate the wide variety of Shakespeare-related video that can be found on YouTube and how easy it is to mess about with it.” The video, the filmmaker claims, took “3 hours to produce from searching t’ube [sic], downloading, importing into iMovie and editing” (“Hamlet ‘To Be or Not to Be’ Mashup” 2008). All of the footage – twenty clips complete with URLs listed in the video’s description – is taken directly from YouTube itself. While the author strikes a hacker pose, foregrounding the ease and short time of production and thanking “all the people I ripped off for this. Hope you don’t mind,” he also plays the scholar, allowing viewers to follow the artistic trail to his sources: straightforward rips of Branagh, Kevin Kline, Derek Jacobi, and Alexander Fodor’s experimental Hamlet film; several clips of differing quality declaring themselves as school projects; a pretty good Lego staging; an adolescent reading the soliloquy as Borat (“Ay, there’s the rubber ducky”); and a US teen and Barcelona singer performing original songs with Hamlet’s lyrics (“Hamlet ‘To Be or Not to Be’ Mashup” 2008). The video description suggests a possible submission to the Royal Shakespeare Company; but although I could find discussion of collaboration with that group by the filmmaker, I have seen no evidence of further Shakespearean activity on his part. I did find one of this artist’s sources (the Lego “To be or not to be,” with a skull reciting the speech) on the Royal Shakespeare Company’s site Bardbox, the brainchild of film theorist Luke McKernan – a linking out to another archive of videos carefully selected for their “quality.” Nevertheless, the problem of YouTube as an archive, as articulated by Shohet (2010) and implicitly redressed

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by Bardbox – a lack of reliance on expert opinion for filtering – may prove in the end to be the site’s greatest strength. Johnson writes: “The computer scientist Christopher Langton observed several decades ago that innovative systems have a tendency to gravitate toward the ‘edge of chaos’: the fertile zone between too much order and too much anarchy” (2010, 52). Innovation takes place most readily on this border between order and anarchy because “a good idea is a network. A specific constellation of neurons – thousands of them – fire in sync with one another for the first time.” Such a network needs to be large and dense (“you can’t have an epiphany with only three neurons firing”) and “plastic, capable of adapting to new configurations” (Johnson 2010, 46, 47). YouTube, one of Johnson’s prime examples of a virtual environment conducive to innovation, fulfils both of these requirements precisely because of its unwieldy size and rapid but uneven reconfiguration. Innovation occurs when the environment assembles an “eclectic collection” of building blocks, “spare parts that can be reassembled into useful new configurations” (Johnson 2010, 42). The trick to having good ideas, according to Johnson, “is not to sit around in glorious isolation and try to think big thoughts. The trick is to get more parts on the table” (42). This is exactly the lesson provided by the “Hamlet ‘To Be or Not to Be’ Mashup” constructed entirely from YouTube’s cache of available materials – its spare parts, if you will. Reinventing Shakespeare by sampling, linking, and combining YouTube’s collection of “spare parts” provides an alternative intermedial paradigm for Shakespearean appropriation, one in which the mashup becomes not a sideshow, but the main event on the digital Shake-scene. NOTES 1 For a comprehensive overview of digital Shakespeare and discussion of the role videos and multimedia play in this domain, see Best 2011, especially 565 and 573. 2 I do not engage with either commenters or creators of YouTube videos in this essay, although I have in the past for other portions of my research; concerning the videos I discuss here, the commentary tends to be sparse and does not engage with issues of invention or creativity. For a look at other venues in which comments can exert a direct and decisive influence over production, particularly in blog fiction, see Page 2010. Commentary can also be important to some Shakespearean videos and to research on

YouTube Shakespeare  71 them. For an essay that productively analyses some often incendiary user comments in YouTube Othellos, see Thompson 2010. For another account of some difficulties facing social media research that involves direct contact with Shakespearean adapters, see Iyengar and Desmet 2012; not only are many artists under the age of eighteen, but many guard their privacy and are averse to participating in research. 3 For a discussion of code as Foucault’s panopticon in databases created through markup language, see Desmet and Iyengar 2009. Later in this essay, however, I characterize the YouTube algorithm as more of an active agent in the application. 4 For a nuanced definition of “intermediality” in this narrower sense, see Rajewsky 2005. 5 For a 2007 review of YouTube’s engagement with the copyright controversy, see Hilderbrand. For an update on Viacom’s unsuccessful attempt to sue YouTube for copyright violation, see Liedtke 2010. 6 For a good overview of YouTube’s current business model and a useful perspective on the role played by its algorithm, see Seabrook 2012. 7 On the affinity between Web 2.0 and conspiracy theories, see Krapp 2011, especially chapter 2, “Terror and Play, or What Was Hacktivism?” 8 In concluding my analysis of YouTube’s backstage participants here, I am leaving out the “political economy” of YouTube and its recent entrance into a more capitalist system with Google’s purchase of the company and insertion of advertisements into the social mix (see Wasko and Erickson 2009). This economic and political shift in YouTube’s orientation and stated purpose is significant, but none of the examples I discuss here have ­advertisements attached to them. 9 Wes Folkerth (2000), discussing the cultural dynamics of this Beatles skit, concludes that at the time of the original television performance (1964), the Beatles adapted Shakespearean comedy to suit their own class identity and comic ethos. A more recent essay by Louise Geddes (2012) discusses the translation of this skit to YouTube, but in the end proves more interested in its historical context and thus is content to explain the YouTube afterlife of the Beatles’ “Pyramus and Thisbe” in terms of its stage and television origins. 10 Viacom, depicting YouTube’s founders as cyber “pirates,” sued Google, as YouTube’s parent company, for $1 billion in damages on the grounds that they illegally tolerated copyrighted material on the site. In January 2012, a federal judge ruled that YouTube was not guilty, citing a “12-year-old law that shields Internet services from claims of copyright infringement as long as they promptly remove illegal content when notified of a violation” (Liedtke 2010). The parties settled in 2014, with no financial implications.

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WORKS CITED “Around the Beatles rare Apr-28-64.” 2010. YouTube, 22 August. http://www .youtube.com/watch?v=Vo8qpZ-rl0o. Accessed 13 February 2012. Bakhtin, Mikhail M. 1981. “Discourse in the Novel.” In The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, ed. Michael Holquist, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist, 259–422. Austin: University of Texas Press. – 1990. Art and Answerability: Early Philosophical Essays. Ed. Michael Holquist and Vadim Liapunov, trans. Vadim Liapunov. Austin: University of Texas Press. Barbules, Nicholas. 1997. “Rhetorics of the Web: Hyperreading and Critical Literacy.” In Page to Screen: Taking Literacy into the Electronic Era, ed. Ilana Snyder, 102–22. London: Allen and Unwin. Best, Michael. 2011. “Shakespeare on the Internet and in Digital Media.” In The Edinburgh Companion to Shakespeare and the Arts, ed. Mark Thornton Burnett, Adrian Street, and Ramona Wray, 558–76. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Desmet, Christy, and Sujata Iyengar. 2009. “Appropriation and the Design of an Online Shakespeare Journal.” In Shakespeare in Hollywood, Asia, and Cyberspace, ed. Alexander C.Y. Huang and Charles S. Ross, 239–51. West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press. Faden, Eric. 2007. “A Fair(y) Use Tale.” The Center for Internet and Society, Stanford University. 1 March. http://cyberlaw.stanford.edu/blog/2007/ 03/fairy-use-tale. Accessed 12 February 2012. Folkerth, Wes. 2000. “Roll Over Shakespeare: Bardolatry Meets Beatlemania in the Spring of 1964.” Journal of American and Comparative Cultures 23: 75–80. Frowe, John. 2007. “Reproducibles, Rubrics, and Everything You Need: Genre Theory Today.” PMLA 122.5: 1626–34. Geddes, Louise. 2012. “‘Know That I, Ringo the Drummer, Am’: Shakespeare, YouTube, and the Limits of Performance.” Shakespeare Bulletin 30.3: 99–118. Geertz, Clifford. 1973. “Thick Description: Toward an Interpretive Theory of Culture.” In The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays, 3–30. New York: Basic Books. “Gilligan’s Island Clips [Hamlet].” 2010. YouTube. 31 May. http://www.youtube .com/playlist?list=PLB025904E99F6A678. Accessed 15 February 2012. Gitelman, Lisa. 2006. Always Already New: Media, History, and the Data of Culture. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Graham, Beryl, and Sarah Cook. 2010. Rethinking Curating: Art after New Media. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. “Hamlet Is Back.” 2008. YouTube, 29 January. http://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=m1j-wvCtzuI. Accessed 13 February 2012.

YouTube Shakespeare  73 “Hamlet Mash Up.” 2011. Dir. Geoff Klock. YouTube. 21 June. http://www .youtube.com/watch?v=DDTAn6r4HpQ&feature=related. Accessed 11 February 2012. “Hamlet – the Mashup!!!” 2011. YouTube, 5 December. http://www.youtube .com/watch?v=JtK-4L9Zt_0. Accessed 11 February 2012. “Hamlet ‘To Be or Not to Be’ Mashup.” 2008. YouTube, 15 August. http:// www.youtube.com/watch?v=tXu80HmuQoY. Accessed 11 February 2012. Hilderbrand, Lucas. 2007. “YouTube: Where Cultural Memory and Copyright Converge.” Film Quarterly 61.1: 48–57. Hutchins, Edwin. 1993. “Learning to Navigate.” In Understanding Practice: Perspectives on Activity and Context, ed. Seth Chaiklin and Jean Lave, 35–63. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Iyengar, Sujata, and Christy Desmet. 2012. “Rebooting Ophelia: Social Media and the Rhetorics of Appropriation.” In The Afterlife of Ophelia, ed. Kaara L. Peterson and Deanne Williams, 59–78. New York: Palgrave. Jakobson, Roman. 1971. “Two Aspects of Language and Two Types of Aphasic Disturbances.” In Fundamentals of Language, 2nd ed., 69–99. The Hague: Mouton de Gruyter. Johnson, Steven. 2010. Where Good Ideas Come From: The Natural History of Innovation. New York: Riverhead Books. Krapp, Peter. 2011. Noise Channels: Glitch and Error in Digital Culture. Electronic Mediation 37. Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press. Lessig, Lawrence. 2006. Code: And Other Laws of Cyberspace, Version 2.0. New York: Basic Books. Liedtke, Michael. 2010. “Viacom Loses to YouTube in Landmark Copyright Case.” Huffington Post, 23 June. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/06/ 23/youtube-viacom-lawsuit-se_n_623256.html. Accessed 7 February 2010. McKernan, Luke. 2008. “Bardbox: Shakespeare and Online Video.” http:// bardbox.wordpress.com/. Accessed 13 February 2012. Miller, Carolyn R. 1984. “Genre as Social Action.” Quarterly Journal of Speech 70: 151–67. “Monty Python – Hamlet.” 2011. YouTube. 25 May. http://www.youtube. com/watch?v=xsXKT5RhJf8&feature=related. Accessed 10 February 2012. “Moonlighting Taming of the Shrew.” 2006. YouTube. 1 July. http://www .youtube.com/playlist?list=PLBEBCF0BAFD0DEAF1. Accessed 15 February 2012. Page, Ruth. 2010. “Interactivity and Interaction: Text and Talk in Online Communities.” In Intermediality and Storytelling, ed. Marina Grishakova and Marie-Laure Ryan, 208–31. Berlin and New York: Walter de Gruyter. Rajewsky, Irina O. 2005. “Intermediality, Intertextuality, and Remediation: A Literary Perspective on Intermediality.” Intermédialités 5: 43–64.

74  Christy Desmet Seabrook, John. 2012. “Streaming Dreams.” New Yorker, 16 January. http:// www.newyorker.com/reporting/2012/01/16/120116fa_fact_seabrook. Accessed 13 February 2012. Shohet, Lauren. 2010. “YouTube, Use, and the Idea of the Archive.” Shakespeare Studies 38: 68–76. Slavin, Kevin. 2011. “How Algorithms Shape Our World.” TEDGlobal talk. YouTube. 21 July. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TDaFwnOiKVE. Accessed 2 February 2012. Thompson, Ayanna. 2010. “Unmooring the Moor: Researching and Teaching on YouTube.” Shakespeare Quarterly 61.3 (Fall): 337–56. Unsworth, John. 2000. “Scholarly Primitives: What Methods Do Humanities Researchers Have in Common, and How Might Our Tools Reflect This?” Paper presented at “Humanities Computing” symposium, King’s College, London. http://people.lis.illinois.edu/~unsworth/Kings.5-00/primitives .html. Accessed 19 January 2012. Wasko, Janet, and Mary Erickson. 2009. “The Political Economy of YouTube.” In The YouTube Reader, ed. Pelle Snickards and Patrick Vondereau, 372–83. Stockholm: National Library of Sweden. Wesch, Michael. 2008. “An Anthropological Introduction to YouTube.” Library of Congress, 23 June. YouTube. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TPAOlZ4_hU. Accessed 3 March 2013.

“Is There an App for That?”: Mobile Shakespeare on the Phone and in the Cloud Jenni fer L. Ail l e s

In many cases a mobile phone is more of an educational tool than a book. – Steve Vosloo In today’s world, we all inhabit the intermedial – we are surrounded by newspapers, films, television. We live in-between the arts and media – intermediality is the modern way to experience life. – Freda Chapple and Chiel Kattenbelt

Forty Billion Apps and Counting The world is a mobile place and Shakespeare is at the heart of it. This rapid proliferation of mobile devices and apps, short for applications, in the past few years has radically altered how Shakespearean texts, performances, and adaptations are created, encountered, researched, and circulated globally.1 While Shakespeare’s texts have been readily available online for years,2 they are now easily accessed on ereaders and tablets through stand-alone content apps and web apps that link to the internet or sync via network Cloud storage. The user is no longer tied to the laptop or desktop computer to access Shakespeare’s works, but can read them almost anywhere electronic devices can be taken. Aside from Shakespeare’s oeuvre, along with a significant amount of the canon, now being portable, a host of multimedia paratexts are also readily available – dictionaries, concordances, scholarly articles, images, audio and video recordings of performances, and related social commentary – which enrich our reception and understanding of these

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works. In fact the overabundance of material and the hyperconnectedness of digital media have raised an extensive debate about what even constitutes a primary “text,” let alone a “book.” There have been a number of articles published on Shakespeare on the web,3 but an overview of the new intermedia field of mobile Shakespeare and its ramifications for Shakespearean pedagogy, scholarship, and the creation and circulation of adaptations is needed. Intermediality, according to Freda Chapple and Chiel Kattenbelt, “is a powerful and potentially radical force, which operates in-between performer and audience; in-between theatre, performance and other media; and in-between realities” (2006, 12). Mobile computing and, especially, mobile Shakespeares are transformative intermedial forces; they bridge boundaries not only between performers and audiences through the digital media, but also between content creators and mobile users: they literally and figuratively change realities. Mobile Shakespeare exists as texts on cellphones, as books on electronic readers, and as apps on tablets, but may also take the form of films and videos on YouTube (discussed elsewhere in this volume), paintings and photographs on Flickr, and audio clips on iTunes. All of these media raise questions about what is included and excluded from mobile Shakespeare, what constitutes an adaptation versus a performance, and who creates the various digital interfaces and thus controls the distribution, contextualization, and rhetoric surrounding the presentation and reception of the Bard in the mobile landscape. What does that mobile landscape, one based in intermedial spaces, at the intersection between the material device and the web and the invisible Cloud of data, even look like? To begin answering this question, the first half of this essay surveys the current state of mobile Shakespeare from ereaders and apps to MOOCs. The rapidity with which the mobile digital realm expands and morphs, as demonstrated by the meteoric growth and proliferation of apps and mobile users, is a marker of its intermediality, and as such, this first section can only be a brief snapshot, a screenshot, if you will, of the range and possibility of digital Shakespeare captured in a particular, ever-morphing moment. Shakespeare’s works are central to pedagogical curriculums around the world. Thus at the heart of any discussion of mobile Shakespeare is the issue of literacy – both the ability to read and the ability to operate technology – and the issue of access to web-equipped devices and sufficient internet service. Literacy and access to technology are both contingent on and contribute to the digital divide between the Global

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North and South. The second part of this essay, then, via some particularly exemplary case studies, examines how mobile Shakespeare is being used to bridge this geopolitical divide through social networking learning and literacy initiatives. Projects, such as the m4Lit, or Yoza Cellphone Stories, in South Africa, foster literacy and nation building through m-novels, while the highly sophisticated cross-platform productions of Such Tweet Sorrow, a Twitter adaptation of Romeo and Juliet, and the equally ambitious “myShakespeare,” a panchronic digital flow project backed by the Royal Shakespeare Company as part of the World Shakespeare Festival 2012, create new intermedial experiences that alter the barriers among content creators, performers, audiences, and mobile users. eShakespeare eReaders Shakespeare’s complete works are readily available on mobile devices through a wide variety of ereaders and apps.4 There are two main types of apps: native and web apps. A native app is designed to run on a particular device (i.e., a game, music player, or calculator) whereas a web app is accessed via the internet and can be run on almost any web-enabled device (such as YouTube, Skype, or Facebook). Native apps can be used when a device is offline, while web apps require internet access to work. The line between the two types of apps is blurring, since most web apps have native app portals on the various mobile devices that may partially store online material in caches and/or incorporate realtime connectivity that hides the web aspects, making them transparent, while native apps will push and sync material with Cloud servers when connected to the web so that the latest material is available offline. Most apps are simple and focus on a particular task, function, or presentation of material. Some are on dedicated devices, such as the original Kindle or Nook ereaders, while the rest operate on non-dedicated mobile phones and tablets. Some apps even operate on non-mobile desktop computers. Other apps have apps themselves, such as Facebook’s inapp App Center, which was launched late spring 2012.5 According to mobiThinking (2012), a mobile marketing tracker, “On average US feature-phone users have 10 apps on board and smartphone users have 22 apps (of which iPhone users have the most with 37).”6 In general, apps are cheap enough to allow for impulse buys, they offer fast access to highly selected and curated task-oriented programs and material, and they extend and sometimes replace the functionality of desktop

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computers through their portability. The wide spread of apps, which increases and diversifies every day, allows for each user to personalize and customize her mobile device according to her needs and interests.7 Readers and users can access Shakespeare’s works on all of the major ereaders, either on the dedicated devices with native apps or as web apps that work across mobile platforms. For example, Kindle, Nook, and Google Play are all available on Apple mobile devices along with Apple’s own iBooks. The Bard’s works appear in the form of digital editions of traditional hard copy books, such as The Oxford Shakespeare: The Complete Works (2nd edition, edited by Stanley Wells and Gary Taylor), single-volume editions (mainly Penguin/Pelican/ Signet Shakespeare, Modern Library RSC Shakespeare, and Dover Thrift Editions), and free editions drawn from those already circulating on the web as part of Project Gutenberg or library copies scanned as part of Google’s digitization project. At the time of this writing, Penguin is the only publisher whose Shakespeare editions are available for Amazon’s Kindle, Barnes and Noble’s Nook, Google’s Google Play/Google Books for Android, and Apple’s iTunes/iBooks. By contrast, The Oxford Shakespeare is available for every platform except iBooks. The Riverside, Norton, Arden, and Bedford Shakespeare editions are not available for digital download on any of the four platforms, while the Folger Shakespeare is only available for the Nook.8 There are numerous self-published editions of the plays, especially on Amazon, so that it is very difficult for a non-academic to find quality editions with supplemental material – most are just repackaged free online editions.9 Ereaders present the texts in two main formats: scanned PDF copies of hard copy books or flowing ePub text that allows the user to alter the font type and size for easier reading on a variety of screen dimensions. Google’s scanned PDF format, while harder to see on a small screen, is functionally useful to scholars who want to see the printed edition of a play in its original published form, along with any marginalia. Some ereaders present the flowing text using a book-based aesthetic with pages that can be “turned,” while the rest just present the works in a more or less steady stream of text that can be scrolled. The most comprehensive ereader app for scholars is Shakespeare Pro, and its corresponding free version Shakespeare, by Readdle and PlayShakespeare. com. Both the Pro and the free versions have all the plays and poems of Shakespeare, along with three plays whose attribution is contentious:

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Edward III, Sir Thomas More, a collaborative play which Shakespeare is argued to have contributed to, and Double Falsehood by Lewis Theobald, arguably an adaptation of the lost Cardenio by Shakespeare and John Fletcher. In addition, the Pro edition contains Charles and Mary Lamb’s Tales from Shakespeare, which adapt the plays for younger readers. While the lite, or free, version has a searchable concordance and is a useful app for simply reading the texts, the Pro edition has numerous features that make it a wonderful asset for scholars. Besides including copies of the First Folio or Quarto editions for almost all of the texts, using original spelling and font, including the long “s,” the Pro edition has line numbers and lets the user track and highlight particular characters. It also allows bookmarks, textual copying, and note creation, and it has a  fully searchable integrated glossary based on the online version of David and Ben Crystal’s lexicon, Shakespeare’s Words. Ben Crystal affirms, “The book and the site seem to have become the go-to glossary for the profession and indeed for non-professionals too. Last year, I negotiated a deal with playshakespeare.com, who run the Shakespeare App for the iPhone, iPad, iPod. Now the glossary that underpins their complete works is powered by our database” (quoted in Lanir 2011).10 The Shakespeare Pro app highlights what the best ereaders have: highquality content that is presented in a clean design and that allows the user to adjust visual settings, in-app dictionaries, search functionality, and note and highlighting features that allow the user to annotate the content for further study. Ereader editions of Shakespeare’s written texts use the traditional conventions of book formatting and editing to present the texts, but they also directly challenge the notion of the discrete book through the free flow of text, the openness to instantaneous upgrading via Cloud syncing, and the incorporation of other media via the eplatform. Beyond eReaders: Shakespeare Apps At the time of this writing there were over two hundred apps in the iTunes App Store that were connected in some capacity to “Shakespeare,” in addition to the various ereaders discussed previously. Shakespeare apps cover a wide range of topics and aspects of Bard culture from quotation collections to festival playbills and games and adaptations to educational learning apps.11 Many of these apps are duplicated in the Google Play App Store for Android devices, while others have been released exclusively on the Apple platform.

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All of these apps, including those that function as ereaders, are part of the larger history of Shakespeare’s works being adapted to new modes of popular culture entertainment and, increasingly, education. Their development reveals how the mobile apps inspire new intermedia forms of adaptation that capitalize on the technological innovations of sophisticated mobile devices. Mobile apps are often seen as passive delivery content systems, but they actually require the user to be an ­active participant in the achievement of the apps’ performative goals. The user must select, input, stroke, tap, shake, tilt, rotate, walk, talk to, listen, record, take pictures or film video, and share with the mobile device for the app to “complete” its performance. The reliance on the user’s corporeality in digital mobile app functioning challenges the binary between the performer and the audience and raises the question of who the actor is – an issue that is also at the heart of Such Tweet Sorrow, which I discuss at length below. The confluence of the virtual app content and the actual user interaction demonstrates a central feature of Dick Higgins’s original sense of intermedia: hybridity between art and life (Friedman 2002, 246). In this sense the mobile app enables the user to become a part of the art and the art to become part of the user’s life, raising the larger issue of what constitutes an “actor” in the intermediated digital realm. This hybridity is evident in the numerous Shakespearean quote collections or quote generators available to meet the user’s every ­ Shakespearean need and allow the user to act a part in a Shakespearean work or bring Shakespeare more firmly into the user’s life. Shakespeare in Love features love quotations from the plays and sonnets, while William Shakespeare Inspirational Quotes “enhance[s] your productivity and peace of mind” by inspiring the user with the Bard’s famous phrases. Laugh Shaker makes use of mobile devices’ built-in accelerometers and gyroscopes to let users “shake” their devices to produce a new humorous quote. Shakes Pear – Organic Shakespeare Quotes also uses the same shaking motion to randomly select passages, but accompanies them with an image of a pear – though not necessarily “a pop’rin pear” (Romeo and Juliet 2.1.38). There are numerous apps providing samples of invective and abuse, including Bard You, Ye Olde Insulter, and Shakespearean Insults – several of which are modelled on the infamous “Shakespeare Insult Kit,” which lets the user combine various insults from the plays into new curses and then share them with friends. The Shakespeare Convertor moves beyond insults and quotations to let the user convert user-generated phrases into Shakespearean, as well as

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translating various sixteenth-century English words and phrases into twenty-first-century language. For those wishing to learn more than a few quotes, Realtime Music Solutions produces a series of Sides apps that allows the user to learn all of a character’s part by first listening to professional stage actors read lines from many of Shakespeare’s plays and then rehearsing them, karaoke-style, while the app reads the lines of the other characters. The premium version of The Sides Winter’s Tale app, for example, also allows users to record themselves and their cast mates for production-specific rehearsal – a feature that might be useful for budding thespians. A number of apps are dedicated to marketing and increasing audience enjoyment of Shakespearean festivals and groups that perform live adaptations and stagings of Shakespeare’s plays.12 Vancouver’s resident Shakespeare festival, Bard on the Beach, and the world-famous Stratford Shakespeare Festival are two well-known festivals that make use of apps to support their production seasons – both present their playbills, festival production information, in-app ticket sales, and travel information, along with photos and other media, in accessible formats designed especially for mobile phones. The Stratford app, in particular, contains a wealth of material taken from the annual hard copy playbill that makes the app indispensable to a visitor to Stratford. Broadway across America’s West Side Story app, supporting the Portland, Oregon 3–8 January 2012 revival of the musical adaptation of Romeo and Juliet, also makes productive use of the digital playbill format on the iPad. At first glance, the West Side Story playbill looks like a scanned copy of a standard playbill, but as the user scrolls vertically or horizontally through the various pages, the playbill expands to include longer interviews, videos, and images. One of the more interesting features of the playbill is how it incorporates ads: instead of being flashy and intrusive, many of the ads, whether for cars, local restaurants, or a young performing artist group, have “Easter egg” icons that the user clicks to reveal images and videos associated with the ad. Though few in number at the moment, these digital app playbills demonstrate some of the possibilities of the portable digital medium to provide information and records of performances as well as immersive intermedia that augment the theatre-going event. Notably, though, the Royal Shakespeare Company does not have a significant app presence at the time of this writing, even though they have been at the forefront of using mobile media in their productions – something I will discuss more in the second half of this paper. The

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only RSC app is Adelaide Road, based on a 2011 live show and workshop written by poet Aoife Mannix and directed by Ola Animashawun. The app provides an “interactive theatrical journey,” derived from As You Like It, which allows the user to take advantage of the GPS in her phone to access readings geospatially linked to specific locations along Adelaide Road in London. Though there was an associated live performance, this app allows the user to recreate and participate in part of the production that continues despite the cast being in absentia. Every interactive “walk” thus becomes a new and distinct presentation, an appbased intermedial performance that extends the theatrical season as long as the app exists and is deployed.13 While there are numerous Shakespearean adaptations available via aggregate apps, such as ereaders, film-sites, music players, fine art digital collections, and other user-generated sites such as YouTube, a few adaptations of Shakespearean source texts have their own mobile apps. Opera: Macbeth, for instance, presents the synopsis, character list, and the libretto in Italian and English for Giuseppe Verdi’s operatic adaptation. The app does not contain a musical recording of the opera, but it allows the user to sync her reading of the libretto with recordings played in iTunes. Verdi’s Otello is also available from the same company. Hamlet! is a short animated adventure puzzle game that takes a modern-day scientist and makes him travel back to Shakespeare’s time to save Ophelia from Claudius’s evil grip. Shakespeare Made Easy repackages Edith Nesbit’s short story adaptations of sixteen of the plays with short videos giving some context to Shakespeare’s life and writing. Ave!Comics and Self Made Hero’s Manga Shakespeare app is a gateway app that allows the user to buy the fourteen graphic novels adapted by Richard Appignanesi and illustrated by a variety of artists. These adaptations recast King Lear as a Native American in the mid-­ eighteenth century facing European expansion on the frontier, Romeo as a rock star in Tokyo whose family is part of the Yakuza or Japanese “mafia,” and Hamlet as a still brooding youth whose native Denmark is now devastated by climate change.14 Similarly, the highly acclaimed Kill Shakespeare graphic comic book series by Canadians Anthony Del Col, Conor McCreery, and Andy Belanger is also available through the Comics gateway app. Thumbnail Theater: Macbeth by Michael Mills Productions, Canada’s oldest commercial animation company, is another adaptation that has expanded its audience through a digital app presence. Based on the animated TV show of the same name, the app is part of a series of TV

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adaptations that teach Shakespeare through “edutainment” or “[e]ducational entertainment that is lively, humorous and designed to encourage knowledge of the classics” (Michael Mills Productions 1995– 2011). The animated and graphic novel adaptations are highly accessible formats that are used in educational settings to encourage student interest in Shakespeare. The Toronto School Board bought the TV version of Thumbnail Theater: Macbeth for inclusion in the public school curriculum and the accompanying app is also used as a standalone or in the classroom. Having these highly visual and “hip” adaptations made available to the general user and to students presents Shakespeare’s works as being a part of everyday digital lives. Mobile Education and the Flipped Shakespearean Classroom By far the largest group of Shakespeare apps is educational and many of them try to make Shakespeare more approachable for public and high school students. These apps provide a putatively dynamic and interactive learning experience that is personalized and that can be ­incorporated into formal curricula. According to a 2011 international study commissioned by the RSC and the British Council, “[a]pproximately 50% of schoolchildren across the world, at least 64 million each year, are studying Shakespeare at school. Thirteen times the population of England when Shakespeare was alive now learn about him every year” (RSC, “Wiki Shakespeare” 2011). It is not surprising given this reality that the majority of apps are dedicated to facilitating this study. Educators, especially at the high school level, are encouraged to use and integrate these educational Shakespeare apps as part of “flipped classrooms,” hybrid learning environments that use digital materials, especially interactive modular lessons created by an instructor or short videos produced by a content management system such as the Khan Academy or iTunes U (both have their own apps), to teach course material. In the traditional classroom model, lessons are presented in class by the instructor and reinforced through homework. The flipped or “inverted” classroom alters that model by having the primary lessons presented, or heavily reinforced, in a digital format accessed outside of the classroom space in an effort to free up in-class time to focus on problems and discussion instead of lectures and content lessons. The flipping of the traditional classroom is part of what Klaus-Peter Busse refers to as “[i]ntermedial learning.” Intermedial learning is “open, determinedly non-linear and polymedial” and “lack[s] a medial centre”

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(2005, 269). Busse argues that “[t]he point [of intermedial learning] is not to search for a medial center in art education [or any other subject] which is to provide meanings but to enable teaching situations where the constitution of meaning occurs as a result of the de-centring process” (269). Though Busse is discussing art education, his description is apt for how students learn about Shakespeare’s works and adaptations in environments where the hierarchical lecture has been dislocated via digital intermedia strategies. The two biggest elements driving the flipped classroom movement are poor completion rates in high schools following traditional pedagogical models and the availability of digital teaching materials online and through mobile apps and learning management systems – many of which are already being accessed by students as part of “free-range learning.” Free-range learning occurs when students look for online materials to supplement those assigned in class. According to a National Science Foundation study on undergraduate online study habits led by Glenda Morgan, students “generally shop around for content in places educators would endorse. Students seem most favorably inclined to materials from other universities … they prefer recognized ‘brands’” (quoted in Parry 2012). Students engage in free-range learning for a variety of reasons, including taking an interest in a topic, doing homework or studying for writing papers, or “dissatisfaction with their own professors” (Morgan, quoted in Parry 2012).15 The variety of mobile apps and materials that students employ in free-range learning is connected to the breadth of resources and methods at the heart of intermedial learning. Busse argues that “[t]hese methods provide rhizomes within which students can move. To a significant degree, intermedial learning is a type of deconstructive learning by processing texts and images” (2005, 269). Facilitating this rhizomatic free-range learning, both CliffsNotes and SparkNotes have brought their ubiquitous study guides to the mobile platform for the most popular plays.16 Julius Caesar – CliffsNotes, for example, offers two time-based study options – the “Cram Plan” and the “Full Study Plan” – and promises the user: “Learn faster, study better, and score higher with CliffsNotes Apps.” SparkNotes, whose motto is “When your books and teachers don’t make sense, we do,” has two available apps. The first is a free app, SparkNotes, which contains fifty study guides in a native app, including all of Shakespeare’s works, with the ability to download from the rest of the SparkNotes online catalogue through the web. The second SparkNotes app is No Fear Shakespeare, based on the book series, which “puts Shakespeare’s

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language side by side with a modern-English translation – the kind of English people actually speak today.” No Fear Shakespeare is a gateway app that allows the user to buy eighteen of Shakespeare’s plays. The gateway app follows the “freemium” model where the main app is a free app that requires the user to make further purchases in-app to access content related to particular plays.17 Shakespeare in Bits by MindConnex Learning also follows the freemium model. The app currently links to four plays – Romeo and Juliet, Macbeth, Hamlet, and A Midsummer Night’s Dream – with Julius Caesar coming soon. The app is notable in that it has won a number of awards18 for its use of animation, voiced by professional actors such as Fiona Shaw, Kate Beckinsale, and Michael Sheen, to present the full-length plays side-by-side with the text. The animation uses Shakespeare’s original text and is presented in approximately one-minute segments, or “bits,” allowing the user to focus in on smaller sections of the works rather than being overwhelmed by a whole scene. In his acceptance speech for the “Cool Tool Award for Best Content Provider Solution,” Michael Cordner, CEO of MindConnex, averred: The edtech industry is such an exciting place to be right now but it fundamentally comes down to making technology that engages and enhances the learning experience for students and teachers. Shakespeare In Bits achieves this by bringing Shakespeare to life in the classroom and in the minds of the students – helping them to get to grips with 400 year old literature in a way that engages them from a visual, aural and textual perspective, and on a platform that they are extremely comfortable using. (MindConnex 2012)

The app, and its associated learning management system, have also been adopted by schools as part of their curriculum. MindConnex “signed its first school district deal in Canada with Chinook’s Edge School Division for its online, subscription-based Shakespeare in Bits Live! service” (“820 students” 2011). The agreement enables teachers to use the program in the classroom and students to revisit the material outside of the classroom. Going beyond the K-12 demographic, Romeo+Juliet: The Shakespeare App by InteractiveReaders Inc., based on the Canadian Adaptations of Shakespeare Project’s Interactive Folio: Romeo and Juliet, developed by Daniel Fischlin and the CASP research team at the University of Guelph, includes video talks by prominent Shakespearean academics on various aspects of the play as well as linking, via the web, to

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scholarly ­articles on adaptation, textual sources Shakespeare drew on while adapting Romeo and Juliet for the stage, and various Canadian adaptations of the play – all housed on the Canadian Adaptations of Shakespeare Project webpage. Shakespeare’s The Tempest for iPad by Luminary Digital Media is another scholarly-based app, developed by  Elliott Visconsi and Katherine Rowe, which presents a high-level access point into studying the play. The app also contains lectures from noted Shakespeareans, along with illustrations and audiovisual materials from the Folger Shakespeare Library Master Class. Both of these apps demonstrate how educational apps can incorporate a more sophisticated and scholarly approach to studying the plays instead of assuming that Shakespeare’s works are too hard and must be “made easy” or broken into “bits” to be understood. Apple is taking a primary role in providing “branded” content for use by students and educators interested in intermedial learning in the form of iTunes U, which was relaunched in 2012.19 iTunes U, which has had over one billion downloads as of February 2013 (Apple, “iTunes U” 2013), includes lecture podcasts and videos on Shakespeare from Oxford University, Cambridge University, the Open University, the Huntington, Yale University, and the University of Warwick, among many others. In the spring of 2012, Apple also released a new version of iBooks 2 and an associated non-mobile app, iBooks Author, to allow for textbooks and Shakespearean adaptations to be created and sold exclusively on the Apple platform. These books, especially the textbooks created on the app, allow for the standard text to have interactive images, videos, and high-resolution graphics that allow concepts and lessons to come “alive” for students. The market for etextbooks and online education is growing substantially and Apple is aggressively promoting its platform, especially the iPad, as a complete learning management system rather than just a content management system. iTunes U allows instructors around the world to house all of their Shakespearean course materials, including customized etextbooks, assignments, video and podcast lectures, and even tests, so that students can have access to all of their course materials in one mobile location – downloading updates from the Cloud.20 Shakespearean MOOCs While iTunes U promotes itself as at the forefront of highly personalized mobile learning, it is also setting itself up to be a MOOC. MOOCs, or

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Massively Open Online Courses, are the latest iteration in the online movement, but they move beyond the traditional online, blended, or flipped classroom course in terms of sheer scale and the lack of interaction between the online instructor and the students and their reliance on the full range of intermedial technologies. MOOCs bring to mind the MMOGs, Massively Multiplayer Online Games, and MMORPGs, Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Games, such as World of Warcraft, which, incidentally, contains numerous references to Shakespeare’s works, including Hamlet, Macbeth, and Romeo and Juliet, within the gaming environment. MOOCs take the online platform and let it run independently of bricks-and-mortar schools. Once a course is set up on the learning management system, it runs with little to no interaction between the students and the instructor.21 After a number of independent test courses, several major universities have now joined together to offer their own “branded” MOOC course platforms, including edX (created by MIT and Harvard in 2012) and Coursera (formed with Princeton University, Stanford University, University of Michigan – Ann Arbor, University of Pennsylvania, and University of California, Berkeley in 2012).22 edX’s original mandate outlines the stakes involved in MOOCs by “offer[ing] Harvard and MIT classes online for free. Through this partnership, the institutions aim to extend their collective reach to build a global community of online learners and to improve education for everyone” (edX 2012). edX is based on MITx, which launched earlier in the spring of 2012. The first course offered was “6.002x: Circuits and Electronics” and drew 120,000 registrants in the first month of offering (Kolowich 2012). MIT has been committed to online open access education for a long time. Since 2002 MIT has housed an online archive of “virtually all” past courses (over two thousand as of 2012), including a wide range of Shakespearerelated courses, as part of its MIT OpenCourseWare (OCW) web-based archive. OCW video lectures are available via the MIT OpenCourseWare Lecture Hall app. In the first year of classes, Coursera grew to 62 partner universities from around the world offering 328 classes, while edX has expanded to 12 universities and a significantly more focused course list. Though there are more computer science courses available as MOOCs, the number of humanities classes is rising. It is hard to imagine that MOOCShakespeare will be long in coming, considering the leading role Shakespearean works and adaptations play at the heart of the literary canon and in how that canon is now being disseminated through mobile, intermedial learning strategies.

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MOOCs inevitably raise contentious questions regarding the need for traditional campuses and highly trained faculty teaching in programs with high tuition rates.23 Arguably, course content can be established by one or two academic experts and a team of IT professionals who set up and maintain the course online platform or its affiliated app. After the initial set-up has been accomplished, all that is needed is periodic content updating – especially if the assignments and grading are done by computer or through peer evaluation, both of which are prominent features of MOOCs. Though this model is seemingly more easily applied to math and science courses, it is also being applied to the humanities and courses in which writing and discussion seminars are the central teaching model. Gerald Sussman, a professor of electrical engineering and co-instructor of “6.002x” at MITx, addresses this issue: “The goal of developing virtual laboratories and software that automatically assesses students’ ability to vanquish complex problems and tasks is not to eliminate the need for real, live professors; it is to figure out what parts of the face-to-face delivery model can be automated so professors and students can double-down on the pieces of an  MIT education that are orientated to apprenticeship” (quoted in Kolowich 2012). But the reality is that the value of education is highly debatable, and systems of delivery that separate the content from formal institutions, even while using the brand of those institutions, add to the idea that people can educate themselves via these intermedial forms of technology without the need for guidance from a trained educator. The proliferation of free-range learning, and now MOOCs, has led to a rise in calls for certification for online learning, especially for online learning beyond the classroom. For those who finish the MOOC classes, edX plans to award certificates with the MIT “brand,” while several colleges have already started accepting transfer credits.24 Many K-12 schools that incorporate online and flipped classroom models have already started awarding points or rewards, such as badges, for completing tasks like memorizing a sonnet, passing a quiz, or watching a particular number of Shakespeare videos. The awarding of badges is part of a “gamification” model that awards users/players/students for performing a particular task.25 This self-learning ideal recognizes the learning that takes place outside of a formal setting, but it assumes that the online and mobile users, the non-student students, are already literate and motivated enough to complete the courses. In fact, the vast majority of those who start MOOCs do not finish them.26 Furthermore, the move to digital auto-education also assumes that users/(non)-students

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have access to the technology required to access online courses, such as high-speed broadband and high-resolution computers and, increasingly, iPads. Accessing Shakespeare in the Cloud Accessing Shakespeare via this broad-based education requires substantial literacy and material resources. Ereaders and educational apps offer the utopian promise of education, and ultimately, democratic agency, for all – a supposed “great equalizer across boundaries of ability, resources and education” (Gahran 2012). But the more sophisticated and interactive the intermedial educational platforms are, and the more they operate in the digital Cloud, the higher the problem of constant connectivity is and the need to have constant access to the web. This problem is especially acute for educational apps and courses that need to work in tandem with the web for downloading course content, posting to discussion boards, submitting assignments, and completing exams. Literacy refers to “a competence of skill, which gains higher status by virtue of an analogy with books, reading, and authorship. Phrases such as ‘computer literacy’ or ‘digital literacy’ equate the use of digital media software, computers, networks and other technologies with the ability to read and write. Such usage, by implication, sets technology users apart, ensconced in the ranks of the ‘literate,’ in an implicit contrast with the ‘illiterate’” (Walton 2009, 6). Digital access requires reading ability and technological literacy. Apps, in particular, try to lower the threshold for participation, in comparison to computers, by keeping the technical apparatus and coding hidden behind the user interface of the mobile platform. The level of technological literacy seems low to operate a smartphone or tablet, as demonstrated through the proliferation of apps aimed at and operated by young children (and by the lawsuit mentioned in an earlier note about children making in-app purchases). But the cultural and technological literacy that is required to support mobile devices is incredibly high and complex. Mobile devices rely on an intensely complicated infrastructure of equipment, internet access, networked Cloud data storage, and the requisite electricity to power it all.27 Access to that technological infrastructure varies greatly across the globe. According to the UN’s International Telecommunication Union, “In developing countries, 25% of homes have a computer and 20% have

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Internet access, compared to 20% and 13%, respectively, 3 years ago [in 2008]” (ITU 2011, 2). “Over the last five years, developing countries have increased their share of the world’s total number of Internet users from 44% in 2006, to 62% in 2011” (1), but cost is still a huge barrier: “In 31 countries – all of them highly industrialized economies – an entrylevel broadband connection costs on average the equivalent of 1% or less of average monthly GNI per capita, while in 19 countries – most of them least developed countries – a broadband connection costs on average more than 100% of monthly GNI per capita” (7). Even in the United States there is a problem of bandwidth “spectrum crunch” – the wireless spectrum allotted to commercial usage is a finite resource and it is being taxed by the increase in mobile wireless usage, leading to data caps and service outages. According to Cisco’s Mobile Visual Networking Index, the mobile industry’s most comprehensive annual study, Global mobile data traffic is just about doubling every year, and will continue to do so through at least 2016 … The iPhone, for instance, uses 24 times as much spectrum as an old-fashioned cell phone, and the iPad uses 122 times as much, according to the Federal FCC. AT&T says wireless data traffic on its network has grown 20,000% since the iPhone debuted in 2007. (Quoted in Goldman 2012)

Ironically, the same technology that increases literacy and access to intermedial education for the masses also creates barriers for others through the sheer volume of usage. Added to the crunch is the “bandwidth divide” – only two-thirds of American households have access to the high-speed broadband needed to download the video lectures that are a hallmark of MOOCs (Young 2013).28 Those living in rural or technology-poor areas are increasingly left with impoverished internet options. Beyond reading and technical literacy, Marion Walton points out a third Freireian sense. She states that “‘reading the word’ is a critical ability, which reciprocally entails ‘reading the world.’ This critical approach to literacy has an explicit political agenda which situates reading and writing as part of a process of questioning and social activism.” Walton goes on to argue, “When knowledge of technology is described as ‘literacy’ in this way, it is not only seen as a basic requirement for participation and inclusion in modern society, but also as a prerequisite for agency, and thus an important democratic right to which all are

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entitled” (2009, 6). Digital literacy is thus at the heart of nation building, the democratic process, economic development, education, and global and local (glocal) citizenship. Having access to mobile technology has allowed for the instantaneous circulation of news throughout the digital Cloud in the form of Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube postings. These developments have proven particularly relevant in the Arab Spring and Occupation movements and protests. Shakespearean adaptation has even found its place within the Occupy movement with activists reading scenes from the plays at protests and then posting videos of those recordings on the web.29 The works of Shakespeare have long played a role in literacy and nation building. Now the technology of mobile Shakespeare is at the heart of many educational movements and experiments. I will focus in the second part of this paper on two such examples – one from the Global South and the other from the Global North. Yoza Cellphone Stories in South Africa show how mobile technology is bridging the digital divide and increasing literacy by bringing Shakespeare to new audiences; and the Royal Shakespeare Company’s productions of Such Tweet Sorrow and “myShakespeare” from the World Shakespeare Festival 2012 showcase how mobile Shakespeare is part of a panchronic digital flow of information. From the supposedly simplistic to the incredibly complex, these case studies show how intermediality is truly a “radical force” (Chapple and Kattenbelt 2006, 12) that bridges and creates new interpretive realities. mShakespeare in South Africa The ability to access Shakespeare’s works on a mobile phone may seem only a convenience, but for places where literacy is a major issue and computers or tablets cost too much and books are scarce, a mobile phone offers a ready, if sometimes the only, option. In 2010, a widely cited study by M.D.R. Evans, Jonathan Kelley, Joanna Sikora, and Donald J. Treiman was published in the journal Research in Social Stratification and Mobility. The study, “Family Scholarly Culture and Educational Success: Books and Schooling in 27 Nations,” addresses the compelling connection between the number of books in a home and the amount of education that a child completes. According to the study, Children growing up in homes with many books get 3 years more schooling than children from bookless homes, independent of their parents’

92  Jennifer L. Ailles education, occupation, and class. This is as great an advantage as having university educated rather than unschooled parents, and twice the advantage of having a professional rather than an unskilled father. It holds equally in rich nations and in poor; in the past and in the present; under Communism, capitalism, and Apartheid. (Evans et al. 2010, “Abstract”)

In response to the report, Steve Vosloo, the founder of m4Lit (Mobile Phones for Literacy), which became Yoza Cellphone Stories in South Africa, raised the question: “But what happens when there are no books?,” arguing, “In developing countries the pixels versus paper debate is often an irrelevant luxury … The low level of literacy amongst South African youth is a recognized problem.” Moreover, Vosloo avers, “While it is a very complex problem, one contributing factor is that books are unaffordable, and therefore unavailable, to many students. The lack of books extends to homes – in 2006, 51% of South African households owned no leisure books – and to schools – only 7% of public schools in South Africa have functional libraries of any kind” (Vosloo 2010).30 Further, “Computers (desktops and laptops) are still not accessible to [South African teens], with only 63.9% of [survey] respondents having ever used one. Neither are computers an everyday part of their media landscape, since only 18% reported having used a desktop computer [recently], and an equally small group reporting having a computer at home” (Walton 2009, 32). What South Africans do have access to, especially the teens, are cellphones – “stats indicating that 90% of urban youth have their own cellphone” (Yoza Project 2010). UN studies reveal that “[w]hile people in developed countries usually use mobilebroadband networks in addition to a fixed-broadband connection, ­mobile-broadband is often the only access method available to people in developing countries” (ITU 2011, 4). The m4Lit project began in 2009, based on a Japanese project for teens reading and writing novels on their cellphones. Japanese teens started this mobile intermedial usage in response to travelling on “crowded public transportation, with passengers crammed so closely together that it [was] impossible to open a book” (Clark 2009); they created a new form of text and reading in response to the physical limitations they faced by using new media technologies. The Japanese mobile or m-novels were written in SMS, Short Messaging Service or Textspeak, and the original chapters contained less than one hundred words to fit the character limit of the SMS transmission system. David Crystal notes, “The brevity of the SMS genre disallows complex formal pattern-

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ing – of, say, the kind we might find in a sonnet. It isn’t so easy to include more than a couple of images, such as similes, simply because there isn’t the space. Writers have nonetheless tried to extend the potential of the medium. The SMS novel, for example, operates on a screen-by-screen basis” (Crystal 2008a). The technical restrictions of the format result in short sentences, frequent abbreviations, and lots of dialogue.31 As the number of characters and words that can be sent in a single text message has increased, so too has the length of chapters, with full sentences, that can be sent via SMS.32 m4Lit’s goal was to get South African youth reading and encourage indigenous language use. The original project published the first stories in English and isiXhosa, while the Yoza Cellphone Stories, launched in 2010, have also added stories in Afrikaans.33 The first two stories in the m4Lit Project were read over 34,000 times in the first seven months – “[t]o put this in context, a book is considered a best seller in South Africa if 3,000 copies are sold. Over 4,000 entries were received in the writing competitions and over 4,000 comments were left by readers on individual chapters” (Yoza Project 2010–12). While Yoza contains numerous indigenous texts, it also contains a “classics” section with Shakespearean texts pulled from the public domain. Shakespeare is mentioned in numerous write-ups about the project as being one of the selling points for improving literacy and helping with school work: “School prescribed work Macbeth is one of the first titles selected for Yoza Classics. The idea is not necessarily that teens will read the whole of Macbeth on their cellphones, but if they have to read Act 1; Scene 1 for homework and they don’t have a textbook, then they can do so on their phones” (Yoza Project 2010). Shakespeare’s works are compulsory as part of English language study for all fourteen- to sixteen-year olds. Similar to the apps intended for curriculum inclusion, the selection of Shakespearean texts included in the Classics section centres on familiar plays: Hamlet, King Lear, Macbeth, Othello, and Romeo and Juliet. The SMS format lends itself surprisingly well to plays, with Shakespeare’s texts divided into chapters according to standard act and scene divisions.34 The project encourages readers to comment on the story, and this is where there is an abundance of textspeak. Readers exclaim: “Omg, romeo nd juliet is a golden oldie nd knwin dat we hv access 2 it is awesum” (Yoza Cellphone Stories 2010c) or “King lear may b a shaksperien buk bt its actually quite a gud buk, think 0f a m0dern day thriller with l0ads 0f family feuds nd a killer ending” (Yoza Cellphone Stories 2010b).

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Though there is considerable resistance to mobile texting in educational settings, mainly because it is seen as an intrusive distraction, its combination of spoken and written discourse, that is of phonocentric and logocentric strategies, makes it a useful language tool. Crystal draws on recent studies to point out that texting actually improves reading literacy rather than reducing it. Crystal argues that users could not be good at texting if they had not already developed considerable literacy awareness. Before you can write and play with abbreviated forms, you need to have a sense of how the sounds of your language relate to the letters. You need to know that there are such things as alternative spellings. If you are aware that your texting behaviour is different, you must have already intuited that there is such a thing as a standard. If you are using such abbreviations as lol and brb (“be right back”), you must have developed a sensitivity to the communicative needs of your textees. (2008a)

These comments focus on how users ask questions and make connections with each other. This connectivity, a form of intermediated shift in how meaning is created, is a key feature of mobile devices: “With chapter comments left by our readers for all to see, reading moves from a solitary exercise to a more social one. While reading a book on one’s own is a very enjoyable pastime, a more social experience has huge potential for those who need help with texts through annotations” (Vosloo 2010). Vosloo calls these digital paratexts a “sort of marginalia.” These marginalia become a part of the permanent digital archive of the Shakespearean work – one that is not isolated to the individual Yoza edition, but is a part of the entire Shakespearean web archive for each play. To encourage a broader distribution of the stories and increase interaction between readers, the Yoza Cellphone Story links are also published via social graphs or social networks, including Facebook and MXit,35 an online instant messenger service that is “Africa’s biggest social network” with over 750,000,000 messages sent per day (Mxit 2012).36 Also available under the Classics section is an adaptation of Romeo and Juliet by Mark Dornford-May entitled Romeo + Khunjulwa, released by the Van Schaik Bookstore for Yoza. The story is set in contemporary Cape Town where fighting between the rival parties, CAPU and MONTA, has led to a “State of Emergency.” Divided into twenty chapters, the story is retold in a mixture of reports from the “Instant News Service from Crossingstar.com,” diary entries written in prose, and

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phone text SMS exchanges between the various characters. One reader of Dornford-May’s story compares it to the 2008 TV series Shakespeare in Mzansi uGugu no Andile, a six-part drama directed by Minky Schlesinger for the South African Broadcasting Corporation (SABC/SABC1) that was later turned into a feature film, Gugu & Andile, by Luna Films/ Firework Media. Set in 1993, just before the first democratic elections in South Africa, it centres on a “star-crossed” couple from different Zulu (Gugu) and Xhosa (Andile) tribes. The Shakespeare in Mzansi series also included adaptations of Macbeth (Entabeni and Death of a Queen), Julius Caesar (Jolile ka Kheza), and King Lear (Izingane zoBaba) – all demonstrating that “Shakespeare [can] be adapted to South Africa today, speak[ing] to the hearts of South Africans about South Africans” (Schlesinger quoted in Mushakavanhu 2010). These adaptations focus on the themes of the “futility of war, and the hope for reconciliation [which are] … vital issues in contemporary South Africa” (Schlesinger, quoted in Mushakavanhu 2010). The series was filmed using the languages of isiZulu and isiXhosa for the local black audiences. Similar to the m4Lit and Yoza projects’ efforts, the film series was also part of a concerted effort of nation building by increasing South African content for South Africans, a familiar strategy of doing so via the Bard’s cultural capital adapted into new national contexts.37 In this example, where intermediated Shakespeares are prominent, South Africa, and the m4Lit project in particular, are part of a more generalized fight against the prejudice and dominance of the Global North and Western World. Part of that fight has to do with the way in which media travel from privileged access to computers in the West through to access to mobile devices in the majoritarian world. Walton argues Studies of children’s “new literacies” in the global north have yet to consider the distinct features of literacy associated with mobile phone use for the majority of the world. Scholars who investigate “digital literacy” have tended to assume that all young people have (or should have) access to computers, and that “new literacies” develop primarily through children’s extensive out-of-school experience in using computers to access the Internet, digital media, and games. (2009, 3)

While access to computers and the internet leads to certain technological literacies and allows many to cross the digital divide, “innovative uses of mobile technology are not always viewed as positively,

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particularly when they do not follow the North American or European model” (Walton 2009, 2). Walton argues further: Unlike computer skills, the digital literacies associated with mobile phone use are not considered generally desirable or necessary … the relatively slow adoption of mobile communication in the United States meant that skills in mobile communication tended to be regarded as culturally specific preferences, or as exotic peculiarities rather than as essential “mobile literacies.” (Walton 2009, 2–3)

Or, in other words, cellphone or m-literacy in the Global South has been  undervalued and misunderstood because of the Global North’s m-­illiteracy. Instead, the Yoza Cellphone Stories and their counterparts around the world demonstrate the rich literacy and creativity of Shakespearean adaptation that mobile technology has allowed. By skipping computers and moving directly to mobile cellphone use, Africa is on pace to become the first “post-PC” continent.38 The free and low-cost mobile offerings provided by MOOCs open up a world of possibility for students in South Africa who can move from the Yoza Cellphone Stories to reading, creating, and engaging with criticism and scholarship about Shakespeare’s works, all while interacting with scholars and students from around the world. Until the technological requirements needed to access the digital material are more universally available, the students in technologically poorer areas, whether in Africa or North America, can at least use if not create intermedia to bridge the digital divide via their mobile phones. Panchronic Shakespeare In the spring of 2010, the Royal Shakespeare Company and the Mudlark Production Company performed an intermedial adaptation of Romeo and Juliet, directed by Roxana Silbert, entitled Such Tweet Sorrow. The cast figured six actors playing the parts of Romeo, Juliet, Mercutio, Tybalt, Jess the nurse, who is also Juliet and Tybalt’s older sister, and Lawrence Friar, an internet café owner and small-scale drug dealer. An added character is Jago Mosca, performed by unnamed actor(s), a student in Juliet’s class who is all-seeing. The five-week performance “was performed entirely via Twitter. Six actors and actresses tweeted the performance over five weeks, and anyone with an Internet connection could follow the performance at any time by visiting the performance

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website or the individual characters’ Twitter profiles” (Way 2011, 401). The performers were also linked to Facebook and uploaded videos to YouTube, along with integrated musical playlists, twitpics, audio tracks of dialogue and music, and blog posts – all posted to their mobile Twitter feeds. Audience members could interact with cast members via other online platforms such as chatting with Romeo via Xbox or playing against him in Call of Duty. The cast was given a script overview each day, but left to decide how to post their lines/actions/events in real time on the social network. This open interaction between the actors and the audience and between audience members exemplifies intermediality as a “force [that] operates in-between performer and audience” (Chapple and Kattenbelt 2006, 12). It brings the characters into the twenty-first century and makes them as real as any other person with a digital life. Arguably, we are all characters and actors in the intermedial digital field.39 The RSC has followed Such Tweet Sorrow’s cross-platform production with a potentially even more ambitious project for the World Shakespeare Festival 2012. Beyond the usual festival- and companyrelated materials posted on the main website, the World Shakespeare Festival 2012 site has several notable features under the “myShakespeare” tab. According to the page, “myShakespeare is a place to consider what Shakespeare means to us today. A creative space to share our thoughts and ideas, revealing how his words and characters continue to influence and reflect human life.” “myShakespeare” collects and tracks a number of Shakespearean vectors from April through November 2012: it consists of a gallery of user and commissioned ­artwork, performances, and soundscapes; blog, Twitter, and Facebook social networking connections; and “Banquo,” a dynamic data visualization stream that “show[s] global, Shakespeare-related social media by the hour, taken from Twitter, Flickr, and eBay” (RSC 2012a). These last three all have web apps that sync via the Cloud. The data visualization is named “Banquo” after the ghost in Macbeth, “to draw parallels between the way social media leaves a lasting impression of our comments, ideas, thoughts and activity that remain in cyberspace long after they initially existed” (RSC 2012a). It is a social revenant, an emblem of what the Introduction to this volume describes in its discussion of Kittler’s discourse networks as a cognitive resonance arising from intermediated forms of memory and history. Such Tweet Sorrow and “Banquo,” along with the Adelaide Road app, also raise questions about time and the flow of information in a digital

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medium. In Such Tweet Sorrow the content of the tweets and other postings was created by the actors, who decided what to post based on their script prompts, while the actual archival website was controlled by the director and design company to allow the audience to view the timeline synchronically, as things were posted live, or diachronically, in retrospect. The material can be viewed asynchronically, outside of any linear order, since various parts of the materials were posted on several social media networks. Once posted, these materials were open, and still are, to reposting and/or adaptation by anyone across these same social ­media networks. David Crystal addresses the problem of how we can conceptualize time in the production and reception of a text with the concept of the “panchronic” or “panchronicity.” Crystal argues, “Ferdinand de Saussure’s classical distinction between synchronic and diachronic does not adapt well to these kinds of [internet] communication, where everything is diachronic, time-stampable to a micro-level … But with many electronically mediated texts there is no finished product. And in many cases, time ceases to be chronological” (Crystal 2011, 8). If one inserts new material into an old blog posting or updates a Wiki page, then, according to Crystal, a chronological anomaly has been introduced into an original text. This is a new take on the grammatical notion of “future in the past” – or perhaps better, “back to the future.” … A text which contains such futurisms cannot be described as synchronic for it cannot be seen as a single état de langue: it is a conflation of language from two or more états de langue. Nor can it be described as diachronic, for the aim is not to show language change between these different états. Such texts, whose identity is dependent on features from different time-frames, I propose to call panchronic. (Crystal 2011, 9)40

The concept of the panchronic works well for describing the intermedial multi-platform, multi-time, multi-spaced text(s) exemplified by Such Tweet Sorrow. “Banquo” is also panchronic. It provides a constant stream of data from around the world in live time that is also, simultaneously, always already a record of the past(s) that are/is still present. Tweets stream by quickly, while Flickr images and eBay auction listings move more slowly across the screen. The user can select which day she wants to look at as well as whether to focus on a particular genre – say all comedies – or track a single play or two, which is a distinctive feature for anyone

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interested in the circulation of a particular work. Any item in the data stream can be moved around the screen, either when the stream is paused or in mid-stream, and clicked on to access the original posting website page, which is still active in the present time, outside of the stream. There is also a running graph along the top of the stream showing the rise and fall of the postings, which range roughly from five hundred to one thousand discrete postings each day. Tied to the panchronic is a sense of “flow,” which Stephen Downes likens to an almost organic stream of consciousness: Flow is what happens when your content and your data becomes unmanageable. Flow is what happens when all you can do is watch it as it goes by – it is too massive to store, it is too detailed to comprehend. Flow is when we cease to think of things like contents and communications and even people and environments as things and start thinking of them as (for lack of a better word) media – like the water in a river, like the electricity in our pipes, like the air in the sky. (Downes 2012)

Flow is an almost pure circulation of data. “Banquo” comes close to embodying this pure flow of data. Where it falls short is in the necessity of curation for focus and manageability through the use of algorithms to mine the websites for the appropriate Shakespearean content. Left uncurated, the digital flow of Shakespearean references, including user comments such as the textspeak from the Yoza Cellphone Stories, would create what Clifford E. Wulfman calls the “hypervariorum” – “the explicit linking of all that has been thought and said in print [writ large] about a canonical work … the ‘perpetual commentary,’ in which new knowledge depends [on] an engagement with all previous knowledge” (2009, 21–2). The hypervariorum of perpetual commentary is the ultimate dream for many Shakespearean scholars, and the “Banquo” data visualization, which is also a form of intermediation, gives a sample of its potential to allow new critical and creative connections across cultures. “Banquo” also reveals how unwieldy that flow of panchronic material is, since it demands the highest levels of reading, technological, and world literacy to make any sense of the data. For most users, in the Global North or South, mobile apps that curate the Shakespearean material into small and containable “bits” and maintain intermedial simplicity are both necessary and desirable – especially for those engaged in flipped classroom or MOOC educational curriculums. In terms of

100  Jennifer L. Ailles

Shakespearean adaptation, the unending stream of panchronic digital flows expands the concept of adaptation to include almost any cultural iteration of the digital Bard. It also challenges the very notion of adaptation because it breaks down what constitutes an original text that can be adapted. How can there be an original when digital time is panchronic and the texts are circulating in multiple variations that not only allow perpetual alterations that undermine the linear sense of before and after but also are not locatable in a discrete geospatial position? The landscape of mobile Shakespeare is currently one of unending organic flow, held in check by curated apps. As the socially networked Web 2.0 continues to morph into the semantic panchronic Web 3.0, intermediality will continue to change and alter the relations among content creators, performers, audiences, and mobile users. NOTES 1 I would like to thank Eric Hengstebeck for his thoughtful comments on various drafts of this essay. As of March 2013, 15.11% of all global website access came via an app on a handheld mobile device (StatCounter 2013). This rate is growing rapidly: it increased from 9.94% in April 2012 (StatCounter 2012) to 15.11% in less than a year. According to the International Telecommunication Union (ITU), the UN agency for information and communication technologies, there were almost 6 billion ­mobile-cellular subscriptions around the world by the end of 2011 (that’s 87% of the world’s population) and 1.2 billion active mobile-broadband subscriptions for 2G and 3G (17% of the word’s population). ITU states: “Mobile-broadband subscriptions have grown 45% annually over the last four years and today [end of 2011] there are twice as many mobile-broadband as fixed-broadband subscriptions” (2011, 2). The number of subscriptions is expected to reach seven billion by early 2014 (ITU 2013). 2 See Cook’s “Shakespeare on the Internet” (2009b) and corresponding “Selected Guide to Shakespeare on the Internet” (2009a) for an overview of websites dedicated to the Bard (www.shaksper.net). 3 See Shakespeare 4.3 (September 2008), edited by Alan Galey and Ray Siemens, College Literature 36.1 (Winter 2009), and Shakespeare Quarterly 61.3 (Fall 2010), edited by Katherine Rowe, for some recent overviews of the field. 4 According to Apple, there are “over 775, 000 apps for iPhone, iPad and iPod touch users worldwide” (Apple 2013a). In January of 2013 Apple

“Is There an App for That?”  101











announced that the 40 billionth app had been downloaded from its App Store. This number has grown at an extraordinary pace. The 25 billionth app was downloaded in early March 2012 (Apple 2012), so almost half of the total number of apps downloaded happened just in 2012 (Apple 2013a). Over 25 billion Android apps have also been downloads. Download numbers are as of September 2012 for Android (Rosenberg 2012); these are up from 11 billion in January 2012 (Crider 2012). In addition, mobile and tablet users have downloaded billions of apps for BlackBerry (McInnes 2012) and Microsoft’s Windows Phone platforms – though their markets account for only a small fraction of the mobile market, which is dominated by Apple and Android (ABI Research 2013). In total, there have been approximately 10 apps downloaded per person on the globe since Apple first launched the App Store in July 2008. Those numbers will only increase as millions of apps are downloaded daily while millions of mobile devices go online and the world becomes more connected via portable devices. 5 The Facebook App Center is “platform-agnostic,” meaning that it is not tied to a particular platform like Android or Apple’s iOS. With a user-base of around a billion, and requiring only internet access to log on, Facebook’s App Center has the potential to reach huge numbers of people as earlier game apps such as Farmville and Cow Clicker have spread across the social platform. 6 Feature phones are usually those phones without full keyboards, video screens, cameras, or the enhanced capabilities such as those found on an iPhone. Feature phones tend to have fewer apps, most of which are native apps. The difference between smartphones and feature phones is lessening as more feature phones contain web apps and photo and video capabilities. 7 In fact most apps are downloaded and forgotten. A study by Localytics (January 2010) found that over one-quarter of all apps are downloaded, tried once, and then discarded (cited on mobiThinking 2012). The disposability of apps is a result of the low or no cost price-point, the inability to sample apps before purchase and downloading, and the overabundance of poorly designed apps. 8 In May 2012 the Folger Shakespeare Library announced that they were making the texts of the Folger Shakespeare series, minus all paratextual material, free online for non-commercial usage. See press release (Folger Shakespeare Library 2012) for more information. 9 Amazon’s storefront search makes it hard to find particular editions because it will list a related Kindle edition under any title that does not have its own digital edition for sale. For example, someone wanting to purchase the Kindle edition of The Complete Works of Shakespeare edited by David

102  Jennifer L. Ailles Bevington (now in its 6th edition) is given the Project Gutenberg edition for $1.99 – a text available free online. Since the Kindle edition is presented with exactly the same product description from the back cover of the Bevington edition, a buyer would only know of the bait and switch if she clicked on the “Look Inside” preview, where the text clearly states is it a Project Gutenberg edition, or if she took the time to read some of the customer reviews, which point out that the etext is not the Bevington edition. 10 See www.shakespeareswords.com for more on David and Ben Crystal’s glossary. 11 Some apps are one-note jokes or are so limited in their function to be almost useless. For example, iKing Shakespearean leads the user through a series of questions to find out which Shakespeare King you are and also lets you know how many other “kings” there are in the world. 12 For an overview of Shakespeare festival websites, please see Ailles 2002. 13 See the Adelaide Road project website on the RSC website for more information: www.rsc.org.uk. 14 Though they are not incorporated into the Manga Shakespeare app, the ­associated website (mangashakespeare.com) and a social network (­mangashakespeare.com) provide educational support materials, manga instruction, and behind the scenes information on the creation of the series. The app would be a significant resource for students and educators if these materials and links were included. 15 There are numerous online resources for the “flipped classroom” but “The Flipped Classroom” (2011) infographic by Knewton provides a very clear overview of the teaching model. 16 CliffsNotes has guides for Hamlet, Romeo and Juliet, Macbeth, Othello, King Lear, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and Julius Caesar. 17 At its most extreme, the “freemium” model led to a 2011 class-action lawsuit against Apple for luring kids into “addictive” games that follow in-app purchase models that allow children, and others, to download a free app and start playing a game/accessing free content that then requires them to make further purchases via virtual and real currency to continue the game, buy game accessories, or access the full content. The so-called freemium games can lead to credit card charges of hundreds of dollars. See “United States District Court Northern District of California San Jose Division Case No. 5:11-CV-1758 EJD” (2012) for more on the class-action suit. 18 Shakespeare in Bits has been named “Best in eLearning” Nokia Digital Media Awards 2012, 2012 “Readers’ Choice Award” for best K-12 product from eSchool Media, and “Cool Tool Award for best Content Provider Solution” from EdTech Digest, 17 April 2012, among others.

“Is There an App for That?”  103 19 iTunes U was originally launched in 2007. 20 Barnes & Noble and Microsoft also teamed up in late spring 2012 to promote the adoption of ereaders and etextbooks in classrooms, especially at the college level. 21 See Downes 2012, a talk on the history of online learning generations. Downes ran the first MOOC in 2008, along with George Siemens, on “Connectivisim and Connective Knowledge” for the University of Manitoba’s Certificate in Adult Education. 22 Udacity is an independent educational organization that also offers MOOCs in computers and robotics. It was launched in February 2012 by three roboticists, David Stavens, Mike Sokolsky, and Sebastian Thrun, after Thrun taught an experimental MOOC at Stanford in the fall of 201l. 23 The MIT OCW site reveals how much it costs to set up their archive of course content: “Each course we publish requires an investment of $10,000 to $15,000 to compile course materials from faculty, ensure proper licensing for open sharing, and format materials for global distribution. Courses with video content cost about twice as much” (ocw.mit.edu). 24 See Kolowich 2013 and Jaschik 2013. At the time of this writing, Senate Bill 520 was introduced in the California Legislature, requiring transfer credit for MOOCs and other online courses in a bid to help increase student access to classes and relieve the overburdened state system. See Gardner and Young 2013. 25 See O’Brien 2011 and Fain 2012 for more on these developments. 26 The dropout rate is as high as 90%. This extremely high rate of attrition is attributed, so far, to the free nature of MOOCs, the lack of prerequisites, and the lack of personal interaction with faculty. There are also a high number of students, including faculty and researchers, sampling the ­classes to see what MOOCs can offer. See Rivard 2013. 27 See Manovich 2001 for more on the various technological and intermedial aspects of digital media. 28 See Young 2013 and Lennett and Kehl 2013 for more on the digital divide in the United States and its effects on online learning. 29 For an example of Occupy Shakespeare, see Barclay 2011. 30 Access to physical books in the United States is beginning to be an issue for different reasons. The move to internet buying over the past decade has led to the widespread closing of physical bookstores. While physical books can still be bought, ebooks are outpacing hardcopy sales and personal and public libraries are being culled as they are supplanted by ­digital resources. Furthermore, the cost of digital books and journals is surprisingly high – especially for libraries – and this has led to a further

104  Jennifer L. Ailles imbalance in holdings. For example, the US government sued Apple and book publishers HarperCollins, Macmillan, Penguin, and Hachette over price fixing. These companies all followed a model endorsed by the late Steve Jobs, focusing on the agency model of pricing where the publisher sets a price and the seller gets a 30% stake versus the wholesale model where the publisher sets the price for the seller and the seller then sets their own retail price. In another example, Libraries Online Incorporated (LION), “a consortium of twenty-five Connecticut public, academic, and school libraries, has imposed a moratorium on the purchase of ebooks from Random House … in response to the March 1 [2012] price hike put in place by Random House that doubled and sometimes tripled the price of ebooks for libraries” (Kelley 2012). 31 See Crystal 2008b for an in-depth study of the use of texting and Clark 2009 for more on the rise of the m-novels in Japan and potential for US markets. 32 An early US trial Twitter version of the m-novel, launched in 2008, called Quillpill, produced a number of texts. The site Textnovel, also launched in 2008 and still operating, features “ongoing serial narrations … each chapter is usually only up to 100 to 200 words in length” (Textnovel 2010). There are a number of Shakespearean adaptations on the site, including “Remembering Romeo” by Becky Hill, a serial novel in progress, and “Fleance’s Story,” a four-chapter young adult short story inspired by Macbeth from the Short Story Collection by Lady Charlotte (2009). 33 For an extensive review of indigenous literacies and the origins of the m4Lit project in South Africa, see Ana Deumert’s report (2010), in collaboration with Steve Vosloo and Marion Walton. 34 See Depraetere 2011 for a quick take on the success of Yoza and m4Lit. 35 “In South Africa English-based textspeak is commonly referred to as ‘MXit language’ (as it is used most frequently by users of the mobile instant messaging service MXit). Textspeak is not only found in English. An example of isiXhosa textspeak is given in the title of this report: klk cc > kaloku sisi (‘now my sister’)” (Deumert 2010, 21). 36 See Walton 2009 – a report prepared for the Shuttleworth Foundation. 37 “uGugu no Andile had the highest Audience Ratings of any drama on South African television for the full 6 weeks of broadcast. This was in the region of 4 million viewers (or one tenth of the population) every week” (Schlesinger, quoted in Mushakavanhu 2010. The film version won several awards, including three African Movie Academy Awards and a SAFTA, and was named Best South African Film. For more on the series and the adaptive process involved in the creation of Shakespeare in Mzansi uGugu

“Is There an App for That?”  105 no Andile, see Tinashe Mushakavanhu’s interview with the director, Minky Schlesinger (Mushakavanhu 2010), and a report by Kethiwe Ngcobo, Head of Drama, South African Broadcasting Corporation, and Minki Thulu, Content Buyer, South African Broadcasting Corporation (Ngcobo and Thulu 2009). 38 For more on the rise of smartphones and feature phones using more than SMS, see “The beginning of Africa’s long, slow transition away from SMS – new browser kids on the block making mobile Internet access easier” in Balancing Act: Telecoms, Internet and Broadcast in Africa (January 2012). 39 See the Royal Shakespeare Company and Mudlark Production Company’s Such Tweet Sorrow website www.suchtweetsorrow.com and the archived Twitter feed twitter.com/#!/Such_Tweet/such-tweet-sorrow along with Way 2011 for more on the RSC production. 40 For more on the panchronic, see Crystal 2011.

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106  Jennifer L. Ailles Manga Shakespeare. 2011. Apple App Store. Vers. 1.0. Ave!Comics Production and Self Made Hero, 5 January. Accessed 2012. MIT OpenCourseWare LectureHall. 2011. Apple App Store. Vers. 1.3. Lrynsoft + MIT OCW, 10 October. Accessed 2012. No Fear Shakespeare. 2011. Apple App Store. Vers. 1.1. SparkNotes LLC and Pinger, Inc., 3 February. Accessed 2012. Opera: Macbeth. 2009. Apple App Store. Vers. 1.2. Intermundia, 18 December. Accessed 2012. Opera: Otello. 2009. Apple App Store. Vers. 1.2. Intermundia, 18 December. Accessed 2012. Romeo+Juliet: The Shakespeare App. 2011. Apple App Store. Vers. 1.1. InteractiveReaders Inc, 24 October. Accessed 2012. Shakespeare. 2012. Apple App Store. Vers. 3.2.1. Readdle, Inc., 15 May. Accessed 2012. Shakespearean Insults. 2009. Apple App Store. Vers. 0.1. Dos Gatos Negros, LLC, 6 November. Accessed 2012. Shakespeare Convertor. 2012. Apple App Store. Vers. 1.0. RD Hare, 12 April. Accessed 2012. Shakespeare In Bits. 2012. Apple App Store. Vers. 2.0.0. Mindconnex Learing Limited, 21 March. Accessed 2012. Shakespeare in Love. 2011. Apple App Store. Vers. 1.30. US Design Dynamics Inc., 23 November. Accessed 2012. Shakespeare Made Easy. 2010. Apple App Store. Vers. 1.0. Vook, Inc., 16 July. Accessed 2012. Shakespeare Pro. 2012. Apple App Store. Vers. 1.5. Readdle Inc., 7 May. Accessed 2012. Shakespeare’s The Tempest for iPad. 2012. Apple App Store. Vers. 1.0. Luminary Digital Media LLC, 11 April. Accessed 2012. Shakes Pear – Organic Shakespeare Quotes. 2012. Apple App Store. Vers. 2.0. MEA Mobile Limited, 12 October. Accessed 2012. Sides The Winter’s Tale. 2011. Apple App Store. Vers. 1.2.655. Realtime Music Solutions, LLC, 28 October. Accessed 2012. SparkNotes. 2012. Apple App Store. Vers. 1.0. SparkNotes LLC, 28 March. Accessed 2012. Stratford Festival Guide. 2010. Apple App Store. Vers. 3.6. Metronome Inc., 21 September. Accessed 2012. Thumbnail Theater: Macbeth. 2012. Apple App Store. Vers. 1.0.1. Michael Mills Productions and 141201 Canada Inc., 27 February. Accessed 2012. William Shakespeare Inspirational Quotes. 2011. Apple App Store. Vers. 1.0. Space-O Infocom Private Limited, 9 February. Accessed 2012.

“Is There an App for That?”  107 Ye Olde Insulter. 2010. Apple App Store. Vers. 1.1. Pathfinder Strategies Pty. Limited, 13 July 2010. Accessed 2012.

WORKS CITED “820 Students to Study Shakespeare 21st Century-Style with Online Access to Shakespeare in Bits.” 2011. eSchool News: Technology News for Today’s K-20 Educator, 9 November. www.eschoolnews.com. Accessed 2012. ABI Research. 2013. “Android Will Account for 58% of Smartphone App Downloads in 2013 with iOS Commanding a Market Share of 75% in Tablet Apps.” Press Release. ABI Research. 4 March. www.abiresearch.com. Accessed 2013. Ailles, Jennifer L. 2002. “Adapting the Bard: A Virtual Guide.” CTR: Canadian Theatre Review 111 (Summer): 28–32. Apple. 2012. “Apple’s App Store Downloads Top 25 Billion.” Press Release. Apple, 5 March. www.apple.com. Accessed 2012. – 2013a. “App Store Tops 40 Billion Downloads with Almost Half in 2012.” Press Release. Apple, 7 January. www.apple.com. Accessed 2013. – 2013b. “iTunes U Content Tops One Billion Downloads.” Press Release. Apple, 28 February. www.apple.com. Accessed 2013. Barclay, Bill. 2011. “Best of Occupy Boston.” Shakespeare Aloud, 5 November. www.shakespearealoud.com. Accessed 2012. “The Beginning of Africa’s Long, Slow Transition Away from SMS – New Browser Kids on the Block Making Mobile Internet Access Easier.” 2012. Balancing Act: Telecoms, Internet and Broadcast in Africa 589 (January). www .balancingact-africa.com. Accessed 2012. Busse, Klaus-Peter. 2005. “Intermedia: The Aesthetic Experience of Cultural Interspaces.” Trans. Walter Grünzweig. In Intermedia: Enacting the Liminal, ed. Hans Breder and Klaus-Peter Busse, 262–70. Dortmund: Schriften zur Kunst. Chapple, Freda, and Chiel Kattenbelt. 2006. “Key Issues in Intermediality in Theatre and Performance.” In Intermediality in Theatre and Performance, ed. Freda Chapple and Chiel Kattenbelt, 11–25. New York: Editions Rodopi B.V. Clark, Ruth Cox. 2009. “Cell Phone Novels: 140 Characters at a Time.” Young Adult Library Services 7.2: 29–31. AdLit.org. Accessed 2012. College Literature. 2009. 36.1 (Winter). EBSCO. Accessed 2012. Cook, Hardy M. 2009a. “A Selected Guide to Shakespeare on the Internet.” SHAKSPER: The Global Electronic Shakespeare Conference. www.shaksper.net. Accessed 2012.

108  Jennifer L. Ailles – 2009b. “Shakespeare on the Internet.” SHAKSPER: The Global Electronic Shakespeare Conference. www.shaksper.net. Accessed 2012. Coursera. 2012. www.coursera.org. Crider, Michael. 2012. “Google’s Fourth Quarter: 250 Million Android Devices, 11 Billion App Downloads.” Android Community, 19 January. www.androidcommunity.com. Accessed 2012. Crystal, David. 2008a. “2b or Not 2b?” Guardian, 4 July. www.guardian.co.uk. Accessed 2012. – 2008b. Txting: The gr8 db8. Oxford: Oxford University Press. – 2011. “‘O Brave New World, That Has Such Corpora in It’: New Trends and Traditions on the Internet.” Plenary paper. ICAME 32: Trends and Traditions in English Corpus Linguistics. Oslo, 1 June. 1–17. www.davidcrystal.com. Accessed 2012. Crystal, David, and Ben Crystal. 2004 [2002]. Shakespeare’s Words: A Glossary and Language Companion. London: Penguin. – 2008. Shakespeare’s Words. www.shakespeareswords.com. Accessed 2012. Del Col, Anthony, and Conor McCreery. Illus. Andy Belanger. 2010–11. Kill Shakespeare, 1–12. San Diego: IDW. Depraetere, Heidi. 2011. “African Teenagers Excited about Reading Shakespeare on Their Mobile Phone.” Educational Technology VUB, 30 December. www.educational-technology-VUB.blogspot.ca. Accessed 2012. Deumert, Ana. 2010. “Klk cc … Supporting Indigenous Literacies in the Digital Space.” Report. Yoza Project, 1–23. March. yozaproject.com. Accessed 2012. Dornford-May, Mark. 2011. “Romeo + Khunjulwa.” Tyger Valley: Van Schaik. Yoza Cellphone Stories. www.yoza.mobi. Accessed 2012. Downes, Stephen. 2012. “E-Learning Generations.” Half an Hour, 11 February. halfanhour.blogspot.com. Accessed 2012. edX. 2012. www.edx.org. Evans, M.D.R., Jonathan Kelley, Joanna Sikora, and Donald J. Treiman. 2010. “Family Scholarly Culture and Educational Success: Books and Schooling in 27 Nations.” Research in Social Stratification and Mobility. 28.2 (June): 171–97. Fain, Paul. 2012. “College Credit without College.” Inside Higher Ed, 7 May. www.insidehighered.com. Accessed 2012. Fischlin, Daniel. 2004. Canadian Adaptations of Shakespeare Project. www .canadianshakespeares.ca. Accessed 2012. – 2007. Interactive Folio: Romeo and Juliet. Canadian Adaptations of Shakespeare Project. www.canadianshakespeares.ca. Accessed 2012. “The Flipped Classroom.” 2011. Infographic. Knewton. www.knewton.com. Accessed 2012.

“Is There an App for That?”  109 Folger Shakespeare Library. 2012. “Folger Making Shakespeare Editions Text Available Free for Non-Commercial Use.” Press Release. Folger Shakespeare Library, 17 May. www.folger.edu. Accesssed 2012. Friedman, Ken. 2002. “Intermedia.” In Encyclopedia of New Media, ed. Steve Jones, 246–8. Thousand Oaks: Sage. Gahran, Amy. 2012. “E-books Spur Reading among Americans, Survey Shows.” CNN Tech, 5 April. www.cnn.com. Accessed 2012. Galey, Alan, and Ray Siemens, eds. 2008. Shakespeare 4.3 (September). EBSCO. Accessed 2012. Gardner, Lee, and Jeffrey R. Young. 2013. “California’s Move toward MOOCs Sends Shock Waves, but Key Questions Remain Unanswered.” Chronicle of Higher Education, 14 March. www.chronicle.com. Accessed 2013. Goldman, David. 2012. “The Spectrum Crunch. Sorry, America: Your Wireless Airwaves Are Full.” CNNMoney, 21 February. money.cnn.com. Accessed 2012. Hill, Becky. 2011. “Remembering Romeo.” Textnovel. www.textnovel.com. Accessed 2012. ITU (International Telecommunication Union). 2011. “The World in 2011: ICT Facts and Figures.” In ITU: United Nations Agency for Information and Communication Technologies, 1–8. Geneva. www.itu.int/ict. Accessed 2012. – 2013. “ITU Releases Latest Global Technology Development Figures.” Press Release. ITU: United Nations Agency for Information and Communication Technologies, 27 February. www.itu.int. Accessed 2013. Jaschik, Scott. 2013. “MOOCs for Credit.” Inside Higher Ed, 23 January. www .insidehighered.com. Accessed 2013. Kelley, Michael. 2012. “Consortium of 25 Libraries in Connecticut Votes to Boycott Random House.” The Digital Shift: On Libraries and New Media, 5 April. www.thedigitalshift.com. Accessed 2012. Kolowich, Steve. 2012. “The MITx Factor.” Inside Higher Ed, 6 April. www .insidehighered.com. Accessed 2012. – 2013. “American Council on Education Recommends 5 MOOCs for Credit.” Chronicle of Higher Education, 7 February. www.chronicle.com. Accessed 2013. Lady Charlotte. 2009. “Fleance’s Story.” Short Story Collection. Textnovel. www.textnovel.com. Accessed 2012. Lanir, Lesley. 2011. “Shakespeare’s Words Database Powers iPhone App.” Digital Journal, 22 December. http://digitaljournal.com. Accessed 2012. Lennett, Benjamin, and Danielle Kehl. 2013. “Data Caps Could Dim Online Learning’s Bright Future.” Chronicle of Higher Education, 4 March. www .chronicle.com. Accessed 2013.

110  Jennifer L. Ailles Manovich, Lev. 2001. The Language of New Media. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. McInnes, Kyle. 2012. “RIM and Partners Announce Amazing Stats around BlackBerry Apps, Growth and the Platform #MWC12.” BlackBerryCool, 29 February. www.blackberrycool.com. Accessed 2012. Michael Mills Productions. 1995–2011. Thumbnail Theatre: Macbeth. Thumbnail. Michael Mills Productions. www.thumbnailanimation.com. Accessed 2012. MindConnex. 2012. “Shakespeare In Bits Wins ‘Cool Tool’ Award for Content Provider Solution from EdTech Digest.” MindConnex: Learning Made Easy, 17 April. www.mindconnex.com. Accessed 2012. MIT OpenCourseWare (OCW). 2012. www.ocw.mit.edu. MITx. 2012. www.mitx.org. mobiThinking. 2012. “Global Mobile Statistics 2012: All Quality Mobile Marketing Research, Mobile Web Stats, Subscribers, Ad Revenue, Usage, Trends …” February. mobithinking.com. Accessed 2012. Mushakavanhu, Tinashe. 2010. “Shakespeare in Mzansi: A South African Perspective: The SLQ Interview with Minky Schlesinger.” Sentinel Literary Quarterly 4.1 (October–December). www.sentinelpoetry.org.uk. Accessed 2012. MXit. 2012. get/mxit.com. Ngcobo, Kethiwe, and Minki Thulu. 2009. “The South African Experience in Increasing Local Content Production.” South Africa: South African Broadcasting Corporation, 1–40. O’Brien, Anne. 2011. “Student Awards: Digital Badges Make a Debut.” Edutopia, 9 September. www.edutopia.org. Accessed 2012. Parry, Marc. 2012. “‘Free-Range Learners’: Study Opens Window into How Students Hunt for Educational Content Online.” Chronicle of Higher Education, 25 April. www.chronicle.com. Accessed 2012. Rivard, Ry. 2013. “Measuring the MOOC Dropout Rate.” Inside Higher Ed, 8 March. www.insidehighered.com. Accessed 2013. Rosenberg, Jamie. 2012. “Google Play Hits 25 Billion Downloads.” Android Official Blog, 26 September. www.officialandroid.blogspot.com. Accessed 2013. Rowe, Katherine, ed. 2010. Shakespeare Quarterly 61.3 (Fall). Project Muse. Accessed 2012. RSC (Royal Shakespeare Company). 2011. “Wiki Shakespeare – Teaching Shakespeare around the World.” World Shakespeare Festival 2012, 14 December. www.worldshakespearefestival.org.uk. Accessed 2012. – 2012a. “myShakespeare.” World Shakespeare Festival 2012. www .worldshakespearefestival.org.uk. Accessed 2012. – 2012b. World Shakespeare Festival 2012. www.worldshakespearefestival.org.uk.

“Is There an App for That?”  111 RSC, Aoife Mannix, and Ola Animashawun. 2011. Adelaide Road. Royal Shakespeare Company. www.rsc.org.uk. Accessed 2012. RSC and Mudlark Production Company. 2010a. Such Tweet Sorrow, 10 April–14 May. www.suchtweetsorrow.com. Accessed 2012. – 2010b. Such Tweet Sorrow. Twitter. twitter.com/Such_Tweet/lists/suchtweet-sorrow. Accessed 2012. Schlesinger, Minky, dir. 2008. Shakespeare in Mzansi uGugu no Andile/Gugu & Andile. South Africa. South African Broadcasting Corporation (SABC/ SABC1)/Luna Films. Self Made Hero. 2009. Manga Shakespeare. www.mangashakespeare.com. Accessed 2012. – 2012. Manga Shakespeare. Social Network. www.mangashakespeare.com. Accessed 2012. Shakespeare, William. 1994. The Complete Works of Shakespeare. Project Gutenberg. www.gutenberg.org. Accessed 2012. – 2008. The Complete Works of Shakespeare. Ed. David Bevington. 6th ed. New York: Longman. “Shakespeare Insult Kit.” 1996. Shakespearean Insulter. www.pangloss.com. Accessed 2012. StatCounter. 2012. “Mobile vs Desktop from December 2008 to April 2012.” StatCounter Global Stats, 1 April. http://gs.statcounter.com. Accessed 2012. – 2013. “Mobile vs Desktop from December 2008 to March 2013.” StatCounter Global Stats, 1 March. http://gs.statcounter.com. Accessed 2013. Textnovel. 2010. www.textnovel.com. Udacity. 2012. www.udacity.com. “United States District Court Northern District of California San Jose Division Case No. 5:11-CV-1758 EJD.” 2012. Scribd, 31 March. www.scribd.com. Accessed 2012. Vosloo, Steve. 2010. “Book-Poor, but Mobile Phone-Rich? Look to M-Novels.” Educational Technology Debate: Expoloring ICT and Learning in Developing Countries, 26 August. edutechdebate.org. Accessed 2012. Walton, Marion. 2009. “Mobile Literacies & South African Teens: Leisure Reading, Writing, and MXit Chatting for Teens in Langa and Guguletu.” Report. Shuttleworth Foundation, December. 1–108. yozaproject.com. Accessed 2012. Way, Geoffrey. 2011. “Social Shakespeare: Romeo and Juliet, Social Media, and Performance.” JNT: Journal of Narrative Theory 41.3 (Fall): 401–20. Project Muse. Accessed 2012. Wulfman, Clifford E. 2009. “The Perseus Garner: Early Modern Resources in the Digital Age.” College Literature 36.1 (Winter): 18–25. EBSCO. Accessed 2012.

112  Jennifer L. Ailles Young, Jeffrey R. 2013. “‘Bandwidth Divide’ Could Bar Some People from Online Learning.” Chronicle of Higher Education, 4 March. www.chronicle .com. Accessed 2013. Yoza Cellphone Stories. 2010a. www.yoza.mobi. – 2010b. “User Comments for King Lear.” Yoza Cellphone Stories. www.yoza .mobi. Accessed 2012. – 2010c. “User Comments for Romeo and Juliet.” Yoza Cellphone Stories. www .yoza.mobi. Accessed 2012. Yoza Project. 2010. “Launch of Yoza m-Novel Library.” Press Release. Yoza Project: Behind the Scenes of an m-Novel Project in South Africa, 23 August. yozaproject.com. Accessed 2012. – 2010–12. Behind the Scenes of an m-Novel Project in South Africa. yozaproject .com.

PART TWO “These Violent Delights Have Violent Ends”: Shakespearean Adaptation and Film Intermedia

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Melted into Media: Reading Julie Taymor’s Film Adaptation of The Tempest in the Wake of 9/11 and the War on Terror D o n Moor e

The television, … films, a whole certain literature shows a force of the state that doesn’t exist. The only thing on which the state rests is illusion, the presumed absence of resistance, and passiveness. – Antonio Negri, Negri on Negri

Julie Taymor’s filmic adaptation of Shakespeare’s The Tempest (2010) may give filmgoers with memories of the terrorist attacks in New York City on September 11, 2001 an eerie déjà-vu. For example, unlike Shakespeare’s play, Taymor’s film doesn’t start in the midst of a raging tempest. Instead, much like Manhattan on the morning of the “9/11” terrorist attacks, Taymor’s film starts out forebodingly calm. In the background are the sea and a blue skyline. In the foreground is a dark sand tower balancing in the palm of Miranda’s hand. The silence finally breaks with a tense, slow crescendo of high-pitched violins and one or two ominous thunderclaps. Suddenly, we hear a deafening “crack!” of thunder as the tempest explodes on to the screen. Similar to watching first one plane, then a second hit the World Trade Center, the tempest erupts like a catastrophic, yet undoubtedly calculated, event, throwing the peaceful scene into confusion and chaos. Sudden gusts of rain melt the sand tower, causing it to implode, much as the World Trade Center towers did on September 11, 2001. Like a rescue worker jolted into action by an alarm, Miranda reacts to the sudden violence of the storm by racing up the hill towards her mother, Prospera. The sorceress is perched on a precipice overlooking the sea, arms and wand outstretched like an angry statue (of liberty?). A series of jump-cuts then alternates back and forth between Miranda’s

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rescue mission and shots of the terrifying carnage Prospera rains down on the ship caught directly in the eye of her perfect storm. The passengers on the ship are trapped, terrified, and helpless. Struggling, seemingly in vain, to survive, at least three passengers hurtle over the side of the vessel into the sea. This image of passengers jumping to their apparent deaths is unmistakably reminiscent of the infamous 9/11 falling man suicide photo. Another post-9/11 motif unfolds on the ship when Antonio, trapped in the ship’s burning quarterdeck, holds a flaming cross and curses at devils who he says are “flying about.” All at once, a giant wave crashes in through the windows of the quarterdeck, causing a fiery explosion. Antonio is flung across the room, which is now engulfed in flames. This is a “post-9/11” image, in that it is reminiscent of how two planes didn’t just smash in through the windows of the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001 but also incinerated inside the building like jet-­­fuelladen bombs. Such post-9/11 images, however, can only be represented in fictional recreations like this one from Taymor’s Tempest or Frédéric Beigbeder’s novel Windows on the World (2003). In regard to the production of a discourse of “9/11,” therefore, these fictional accounts become intermedial sources for interpreting “real world” events, at least in the mass media archive struggling to make sense of the unthinkable. Nearing the end of the opening scene from The Tempest, we jump cut once more to a full-screen shot of the screaming face of Prospera, the perpetrator of the tempest attack. Her outfit is like a giant bird costume made of shimmering blue feathers. She holds her magic staff out in front of her with both hands as she screams, as if riding a hang glider on a terrorist suicide mission against the helpless ship. The close-up of Helen Mirren’s face depicts all the rage, fear, and insane murderous determination that are staple Hollywood stereotypes of mad geniuses, suicide bombers, and terrorists. This scene and others in Julie Taymor’s Tempest contain what I provisionally call generic elements of “post-9/11 Global Cinema.” By this, I don’t mean to suggest that Taymor intentionally constructed her film to be an allegory about the attacks on the United States on September 11, 2001 – attacks widely referred to as, though not definitively reducible to, that dubiously iconic name/date 9/11. Nor do I mean to suggest that the film is really all about post-9/11 empire-building or the global war on terror. What I do propose, however, is that, particularly for Western audiences living at this point in history, Taymor’s film possesses a post9/11 melted mediality. In other words, Taymor’s Tempest’s intermedial

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(meaning cross-generic and/or mixed media) evocations of key discourses, images, and generic motifs related to 9/11 are melted into the film’s adaptation of Shakespeare’s play. This post-9/11 melted mediality situates Taymor’s film simultaneously within a number of post9/11-related discourses. These include the “hyperreal” contexts of ­contemporary globalization/empire, global media spectacle, and the “black arts” of the war on terror, as well as The Tempest’s more traditional early modern contexts. The film exemplifies some of the ways in which seemingly “older” postcolonial questions and theories have become urgently current in the wake of the September 11, 2001 attacks on the US and the so-called war on terror launched in retaliation. To give an example: From the perspective of a North American audience viewing the film at the time of its release, certain key aspects of Taymor’s Tempest are identifiable as post-9/11 generic elements. These elements include the film’s explicit colonialist allegory with its evocation of cultural clashes; the extra-­geographical, perhaps even “simulacral,” indeterminacy of its mystical island setting as the scene for encountering difference; Prospera’s magical powers to deceive, to produce often terrorizing (even terrorist) spectacles, and to alter “reality”; and distinctive images that echo post-9/11 realities such as an imploding tower and terrorist attacks from the air – among other unmistakably post-9/11 motifs evident in the film. These very elements are also intermedial, spectral remainders/reminders of issues long associated with the production, adaptation, and criticism of The Tempest. So how do we read these aspects of the film? Undoubtedly, the answer will vary with different audiences and contexts. While such elements are identifiable at the time of the film’s release in 2010 as “post-9/11,” they are not reducible to, or even universally recognizable as, generic elements of post-9/11 global cinema. In fact, they evoke a number of different historical, political, and colonialist contexts from the early modern period to the present, all of which intermedially melt together within the film’s post-9/11 contexts. A defining element of 9/11, however, is the massive intermedial (re)production of discourses that surround and in fact comprise that event. This is a discursive production and remediation that evokes the rhetoric of colonial and imperial intervention in ways analogous to The Tempest. Indeed, as Antonio Negri suggests in the epigraph to this essay, contemporary hegemonic power structures depend upon such intermedially circulated discourses and cultural narratives for maintaining the illusion of their

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“naturalness,” their centrality, contrasted with the seeming powerlessness of the dominated. Reading the events and ongoing effects of September 11, 2001/“9/11” through Taymor’s Tempest instructively shows how contemporary mass media illusions and globally networked political spectacles are not new ideological strategies for interpellating docile, willing subjects, but merely the latest versions of long-practised weapons of hegemonic power. A Shakespearean lesson intermedially transmitted via Taymor’s post-9/11 adaptation of The Tempest, then, is that recognition of the dreamlike qualities of hegemonic power in whatever spectral form they may take can also reveal possible avenues of resistance to power. 9/11 as Intermedial Phenomenon After Prospera’s destruction of King Alonso’s ship in a fiery explosion, she repairs to a secret underground cave with angular staircases and an odd postmodern design. From the top point of the cave flows a rock slope that resembles water or lava. At the end of the slope is a small semicircular pool that acts as a kind of portal through which Prospera communicates with and calls forth Ariel, her spirit slave. Ariel recounts to his mistress in detail how he orchestrated the tempest and launched it against Alonso’s ship to maximum terrifying effect. Then, at a different location on the coast of the enchanted island, we then see the King and three other members of his train magically rise unharmed from the ocean, their clothes dry and spotless. The water in this scene is not only a symbol of redemption and renewal, but also a symbol of illusion and intermedial spectacle in the film. The strange postmodern cave pool resonates with Plato’s allegory of the cave with its shadowy reflections of reality, which the prison-dwellers are forced to watch. Water is thus a kind of tele-technological medium for both creating and witnessing the terrorist spectacle of the attack on the ship. But it also functions to “premediate,” or prepare the filmgoer for the worst by acting as a medium (like Taymor’s post-9/11 film?) for delivering the victims of the tempest unharmed to shore in order to work through their problems and redeem themselves by the film’s end. Intermediality is related to the concept of remediation. Jay Bolter and Richard Grusin, in their book Remediation: Understanding New Media, define remediation as having to do with “the particular ways in which [different forms of “new media”] refashion older media and the ways in which older media refashion themselves to answer the

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challenges of new media” (Bolter and Grusin 1999, 15). Put differently, Bolter and Grusin’s concept of remediation concerns the ways in which a “melting together” of otherwise diverse forms of media creates new, or more accurately, reconfigured generic effects and forms. As such, questions related to remediation cannot be separated from intermediality. This relationship between the remediated and the intermediated has to do with the ways in which remediation (and thus, by extension, intermediality) can be understood to operate within a semiotic logic of supplementarity. Remediation involves the supplemental referencing or reintroduction of one media form within another, which always already points beyond the structural limits of either form. This supplemental structure of remediation results in the disruption and/or reconfiguration of both in relation to each other, and likewise refuses any definitive relationship of copy to “origin”/mediation to “source.” In McLuhanesque terms one might say that inasmuch as media are structured like a linguistic sign system based on supplementarity (referential signification) with no access to origins, the medium both structures and is implicated by the message, which is always already a medium. Instead of referentiality, this interaction creates what I call melted intermediality. An example of this type of intermedial interaction is Taymor’s Tempest’s remediation of the colonized figure of Caliban within the post9/11 inflected, simulacral realm of the film. The signifier “Shakespeare” has often been deployed in colonialist contexts to signify “the ultimate guarantor of greatness and aesthetic value” and as a sign of imperial culture (Fischlin and Fortier 2000, 11). By exploiting Caliban, a reference to early modern colonialism, in a film that evokes a contemporary, post-9/11 historical context, Taymor’s Tempest does two things at once. First, it throws into question the “post” in postcolonialist views that imply colonialism is over with. At the same time, it also opens up the possibility that the early modern European colonialist enterprise Caliban symbolically represents is still ongoing in a remediated form. In fact, cultural colonialism in the form of media spectacle is arguably part and parcel of the current discursive productions of 9/11 and the war on terror – a media spectacle that, for better or worse, includes Taymor’s Tempest. Sonia Baelo-Allué describes 9/11 as a “cultural trauma and an intermedial phenomenon” (Baelo-Allué 2011, 184). The implications of this provocative description are at least threefold. Most obvious is how the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 against the US are the most

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filmed and photographed disaster in history. A second implication is that “9/11” is a predominantly media-centric event in regard to its production of such immediate global impacts and massive, ongoing geopolitical effects. Perhaps the most provocative aspect of Baelo-Allué’s description, however, is its reference to the ways in which even eyewitness and journalistic accounts of 9/11, struggling to comprehend and remediate an overwhelmingly wide range of intermedial accounts of the event, have often done so by drawing upon “the conventions of fiction (plot, point of view, interior monologue, etc.)” (184–5). Reading Julie Taymor’s adaptation of The Tempest as an intermedial post-9/11 allegory is thus a particularly post-9/11 approach to working through the tangled, traumatic web of discourses surrounding September 11, 2001 and the war on terror. Richard Grusin’s more recent book Premediation: Affect and Mediality after 9/11 (2010) goes even further, suggesting that the cultural trauma experienced as a result of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 in the US can be understood as a kind of poverty in the ability of existing media structures at the time to premediate that disaster. Grusin’s concept of premediation evokes the Bush administration’s military policy of “pre-emptive strikes.” Premediation, however, focuses on media pre-emption strategies designed to ameliorate the cultural shock for American audiences by having already prepared and proliferated an adequate and ready media archive of images and storylines through which to comprehend and “spin” cataclysmic events such as 9/11. In Taymor’s Tempest, for example, the premedial effect is to work through and resolve political strife, which is seen as the root historical cause of the terrorist violence in the film. Prospera’s “unofficial or unauthorized use of violence and intimidation in the pursuit of political aims” is the dictionary definition of terrorism (OED). Perhaps more importantly, the spectacular and hypermediated aspects of those acts satisfy the Hollywood stereotype of a terrorist attack, even if Prospera doesn’t necessarily fit Hollywood’s racial or political stereotypes of “terrorist.” The allegorical references to post-9/11 terrorist violence thus intermedially connect contemporary world events to the political strife in the film, giving the filmgoer a sense of hope and relief when a happy ending is finally produced. On the other hand, the film’s images of terrorist violence and destruction also premediate the filmgoer’s sensibilities, by proleptically preparing and thus lessening the “shock and awe” of possible real world terrorist events.

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A similar post-9/11 premediatory narrative runs through John Hillcoat’s post-apocalyptic film The Road (2009). Based on Cormac McCarthy’s novel of the same name, the film offers us a glimpse into how humanity might cope after an unspecified apocalyptic event, which wipes out most human and animal life. There are similar coldwar narratives of nuclear holocaust survivors, but the uncertainty of the cause of the disaster in The Road is particularly post-9/11 in that it draws on the terror of an unforeseeable and unexpected catastrophic event. The film, like Taymor’s Tempest, is also rife with religious symbolism and moments in which humans reconnect with each other and the preciousness of human life in the face of humanity’s destruction. The Road’s post-9/11 premedial gesture, however, is more of a dire warning than The Tempest’s resolution of conflict and restoration of “freedom” to all by the end of the film. Nonetheless, this “resolution” seems complexly jaded, particularly in the contexts of a postcolonial reading of The Tempest. Grusin argues that, in the US, the dominant strategy related to premediation since September 11, 2001 and in particular leading up to the Iraq war is the perpetuation of “an almost constant, low level of fear or anxiety about another terrorist attack” (Grusin 2010, 2). This type of premediation strategy allows hegemonic global power more easily to control and manage messages and information being transmitted via global mass media and communications networks, and thus more effectively anticipate the shock and awe of events like 9/11. Premediation can also limit the possibility that such events be read subversively as blowback, as for example happened with the revelation in the mass media of disastrous consequences resulting from the US government’s previously unpublicized covert actions and/or secret foreign policy decisions in the war against terror. A case in point: Osama Bin Laden’s Al Qaeda forces, widely acknowledged to be the perpetrators of the 9/11 attacks, were armed and trained by the US government several decades earlier when they were viewed as allies against Russian expansionism in Afghanistan. What’s more, the US has a long history of both economic and militaristic adventurism in the Middle East, as well as close ties with Israel, a country viewed by many as a perpetrator of state terrorism against Palestinian Arabs.1 Nonetheless, the Bush administration was at a loss to answer the inanely simplistic question raised in the popular US media immediately after the 9/11 attacks: “Why do they hate us?” David Simpson

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connects many of these incendiary dots and more in his book 9/11: The Culture of Memorialization, pointing out that not only are the events of Abu Ghraib the events of American prisons, but bin Laden wealth is/was deeply implicated in the U.S. economy, Osama himself was a former ally in the war against the USSR in Afghanistan, Saddam himself was an ally whom America supported in his war against Iran (and who in 1988 gassed some of his own citizens, the Kurds – one of the crimes produced against him in 2003 – with weapons financed by American support). Every imagining of the other is an encounter with the self: they are us. (2006, 135–6)

Simpson makes the intriguing point here that given this tangled web of historical alliances, geo-politico-economic intrigue, and disastrous foreign policy decisions, the US government’s war on terror, in a certain way, is a war against itself. This is why the intermedial campaign of mass deception is such a key aspect of this war, in order to clarify, mediate, and manage its many contradictions and hidden realities. Taymor’s film undoubtedly draws upon and contributes to the cultural archive of images and storylines that comprises the popular discourse associated with 9/11. Imploding towers, fiery attacks from the air, and helpless victims jumping from burning structures are only the most recognizably post-9/11 images among many more subtle and/or allegorical post-9/11 motifs in the film. The film constructs these images, however, by recontextualizing them (and perhaps, in the mode of premediation, the discursive production of similar “future” 9/11s) in relation to Shakespeare’s early modern contexts. Indeed, Grusin’s logic of premediation reminds us that the “future” is always already conceptualized in the past. That is why so many have noted that part of the symbolic importance of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 entailed targeting the very logical coherence of “globalization.” The attacks disrupted a key hegemonic conceptual apparatus through which we were supposed to be able to filter and comprehend an event like “9/11,” thus resulting in what Walter Benjamin once called a cultural “shock.” Taymor’s Tempest also disrupts hegemonic discourses via its intermedial references, by making productive connections between the politics of early modern colonialism and the supposedly “world changing” events of September 11, 2001. In this way, Taymor’s Tempest illuminates some of the hidden histories and ongoing cultural traumas to which 9/11 is connected. Hence, Taymor’s film is not unlike a range of

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similar “post-9/11 films” that both mediate and intermediate the discursive aspects of 9/11. Post-9/11 Global Cinema What do I mean by calling Taymor’s Tempest a “post-9/11 film”? My understanding of “post-9/11 global cinema” is necessarily conflicted. On the one hand, there is an impulse prevalent in many such films to represent 9/11 as a kind of moral or even theological justification in itself for violently defending the values, ideologies, and discourses long associated with Western globalization. An example of this more dogmatic world view is on display, for instance, in the political speeches of former President George W. Bush. In those public performances, he often characterized “the terrorists” as being a kind of pure evil that must be rooted out, at all costs and by all means necessary, in order to protect freedom, troped as “good” and even as “God’s gift to the world.” The theocratic interpretation of 9/11, of which Bush’s rhetoric is an example par excellence, is that 9/11 represents a definitive historical break, usurping “Auschwitz” as the new moral benchmark of “the ultimate evil” against which our most significant “moral” legislations and guidelines are measured. These legislations include the four treaties and three ­protocols collectively known as the Geneva Conventions, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and international genocide legislation like the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (CPPCG), which came into effect in 1951 as the result of efforts made by the United Nations General Assembly. A strong indication that such an ethical shift may have occurred (at least for some) is evidenced by the fact that the first two and possibly even the third aforementioned human rights protections, which were largely inaugurated as a result of the experiences of the Holocaust/Shoah, were suspended and/or contravened in conjunction with the war on terror and the exercise of various extra-legal measures taken by the US government. This was the case at prisons such as Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo Bay and with the Israeli government against Palestinians, among other examples globally.2 These suspensions and/or contraventions were all done in the name of the exceptionalist moral authority arising from the singularity of “9/11.” Such a contemporary post-9/11 ethico-political shift is evoked in Taymor’s Tempest by the plight of Caliban, the former ruler-to-be of the island kingdom. Prospera’s colonialist occupation not only deprives

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Caliban of his throne but also restricts his movements in a manner reminiscent of Israel’s system of control over Palestinians, which renowned international human rights law expert Dr Francis Boyle likens to the now defunct South African apartheid system (Boyle 2008, 28–9) and characterizes as an act of genocide (Boyle 2012). In Caliban’s case, the situation also resembles that of a forced labour camp. The physical abuse and colonialist subjugation of Caliban – abuses that would now be considered violations of international human rights law but may also allegorically allude to the genocidal reality of early modern colonialist subjugation – are justified by Prospera as necessary measures to protect the security of both herself and her daughter from a creature whom she doesn’t even consider “human.” Prospera’s excuse resembles not only the US government’s justification after the terrorist attacks of 9/11 for its illegal military actions, torture of prisoners, and rolling back the human rights of its own citizens under the Patriot Act in the name of national “security,” but also Israel’s use of the post-9/11 rhetoric of war on terror for justifying its ongoing state terrorist campaign against Palestinians. Since September 11, 2001, a number of different governments and groups around the world have invoked the mystical moral authority of “9/11” for justifying various policies and actions, including questionable interpretations, revisions, and even rescissions of basic human rights protections. The effects are dramatic and globally wide-reaching in their political, legal, and cultural ramifications. One such effect is in relation to the post–Second World War orientation of the “ethical limit” associated with the Holocaust/Shoah. That conflict, it is important to remember, had its own particular historical, religious, industrial, and geopolitical specificities. Nonetheless, the conventions and human rights codes founded in the name of Auschwitz were directed beyond those specific events towards more “universal” application with important, yet often limited successes.3 By contrast, the geopolitical, religious, and even geographical contexts of “9/11” are different from those associated with the Holocaust/ Shoah. We now live, for instance, in what is often described as a globalized, post-industrial, thoroughly networked, and differently, yet nonetheless still racially and ethnically, polarized historical context. Indeed, not only were the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 directed against global capitalism, those particular attacks could not have occurred without the teletechnologies and intermediated network structures of globalization. Yet the overshadowing in popular discourse of the idea

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of the Holocaust/Shoah as a grounding ethical symbol by a war against “terror” (inferring a war against the worst conceivable contemporary form of human “evil”) as the new contemporary moral limit term is risky on at least three counts. The first is the perpetuation of a disastrous historical amnesia in regard to the lessons of the Holocaust/ Shoah; the second is that of opening the door to reductive reinvocations of a universalizing ethical rhetoric that polarizes and excludes; and the third is that such a rhetorical shift risks the unjust association of longstanding Orientalist stereotypes of Arab-Muslim terrorists with reductive notions of “ultimate evil” in the form of an impossibly abstract and recklessly reactionary concept of generalized “terror” embodied in a demonic other. Taymor’s Tempest reflects such a historical shift in how we negotiate our post-9/11 global ethical climate in a few subtle ways, one of which is the film’s setting. It is historically early modern, yet nonetheless contains many postmodern aesthetic, architectural, and intermedial qualities evoking a contemporary post-9/11 context that informs how the action and politics of the film can be interpreted. Another is clothing style and architecture. One of the best examples of the clash between the early modern and postmodern in the film is the scene in which Caliban, Trinculo, and Stephano are foiled in their attempt to assassinate Prospera. In a previous scene, they stumble on a cache of Prospera’s and Miranda’s clothing, some of which they are now wearing. The clothes are early modern in style, but the wearing of these clothes transgresses class, gender, and even standards of aesthetic taste, making a mockery of their vain attempt to rise above their “proper” social status and usurp power from Prospera. The carnivalesque impropriety of Trinculo’s and Stephano’s clothing, however, is never really commented on in the film, perhaps because Taymor’s Tempest’s audience possess more “postmodern,” ironic sensibilities with regard to fashion and sexual propriety. What’s more, Prospera leads them into her cave-bunker with its markedly postmodern architecture. This includes the already mentioned magical crystal ball-like pool, two long angular staircases, and sharply angled walls that defy functional logic and seem to turn the world topsy-turvy for the occupants. As such, we recognize the early modern Shakespearean elements of this scene, but the postmodern details remind us that we are rereading the events in a more contemporary context. Another symbolic reflection of a contemporary ethical shift is the “violence” in the film, which largely derives from illusion and spectacle. In

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other words, it is “hyperreal” violence, as opposed to “real” in any early modern or even modernist sense. Even so, this violence has real and often devastating effects for the characters in the film. Prospera’s attack on her countrymen’s ship, for example, is more spectacle and illusion than “real,” and yet the attack has real and devastating effects. What’s more, most of the violence in the film can be read as terrorist violence, given the fact that Prospera – perpetrator of most violent acts in the film – is technically “stateless,” and thus never really (legally) at war with anyone. Further, even if we accept the legitimacy of her own self-proclaimed rule over the island kingdom, her acts of torture against Caliban would constitute a form of state terrorism. Even her methods of doing violence seem calculated above all to terrorize in spectacular fashion, as evidenced in her unleashing the horrifyingly violent, yet ultimately non-lethal tempest on King Alonso’s vessel. Yet another reflection in Taymor’s Tempest of our contemporary post-9/11 geopolitical order is that the power to control people and to  create fear circulates in the film through information-based tele-­ technologies emblematized by Prospera’s knowledge-based magic. The island’s biopolitical order evokes the intermedial network structures of post-9/11 globalization in a film that stages intermediality within an early modern context. The landscape of the film is eerily “hyperreal,” its appearance shifting and changing according to Prospera’s “magical” mediation of her surroundings. Within this landscape, moral codes and political alliances also shift and change at the whim of Prospera’s political ambitions, and in response to challenges to her authority. Indeed, like our contemporary post-9/11 world, the film’s island setting is a world in which power and violence are invoked by appearances and mediated spectacles, which triumph over the well-oiled political machinery of state that Prospera exposes as itself illusory via her magic and control of illusion. Power and the moral authority it lends are thus decentred in the film, and instead circulate most prominently as the illusion of authority conjured and maintained through intermedially maintained “magic.” As such, no one “properly” possesses power, and Prospera’s position is always in question, always open to challenge. God is on no one’s side. The illusion of Godlike omnipotence is the real source of power in the film. This is on display, for example, in Prospera’s control of the weather as a terrorist weapon against the corrupt states of Milan and Naples. As a result, the source of moral legitimacy in the film is always in question. Taymor’s Tempest embodies the clash between an early modern conception of

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transcendental theologically based moral law and a more postmodern view of biopolitical power structures and moral relativism that is never neatly resolved. On the Other Hand … 9/11 as Limit Term As opposed to simply a moral justification for maintaining Western hegemonic “world order,” 9/11 is alternatively represented in many “post-9/11 films” as “a limit event, an event so traumatic that it shatters the symbolic resources of the individual and escapes the normal processes of meaning-making and cognition” (Versulys 2006, 1; emphasis mine). A host of scholars point out that in our current era of global media spectacle, the products of mass media such as cinema, internet content, video games, and so on play dominant roles in the hegemonic process of making meaning.4 This process was interrupted by the events of 9/11 in such a way that we will never definitively know its meaning because the very event itself disrupted the discourses and conceptual norms (such as the master narrative of “globalization”) that we have long taken for granted as apparatuses that can allow us to understand such an event as “9/11” (Derrida 2003, 85–136). Taymor’s Tempest intermedially recontextualizes 9/11 by melting together a range of historical references. These include representations and remediated images related to colonialism, empire building, and political intrigue driven by knowledge-based technologies that span the early modern period to the post-9/11 era. The film contrasts and contextualizes these references, thus helping to demystify the politics of September 11, 2001 in relation to, and in many ways as a continuation of, early modern colonialism and empire building. As such, Taymor’s Tempest repoliticizes the seeming “magical” spectacle of global media in and through which the discourse of 9/11 is most dominantly disseminated, and privides a unique lens through which to reconsider those earlier, yet in many ways still ongoing, early modern colonial projects. The sand castle that melts in Miranda’s hand in the very first scene of the film, for instance, is an image blending an early modern symbol of castles and the implosion of a monarchic power structure within an unmistakably post-9/11 image resembling the destruction of the World Trade Center towers. Such a complex tropology evokes inevitable comparisons between the two historical political situations in ways that productively interrogate both contexts via how each makes meaning in and through the other.

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Motifs and Generic Elements of the (Non-)Genre of Post-9/11 Cinema My understanding of post-9/11 global cinema is that it is a collection of identifiable (if irreducible) generic aspects and motifs, a non-genre in the sense that post-9/11 global cinema refuses the idea that there could ever be such a thing as a stable post-9/11 film genre made up of a definitive archive of films. My concept of post-9/11 cinema, then, as a (non-)genre is informed by critical theory – specifically deconstructive approaches to genre studies suspicious of definable archives and ontologizable artistic elements like those evoked by the very notion of “film genre.” Such concepts are most interesting when understood via the “totalizing” gestures and genres that are left out of their conceptual apparatuses. Like the irreducible name-date “9/11,” it is impossible to know definitively what “post-9/11 cinema” might mean. Yet post-9/11 global cinema signifies the indelible ways in which particular cinematic elements and motifs generic to the discourse of 9/11 are now unmistakably identifiable as such, and regularly show up in a range of films made both before and after September 11, 2001. These are cinematic evocations of 9/11 with important and irreducible ideological and discursive effects. In fact, as opposed to identifying a particular “genre film” that more or less fits in to the category “post-9/11 global cinema,” my argument is based on a set of conventions and motifs evident in a range of films and genres. These motifs are visible to contemporary filmgoers who recognize these generic elements as “post-9/11” and not necessarily because those films were ever made to fit a particular generic category. Such is the case with Julie Taymor’s Tempest – it is not a post-9/11 film per se, but most definitely a post-9/11 film in that it cannot help but be recognized as such. What’s more, these post-9/11 generic elements are themselves contradictory. On the one hand, they include reductive generic stereotypes now unmistakably recognizable as post-9/11 (think exploding towers; airline hijackings; orientalist Hollywood stereotypes of Arab terrorists, dating back to action films, war movies, and even news reportage from the early 1980s; the spectacular destruction of New York City involving the Manhattan skyline; and so on). On the other hand, these very same motifs often signal eruptions of the ethical, political, ideological, and conceptual limits of our understanding of 9/11. Such evocations of the limit, when they show up as generic elements in post-9/11 cinema, likewise refuse definitive and/or reductively dogmatic renderings of what

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“9/11” might possibly mean. Julie Taymor’s Tempest deploys such post9/11 motifs in its intermedial adaptation of Shakespeare’s play, thus hybridizing and transforming the meanings of both its Shakespearean and post-9/11 content to produce new insights. Globalization, Intermediality, Diffused War, and Taymor’s Tempest One such post-9/11 motif in Taymor’s Tempest is its magical island setting. Many aspects of this extra-geographical, almost “simulacral” island landscape allude to the post-9/11 context of globalization and the ways in which intermediality, a tele-technological aspect of globalization, is now central to human experience. The island is mostly barren desert landscape, with next to no architecture except for modestly furnished caves. Prospera and Miranda live in one such cave, which they have decorated with a few belongings as well as Prospera’s potions and equipment for her sorcery. Like the cave with the magic pool I discuss briefly earlier, Prospera and Miranda’s living quarters are also evocative of Plato’s allegory of the cave, such that Prospera’s magical equipment – her books as well as a tree of glass spheres filled with liquid – represents the sources of illusion and hyperreal spectacle on the island. In Baudrillardian terms, the island is a kind of “desert of the real.” It is literally mostly desert landscape scattered with a few trees and caves, on which Prospera’s knowledge-based magic is projected in the  form of hyperreal illusions that shape the reality of the island and its occupants. In other words, the seeming “depthless surfaces” that Baudrillard associates with “postmodern Reality” and what is loosely termed “globalization” are allegorically represented by the island landscape, which melds the real with the virtual to the point that they are indistinguishable from one another. In The Intelligence of Evil or the Lucidity Pact, Baudrillard developes these themes in relation to “9/11” and contemporary cinema. He observes that the films produced today are merely the visible allegory of the cinematic form that has taken over everything – social and political life, the landscape, war, etc. – the form of life totally scripted for the screen. This is no doubt why cinema is disappearing: because it has passed into reality. Reality is disappearing at the hands of the cinema and cinema is disappearing at the hands of reality. A lethal transfusion in which each loses its specificity. (2005, 125)

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For Baudrillard, the world used to be thought of or experienced as “real.” But largely because of what we loosely understand as “globalization” (and in particular its technological forms as “media”), it is ceasing to be so. And while the world is not yet fully virtual, for Baudrillard it is fast becoming that way (Baudrillard 2005, 34). In other words, the tele-technologies and media-dominated culture of contemporary globalization have created an experience of the world that has become the dominant form of reality. This Baudrillardian critique of our globalized contemporary world is allegorized by Taymor’s Tempest’s island setting, which, like Taymor’s film itself, is a kind of intermedial “hub” through which part of the global discursive production of “9/11” is transmitted. The tele-technologies, media systems, and network structures of globalization, according to media theorist Andrew Hoskins, are part of what he calls a contemporary “diffused war.” Hoskins coins this term to describe the ways in which global media systems, military infrastructures, governments, and networked tele-technologies now must collude with each other in order for global militarism to function. This complex interdependence of media, military, political, and global teletechnological systems makes possible more diffuse causal relations between cause and effect. This diffusion of the relations between cause and effect, in turn, creates greater uncertainty for policymakers in the conduct of war, as well as greater uncertainty for those trying by various means to make sense of what might actually be going on. In short, in an age in which media spectacle and reality are increasingly difficult to tell apart, the symbolic violence of the cinema is itself a key node in the diffused global network systems waging the “war on terror.” In this sense, films like Taymor’s Tempest can be understood not merely as reflections, but as integral parts of those overwhelmingly media-driven spectacles of post-9/11 terrorism, the global war on terror, and the discourse(s) of 9/11. A clear example of one such post-9/11 motif appears in the very first moments of Taymor’s film: a close-up shot of a black sand castle tower falling down as a result of the tempest Prospera has conjured. But as the camera pulls back to a medium shot, we realize that what we really are gazing at is a sand castle held in the palm of Prospera’s daughter Miranda’s hand. Miranda is watching the destruction of the miniature castle almost like a meta-theatrical news bulletin transmitted literally via a handheld device. The “news report” is a recounting of the storm and its terrifying destruction of the vessel carrying the entire Italian

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monarchy, as symbolized by the sand castle – an event that Miranda is standing in the very middle of, yet chooses to watch on her handheld sand tower, itself a metonymy of mobile devices and tele-technologies that intermediate experience. But this isn’t just any tower. It’s a castle made of sand, which figures the unreliability of its form and message as a metatheatrical/intermedial device; the deceptive and shifting political situation of the Italian monarchy that it symbolizes; and finally, the fact that the monarchic structure rests in the palm of Miranda’s hand. The camera then pans out to an even longer shot, framing the tempest over the sea as well as the tempest-tossed Italian ship. But even this wide establishing shot, meant to reorient the viewer in relation to the continuity of action onscreen, we later discover, is itself a deceptive spectacle, much like the handheld media device of the sand castle. The spectacle is an illusion created and maintained by Prospera’s “black arts” and her slave Ariel’s magic. This very first scene of the film, following classic Hollywood structure, thus resembles a proleptic revelation of the entire plot in one brief opening sequence. And this sequence is replete with unmistakably post-9/11 allegorical elements such as the imploding sand tower, the terrorist attack on the ship, and the sailors jumping over the side of the vessel. Many of these elements link the deceptive qualities of media and newmedia spectacles to the magical powers of Prospera, her efforts to indoctrinate her own daughter, and her attempt to manipulate the Italian political situation in her favour with the magical conjurations that produce a terrorist spectacle via her attack on hegemony. Media spectacle, like that produced by the global film industry, is itself a key element of what is now called “global terrorism.” From the video messages of Osama Bin Laden, to recreations of the events of 9/11 in movies like Paul Greengrass’s United 93, to more allegorical representations of mediatized terror in Taymor’s Tempest, cinema is a powerful intermedial purveyor of symbolic violence. As such, it is also a vehicle par excellence for “illegitimate” forms of global terrorism as well as “legitimized” terrorisms, such as the state-sanctioned retributive violence of the war on terror. The most filmed and photographed events in history, the real 9/11 terrorist attacks have even been compared to a bad movie, as if the actual event was unbelievable by cinematic standards.5 The mediation of 9/11 is such a key element of its cultural ethos, suggests Baudrillard, that “this terrorist violence is not ‘real.’ It is worse in a way: it is symbolic” (Baudrillard 2001). Baudrillard goes even further, likening the

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terrorist attacks in New York City on September 11, 2001 to a piece of cinema, provocatively suggesting that “in this singular event, in this disaster movie of Manhattan, the two elements that fascinate 20th century masses are joined: the white magic of movies and the black magic of terrorism” (Baudrillard 2001). In these ways, post-9/11 cinema can be understood as both a reflection and an extension of the discursive productions of the spectral “disaster movies” of 9/11, global terrorism, and the war on terror. Zero Dark Thirty, Kathryn Bigelow’s 2012 film about the hunting and eventual killing of Osama Bin Laden, is a recent example of a film that not only depicts particular aspects of the war on terror, but is controversial for its creative embellishment of the historical record of that event. In fact, a United States Congressional Committee was set up to investigate the extent to which the CIA was involved in script development, possibly for the purpose of slanting the narrativization of those events in the popular media. In Taymor’s film, the tempest brought down upon the Italian ship is a magical act of terrorism against Prospera’s brother, the reigning duke of Milan, and his entourage. The tempest is framed in the film as a play within a play, in such a way that the audience of Taymor’s film is made to identify with Miranda’s own “hypermediated” gaze, and thus identify with her perspective on the events occurring around her. Miranda, like many of us who witnessed September 11, 2001, seems to need to watch the disaster unfold through media. Hence, she watches via the handheld media device of the sand castle as a means by which to comprehend and filter events before she is able to respond or take any action. Indeed, she is interpellated as an actor in the unfolding events via her mediated gaze at the terrifying spectacle created by her mother. This intermedial moment is reminiscent of the ways in which 9/11 “happened” for most people around the world on television, perhaps in even more impactful ways than on the ground. Even though Miranda is already caught up in the middle of the unfolding disaster, she seems paralysed without the filter of media to guide her judgments and actions. What’s more, Miranda’s media filters, which include the melting sand castle and the spectacle of the storm, are completely the product of her mother’s knowledge-based magic, itself a trope for technologies that can produce terror. After Prospera allays the storm at the pleading request of her daughter, she then questions Ariel as to whether or not he/she carried out the tempest exactly as per Prospera’s instructions. Ariel’s recounting of events is illustrated in the film by visually stunning, stylized shots of

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Ariel, his/her body aflame, setting fire to the ship, which eventually explodes and goes down in a spectacular fireball. As it sinks, its smouldering remnants create a cloud of smoke over the water, an image eerily reminiscent of the post-9/11 images of the destruction of the World Trade Center as witnessed over and over again on the news from the perspective of the Jersey City waterfront. Prospera’s conspiracy with Ariel has uncanny parallels with conspiracy theories about 9/11 regarding the possibility that elements of the US government perhaps orchestrated the attacks against its own cities and buildings for nefarious political purposes. Prospera, for instance, recruits Ariel into the role of magical terrorist, trained and armed to strike a symbolic blow against her own countrymen. This reading is reinforced in the film by the image of Ariel, body set aflame, throwing fireballs down at the ship from the sky. This image reproduces the logic of the suicide bomber, or of the pilots who flew the hijacked jetliners into the World Trade Center, incinerating both the planes and themselves in the process. Perhaps even more disturbing, however, are the ways in which Prospera’s and Ariel’s actions are eerily reminiscent of the historical fact that many Al Qaeda terrorists were originally armed and trained by the US government, that is, were a by-product of an intercultural relationship involving the very parties who were to become adversaries. Another example of the film’s contemporary post-9/11 references is the theatrically “unnatural” geometry of the tempest. This “postmodern” storm ravages the Italian ship in the first scene of the film. We view the events from Miranda’s perspective as she stands atop a rocky vista and watches the storm take place directly centre stage. In fact, every storm cloud seems choreographed to align exactly over the only vessel on the water. And the vessel itself remains oddly stationary at the very centre of the horizon in spite of the raging wind. Every lightning bolt hits its mark. Every gust of wind seems destined to strike, inevitably, the deck of the doomed ship. From a post-9/11 perspective, Ariel’s attack seems like a mocking parody of the supposed accuracy of ­ “smart bombs” as propagandized by the US government during the Afghanistan and Iraq wars. What’s more, we find out later that this real event is nothing more than a theatrical spectacle orchestrated by Prospera. In this scene, cinema-like spectacle has indeed become reality in Baudrillardian fashion, such that the effects of this real event can best be described as “hyperreal” or “simulacral.” This hyperreality is evidenced by the ways in which no one perishes in the storm, the passengers later rise up out of the water and walk on shore in a prearranged

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fashion, and the ship seems utterly destroyed, yet somehow eventually ends up safe and sound floating in a hidden bay. In other words, events really occur, but it is difficult to describe the “realities” that unfold as happening in a “realistic” way. Indeed, the most affective events in the film are precisely those that are simulacral as opposed to “the real.” This simulacral situation is made possible in the context of globalization by the dominance of tele-technology and mediatized images over most other forms of life and experience, at least for the “global citizens” living in the West whose reality is ineluctably defined by intermediated forms of representation. Globalization is also evoked by Prospera’s knowledge-based magic through which she manages and manipulates events on the island – her magic is precisely the power to mediate reality. In more explicitly Foucauldian terms, Prospera is adept at manipulating truths and the appearance of reality explicitly for the strategic purpose of manipulating the power dynamics of her own political situation. Her books and magical knowledge give the appearance that she has omnipotent powers. If this were actually the case, however, it would pose problems with regard to the dramatic conflict in the film, as well as in Shakespeare’s play. There are several clues throughout the film that contradict a reading of Prospera as omnipotent sorceress. First, she is always strangely on edge in the film, always paranoid that someone will get to her, find out too much, or try to assassinate her. This paranoia is at odds with the powers her magic seems to give her, and raises the stakes for Prospera (and also for Shakespeare’s Prospero) in regard to maintaining the illusion of being all-powerful as a means, or tactic, for holding on to political power. What is the nature of Prospera’s (and Prospero’s) power? What is actually contained in his/her books? Is there a parallel to be drawn between the magical power of Prospera’s/Prospero’s books and the post-9/11 power dynamics of intermedial political spectacle in the way in which Taymor adapts Shakespeare’s play? Do such questions, intermedially raised by the film, retroactively complicate, or perhaps centralize, the political and postcolonial allegory of the play as opposed to the popular notion that, as Shakespeare’s last play, it is really about the aesthetic power of theatrical and artistic genius? Prospera’s paranoia, as depicted by Taymor, may also be read as a particularly post-9/11 motif, such that the threat of terrorist violence, as represented by 9/11, is not just a threat to buildings, people, and planes, but more radically still to the “system of interpretation, the axiomatic, logic, rhetoric, concepts, and evaluations that are supposed to allow

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one to comprehend and to explain precisely something like ‘September 11’” (Derrida 2003, 93). In short, 9/11 poses a threat to hegemonic regimes of knowledge and truth, such as the almost magical-seeming “universality” of globalization as a world system predicated on an inevitable logic of imperial expansion. This is why Prospera so desperately tries to maintain her own mystique as an omnipotent, omniscient magician, even to the extent of threatening to torture Caliban and others on her island kingdom. Even Ariel, for whom Prospera seems to have an almost romantic affection, is nonetheless threatened with reinsertion back into the tree trunk, where he/she was imprisoned originally by the witch Sycorax, if he/she doesn’t obey. Prospera is also accused of being a witch practising “black arts” by her Italian countrymen, and has thus become a version of her own worst enemy. What’s more, her offers of freedom that come at the end of the film are all inseparable from how Prospera herself enslaved all those she offers to set free. As a sorceress of intermedial spectacle and illusion, this notion of freedom as slavery thus resonates with what Baudrillard, referring to Disneyland, once called the American social enslavement to the “hyperreal order and to the order of simulation” (Baudrillard 1994, 10). Prospera’s magical enslavement of even her “free” subjects allegorically mirrors the ways in which, in our contemporary post-9/11 media sphere, “freedom” often amounts to the choice to spend our leisure time being entertained by and consuming the very media products that structure our work environments. In this sense, the terms of our freedom reproduce our ideological enslavement to global capitalism as a form of pleasure, a scene rescripted by Taymor’s adaptation in no uncertain terms. Ideological Training in Taymor’s Tempest Prospera’s magic, when not being used to inflict or threaten torture (yet another post-9/11 motif in the film), is most potent in its ability to deceive. Very often, the target of this deception is Prospera’s daughter, Miranda. A manipulator and political strategist extraordinaire, Prospera specifically directs most of her efforts in the film towards the ideological training of her daughter. Miranda is in fact the only “legitimate” citizen under Prospera’s rule on the island. Miranda’s training over the course of her entire upbringing is towards a “correct” interpretation of Prospera’s place in Italian politics. This includes understanding the historical injustices that Prospera says she suffered at the hands of her own

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family and political rivals. During Prospera’s political rant to Miranda at the beginning of the film, Prospera commands her – and seemingly, by extension, the film’s audience – to “mark me!” “Dost thou attend me?” “Thou attends’t not!” (Garber 2004). The filmgoing audience is co-implicated as recipients of Prospera’s indoctrination strategies by the film’s framing of this scene through Miranda’s perspective. We too are encouraged to identify as ideal citizens of this allegorical island, and thus, perhaps, to also identify with the ways in which the island represents our own ideological training, our alienation, as citizens of the post-9/11 global media sphere. Midway through Prospera’s rant, however, a remarkable thing happens. Prospera asks Miranda to “sit down, and be attentive. Canst thou remember/A time before we came unto this cell?/I do not think thou canst, for then thou was not/Out three years old.” The question appears to be rhetorical, since Prospera answers it before Miranda has a chance to utter a word. Miranda, however, does answer. She tells her mother that she can certainly remember something. At this revelation, Prospera is visibly taken aback. Indeed, by all appearances she is upset that Miranda, only three years old at the time, may have her own memories of their former life as the ruling family of Milan. Prospera’s first impulse is to interrogate her daughter to learn if some “other house or person” might have had an influence over the messages and memories Miranda has of her childhood and subsequent life on the island. Prospera then demands that Miranda tell her “By what? By any other house or person?/Of any thing the image tell me that/Hath kept with thy remembrance.” Miranda replies: “’Tis far off,/And rather like a dream.” Once again we have the image of memory as dreamlike, a central theme of the movie. Judging from her reaction, Prospera clearly prefers to be in the position of relaying historical details to her daughter as opposed to receiving them from her after the fact. Being surprised with the revelation of a hazy, dreamlike memory Prospera can handle. She draws the line, however, when Miranda asks later on in the scene if she might be allowed to “read her [mother’s] books one day.” Prospera replies to this request with a silent, suspicious stare – and soon after hypnotizes her daughter with a magical spell. This spell immediately lulls Miranda to sleep, perchance to dream happier, or at least more ideologically “correct,” dreams. This scene, read as a post-9/11 political allegory, evokes the most famous lines from Shakespeare’s The Tempest. These are the lines that suggest life itself may be an illusion, “such stuff/As dreams are made on,

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and our little life/Is rounded with a sleep” (4.1.156–8). The parallelism among ideology, illusion, and life as a kind of dream, circumscribed in Prospera’s enchantment of her own daughter, is evocative of the fantasy factory of global media so integral to the ideological, political, and militaristic strategies of “diffused war” on terror. The global war on terrorism is a hot war, but arguably above all else, it is a media war for the hearts and minds of both the enemy and the folks back home whose patriotism may be in question. Stephen Duncombe suggests in Dream: Re-Imagining Progressive Politics in an Age of Fantasy that the future of progressive politics on the left may depend, not only on debunking and decoding the media-­ driven myth-making of the right, but also on learning from those strategies and dreaming bigger – or, at least, more ethical – dreams. But where Duncombe calls for a kind of “open spectacle” in which “leaders are still needed … to set the stage for participation” (Duncombe 2007, 134– 5), Prospera’s leadership is the opposite. Her political dreamscape relies on the manipulation and careful management of her daughter’s ideas and memories, as well as on the terrifying spectacle of apparent techno-militaristic superiority to enforce her ideological will and maintain the illusion of her political sovereignty. By the end of the film, after granting “freedom” (yet another post9/11 motif via the ethico-political rhetoric of President George W. Bush)6 to all her formerly enslaved subjects, Prospera would rather crack her wand and destroy her books than reveal the secrets behind the ideological spell she has woven around her daughter and everyone else within her magical island realm. This point is driven home in the very last scene of the film, which depicts the cracking of Prospera’s “big stick” into hundreds of shards that, as they fall into the sea, are depicted as hundreds of sinking books. This last image underscores political theorist Carl Schmitt’s point that ideological systems are inextricable from the exceptional forces of law that back them up and thus make them seem coherent. Prospera’s paranoid efforts to manage and control Miranda’s access to knowledge and to other people from outside their private, “magically” managed universe raise doubts about the veracity of Prospera’s political claims. Miranda is brought up by her mother as a barefoot innocent. Dressed in white, she is reminiscent of a striking Hollywood beauty. Miranda is, in many ways, a “Snow White” figure and the ideal, subjugated subject of Prospera’s magical kingdom. Miranda’s dress and appearance may even draw a post-9/11 parallel between her

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mother’s island kingdom and the time-arrested utopic American bourgeois magic kingdom inspired by Walt Disney. The Disney corporation is a Hollywood “dream-factory,” which has manifested its utopic vision of America by constructing a Disney-inspired private community, Celebration USA. Another post-9/11 “Disney-like” resonance for the context of Taymor’s film is the way in which the Bush administration consulted with marketing experts and top Hollywood film executives regarding the management of the media aspects of the war on terror.7 And this tactic of involving Hollywood directly in war on terror propaganda has been replayed more recently with Argo and Zero Dark Thirty, two films with very particular hegemonic contexts in which the CIA was directly involved in script development.8 In many ways, therefore, Taymor’s post-9/11 adaptation of The Tempest is implicated with the actual events, if we understand 9/11 as also being a kind of adaptive, intermedial spectacle produced within the conventions and with the cooperation of Hollywood, itself in collusion with the interests of hegemonic structures like the CIA. Post-9/11 Postcolonialism If the central motif in The Tempest is the indistinguishability between “real life” and dreams, another related aspect of this spectacle of deception is the almost equally hazy relationship between freedom and bondage. Every character in the film is, in one way or another, a prisoner or slave to someone. Prospera, when she ruled Milan, was arrested, exiled, and sent with her then infant daughter to the island she now rules. Had she not arrived there, Caliban would likely be ruler of the island. He was in line to take over the island after inheriting it from his mother, Sycorax. But instead Caliban becomes the slave of Prospera. Ariel is technically the slave of Prospera; yet Ariel’s “bondage” seems much closer to freedom than does Caliban’s servitude, the two perhaps mapping out a continuum of points along a colonial matrix of limited agency and subjugation. This complex economy of slavery on display in the film is further complicated by the arrival of Ferdinand, the Prince of Naples and Prospera’s preferred suitor for Miranda. When Ferdinand appears on the island, his love affair with Miranda (carefully arranged and orchestrated by Prospera) causes him to find pleasure in carrying heavy logs for the sorceress and her daughter. The carrying of heavy logs, however, is one of the tasks most hated by Caliban, who is required to do it as part of the terms of his enslavement. Perhaps another

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subtle inference here regards the ways in which love-bonds may also constitute a kind of consensual servitude, or colonization of the heart. By the end of The Tempest, therefore, the concepts of “freedom” and “slavery” begin to subtend and overlap with each other in irreducible ways. This is a freedom akin to the kind offered by the “blue pill” from the sci-fi classic The Matrix: its effect is to “free” personal enjoyment by hiding the fact that one is, nonetheless, completely enslaved within the virtual dreamscape of the matrix itself. As such, the magical, simulacral images and spectacles that provide the ideologically driven mise-en-scène of the island setting resonate strongly with the deceptive, post-9/11 spectacles of the war on terror. Daniel Fischlin argues in his essay “Terrorism, Security, and Selective Rights in an Age of Retributive Fear” that even the name “war on terror” is a deceptive, rhetorical abstraction, which is not even legally possible. Nonetheless, the trope effectively obscures various forms of state-sponsored terror tactics, excessive retributive violence, and the wholesale rollback of basic human rights. Even worse, the war on terror, on close examination, seems in many ways indistinguishable from a war of terror, meaning a war fought by means of state terrorism (Fischlin 2008, 253–8). Post-9/11 military campaigns such as the invasion of Afghanistan and the war in Iraq were ostensibly launched to bring freedom to those countries. They are in many ways indistinguishable from the violent colonialist conquests for the purposes of military, political, and economic control of those regions. And these contemporary neocolonialist enterprises are intermedially resonant with those sixteenth-century forms of colonialism that feature as intertexts for Shakespeare’s The Tempest, particularly in regard to its intertextual resonances with Montaigne’s writings about European colonialism.9 An intriguing question raised by Taymor’s Tempest, therefore, is whether or not “the ‘post’ in postcolonial [is] the same as the ‘post’ in post-9/11” (Ball 2008, 296). Most critics reject the “post” in postcolonialism, calling it premature in that colonialism, while it has shifted and changed, is still going strong. Does the false “past tense” signalled by the “post” in postcolonial studies, however, also resonate with a similar false notion that we are somehow “post”-9/11? In other words, does the “post” in post-9/11 give the false impressions that, first, we can definitively label, understand, and move on from that so-called event, and second, that it is not still going on in many important ways? A second aspect of this question of the “post” relates to the ways in which, since September 11, 2001, many seemingly “older” postcolonial

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topics of the so-called margin, such as racism, gender inequality, ethnic strife, and religious unrest, have once again become remediated and recentralized in the wake of the global war on terror. Another way of looking at this, however, is that 9/11 merely brought back into focus ongoing racisms, sexisms, and ethnic and religious prejudices that, to a large extent, had been obscured from “popular” view by the dreamlike ideological spectacles and mainstream narratives of globalization. Other contributors to this consensual hallucination of global capitalist utopia are global mass media, transnational capitalism, and mobile technologies of surveillance and communication, which reinforce (often intermedially) aspects of the current “world order.” Taymor’s Tempest, adapted from a play with obvious references to European colonialism, recontextualizes these older “post”-colonial references in relation to the post-9/11 neocolonial context of the war on terror. This is a context that was described, even by the latest Bush administration, in terms of American “empire.” The intersection of neocolonialism with the state-sanctioned violence of the war on terror is articulated in shockingly bald-faced terms in a now infamous 2004 New York Times article by journalist and author Ron Suskind. During the interview, Suskind questions the moral justification and accountability of the former Bush administration’s foreign policy. In response, the interviewee – an aide of then President George W. Bush – scoffs at Suskind’s concerns, declaring that “[the United States is] an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality … We’re history’s actors … and you, all of you [journalists], will be left to just study what we do” (Suskind 2002, 10; emphasis mine; second ellipsis in original). Such a statement, made almost twenty-five years after Edward Said wrote his classic postcolonialist text Orientalism (1978), is a textbook example of the very Western militaristic, historical-revisionist, and cultural-imperialist strategies of colonial conquest that Said rigorously details in his pioneering work. What’s more, in relation to Taymor’s Tempest, the Bush administration aide’s reference to “creating reality” as an imperialist strategy is troublingly evocative of the political strategies employed by Prospera via her magical revision of her own political legacy in order to regain power as Duchess of Milan. In fact, as an intermedial adaptation of the spectacle of 9/11, the film itself can be understood to metatheatrically restage the events of 9/11 as a film within a film within a film. Taymor’s film, then, restages the logic of imperialism within the unavoidable contexts of post-9/11 notions of empire, a restaging that

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grounds, if not governs, how the film means in that context. It is, in short, inextricably a part of the representational logic of post-9/11’s illusive realities. Caliban, the Postmodern Subaltern Yet another post-9/11/postcolonial reference in Taymor’s film is the racially ambiguous and dehumanized figure of Caliban, one of the enslaved subalterns living on the magical island. In the film, Caliban is played by Djimon Hounsou, a well-known black actor originally from Cotonou, Benin. For the role, Hounsou’s body is thickly layered with a kind of textured prosthetic skin makeup, the colouring of which is part black, part tan, and part white. Around the left side of his head, he has a white circular depression in the prosthetic skin that covers half his face and seems to depict the moon. This is a clear reference to his mother being a witch. The rough and varied texture of much of his body makeup evokes and echoes the earthen landscape of the island itself. If we consider the landscape as a kind of intermedial hub against which Prospera projects her magical influence over her subjects, Caliban’s skin texture – which literally blends him into that landscape – can be read as a post9/11 reference to the ways in which ideological control currently operates via mass media spectacle. In this spectacle, global tele-technological network structures interpellate subjects as intermedial nodes within its biopolitical systems of control. Caliban’s texturing echoes primitivist, tribal motifs that tie him to “the land.” His exaggerated, muscular, and dancelike movements evoke a primitivist tribal aesthetic. But Caliban also has ratlike features – his fingers are elongated and pointed, and he eats his food in quick nibbles. These ratlike qualities of Caliban’s appearance evoke a danger that, in Prospera’s eyes, is connected to diseases of the blood. Prospera is especially afraid of Caliban’s potential contamination of Prospera’s royal bloodlines should he successfully “infect” Miranda by mating with her, and in Caliban’s words, successfully “[people] the island with Calibans.” What’s more, Caliban’s distorted physical traits seem designed not only to animalize him, but also to throw into question the specificity of his race. As such, his bodily aesthetics evoke another colonialist erasure related to the ways in which the very concept of race is radically contingent on its particular context of articulation – or intermediation – and impossibly complicated in relation to diasporic ­migrations within the post-9/11 context of globalization.

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As is well documented in the scholarship, Shakespeare’s play putatively draws on Michel de Montaigne’s essay “Of Cannibals” (1580), particularly in regard to the character Caliban. Caliban’s name is a possible anagram variant of “cannibal” that is derived from “Carib,” a West Indian cannibal nation Montaigne references in his essay (Garber 2004, 854). What is particularly poignant about Montaigne’s observations is that he obscures the distinction between so-called civilized European cultures and those cultures deemed to be “savage” nations. Montaigne proposes that “there is nothing savage or barbarous about those peoples, but that every man calls barbarous anything he is not accustomed to” (Montaigne “Of Cannibals,” quoted in Garber 2004, 854). This intertextual reference to Montaigne, via Shakespeare, which Taymor’s film continues to transmit, underlines the uncanny parallels among Caliban’s position as ursurped royalty-turned-slave, Prospera’s own political misfortunes in Milan, and her dubious claim to be the island’s ruler. Taymor’s Tempest’s post-9/11 context heightens this political and representational ambiguity by evoking not only Montaigne’s observations on European colonialism but also the scandalous politics of deception and media manipulation of the war on terror. And addressing Caliban’s post-9/11 resonances as a marker of the savage “other” cannot be separated from the intensification of racial profiling at airports and borders, particularly by the US, after the terrorist attacks. This type of profiling has evoked widespread outrage, but also a disturbing resurgence in racial and religious polarization in the US and around the world. Caliban is marked as ethnically different in Taymor’s film and is clearly targeted by Prospera because of that difference. As a result Caliban becomes an object of torture by Prospera specifically, for his attempt to rape Miranda. Caliban is also depicted as living in a sandy, barren part of the island, often hiding from Prospera in his cave. This image of an animal-man hiding in caves because of the fear of violent retribution from Prospera thus evokes the Bush administration’s post9/11 rhetoric leading up to the Afghanistan invasion, such that they would seek out the Taliban in their caves and bomb them back to the Stone Age. These same Taliban were, like Caliban, also depicted as subhuman brutalizers of women by the US government. Like Prospera’s banishment of Caliban to a cave – where he is safely away from any unauthorized sexual, familial, and thus political union with her daughter – the Bush administration’s rhetoric dehumanized the Taliban and

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Al Qaeda. It also forestalled any discussion of the possible legitimacy to the underlying political messages behind the Taliban’s and Al Qaeda’s radical terrorist acts. By characterizing these groups as being akin to Stone Age cave dwellers and thus uncivilized, illegitimate savages, the Bush administration constructed its enemies as less than human and thus ineligible for international human rights protections or the basic guarantees outlined in the Geneva Conventions regarding the rules of war and fair treatment of prisoners. This post-9/11 form of orientalism strongly resonates with Taymor’s depiction of Caliban in that his stereotypical traits and primitivist costume and movements also border on a kind of unsettlingly racist portrayal of “savages” that undermines some of the more complex and well-thought-out aspects of Taymor’s film. At the end of the day, we are left wondering to what extent the animalistic and tribalistic depiction of Caliban represents Prospera’s own colonialist impulses and to what extent Taymor’s film itself perpetuates a form of intermedially produced racist symbolic violence via these same images. The power of the media to transform a singularity like Caliban into a metonymy for an irreducible multitude of people is the power to reduce meaning via overdetermined intermedial forms that reinforce this kind of reductive logic. Taymor’s Tempest’s Post-9/11 Feminist Utopia The most prominent revision in Taymor’s film adaptation of Shakespeare’s play is the casting of a woman – Helen Mirren – to play the part of Prospera, the deposed Duchess of Milan. This feminization of the role, like so many other aspects of the film, has clear post-9/11 resonances. In an interview, Mirren comments on this casting decision: we can see now in extreme fundamentalist states – whatever religion they are – that they want to exclude women from education. That’s the first thing they do. An educated woman is a dangerous thing. An educated female sex is dangerous for the status quo. I love the fact that in making Prospero a woman we could present that history and those issues. (Singh 2011)

As a post-9/11 motif, the gendering of Prospera as female thus seems to evoke a response to the pre-invasion Afghanistan Taliban government’s notoriously harsh treatment of women. This treatment included

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denying Afghan women over the age of eight an education on pain of execution. The Bush administration and its allies capitalized on the brutal rights realities associated with fundamentalism and used them to win popular support for the American-led invasion of that country. Taymor’s film is in sync with the gender politics that were ostensibly at stake in justifying the war, even if the film’s own politics point to a much wider notion of gender fluidity deployed in many contemporary adaptations of Shakespeare. The choice to cast a woman in the powerful role of Prospera may also resonate with the US media’s casting of Private Jessica Lynch as a kind of “beautiful Rambo” or “girl-next-door American heroine” in connection with her capture and subsequent rescue from a Baghdad hospital during the invasion of Iraq. Private First Class Lynch was serving as a unit supply specialist in the 507th Maintenance Company. Her convoy took a wrong turn and was ambushed by Iraqi forces during the Battle of Nasiriyah. Nine of her comrades were killed, and Lynch was seriously injured. Iraqi forces captured Lynch and she was held at an Iraqi hospital until her rescue by US Special Operations Forces on 1 April 2003 (Kampfner 2003). The rescue mission made headlines around the world. Lynch’s story, however, was distorted in the American mass media. It was originally reported that she had gone down shooting, and the severity of her treatment at the hands of the Iraqis was also exaggerated. Thus, Lynch was made out to be a young, beautiful girl who represented wholesome American values, but who fought fiercely alongside her comrades. Hers was the first successful rescue of an American prisoner since Vietnam. Lynch subsequently denied the original version of her own story, and the idea that she was a “Rambo-like” hero (Kampfner 2003). In both the mythologization of Private Lynch and Mirren’s feminized depiction of Prospera, femininity is coded as representing utopic, democratic values and even vulnerability that justifies extraordinary military responses to any attack on that supposed vulnerability. These values, however, must be enforced via the justifiable evil of state-sanctioned violence as meted out by Mirren’s Prospera in the forms of torture, conquest, and even terrorism against her own citizens. In short, rewriting Prospero as Prospera realigns the character with a feminist mythology that justifies many of that character’s violent and/or vengeful actions. Her enslavement of Caliban, for example, is seen as partially justified because he brutalizes women – much as Prospera’s own family treated her brutally by casting her and her young child out of their home and setting them adrift in a leaky boat.

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Conclusion Reading Julie Taymor’s Tempest as a post-9/11 film offers a way of looking at Prospera’s magical powers of persuasion and the odd out-ofplace-ness of the setting in a way that may clarify many of the dramatic elements often underread in Shakespeare’s version of the play. Two somewhat “standard” readings of Shakespeare’s Tempest are, on the one hand, to see Prospero as a kind of stand-in for the magical power of Shakespeare himself as playwright and master manipulator of reality in the realm of the theatre, or, on the other hand, to view the play as a kind of colonial allegory in which Prospero’s magic lends him seemingly omnipotent and omniscient powers over his island kingdom and its inhabitants. Yet both these readings undermine the dramatic potential of the play by lending too much weight to the argument-ending omnipotence of Prospero’s magic. Helen Mirren’s Prospera, however, possesses no such magical omnipotence – only the power to manipulate (or pre-mediate) the political realities of her island via her knowledgebased “black arts.” As such, the drama of this film (and retroactively, Shakespeare’s play via intermedial resonance with Taymor’s adaptation) comes from Prospera’s ever-present paranoia that her/his “­magic” will be found out. This fear extends to her suspicion of her own daughter, the only ideal citizen of Prospera’s island kingdom. Ironically, Taymor’s intermedial adaptation of Shakespeare’s play is particularly effective as a way of demonstrating how media convergence(s) and mass media entertainments (like Taymor’s film) can act as a distraction from and/or obfuscation of dominant political narratives. Reading the film as a post-9/11 allegory allows us to learn from the lessons Shakespeare teaches. One such lesson is that ideological manipulation requires a compliant de-historicization of events in order to maintain the magical veneer of realism of global intermedially framed “truths.” This lesson is particularly important when considering the ways in which such post-9/11 “truths” are deployed as weapons in contemporary “diffused war,” such as the US-led war on terror. In the case of Taymor’s intermedial post-9/11 adaptation of Shakespeare’s Tempest, those weapons of diffused war that the film itself embodies – a deployment of post-9/11 images, motifs, and discourse that inflects and shapes our mass mediated perceptions of the “truth” about September 11, 2001 and the war on terror – are also the very ones that the film allows us to read in an ironic mode. In this way, Taymor’s Tempest helps us to gain a better understanding of how post-9/11

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intermediality operates not only as a production of hegemonic discourses like “9/11” but also as a way of recontextualizing and learning from those same discourses by reading them as what Marx, in “The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte” (1852), called the borrowed “names, battle slogans, and costumes” out of which contemporary “history” is made. Part of this lesson is to recognize that, since September 11, 2001, these borrowed names, slogans, and costumes are still employed by hegemonic power, but in melted medial forms that may be difficult to recognize in the hypermediated spectacles of post9/11 mass culture. Reading Taymor’s Tempest, which as I have shown is profoundly implicated in the proliferation of melted intermedial ­ discourse(s) of post-9/11, helps indentify how Shakespearean adaptation functions in relation to hegemonic structures that continue to “make” history via the power of intermediation. NOTES 1 US ties with Israel extend as far back as the founding of that state, the US government under President Truman being the first to recognize Israel’s legitimacy. For many years, the US has supported Israel with massive monetary and military aid. In regard to the strategic importance of USIsraeli relations, late US Senator Jesse Helms liked to refer to Israel as “America’s aircraft carrier in the Middle East” (Pipes and Clawson 1995). 2 Daniel Fischlin and Martha Nandorfy, in their book The Concise Guide to Global Human Rights (2007), point out that “the legitimacy of rights as a moral force is compromised as soon as those who set themselves up as leaders in the sustenance and promotion of rights commit violations or abuses of rights” (2007, 133). They are referring here in part to the disastrous human rights violations of the United States government, perpetrated since the founding of that country in a number of different conflicts and covert actions all around the world. They are also referring to the way in which, historically, the US government seems to selectively punish certain governments and groups for perpetuating human rights abuses, while allowing others to commit equally horrendous violations with impunity or even with US support. One such example of the US government’s disregard for basic human rights law in connection with its war on terror is its Guantánamo Bay detention facility. Human rights watchdog agencies such as Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and the United Nations have all condemned this facility on several grounds: the indefinite

Melted into Media: Julie Taymor’s Tempest 147 incarceration of prisoners without trial (in some cases for periods of more than ten years without being charged with a crime); the use of torture or methods tantamount to torture; and the inhumane living conditions of prisoners at the facility. Giorgio Agamben, in his book State of Exception, proposes that prisoners at Guantánamo Bay are contemporary examples of the “homo sacer,” or people divested of their basic humanity and thus able to be exterminated, like lice, without being sacrificed or killed. Agamben argues that the Bush administration’s treatment of terrorist suspects and “enemy combatants” “radically erase[d] any legal status of the individual, thus producing a legally unnameable and unclassifiable being. Not only [did] the Taliban captured in Afghanistan not enjoy the status of POW’s as defined by the Geneva Convention, they [did] not even have the status of people charged with a crime according to American laws” (Agamben 2005, 3). In short, after September 11, 2001, the Bush administration gave itself the exceptionalist ability to suspend the law. In the case of Guantánamo Bay, this means that prisoners not only lose their human rights, but even the right to be recognized as legal humans with rights.   What about possible contraventions of the UN’s 1948 genocide con­ vention perpetrated under the banner of the supposed extra-legal moral authority of “9/11”? According to the research of Dr Francis Boyle, Professor of International Law at the University of Illinois in Champaign and internationally renowned legal expert on issues concerning the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the case can be made that indeed there have been genocidal actions perpetrated by the Israeli government against Palestinians under the banner of the war on terror. Boyle cites “the 1948 Genocide Convention [which] clearly says that one instance of genocide is the deliberate infliction of conditions of life calculated to bring about the physical destruction of a people in whole or in part … And that’s exactly what has been done to Gaza, since the imposition of the blockade by Israel; then the massacre of 1,400 Palestinians, two-thirds of whom were civilians, in Operation Cast Lead. And that also raises the element in the Genocide Convention, of murder, torture, and things of that nature” (Boyle 2012). Thus, according to Boyle’s expert legal opinion, we might also conclude that the Israeli government’s adoption of the rhetoric of “war against terror” in the popular media after September 11, 2001 as a tactic for justifying their military actions against Palestinians amounts to invoking “9/11” for the purpose of contravening the United Nation’s Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. For example, on 1 April 2002, CNN quoted then Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, who declared in a nationally televised address: “Citizens

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of Israel, the state of Israel is in a war – a war against terrorism … It’s a war that has been imposed upon us. It is not one that we have chosen to undertake. It is a war for our home” (Sharon 2002). All of these statements unmistakably echo the post-9/11 rhetoric of then President George W. Bush, amounting to a thinly veiled attempt to align the Sharon government’s genocidal actions and military aggression against Palestinians with the US-led war on terror. 3 One important critic of the “universalizing” rhetoric of post-Holocaust/ Shoah human rights legislation is Hannah Arendt. In her landmark book The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951), she writes that many Jews who had suffered the horrors of the Holocaust/Shoah and were in dire need of international human rights protections had fled oppressive national situations, and thus were without citizenship and/or recognition as humans with rights. As Arendt explains, the intelligibility of the very concepts of humanity and human rights (in regard to International human rights laws) entirely hinges on their particular, heterogeneous political articulations through the juridical and political apparatuses of citizenship. Only through citizenship, she asserts, is humanity recognized and in fact performatively inaugurated as such. National and international citizenship is so closely tied to the concept and juridical infrastructures of human rights that a lack of citizenship left these migrant Jews without even the right to have rights. Yet at the same time, many of these same Jews had an absolute reluctance to be repatriated, a situation which constituted a complex disavowal of citizenship. While the universalizing rhetoric of international human rights supposedly restored the recourse to justice, humanitarian relief, and “human” rights to the victims of Nazi fascism in the wake of the Second World War, as it turns out, this was not the case for those individuals who needed them most. 4 The most famous articulation of this idea was in the Situationist manifesto The Society of the Spectacle (1972) by Guy Debord, but also see the more recent work of Jean Baudrillard, Slavoj Žižek, Robert McChesney, Douglas Kellner, and Stephen Duncombe, amongst many others whose work has mapped the intersections and intermedial links between politics and popular culture. 5 See Dixon 2004, where producer Lawrence Wright comments that “the events of 9/11 were ‘cinematic in a kind of super-real way. It was too Hollywood. We could have never used [the tower attacks] in The Siege. It would be too impossible’” (9). 6 Amongst many other references to “freedom” in his post-9/11 ethico-­ political rhetoric, President George W. Bush, on 4 November 2004,

Melted into Media: Julie Taymor’s Tempest 149 famously said in regard to the war on terror that “freedom is not America’s gift to the world; freedom is the Almighty’s gift to each man and woman in this world” (Bush 2004). 7 See, for example, Rutherford 2004, which details the mass media and marketing techniques employed by the US government to wage its “real time” propaganda war in connection with the US invasion of Iraq in 2003. See also CNN’s article of 12 November 2001, which discusses a meeting that Bush’s top political advisor, Karl Rove, had with Hollywood executives to “discuss ways the industry might spread the message of patriotism and tolerance” (“Bush Advisor Meets Hollywood Execs” 2001). 8 CIA officials, including Michael Morell, the CIA’s deputy director at the time and now the agency’s acting chief, are known to have consulted with Zero Dark Thirty director Kathryn Bigelow and screenwriter Mark Boal in the making of that film (Hosenball 2013). The film has come under attack by that US government committee, as well as many film critics, for appearing to justify CIA torture tactics that extracted the information that supposedly led to the killing of Osama Bin Laden. Argo likewise paints what many critics deem to be an inaccurate and biased pro-CIA version of the operation to free hostages during the 1979 Iranian hostage-taking crisis (Fletcher 2012). 9 In particular, see Montaigne’s essay Of Cannibals.

WORKS CITED Agamben, Giorgio. 2005. State of Exception. Trans. Kevin Attell. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Arendt, Hannah. 1968 [1951]. The Origins of Totalitarianism. New York: Harcourt. Baelo-Allue, Sonia. 2011. Radical History Review 111 (Fall): 184–93. Ball, Anna. 2008. “Critical Exchanges in Postcolonial Studies, Post-9/11.” Review of Education, Pedagogy and Cultural Studies 30.3&4: 296–315. Baudrillard, Jean. 1994. Simulacra and Simulations. Trans. Sheila Faria Glaser. Michigan: University of Michigan Press. – 2001. “The Spirit of Terrorism.” Le Monde, 2 November. The European Graduate School. http://www.egs.edu/faculty/jean-baudrillard/articles/ the-spirit-of-terrorism/. Accessed 3 September 2010. – 2005. The Intelligence of Evil or the Lucidity Pact. Trans. Chris Turner. Oxford: Berg. Bolter, Jay David, and Richard Grusin. 1999. Remediation: Understanding New Media. Boston: MIT Press.

150  Don Moore Borradori, Giovanna. 2003. Philosophy in a Time of Terror: Dialogues with Jürgen Habermas and Jacques Derrida. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press. Boyle, Francis. 2008. Breaking All the Rules: Palestine, Iraq, Iran and the Case for Impeachment. Atlanta: Clarity Press. – 2012. “Francis Boyle: Israel Is Committing Genocide in Gaza.” Media with Conscience News, 15 November. http://mwcnews.net/focus/ analysis/22858-francisboyle-genocide-in-gaza.html. Accessed 15 March 2013. “Bush Advisor Meets Hollywood Execs.” 2001. CNN. 12 November. http:// news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/entertainment/1651173.stm. Accessed 30 March 2013. Bush, President George W. 2004. “Acceptance Speech.” About.com. 4 November. http://uspolitics.about.com/od/speeches/a/bush_speech2_2 .htm. Accessed 30 March 2013. Derrida, Jacques. 2003. “Autoimmunity: Real and Symbolic Suicides.” In Borradori 2003, 85–136. Dixon, Wheeler Winston. 2004. Film and Television after 9/11. Illinois: Southern Illinois University Press. Duncombe, Stephen. 2007. Dream: Re-Imagining Progressive Politics in an Age of Fantasy. New York: New Press. Fischlin, Daniel. 2008. “Terrorism, Security, and Selective Rights in an Age of Retributive Fear.” Review of Education, Pedagogy, and Cultural Studies 30.3–4 (July–October): 253–74. Fischlin, Daniel, and Mark Fortier, eds. 2000. Adaptations of Shakespeare: A Critical Anthology of Plays from the Seventeenth Century to the Present. New York: Routledge. Fischlin, Daniel, and Martha Nandorfy. 2006. The Concise Guide to Global Human Rights. Montreal: Black Rose Books. Fletcher, Bernie. 2012. “‘Argo’: Former Ambassador Ken Taylor Sets the Record Straight.” Toronto Star, 7 October. Accessed 30 March 2013. Garber, Marjorie. 2004. Shakespeare after All. New York: Anchor. Grusin, Richard. 2010. Premediation: Affect and Mediality after 9/11. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Hosenball, Mark. 2013. “U.S. Senate Panel to Examine CIA Contacts with ‘Zero Dark Thirty’ Filmmakers.” Reuters. http://www.reuters.com/ article/2013/01/03/us-usa-ciafilm-idUSBRE90200420130103. Accessed 27 April 2014. Hoskins, Andrew, and Ben O’Loughlin. 2010. War and Media: The Emergence of Diffused War. Cambridge: Polity Press.

Melted into Media: Julie Taymor’s Tempest 151 Kampfner, John. 2003. “The Truth about Jessica Lynch.” Guardian, 15 May. http://www.theguardian.com/world/2003/may/15/iraq.usa2. Accessed 30 March 2013. Marx, Karl. 1852. “The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte.” Marxists.org. http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1852/18th-brumaire/ ch01.htm. Accessed 30 March 2013. Montaigne, Michel de. 2003. Essays of Michel de Montaigne: Book the First. 1877. Trans. Charles Cotton, ed. William Carew Hazilitt. Penn State Electronic Classics Series. http://www2.hn.psu.edu/faculty/jmanis/montaigne/ Montaigne-1.pdf. Accessed 11 May 2012. Pipes, Daniel, and Patrick Clawson. 1995. “Interview with Jesse Helms: Setting the Record Straight.” Daniel Pipes Middle East Forum, March. http:// www.danielpipes.org/6342/jesse-helms-setting-the-record-straight. Accessed 30 March 2013. Rutherford, Paul. 2004. Weapons of Mass Persuasion: Marketing the War against Iraq. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Schmitt, Carl. 1996. Der Begriff des Politischen: Text von 1932 mit einem Vorwort und drei Corollarien (1963). The Concept of the Political. Trans. George Schwab. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Shakespeare, William. 1997. The Tempest. The Norton Shakespeare. Ed. Walter Cohen et al. Sharon, Ariel. 2002. “Sharon’s Words: ‘Israel Stands at a Crossroads.’” Speech. 31 March 2002. Anti-Defamation League Webpage. http://archive.adl.org/ israel/sharon_speech.html. Accessed 23 April 2014. Simpson, David. 2006. 9/11: The Culture of Commemoration. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press. Singh, Anita. 2011. “Dame Helen Mirren Changes Gender of Prospero in The Tempest.” Telegraph, 15 September. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/ film/film-news/7996708/Dame-Helen-Mirren-changes-gender-ofProspero-in-The-Tempest.html. Accessed 15 September 2011. Suskind, Ron. 2004. “Faith, Certainty, and the Presidency of George W. Bush.” New York Times Magazine, 17 October: op/ed. http://www.nytimes.com/ 2004/10/17/magazine/17BUSH.html?_r=0. Accessed 1 January 2008. Versulys, Kristiaan. 2006. “Art Spiegelman’s In the Shadow of No Towers: 9/11 and the Representation of Trauma.” MFS Modern Fiction Studies 52.4 (Winter): 980–1003.

Transgression and Transformation: Mickey B and the Dramaturgy of Adaptation An Interview with Tom Magill

D a n i el Fi sc hl in, T om Magil l , J e s s i c a R i l e y 1. Intermediation and Intermediality in Mickey B Directed and dramaturged by Tom Magill in 2007, Mickey B is a featurelength film adaptation of Shakespeare’s Macbeth developed and performed by maximum-security prisoners inside Maghaberry Prison in Northern Ireland. Initially met with suspicion and local media controversy – before November 2009, public screenings could only take place with prior permission from the Northern Ireland Prison Service (Wray 2011, 340) – Mickey B has gone on to critical acclaim, winning awards such as the 2008 Roger Graef Award for Outstanding Achievement in Film and receiving praise from Kenneth Branagh, Stephen Rea, Ken Loach, and Linda Smith, among others. Mickey B has screened at m ­ ultiple international film festivals and academic conferences, from the EPOS International Film Festival in Israel to the 38th annual conference of the Shakespeare Association of America in Chicago. The film, as the extended interview below makes clear, establishes two contexts for its material production: that activist theatre rooted in Augusto Boal’s Theatre of the Oppressed can be converted into ideologically charged film; and that adaptations in which cultural and media hybrids and crossovers occur can provide rich opportunities for arts-based, c­ ommunity-facing projects seeking to address pressing social issues. Magill is a filmmaker with a background in social theatre as Boal’s official representative in Northern Ireland. A former young offender who served time in England’s Bedford Prison before going on to acclaim as an actor,1 Magill is a longtime prisoners’ rights activist and co-founder of the Educational Shakespeare Company (ESC). Through his work at ESC, Magill encourages people to “explore their own

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stories through the medium of film.” Mickey B, developed collaboratively in a radically dialectic instance of “Prison Shakespeare,”2 adapts Shakespeare’s Macbeth across media and through the dual lenses of the collaborators’ localized, personal experiences and the more global, historical context of the political travails of Northern Ireland in the struggle for decolonization. The film’s prison setting allegorizes the clash of the regional and the global as a key aspect of its ethical compass: the modernized language and local slang, along with the use of prison and gang personalities only accessible within the film’s specific context, effectively resonate with Northern Irish experiences of the extended conflict known as The Troubles. In turn, these resonances generate the potential for the film to mirror and illuminate wider instances of communities facing the challenges and the pernicious effects of colonization and violent conflict, including the struggle to escape stereotypes and reductive readings of complex situations. Mickey B, then, like many of the other adaptations of Shakespeare examined in this book, is situated at the juncture of intermediation and intermediality. Not only does it adapt techniques rooted in Boal’s Theatre of the Oppressed to the medium of film, it also actively represents cultural differences as a key context for its performative, intermedial affect. In this latter sense we understand intermediality to include the crossing of cultural boundaries – English to Irish, putatively “high” to “low” class structures, straight culture to gang culture, and free to incarceral culture – recognizing that the transgression of these boundaries invariably entails multiple forms of intermediation that arise out of difference. Here, as elsewhere in the book, intermediation is understood as a dual process in which media hybridity may also entail cultural crossovers that are generative of diverse, unpredictable, adaptive possibilities. The formal aspects of intermedial crossovers are impossible without the substantive content of the cultures that shape those media into a unique hybrid, an effect we refer to as “differently intermedial.” Michael Darroch pointedly asks, in a cautionary argument about the jargon of intermediality, “In what ways could theatre, as a point of convergence between bodies, tools, buildings, texts, images, voices, sounds and even smells, ever be anything but intermedial?” (2007, 97). The point is well taken and reminds us that the convergence of multiple intermediations, whether in theatre, film, or social media and digital technologies, is a defining aspect of creative undertakings that are profoundly adaptive to the circumstances of production. Theatre and film

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are always already intermedial in that sense. But here we argue for a more expansive notion of intermediality that ties media to context, form to content, terms missing from Darroch’s rundown of the various convergences that inform any theatrical production. When intermediation occurs, as it does in Mickey B, it must be understood through specific historical and cultural contexts that themselves intermediate the media of their transmission. Intermediality, in this sense, is as much about the choice of form and medium as it is about the content that these reflect and mediate. All contribute to the ways in which an adaptation is intermediated into something other than the putative source text. And, in practice, the multiple forms of intermediation that operate on texts via intertexts, nested histories, chance interventions, spectral hauntings, calculated interventions, and so forth all make any one-toone correspondence between a “source” and its others radically reductive of these mediating factors.3 In a telling interview with Sarah Werner, Magill notes: The Canadians got Mickey B. Outside Northern Ireland the film screens differently. People abroad often remark upon the distinctive accents of the prisoners and how different they are to the representations that appear in films about Northern Ireland’s conflict. Audiences abroad don’t have the “cultural capital” to read the films as a local audience would. This means they often miss the parallels in the film – e.g. the assassination of Macduff’s family [in Mickey B] draws heavily upon the assassination of the wife of Irish National Liberation Army leader Dominic McGlinchey, Mary McGlinchey, bathing her two children at home … I think that getting the prison context to fit the story of Macbeth and then being true to the local prison culture has given us a global audience. I have found that people globally are interested in the conflict in Ireland, particularly if they have an experience of conflict within their own society. The film had a very warm reception in both Korea and Israel, where it played with Korean and Hebrew subtitles. The film has also been translated into German and French, and is currently undergoing a Portuguese translation. I think there is something of real interest in the film to colonial cultures or cultures that have been colonised. (Werner 2011, n.p.)

Magill’s comments here are instructive. “Cultural capital” determines the interpretation of media. Translation effects rooted in cultural and historical specificities that are not solely invested in either media or language are a key aspect of adaptation. Adaptation creates meaning

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through these translation effects, which mobilize substantive context, potentially via intermedial forms that further contribute to interpretive pressures that proliferate new, alternative forms of representation. Mickey B’s adaptive techniques, understood in this light, push at the limits of what can be done, intermedially, to Shakespearean source texts. In the film intermediation is associated with an array of contexts – cultural, historical, textual – that collide and hybridize but remain unstable and ambiguous. In rewriting English Shakespeare into the very specific language of prisoners from Northern Ireland, for instance, a remarkable form of cultural intermediation occurs converting the language of the oppressor into the language of the oppressed. Moreover, the film’s political contexts may be said to intermediate, to weigh heavily on and disturb the Shakespearean original, even to “rewright” Shakespeare’s dramaturgy. The effect of that intermediation raises the question of who is doing what to whom. What happens when adaptation inverts the politics of context, in this case from imperial England to (dis)possessed Northern Ireland? Examined in this light, Mickey B’s disruption of the master ­narrative associated with Macbeth can be understood as a result of its border-crossing, medium-shifting techniques and transparent deployment of the interpretive and production contexts out of which it developed. As meaning proliferates through different intermediations, reductive readings are subverted, and more expansive, transformative semiotic potentials are revealed in a process that Peter M. Boenisch describes in the following way: Instead of closing down the multiple semantic potential offered into one coherent meaning, intermedial performances derail the message by communicating gaps, splits and fissures, and broadcasting detours, inconsistencies and contradictions. Therefore, intermedial effects ultimately inflect the attention from the real worlds of the message created by the performance, towards the very reality of media, mediation and the performance itself. The usually transparent viewing conventions of observing media are made palpable, and the workings of mediation exposed. Thus, intermediality manages to stimulate exceptional, disturbing and potentially radical observations, rather than merely communicating or transporting them as messages, as media would traditionally do. (2006, 115)

In short, the unique set of historical and contextual markers that ­determine Mickey B’s intermedial presence in relation to canonic

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Shakespearean productions is resolutely transformative in its production of intermedial transgression. Can maximum-security prisoners “perform” Shakespeare credibly? Can a film be made in severely constrained prison circumstances where even the “literacy” of the performers and their capacity to engage with arts-based practices are at issue? What is productively, transformatively exposed about the performers and their situated, lived contributions to the intermedial product? What is exposed in the source text, whose perceived inviolability is intermedially disrupted in new and revelatory ways? What is the activist potential for the process of this intermedial collision – the processual work of developing the adaptation itself – to transform the participants as well as to expose the “gaps, splits and fissures,” the “inconsistencies and contradictions” that mark how the Shakespeare effect goes out into the world to do its work? Through creative engagement with the Bard, can prisoners transform their abjected, criminal status into something else, potentially becoming positive role models for the ways in which arts-based activism produces real change in the world? Can a film version of such a performance, made under remarkably austere conditions and faced with numerous constraints, do justice not only to the Shakespearean source text but also to the ever-growing canon of intermediated film adaptations of Shakespeare, one in which huge economies are at stake (as the 2011 animation Gnomeo and Juliet, with worldwide revenues reported at close to $200 million, clearly demonstrates)?4 Intermediality invokes, as has already been suggested elsewhere in this book, the notion of travelling – or, in some instances, dissonantly colliding – across mediatized boundaries; often, when we use the term intermedial, it is to describe the rearticulations that are produced by processes in which one medium supplants or is intermixed with another. But the social, political, and historical contexts out of which intermedial forms arise, the specific sites in which processes of adaptation occur, also contribute to the choices that produce intermedial effects. Is it possible to separate the choice of medium from the cultural contexts that inform that medium? Our sense is that it is not, and that Mickey B represents an especially telling instance of how the intermedial crossovers to film from theatre (Boalean, Shakespearean, even the traditionally theatrical genre of “Prison Shakespeare”) resonate within the specific circumstances out of which this intermediation develops. In the case of Mickey B, Shakespeare remade on film is also, inextricably, Shakespeare remade in Northern Ireland, and thus, as Daniel Fischlin

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and Mark Fortier argue, “Even as the Shakespeare effect becomes an instrument of colonial hegemony, it also facilitates a form of transcultural exchange that produces a new literary and performative hybrid” (2000, 13). As Mickey B demonstrates, both cross-media and cross-­ cultural intermediality can be seen to operate simultaneously, even inextricably. Both forms of intermediation represent compelling ways in which adaptation needs to be understood as a construction that is fundamentally protean. How this expanded sense of the intermedial affect reconstitutes meaning is a key factor in thinking through the limits of what can be done to Shakespeare in the name of adaptation, especially in a global, digital age marked by increasingly dense modes of intermedial representation. 2. Dialectical Dramaturgy: Intermediality and Mutual Transformation Mickey B’s complex roots in the history of Northern Ireland and the incarceral system that has arisen to address paramilitary violence between Republican and Loyalist forces make it inevitably a profoundly intermediated text. With his origins in a Loyalist upbringing that was fundamentally reshaped by his own experiences in prison – particularly the encounters with IRA hunger strikers that changed his “hate” to “compassion” – the unique cultural and political background that Magill brings to the work of adaptation as both dramaturge and director cannot be left out of the narrative of how cultural difference is mediated in Mickey B. The film quite literally stages intermediation via arts-based learning practices as one nuanced response to violence and its aftermath. The prisoners’ linguistic and dramaturgical interventions via the adaptation of Shakespeare’s source text unleash considerable energy in the film, an energy that speaks back to the creators’ own Northern Irish and prison contexts, to a broader, global audience, and to received assumptions about Shakespeare’s source text. Indeed, while the interview below demonstrates Magill’s desire to make the “variety of knowledge” he finds in Shakespeare’s works “accessible,” it is also evident – and essential – that his desire to unlock for others the transformative potential he found in his own experiences of reading and playing Shakespeare’s drama is bound up in a transgressive, revisionist, dialectical imperative. As Magill puts it, the aim of his work (in adapting Mickey B and in the ESC’s next planned project, an adaptation of The Tempest entitled Prospero’s Prison) is to “challenge

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the conventions” associated with “enclosed, hermetically sealed” treatments of Shakespeare; for Magill, access to Shakespeare’s plays is, significantly, linked to the “opportunity to participate with the text.” Participation with the source text lies at the core of Magill’s dramaturgical process, highlighting an impulse not only to learn from the play but also to speak back to it, to be transformed but also to enact transformation in a dialectical exchange that arises out of both his admiration for Shakespeare and his commitment to the social, political, and cultural situatedness of his production context. The wisdom Magill perceives in the works of Shakespeare isn’t static, inviolable, or sacred. Rather, it is generative, dynamic, and adaptable. Magill’s reverence for Shakespeare doesn’t hinder the egalitarian, collaborative imperative of his development process. Rather, the dynamic of questioning, of mutual transformation, that marks his Boalean methodology extends to the dialectic with the Bard that Mickey B’s linguistic and dramaturgical innovations enact. As Magill tells us, many key reimaginings of the source text arose out of the dynamics of both the development process and its differently intermedial contexts. Reimagining the Witches as Bookies, for instance, arose directly from insights offered by Magill’s collaborators. Integrating their own personal, lived experiences into the adaptation of ­Shakespeare’s Macbeth, and thus working across historical and cultural constraints, this rescripting is also an act of interpretation, speaking back to and illuminating the source text even as it transposes and anchors the adaptation in its cultural context. Likewise, the prisoners’ collaborative input at the level of the project’s adaptation into film, as this interview makes clear, arose out of their direct experiences, their own readings of media culture, their own histories and perception of contemporary resonances. Indeed the dramaturgical relevance of these contexts extends even to the minute specificities of some of the film’s most powerful sound and visual effects. The depiction of the murder of Duncan, for example, which drew directly on the prisoners’ desire to generate realistic sounds and images that resonated with their own lived experiences of violence, provides a clear illustration of how this film evolved out of the intermedial transposition from theatrical tradition (Shakespeare places the murder offstage) to cinematic convention (with its own traditions of graphic depiction of violence), but also from lived experience to fictional representation. The intervention arose, as Magill explains, out of the differently intermedial application to the source text of the prisoner-actors’

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lived experience of sectarian and gang violence in Northern Ireland. The specific cultural context feeding into what is shown in the film determines non-linguistic meaning at the level of sound and image, inflecting the source text in unpredictable yet compelling ways. Censorship too – and the inherent potential, in transgressive intermediality, to operate productively against restrictions, within the Boenischian “gaps” and “fissures” of meaning that intermediality generates – is clearly a key context that informs the adaptation of the source text in Mickey B. In the interview, Magill provides a stark sense, for ­example, of the restrictions imposed by the prison on the script development process, specifically the restrictions that arose out of the potential contemporary, local resonance of Ladyboy’s suicide. Here, the triumph of Mickey B over the censors may be seen as a success jointly bolstered by the power of the film medium and of the Shakespeare ­effect. As Magill notes, the inclusion of the suicide was defended in the face of censorship on the grounds of its centrality to the original – Shakespeare’s revered source text. Beyond this, the intermediality of the project allowed for further evasion of censorship, with the cinematography actually generating a clearer sense of the contemporary relevance of the suicide scene. As Ramona Wray observes in her analysis of the film, “At the moment of Ladyboy/Lady Macbeth’s suicide, Mickey B is insistently dialogic. Its Shakespearean frames of reference highlight precisely the concerns the institution has endeavored to repress” (2011, 359). That the scene plays out in larger contexts relating to prison suicides generally is a chilling reminder of the power of art to replay and disrupt key tropes associated with issues of crime and punishment that challenge our shared humanity. In the specific contexts of Northern Ireland’s prison system, the scene is especially disturbing and resonant. A 2010–11 report by Pauline McCabe, the Prisoner Ombudsman for Northern Ireland, notes that of the “29 deaths in Northern Ireland prisons since September 2005” (2011, 18), ten were by suicide, the second highest killer of prisoners after natural causes and illness (of which there were twelve). Sixteen of the total number of deaths occurred in  Maghaberry Prison, the location for the filming of Mickey B. The Ombudsman’s report identified “gaps in the Self Harm and Suicide Policy” (20) in Northern Ireland and was especially specific about systemic failures in relation to the case of Colin Bell, a vulnerable prisoner who in 2008 committed suicide while detained at Maghaberry.5 The return of the repressed narrative of suicide via Mickey B’s insistent need

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to confront difficult prison realities heightens the dialectic of the film between source and adaptation, and between text and context. The film engages an adaptive process that is mutually transformative, with the disempowered and voiceless being given intermedial presence even as that presence transforms the Shakespearean source in ways that resonate beyond its original contexts. A considerable set of dialectic dramaturgical innovations arise in connection to the film’s dénouement. In Mickey B, Malcolm’s ascension is reimagined as a conditional victory, dependent upon his concession of control of the jail to the “screws” and “buckets” (prison warders and prison guards), whose help he requires to defeat Mickey B and whose aid must be repaid with the reinstatement of state representatives in the jail and the displacement of the prisoners (himself, to some extent, included) from their previous position of absolute control over the wings. Closural shots, establishing the prisoners’ confinement to their cells and showing Malcolm playing chess with the “screws,” starkly remind viewers of the new disposition of powers after the death of Mickey B. Malcolm’s realpolitik has already created new alignments, new potential injustices, and new prospects for further tragedy. By highlighting the re-emergence of the oppressive custodial figures, wrenching control out of the hands of the prisoners, and reinstating the forces of the state hegemons in “Birnham” jail, Malcolm’s ascendance, often read in the source text as unquestionably restorative, offers instead, in Mickey B, a more complicated picture of the bleak reality – lived experientially by so many of the film’s collaborators – of prison life. The film’s ending is revisionist also in the definitive emphasis Magill places on the disproportionate suffering of the socially subordinate Duffer. Cinematic emphasis, in the final moments of Mickey B, on Duffer’s visible disillusionment and anger in response both to his terrible loss and to the concessions made by Malcolm in the film’s revised ending, offer what Magill speaks of in the interview below as an chance to address Macduff/Duffer’s oppression. Further, this pointed recognition of Duffer’s suffering and resentment establishes the sense of an ongoing cycle of retributive violence that Magill envisions beyond the film’s final moments. Once again, this definitive interpretive response to latent potential in Shakespeare’s ending clearly arises out of the film’s Northern Irish and prison contexts, and out of the class consciousness that informs not only Magill’s reading of Macbeth but also his practice in developing Mickey B. Indeed, Magill’s renovated dénouement reflects the imperative behind the work as process: a belief in

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the cyclical, self-perpetuating nature of violence without reflection, a  problem for which he sees creative acts of self-expression and self-­ reflection as an essential countermeasure. The establishment of violent retribution as a cycle that extends beyond and disrupts the closure of Mickey B may be understood, then, like Magill’s other dramaturgical interventions into Macbeth’s ending, to enact a critique or dialectic response not just to the source text – an interpretive intervention – but also to the material context of the film’s production, producing a politically and culturally intermedial intervention as well. Finally, as we note above, Mickey B has come to speak widely, across cultural and geographical boundaries. This despite the barriers presented by the transposition of the play’s language into the parlance of Northern Irish prisoners, a choice that Magill describes in our interview as emerging from a by-and-for-prisoners adaptive logic. If the language of the prison setting presents a barrier to wider spectatorship (partially mitigated by the inclusion of subtitles), it is worth noting that the logic of adaptation informing Mickey B also included more explicitly reception-oriented modifications of the source text, such as the ­innovative addition of a choric narrator in the character of Steeky. The Steeky character, as Magill explains below, was originally conceived as a sort of ferryman, easing the passage of spectators across the intermedial border and into the prison world of both the film’s production and fictional setting. Once again, this dramaturgical intervention arises in response to the project’s intermedial imperatives and ultimately engages dialectically with both the source text and the sociopolitical context of the film’s production. Notably, Wray has identified Steeky as an analogue of the Porter in Macbeth (2011, 356). In fact, Shakespeare’s Porter may be conceived as split into two characters in Mickey B: Steeky and Peeper. Serving as the “minder” of Mickey B’s cell block, Peeper has a much more limited role that may be understood to correspond with the Porter’s function as the keeper of the castle gate in the Macbeth plot. What Wray’s alignment of the Porter with the choric Steeky productively highlights, however, is the position of privilege within which Steeky-as-narrator uniquely operates. The dynamic of privileged proximity between character and audience that scholars have identified with the Porter in his single scene in Macbeth is uniquely generative of a liminal point of ­access and interactivity between the real world of the spectator and the  fictional world represented on stage (or, in the case of Mickey B, on screen).6 Significantly, the transposition of this position of privilege,

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and its attendant influence on reception, to the character of Steeky in Mickey B expands the presence of the liminal figure and his shaping influence on audience response. Originally conceived as an intermedial intermediary, Steeky actually extends beyond his ostensible spectator-ferrying function in the film’s opening and closing moments. In a moment of considerable significance to the film’s interpretive affect, Steeky’s mediating presence also asserts itself in the midst of the film, when he appears, following Mickey B’s vengeful pronouncement, “Duffer, you’re fucked,” in the moments immediately preceding the murder of Duffer’s family. An omniscient narrator here more than ever, Steeky helps shape spectatorial response to the subsequent action: His face registers remorse as we transition into the murder scene and his utterance, “some pay more than others,” reinforces Magill’s class-conscious reading of Shakespeare’s Macduff. Some do indeed pay more than their fair share. Thus the film’s narrator, initially arising in response to the culturally intermedial challenges of the film’s reception by a wider, non-prisoner audience, also contributes to the communication of the film’s political, contextual, dialectic response to Shakespeare, both cinematically (through the affective closeup on his face) and textually (through the articulation of Magill’s take on Macduff via Steeky’s pronouncement). If Magill and his collaborators have, as he states below, “added another character to Shakespeare,” this addition is only one of many revisions – even transgressions – that productively adapt the source text, speaking back to Shakespeare and to the culture out of which their creative project emerges. In what follows, then, Magill provides in-depth answers to a range of questions that address Mickey B’s intermedial politics, his own dramaturgical strategies in negotiating the transition from stage (or page) to film, and the broad range of local and global circumstances that make Mickey B an exemplar for the ways in which Shakespearean adaptation, understood in the contexts of its production, can generate new ways of seeing ourselves. These contexts, when deployed cannily, as they are in Mickey B, generate mutually transformative forms of intermediation. And they heighten how the unsettled and unsettling dialogue between source text and adaptation creates uniquely hybridized meanings, exposing the productive tension that is generated by speaking against the grain of a tradition in which fidelity to the source and its authenticity is always in question, always amenable to renegotiation.

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3. Incarcerating Macbeth: Liberating Shakespeare in Prison7 DF: Can you discuss how you came to your relationship with Shakespeare? TM: I was in a YP Centre (a young prisoners’ centre) and I had a choice about whether to scrub floors or do education. And I said, “Okay, I’ll do the education.” I did my first exams in prison. I did English language, English literature, and Greek literature in translation in prison. And then I was looking – they had a little cupboard, and that was the library – and I looked in it on a Friday. I wanted something to read over the weekend, and I’d read most of the stuff in there – Conrad, Dickens, Balzac, Tolstoy, Zola, Dostoyevsky, Joyce – I just went through it and read as much as I could.    But then I picked up this little Penguin thing and it was marked differently and I said, “What’s this?” and the teacher said, “That’s Shakespeare. You won’t be able to read Shakespeare” and I said, “Who fucking won’t.” So I took it away. And it was Othello and I read it over the weekend. It gave me a headache – I’m totally serious about that, because I was like, “What does this mean?” – but within that text I recognized this character, Iago. And I thought, “I know you, I’ve met you, I know this character.” I recognized so much in terms of the jealousy and what’s motivating Iago and that’s what I understood, because I’d been that jealous and it had landed me in a lot of problems. And I thought, “Whoa, you can actually learn about yourself through reading these books.” So that’s where it started. And I thought, “I’m going to master this.”    Years later a drama teacher said, “I want to do Shakespeare” and I said, “Yeah, I’ve read Shakespeare.” He said, “I want to do Hamlet and we want you to play Hamlet” and I said, “You want me to play Hamlet? Okay, I’ll try.” And I learned so much from doing it. When you get into Shakespeare, it opens up such a world inside of you that you can learn about yourself by playing these characters and explore yourself, learn more about yourself and other people – but essentially about yourself – which is so liberating. Sometimes, the power of the words would trigger something in me and I would weep. And it was a huge release for me. I realized the power of good writing and I wanted to be a writer. I wanted to write meaningfully, to bring about similar releases for other people.

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JR: Why Macbeth? What process did you use to make the decision about which Shakespeare play to adapt? Was that process collaborative? TM: We had a process in the prison called “pitching sessions” where once a month anyone in the drama group could sit on a chair at the end of the room and pitch an idea for a new project for two minutes. Then the group would debate the pros and cons of the pitch and it would get buy-in or not through consensus. I pitched Macbeth in this way and there was hostility as soon as I said Shakespeare. But I pushed through it and gave them a short synopsis of the Macbeth story. They liked the story and the themes and began to debate it working in a prison culture. JR: In adapting Macbeth to Mickey B, how did the conditions of ­production – working in a prison context as well in the medium of film – contribute to the interpretive choices you made in response to ambiguities in Shakespeare’s text? In Ladyboy, for example, you offer an interpretation of Lady Macbeth as the driving force towards violence, working in collusion with the Witches/ Bookies. How did this decision (or other interpretative choices, such as the reading of the Witches as Bookies rather than as more ambiguous agents of fate) come about? TM: Initially we had talked about doing Mickey B as a theatre piece for funding reasons but it was quickly discounted. For me, theatre is about delayed gratification and film is about instant gratification. Prison culture is a culture of instant gratification – violence, drugs, and so forth.    In theatre you delay your gratification through the rehearsal process until you have the pleasure of a live audience giving you feedback for your performance. In film you get instant feedback from the director and from watching yourself on the playback monitor. Film is also a permanent record of your performance – you can hold it in your hand and replay it. Theatre, after the performance, is memories, ephemera, reviews, and illusory impressions.    The conditions of production in the prison and also in postconflict Northern Ireland contributed enormously to the interpretative choices I made in response to the ambiguities in Shakespeare’s text. In relation to the Witches, I didn’t have an answer to the problem of how to represent them. I posed it as a problem to the cast and they came up with the Bookies. I loved

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the idea. Changing the Witches to Bookies fit perfectly for me, both in a prison context and in a Northern Irish context.    Instead of ambiguous potential agents of fate driving the action we have an anonymous élite making money from collusion and insider dealing. That is a much better fit, both for me and for the prisoners who suggested the idea, in terms of how the world here actually works. There’s a popular phrase that circulates around the jail: “Collusion is not an illusion.” (Understood locally as a reference to alleged collusion between state security forces and Loyalist paramilitaries in assassinating Republican targets.) And then with the Bookies in place, the next question was “Who is colluding with them and why?”    I got the idea of linking Lady Macbeth and the Witches from Michael Bogdanov, the British theatre director associated with the English Shakespeare Company and someone known for his work with new plays, adaptations, and modern reinterpretations of Shakespeare. When I worked with Michael as his assistant director, he was talking about doubling parts for a Macbeth production and Hecate and Lady Macbeth was one possibility mooted for such a doubling. I liked his idea of joining those forces together and I stored the idea for a later date. For me Lady Macbeth is the initial driving force of the Macbeth story. She pulls the strings and is in control. That is until the Macduff family murders, which for her is a bridge too far. It sends her over the edge into madness and suicide. That’s how I read it.    Casting Lady Macbeth was a problem initially. Early on I approached a female prison officer but she declined the offer to get involved in the film. There are no female prisoners in the jail so my options were limited. I pitched the idea of Ladyboy as Macbeth’s “jail bitch” to the group and they approved. It came from my own experience as a young prisoner, witnessing an obviously gay young man’s survival strategy when he was introduced into our prison wing. He traded sexual favours for protection from the toughest guy on our wing and became his “jail bitch.” Incidentally, this tough guy was also illiterate and I used to trade my literacy skills, reading and writing his letters for tobacco and food perks. This was my first experience of realizing that applied knowledge is power.    Making Ladyboy a “bitch” was partly determined, then, by the conditions of production as well as my reading of the Macbeth text

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in multiple contexts related to my own personal history. Jason, the actor who plays Ladyboy in Mickey B, is a heterosexual man and is, in his own words, “confident enough in my own sexual identity to wear a dress.” Jason and I both agreed that in order to survive in that tough macho world she [Lady Macbeth] would have to be “tougher than the best.” So that’s what motivates her to drive the action to claim the number one slot. She initiates the Duncan murder and overlooks the Banquo killing. But the massacre of Macduff’s family is too much for her. How I see her is with a tough exterior as the “queen of hate,”8 but soft inside. Her empathy and humanity won’t let her stomach the Macduff massacre and she goes insane with the guilt that she, ultimately, was its cause. So she might appear as an unequivocal bitch but when you scratch the surface you find a humane and empathetic person who takes her life because she cannot live with the knowledge of her mistakes. JR: The film certainly parallels many elements of plot, character, and theme drawn from Macbeth but it also features some significant departures from or additions to Shakespeare’s play. One example is the ending; another is the inclusion of a narrator in the character of Steeky. I wonder if you could tell us a little more about these dramaturgical innovations? TM: Let’s start with the end first. I began thinking about Macduff, and how Macduff loses everything. He pays the biggest price. And yes it’s great that Malcolm is crowned at Scone but no big deal as far as Macduff is concerned. And I thought, “Malcolm has used this guy to get what he wants, and Macduff is the one who pays the price.” And so for me it was about recognizing and identifying with the people who have suffered the most. I wanted to give Macduff that opportunity to say something. And for me, what I’ve seen about violence is that it is cyclical. Ruthless ambition ends in destruction. There’s the moral – that’s what I take from Macbeth. And if that’s true for the Macbeth story then it’ll be true for Malcolm.    In relation to the narrator of the film, I thought it’s asking quite a lot of people to get straight into this story if audiences can’t identify with someone immediately. Will they identify with Macbeth? No, they won’t, because Davey, who plays Mickey B, is a big, tough, hard guy. Will they identify with any of the prisoners? What about creating a character who is not involved but

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who is almost like a chorus? So, the Steeky character is similar to a chorus, reflecting on the action. He was an afterthought – so we added another character to Shakespeare’s play as part of our adaptation process and to make the alien environment in which we set the play more accessible. DF: And Steeky means what? TM: It means Shakey – because he’s got the shakes. DF: How “Shake”-spearean! JR: The question of access we’ve been touching on here raises the issue of language in the film as well – not only the renovation of Shakespeare’s language, with a few notable lines from Shakespeare retained, but also the choice to update the language through the quotidian speech of the prisoners. The inclusion of subtitles in the film points to the limitations of access to outsiders that this choice necessarily creates. The linguistic innovation of this adaptation, however, is also essential to the politics of the film, to its situatedness in the prison context, and especially in the context of Northern Ireland.    At the same time, the choice to employ what one scholar has called “an often-impenetrable form of thieves’ cant” has been celebrated as unique in Shakespeare adaptations that update the language of the plays – resulting in a “naturalization of Shakespearean language through the back door” – and praised as “differently literate, but literary” (Cartelli 2010, 32, 28).9 I wonder if you could comment on the imperatives that directed the choices you made with language in adapting Macbeth to Mickey B, including the lines from Shakespeare you opted to retain? TM: The language in Mickey B, as I’ve said elsewhere, is colloquial and rooted in the culture of Belfast prison slang. That language is sharp and sparse. Some people have said “rich and poetic.” Working with Bogdanov taught me that Shakespeare requires updating and translating to be meaningful and relevant to an audience today, particularly for spectators not familiar with Shakespeare. I wanted to see if Shakespeare was relevant to a contemporary prison culture. My conclusion after making Mickey B is a resounding yes: Shakespeare is relevant to a prison culture today – if, that is, we follow Bogdanov’s advice and update and translate him.    For me, the Prison has replaced the Tavern. When I think of Falstaff today I think of him in prison. That’s why I think there

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is so much relevance and scope in Prison Shakespeare. Macbeth is a murderer. Scotland is a fortress. Both contexts adapt easily to prison culture.    The film is set in a prison in Northern Ireland and clearly resonates with key aspects of the Troubles.10 The characters in the film have come through the conflict and now they are in a postceasefire society. New allegiances are being formed; new enemies are on the horizon. The recent influx of East European labour has spawned a new battle with “The Cossacks” in a drug turf war. Former Republican and Loyalist adversaries are re-forming into one crew to resist the new “foreign” enemy.   Mickey B was made primarily for a prison audience. So an imperative that directed me in the choice of language used in the ­adaptation from Macbeth to Mickey B was that the language must be familiar and accessible to our prison audience. Using prison slang and Belfast colloquialisms was totally in keeping with that choice. It was our way to reappropriate Shakespeare and make him our own. So from the start it was our aim to naturalize and understand his language in our own working-class colloquial terms, to make what was strange and literary familiar and credible in our own terms – not in scholarly, academic terms.    When we did keep original lines it was a result of actors’ requests. During the rehearsal process I remember Anto, the actor who plays Satan, asking what the original line was at the point where he has to tell Mickey B that Ladyboy is dead. I told him the line – “The Queen, my lord, is dead” (5.5.16) – and he asked if he could try saying it. And I said of course. So he did. He really liked the line and asked could he keep it. We mulled over the pros and cons. Mickey B was a drug “lord,” Anto argued, so the line could be read in that punning context that mixes the honorifics of the prison with the court. I was happy to include the original line as I think it adds weight to the scene. Davey, who plays Mickey B, was curious what Macbeth’s original answer was – “She should have died hereafter” (5.5.17). He tried it and we liked it and kept it too. So the hybrid language of the film developed quite organically during the rehearsal process. The result could be seen as a “naturalization of Shakespearean language through the back door.”    Remember though that we made Mickey B primarily for ourselves. It’s ironic that our localized take on Macbeth is acquiring

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a global audience. We had no idea that Mickey B would ever see the light of day outside the prison gates. We subtitled the film in English because theatre studies postgraduate students from New York University, who were working with ESC as part of their Summer Studies Programme, could not understand the accents of the men in the film. The subtitles do offer a point of access to outsiders and are essential to the understanding of the politics and location of the film in a Northern Irish jail.    Maximum-security prisons operate their security systems on gathering information through surveillance. The eyeball and spy-ball cameras that operate 24/7/365 recording conversations, gestures, and groupings would have been the envy of Jeremy Bentham and his crude Panopticon. Prisoners develop their own jail discourse of speech and behaviour to evade this security surveillance. In Long Kesh (Maze prison) Provisional IRA prisoners used the Irish language to converse with each other and plan their resistance and escape from the surveillance of their Englishspeaking jailers.    So it makes me smile when I read a phrase like “impenetrable thieves’ cant” because the author is correct. The intention is to scramble meaning, to include those who are included and exclude those who are excluded. If we were to pause for a moment and replace the word “thieves” with “cotton-pickers” or “slaves,” we can begin to understand the motivation to include/exclude racially, historically, and culturally. The “impenetrable thieves’ cant” can then be understood as a form of Creole – the so-called degenerate language of indentured slaves (prisoners) to evade the understanding of their colonial masters (jailers).11    Ultimately you need to remember that Mickey B is an unashamedly working-class Prison Shakespeare adaptation, set in post-conflict Northern Ireland for an audience of fellow prisoners. In their own words, they are the “second-class citizens,” the “scumbags, maggots, and hoods” of society. Their language is “differently literate” but not “literary.” It provides a glimpse into another world with different values and different codes. I think that’s part of the fascination with the film for people who have no experience of crime or prison culture. Our intention in making the film was to include those who had never seen or heard of Shakespeare or Macbeth. Mickey B is our underclass Macbeth, based on our experience of the Tavern and the Criminal Court.

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DF: It’s clear that one of the innovative things Mickey B does is to think in terms of what cultural critic Boaventura de Sousa Santos calls an ecology of knowledges. That is, Mickey B imagines and respects forms of knowledge that exist outside of dominant discourses, beyond what de Sousa Santos calls the abyssal line that divides hegemony from margin. Can you talk about how the film’s politics works to break down barriers between cultures determined by class and privilege (and even religion)? TM: Prison Shakespeare is a contradiction in terms. The two should not be together: Shakespeare and prisoners, the best and the worst, the highest and the lowest. Shakespeare is known and remembered for the best things he did in his life – writing those amazing plays. Prisoners are known for the worst thing they have ever done in their lives – committing the crimes for which they have been imprisoned.    Yet the characters that Shakespeare writes about are murderers, rapists, thieves, child-killers, and cannibals. The people who represent those characters on stage and in film are, by and large, the educated élite – those with the least experience of violence, murder, and so forth. So putting prisoners together with Shakespeare is not as strange as it first seems because prisoners have the experience necessary to understand the motivations driving the roles. And if we learn how to value and respect that experience then we can use it to excellent effect in performance and beyond.    As a young actor trying to make my way in this world, especially with my prison past, this was a hard contradiction to get my head around. At the beginning I denied my experience and my criminal past. Then the more parts I played the more I realized that I could draw upon it as a strength. My first-hand experience of violence and imprisonment was my unique selling point and I began to respect it and stopped being ashamed of it. It took me a long time to reach this point of being comfortable in my own skin and owning up to my being a former prisoner.    But when I did, I found a new kind of liberation – the liberation of not having to pretend to be someone else. When I look around me today at the sickness, particularly around mental health, what I see is people not being themselves. They are afraid to tell other people who they really are, for fear of not being good enough or for fear of being rejected. My note to the prisoners playing the characters in Mickey B was “You know this story, be yourself, play to your strengths.” And when they realized that was what I

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wanted, they trusted me and played themselves. Seeing their performances played back on the screen further convinced them that being honest and truthful was the road to their best performance.    This collision of high Shakespearean culture with prison culture produces new knowledge, new insights, new representations and new sounds – of people saying those words, Shakespeare’s words, who have never said them before or never said them in this way before. I remember a woman in Israel telling me that I had desecrated Shakespeare. I told her, “Don’t worry, the original copy of Macbeth is still there, I didn’t burn it, I simply made it accessible to another class of people who have been excluded from it previously.” She wasn’t convinced. But then I had another Israeli, a professor, tell me, “I thought I knew Macbeth, as a scholar, but your film has helped me to see it differently. And now I’ll never be able to see it quite the same again.” This is new knowledge brought about by prisoners interpreting Shakespeare through their own experiences. It links to Bogdanov’s description of Mickey B as “Stunning Shakespeare forged from the scrapheap of society.” The scrapheap can still produce new knowledge and that may be terrifying to some. What society has written off or thrown onto the scrapheap of the prisons and mental hospitals can produce an interpretation of Macbeth that changes how an Israeli professor understands the text. This is how the politics of the film breaks down the barriers between cultures determined by class and privilege.    In terms of religion, the Mickey B cast included a motley crew of former Loyalist and former Republican prisoners from the UDA (Ulster Defence Association), UFF (Ulster Freedom Fighters), and the INLA (Irish National Liberation Army) – as well as ODCs (Ordinary Decent Criminals). This was Margaret Thatcher’s controversial term for non-political prisoners who were not opposing the status quo by attempting to blow up Parliament or the Cabinet, and were simply reinforcing capitalist values by robbing and stealing. As the actor who played Horse, one of the Skagheads12 in the film, reflects in the documentary, “Well you’ve got Protestants and Catholics who a couple of years ago wouldn’t have worked together and are now getting on as happy as Larry as the saying goes.” DF: Can you talk about the challenges you faced in making the film from an intermedial perspective? The film clearly called on you as a director to work with multiple media in ways that were

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challenging – from the restrictions imposed by prison authorities, to the film aesthetic you chose to work with, to the way in which the film gets very close to being theatrical (in terms of its intimacy) while still remaining a film.    We understand for instance that although Mickey B was completed in 2007, the Northern Ireland Office, through the Northern Ireland Prison Service, restricted the film being shown or distributed within the UK and Republic of Ireland without their prior consent for three years after its completion. So there are all sorts of ways in which the film challenges conventional notions of media and faced all sorts of challenges, from constraints during its making to post-production interdiction. Can you discuss these? TM: Mickey B is the first feature film I’ve directed and it was a huge learning process for me. The challenges we faced were immense. Certain influential figures within the prison regime held strong religious beliefs and did not approve of “bad language.” We spent one session cutting the “fucks” from the script. The cast was so annoyed at this censorship that they threatened to pull out of the project. Even one of the senior prison officers questioned the regime’s concerns, saying: “When was the last time they were on the landings? Do they not realize that prisoners swear?”    There were also issues around drug references. Originally we had the bookies smoking a lot of “blow” (marijuana), the spoils of their winnings. But these scenes were cut. The regime’s fear, I suspect, was that a filmic representation of a drug-fuelled, gangstructured jail, with prisoners jockeying for control.    There were also issues around the suicide scene in the film and suggestions that this be cut. When we stated that Lady Macbeth’s suicide was an essential part of the Macbeth story, the scene was reluctantly kept, but with the proviso that we didn’t dwell on the suicide or show where the noose was attached. I’m guessing the sensitivities were due to the growing number of suicides in Maghaberry Prison.    The cast was mostly lifers or long-term prisoners; many were on a basic regime. The basic, standard, and enhanced regime operates on doling out privileges that are dependent upon compliance with the rules. Essentially it is a divide-and-rule strategy to break up prisoner solidarity. Many of the cast in Mickey B were lifers on basic – that is, non-conforming prisoners not involved in prison work or education.

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   Yet another challenge we faced was prisoners not getting over to the education block on rehearsal days. Sometimes prisoners were told, “The class is cancelled today, they don’t need you,” when that was not the case. This delayed and held up our rehearsals. But it built an incredible resilience in the group. One thing I’ve learned as a consequence is to work with what you have. This was only one of a range of delaying mechanisms that the group had to overcome in order to complete the project.    The workshop where we did the filming was next to the dog compound. Some people took great delight in rattling the cages of the Alsatian guard dogs whenever we were filming in order to disrupt our work. This sound was totally beyond our control so we had a problem. I walked around the dog compound with Angus, the cinematographer, and decided to film the dogs barking so we could show where the source of the sound was coming from. This is why there are so many references to dogs barking throughout the film. Some people read the dogs as a metaphor for aggression and violence but their presence is there from necessity.    In terms of how the film aesthetic challenges conventional notions of media, I think that difference is born from my own class background and prison experience. Intermediality for me has as much to do with cultural collisions as it does with hybridized media. First of all most prison documentaries are fixated upon the crimes that prisoners have committed and have some kind of redemption narrative. The Making of Mickey B documentary focuses on what making the film means to the people involved. Personally, I am more interested in what people can do as opposed to what they have done. In the Growing Up with Violence documentary, I showed prisoners as victims talking about the violence that had been inflicted upon them as a challenge to conventional notions of media representation of prisoners solely as perpetrators.    As far as intermediality is concerned, I started work in the theatre as an actor. Moving into film was a real challenge for me as someone with a theatre background. When I first started making short films, for instance, I was shooting everything in wide shots, like a theatre set. And then I learned through many mistakes the power of close-ups. Originally we were going to shoot Mickey B in an actual working prison wing. But that offer was withdrawn at a later stage and we had to construct two cells in a disused

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tailor’s workshop in the prison. So the reason for using so many close-ups is again practical. We had to shoot tight in order to disguise the poverty of our circumstances.    So, it wasn’t as if I was making aesthetic choices from an infinite palette of possibilities. I was doing the best I could with what I had. I also wanted to give people who have not been to prison an experience of what prison is like. So the coldness from the blue camera filters and the strange mixture of isolation and enforced interaction is what I tried to convey. To survive in prison you need to belong in order to find protection. You need to use whatever skills or abilities you have to do this. For Ladyboy that is her power of influence and her sexuality, for Mickey B it is his muscle and his reputation. 4. Progressive Shakespeare, Boalean Adaptation, and the Politics of Intermediation DF: The progressive, activist work of the film extends far beyond the film itself, and what makes this so fascinating is that the medium is a starting point for imagining other realities that are hinted at in the film and its peripheral materials. With some distance now on the project, what has the film taught you about the political and social uses of adapting Shakespeare in such a charged and challenging intermedial context? TM: When I pitched the idea of doing a modern adaptation of Macbeth, the prison authorities had had no objections to the text or that it was Shakespeare. I suspect they thought that Macbeth was a dead safe, reliable bet. It was only in retrospect that they realized the significance of what had been created. I find it incredibly uplifting, as do the prisoners who were involved in creating the film, that so many people from all over the world find meaning in the film and identify with it.    Making the film has taught me the importance of following your vision even when the battle to do so is against overwhelming odds. It’s also taught me that creativity and arts education can transform a maximum-security prison into a film set for six weeks. It’s taught me that even the most recalcitrant prisoners, when given the opportunity to participate, can create something valuable of which they can be proud. It’s reaffirmed to me that we recreate ourselves through the process of artistic creation. It’s

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taught me that when people are creative they are much less likely to be violent. We had no violent incidents whatsoever during our six-week shoot. JR: The grammar of film contributes considerably to interpretive choices made and conveyed by Mickey B. You’ve noted elsewhere that for the prisoners who were your collaborators on this project, film is a crucial art form to which they had access, and with which they were routinely and thoughtfully engaged.13 Can you talk a bit about the dramaturgical impact of the inmates’ cinematic literacy? How did it contribute to the development of the script (its structure, plot, characters, dialogue) or to its realization in production (stylistic choices, camerawork)? TM: If you want to open an animated discussion with a group of prisoners ask them what their favourite film is. The medium of film is the medium that prisoners are most literate in. Film is not premised upon literacy, hence its popularity as a medium in prisons. There are a huge percentage of illiterate prisoners. For many, books are out of their reach. Film fills the gap. Film is also “cool” as a medium. Prisoners like talking about films. Films are a great way of passing time. You can get films from the prison library to escape for two hours of your day.    Hollywood films are the staple diet of prison viewing and common reference points in discussing plot and character comparisons. Not that we had much time to do this given our short rehearsal period. There was also consensus that films about Northern Ireland were generally “shite” and that the cast wanted to make a film that was “different” and “real” (authentic). So you could say that the dramaturgical impact of their cinematic literacy contributed to the development of the script in an oppositional manner. They wanted something completely different from what had been before.    We didn’t consciously choose a cinematic style. Instead the style evolved as we adjusted to the restrictions imposed on us by the conditions of production. But we talked with the group about prison films that inform the Mickey B project: The Shawshank Redemption was a favourite. Don Siegel’s Escape from Alcatraz was also popular. The reason for their popularity, in my view, is both films show how successful escapes from the respective jails are carried out. Sidney Lumet’s The Hill provided material for discussion around representations of oppression and resistance

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within a British army camp prison. Sam, who played Duncan, also recommended the book Animal Factory by Ed Bunker as source material to inform the project. Many of the guys knew the book and spoke highly of it because it was written from Bunker’s first-hand experience.   Later, after Mickey B, I watched the film Animal Factory (2000) directed by Steve Buscemi and was impressed by the production. I thought after seeing it that audiences would think that I got the Ladyboy “jail bitch” idea from this film – but that was not the case.    During the rehearsed reading of Mickey B in the chapel of Maghaberry prison – a reading that included postgraduate students from NYU’s Steinhardt School of Education – we had a visit from the US Consulate in Belfast. During a break in the reading, a representative from the Consulate shook Davey’s hand (Mickey B) and said his performance reminded her of an American actor, James Gandolfini, who played Tony Soprano on the television show The Sopranos.   The Sopranos was screening around that time and it was a favourite show amongst the prison population. Tony Soprano – the acting boss who becomes the street boss and finally the captain of his own crew – in many ways shares a similar journey with Macbeth. The comparison with Tony Soprano influenced Davey’s interpretation of how to play the character of Mickey B, in terms of how he conducted himself, how he walked, and how he talked. Davey’s preference was to talk less and do more. Consequently, we cut lots of his lines in rehearsal and in performance. So Davey’s cinematic, historical, and political literacy, not to mention his taste, all had a dramaturgical impact and contributed to the development of both the script and his performance. JR: Elsewhere, you have summed up your interpretation of Shakespeare’s Macbeth in this way: “The moral of Macbeth is that crime doesn’t pay … Ill-gotten gains have a brief period of enjoyment” (Magill and Marquis-Muradaz 2009, 114). Was this the working assumption out of which your interpretive choices arose, or did this reading of the source text evolve out of the process of developing Mickey B? TM: I think the short answer to the question is that it was a two-way process, with the definitive themes from Shakespeare’s original informing and then being informed by the choices we made in the

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course of developing Mickey B. I was at an advantage because I was most familiar with the Macbeth story. Yet, despite this, making the film clarified the definitive themes of Macbeth for me and helped me see them in stark and shocking contrast – almost as if I was seeing them for the first time, through the virgin eyes and experience of the cast.    It’s useful to remember that during the making of Mickey B we had disparate stakeholder groups to satisfy, and a range of complex sensitivities to negotiate. For me, the premise of Macbeth can be summed up in one line: “Ruthless ambition leads to its own destruction” (Lajos 2004, 20).    I didn’t start the rehearsal process with the cast by hammering out my interpretation of Macbeth. I would have lost them in an instant using any kind of authoritarian approach. I told the story in modern terms from my own reading of the text in line with the above premise. Ideally, I wanted people in the cast to make discoveries themselves, drawing on their own first-hand experiences, in order to take part in the process of exploring the consequences of their fictional crimes. Experiential learning or learning through doing is, in my view, the best way to work with people who have had negative experiences in the education system. I know this from my own negative experience of school, which I left at fifteen with no qualifications. What I’ve learned through my experiences working with “difficult groups” is that the Socratic method, teaching by asking instead of by telling, is especially effective with groups who are anti-authoritarian. The Socratic method and experiential learning through drama create personal insights for people. Film adds the opportunity of seeing yourself at a distance on screen and completes the educational experience in a feedback loop.    From my own experience, and for many of the cast I spoke to, crime does not pay. Ill-gotten gains have a short life. So my take on the Macbeth story via Mickey B was basically in line with what the cast believed were the consequences following from those violent actions. Sam, who played Duncan, sums up the attitude in the Making Of documentary when he says, “If you’re going to do bad it’s going to come back at you.” JR: You align your work at the Educational Shakespeare Company (ESC) with Augusto Boal’s Theatre of the Oppressed.14 Considering that alterations of plot – or more accurately of

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consequences – are central to Boal’s work, I wonder if you could discuss how this informed the revision of Shakespeare’s dramaturgy in the development of Mickey B? Did working in film require a reworking of Boal’s methodology? Can you talk about the transfer of theatre techniques to film as a key way of thinking about how Mickey B is intermedial? TM: For me, working in a cinematic medium did not require a reworking of Boal’s methodology. During the rehearsal process we used games and exercises from Boal’s book Games for Actors and Non-actors to create solidarity in the group. We also used Boal’s Image Theatre techniques during the rehearsals to outline the Macbeth story as a visual narrative. This method is not ­premised upon literacy and was truly effective in constructing key scenes and narratives immediately. It can also show status and motivations really clearly through proxemics and gestures. It helped us tell the story of Macbeth in a number of simple steps to new members of the drama group as they came on board. We used a stills camera to photograph the actors in key scenes, and paring the story right down to a series of tableaux enabled the actors to experience the shifts of allegiances throughout the action. And they enjoyed this process of experiential learning, learning through doing.    I had thoroughly tested and proved the use of Image Theatre in Long Kesh (the Maze Prison) with ten IRA political prisoners in the theatrical adaptation of Bobby Sands’ epic poem The Crime of Castlereagh in H-Block 4.15 That experience convinced me of the usefulness of Image Theatre as a technique for telling complex narratives visually. I used what I had learned in H-Block 4 to work on telling the Macbeth story in another prison setting. As a dramatist and filmmaker I have learned to use whatever techniques and methods are most appropriate, useful, and trustworthy according to whatever setting I am working within and the people I am working with.    It’s interesting to look at Boal’s work as an “alteration of consequences.” I’ve never thought about Boal’s work in that way before. But that’s exactly what it does – alter consequences. I thought about Boal’s work in terms of “raising consciousness” or as “collective problem solving” in order to empower so-called passive spectators to become active performers in the rehearsal for changes in their own lives.

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   Boal’s work opens up choices. This is one of the things I love about Boal’s Forum Theatre. Forum Theatre is collective, group, problem solving – practical choice in action. People can see and hear and feel the implications of the choices they make instantly. Forum Theatre draws upon the collective knowledge of the group to solve a problem. That collective knowledge is always greater than the knowledge of one person. Theatre and filmmaking are both collective arts, and the best directors I’ve ever worked with – Augusto Boal, Michael Bogdanov, Franc Roddam, Peter Kosminsky, and Chrissie Poulter – all drew on the collective knowledge of the people around them. They didn’t pretend to have all the answers.    What I learned from Boal was that other people are potential allies and with them you can create solidarity. And once you create solidarity through trust and mutual respect, then anything is possible. Boal also taught by example to be yourself and to be happy being yourself. And one of the best ways to be happy is through creativity because when we are creative then we feel empowered.    What I take from Boal is the imperative to get people to ask questions. Especially the question: What if things were different? How can we fight oppression? How can we make our work relevant to an audience today? How can we help them empower themselves through risking their own creativity? How can we use the experiences they have, particularly the negative experiences, to help them transform their lives and their opinion of themselves? Essentially, it is about creating the conditions for people to find the tools and the confidence to use them, in order to write their new ending and perform their new role in it.    My use of Boal came down to me realizing that “You can’t give what you don’t have.” It’s twenty-two years since I first encountered Boal and his methods. I was thrilled back then and thought this is exactly what I am looking for – useful theatre methods to create social transformation. And for many years I was convinced that Boal’s methodology was simply all that was needed to continue his amazing work. Later I began to realize that Boal’s methods per se do not guarantee good practice. Over the years, I have been told of self-styled Boal “experts” who humiliate, alienate, oppress, patronize, abuse, exploit, mystify, dominate, and discriminate against members of their groups due to their body weight, class, race, age, or gender. In these cases, those in

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“authority” are using their position, power, and knowledge to oppress minorities in the group, which is entirely in opposition to the spirit of Boal’s work.    The realization began to dawn on me that the values, intentions, attitudes, and motivations of the person facilitating the group are far more important than whatever methods they happen to be using. Many of the students I’ve talked to place much too high a value on method(s) at the expense and importance of scrutinizing the values, intentions, and motivations of the person using the methods.    This realization has been the most radical shift I have undertaken in deploying Boal’s methodology. The questions we need to be asking ourselves about facilitators are: •

How did they get into their current position? Who benefits from the information that is being imparted? • What is the value base of the person imparting the information? • What is the motivation of the person imparting the information? • What authority does the person imparting the knowledge have? • Where does their knowledge come from? •

   Underlying this analysis is a belief in the concept I mentioned earlier: you cannot give what you don’t have. Essentially, it doesn’t matter whether I am working in a cinematic or theatrical medium as this concept fundamentally applies to both. Boal’s methodology works perfectly well when it is in Boal’s control. The problem occurs when other people apply Boal’s methods without Boal’s values, intentions, attitude, and motivation. And that, in my view, is what requires further scrutiny. DF: When it comes to a classic text like Macbeth, you’ve made it very clear that your first concern is how to make the story relevant to an audience today, an approach to adaptation at the centre of your experience working with Michael Bogdanov and the English Shakespeare Company. Do you see a relationship between Bogdanov’s influence on you and Boal’s? TM: I think Boal and Bogdanov share many similarities. They are both rule-breaking radical Tricksters challenging the

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establishment and its politics. Both challenge theatre and Shakespeare to be relevant and useful today. From Bogdanov I learned that we make Shakespeare relevant to an audience today by updating and translating him, particularly to spectators who don’t know him. Otherwise we simply exclude the majority of people from his work, who don’t understand the archaic language or cultural conventions. What is the point of preserving Shakespeare, dead in a sterile vacuum? I call this Museum Shakespeare.    How we update and translate him is to find a relevant contemporary parallel setting, with similar power struggles and hierarchies, and relocate the story in that parallel setting. Once you give yourself permission to change the time and place of the original, then reworking Shakespeare’s dramaturgy follows.    Sometimes this is out of necessity because the original won’t fit with the new setting. But other times it is simply a result of creative inquisitiveness, of asking ‘“what if?” This “what if things were different?” question is what I take from Boal. I said earlier that Macduff loses the most in the Macbeth story. That’s another way of saying that he is the most oppressed. That oppression makes me interested in him as a character and I want to address his loss by giving him a scene to reflect upon what has just happened. He has lost his whole family by taking Malcolm’s side and standing up to Macbeth. Malcolm has the crown, but what does Macduff have?    For me it doesn’t matter if that drama is live or recorded; it is dealing with the same material, human relationships, often in conflict. I know this is not how many people see the difference between film and theatre. I worked in a university in Media and Theatre Studies and saw the clear dividing line between the two. My most interesting work there was with David Butler, from Media Studies. We ran a joint course in the Maze prison for political prisoners called “Culture, Identity, and Representation.” DF: The ESC website says you have an upcoming project called Prospero’s Prison. Can you talk a little about the decision to work with Prison Shakespeare again in a film context? TM: After Mickey B the next project suggested by Jennifer Marquis Muradaz, Mickey B’s producer, was 12 Angry Men, the 1957 film directed by Sidney Lumet about the struggle of a jury to come to a just decision that stars Henry Fonda. We began work

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on a modern version of this classic film and set it in a kangaroo courtroom in a Northern Ireland prison. There was a lack of support for the drama group to begin another film and the project foundered. I was open to any ideas as to the next project and would have listened to any pitch. The idea for The Tempest came from Mark Burnett, Renaissance Professor at Queen’s University, Belfast. Mark has been a supporter of ESC since he first saw the film and helped organize the screening of Mickey B for the 38th Shakespeare Association of America Conference in Chicago. I was happy to return to Shakespeare for the next project. For me, Shakespeare is reliable and trustworthy and infinitely pliable as a source text. I went back and read The Tempest and began to see how it could be adapted.    The conditions of production in relation to making Prospero’s Prison are very different from making Mickey B. During that period of making Mickey B, I was paid one day per week through the Arts Council as a visiting artist to work with the drama group I had established in the prison. After the termination of that contract, I am now working wherever I can to initiate projects. The essential difference is that now I am working outside the prison and on my own. I am currently (as of fall 2011) writing the treatment and then the script to follow.    Not having a prison drama group to work with over a regular period means that I am doing the adaptation alone this time. In prison it was, oddly enough, easier as the men were there and the drama group was a welcome escape from the mind-numbing monotony that is prison life. Outside life is very different with ex-prisoners working feverishly just to survive and care for their families. They have very little time to give to the project. That’s the reality of life after prison. Like everything in life, working on my own now has its pluses and minuses. I miss the banter and fun with the group and the collective process of trying things out on our feet in the rehearsal room through improvisation. I miss the input and the collective problem solving of the group. I miss their support and their generosity in sharing their ideas and experiences.    So this time I hope to use ex-prisoners as cast and doing the production hopefully in Belfast Prison, a former prison (panopticon) that is now in the process of becoming a cultural museum. I hope to be able to raise the money to pay the ex-prisoner actors

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for their time. That is my ideal: to be able to pay them for their time and performances. None of the actors in Mickey B could be paid as they were serving prisoners. (Not that we had a budget to pay them in the first place.) So my approach is two-pronged: finish the treatment/script and raise the money for the production. JR: We notice that the reading of The Tempest that your proposed adaptation will offer centres on the brother’s betrayal and the question of revenge vs reconciliation (for Prospero), which is a relatively uncommon element of emphasis, at least in contemporary performance traditions which tend to pick up the postcolonial implications of the script and focus more on Caliban as emblematic of imperial oppression. TM: The focus for my reading of The Tempest came from my perception of the current needs of my own community, particularly regarding betrayal. Betrayal is a huge unavoidable theme in post-conflict Northern Ireland. The Loyalist/Unionist community feels betrayed by the British Government for [its] pandering to the Nationalist/Republican agenda, “treating Loyalists as second-class citizens” and “allowing terrorists into Government.” Many in the Republican communities feel betrayed by Sinn Féin’s alleged “sellout” to gain access to power and have formed breakaway, dissident paramilitary groups to continue the armed struggle to “get the Brits Out” of Ireland.    So in those contexts, the postcolonial themes of The Tempest via Caliban are compelling. And postcolonialism is an area that interests me. In 1986–7 I worked for Gbakanda Afrika Tiata with Yulisa Amadu “Pat” Maddy, Sierra Leone’s elder statesman of theatre and the performing arts.16 It was as Amadu’s assistant that I began my directing career. He also encouraged me to write.    My understanding of colonialism is that it is about extending control over weaker peoples or areas. Indeed, Ireland is an early example of British Colonial Plantation. So I want to address the idea of people extending control over others in Prospero’s Prison. But I want to try and do it in a way that will not be divisive. We have had enough division in our community. I don’t want to divide our community further. I want a theme that could potentially unite our community in response to the urgent dilemma I believe we’re facing. What do you do when your closest trust and loyalty is repaid with betrayal?

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   I need a dilemma that both sides of our community can relate to – a brother’s betrayal. That’s the dilemma that many people here are facing at the moment. That’s what we are struggling with, that’s the cause of a lot of our hurt and wounds. Our recent history has been that you repay betrayal with violence. But that creates more violence, as we saw in Mickey B. It perpetuates the cycle. That’s why I have chosen the reading of The Tempest that I have. I think the lessons that we can learn from Shakespeare’s play can teach us what we need to remember in order to live together.    I had many useful conversations with Professor Mark Burnett about this reading and he helped clarify and shape the “revenge vs reconciliation” theme in response to betrayal. Originally, I had come up with the term “forgiveness” as the response to betrayal. During the conversations with Mark we questioned whether “reconciliation” or “forgiveness” best describes what Prospero does at the end of The Tempest. 5. “Shakespeare Belongs to Us All”: Transformation, Political Dissidence, and Adaptation DF: One of the compelling things about Mickey B is that it is a testimony to your own history as a former prisoner and young offender. But it also testifies to a much broader context of other such histories specifically situated in Northern Ireland. The word that keeps coming to my mind is “transformation” because you underwent a radical personal transformation from young offender to actor, dramaturge, and director. It sounds like this happened almost by chance, that the gods were moving chess pieces around. But it led you into situations that took a kind of rage that had been there in your youth and transformed it into something really powerful and creative. You were sparked into literature and theatre, especially as forms of creative expression, alchemical and mutative ways of being that can potentially change you from one thing into another.    But then I think there’s something that happened somewhere along the way where you began to understand that these forms of interior transformation were also outward facing, community facing. That’s one of the energies I see most active in Mickey B: you’ve taken this long, incredible personal journey that you’ve

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had and you’ve turned it towards others now, and it’s transformative for them and for you. I think one of the things I’m hearing you say is that the power of theatre is profoundly transformative and it transformed you. Then you started learning how to transform others by using what you have learned. Could you talk a bit about how Mickey B itself came to be out of that personal history you’ve just described for us? TM: I got a call from the Arts Council of Northern Ireland in the early 90s and they asked, “Do you want to introduce drama into Long Kesh in the Maze prison?” DF: Can you explain the significance of that request for those who do not necessarily know the history and importance of the Maze in Northern Ireland? TM: The Maze prison was basically the most secure prison in Europe essentially because it had members of the Provisional IRA incarcerated there, considered the deadliest terrorist organization in the 90s. They were at war with the British because the British had occupied their land. They were doing what they could to remove them through armed struggle. So in 1975, the prisoners began their campaign to achieve political prisoner status, rather than being classified as common criminals. In their view they were POWs – prisoners of war. They had a very structured regime in the prison. They had their own OCs (Officers in Command); they had their own education officers. It was so structured and they were so organized and they worked as a unit and that’s very important to know.    The other thing to know is that no prison officers worked in the wings where the IRA prisoners were located. People say, “What?” And they can’t get their head around that. When people see Mickey B they say, “Yeah but there’s no prison officers and we just see them patrolling in the outer gates and areas.” And I say, “Yeah but once upon a time in Long Kesh, in the Maze, there weren’t prison officers working on the wings. The men controlled the wings themselves. They looked after their own discipline. They looked after their own welfare. They looked after everything. They were a self-sufficient unit.” When I was approached by a probation officer to discuss the project, my initial reservation was that I was an ex-prisoner myself. He said, “It doesn’t matter, it’s not an issue, we want to use your skills.” My job was to introduce drama into the H-Blocks. I worked there for about eighteen

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months and nine of those months the most significant outcome was working with ten IRA prisoners from H-Block 4, which was a Republican Block used to house the Provisional IRA.    Now, remember my history. I’m from a Loyalist community (a particularly hardline form of Unionism), so essentially, the prisoners I was working with were my enemies. Before I went into the H-Blocks, I thought about it long and hard and I thought, my strategy is that I will tell them the truth … exactly the truth. So that’s what I did. I went into the H-Block and I met these guys, and I told them who I was and where I came from. They sat down and quizzed me as they would because of course they are going to be looking for agents of the state trying to infiltrate the movement. I remember them saying to me, “If you’re not who you say you are, then you, my friend, are in a heap of trouble.” I said to them, “If I wasn’t who I say I am, do you think I would be sitting here talking to you?” We had that discussion and they went “okay.” But they checked, and I know they checked so we developed a relationship.    I had just finished working with Bogdanov and the English Shakespeare Company when I went to work in Long Kesh. I had been Michael’s assistant director on Beowulf, his adaptation of the Old English poem, and that was an incredible experience working with him. So adapting a poem for the stage was in my mind. What I said to the guys was “Okay, I’m a theatre artist and how can I help you find your voice and tell your story?” They said, “Okay, this is what we want to do,” and they handed me Bobby Sands’ epic poem, The Crime of Castlereagh. It deals with the Castlereagh detention centre where thousands of prisoners (both Republican and Loyalist paramilitaries) were “interrogated.” It was a notorious centre for abuses involving the torture, rape, and ill-treatment of prisoners, some of which were documented by Amnesty International in a report published in 1993 (Amnesty International 1993).17 DF: By interrogation you mean torture and other abuses associated with Castlereagh? TM: Well, it’s been alleged that they used white noise and that people were pulled into helicopters, taken up with hooded bags over their heads then pushed out of the helicopters. They would only be a foot off the ground but they didn’t know that. So people thought they were being pushed out to their deaths. I mean

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basically the IRA was trying to break down the British presence in Ireland. So the British saw them as the enemy within, and needed to do anything to remove them as a threat. And the IRA were armed incredibly well and organized and had huge support in North America. They had a lot of money, they had a lot of weapons, they had firepower, so they were a formidable force.    The second part of Bobby Sands’ trilogy, “Diplock Court,” was based on the Diplock Courts, which were basically non-jury courts, where people would be tried without a jury.18 The third part of Sands’ trilogy was about the H-Blocks, where people would be caged and they wouldn’t wear prison uniforms, but that happened in 1975, much earlier than 1981 when the hunger strikes took place – so IRA political prisoners eventually won the right not to wear prison uniforms. So the blanket protest was about their refusal to wear prison uniform, clothing themselves instead in their prison-issue blankets. So I’ll wear no convict’s uniform, nor meekly serve my time That Britain might grant Ireland’s fight, eight hundred years of crime

   That stanza is from a 1976 song called the “H-Block Song” written by Francie Brolly, a musician and Republican politician from Dungiven.    So when the prisoners in Long Kesh and I were working on staging The Crime of Castlereagh we used lots of Image Theatre, using lots of Boal’s techniques to do that, and that was an amazing experience. I was getting twelve people in my workshop every time, and I was taking the numbers back to the authorities. Normal classes would have been two or three and I was getting twelve, and they said to me, “What are you doing down there?” and I said, “Why don’t you come down and have a look?” and they said, “Oh no, we wouldn’t go down there!” So they never came down to have a look. And they never knew that we were working on The Crime of Castlereagh.    Eventually, we put the play on in the H-Block and it was an incredible moment because about a hundred guys squeezed in, and we had nothing. We had lockers, a mattress, a bed, sheets, and a mop. It was absolutely Poor Theatre. And I remember, first of all, how daunted I was when I read it; the poem is about 220 stanzas and it’s written in the same metre as Oscar Wilde’s poem The

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­ allad of Reading Gaol (1897), written in exile after Wilde was B released from prison after having been convicted of homosexual offences in 1895 and sentenced to two years hard labour. I scratched my name but not for fame upon the whitened wall, “Bobby Sands was here,” I wrote with fear in awful shaky scrawl. I wrote it low where eyes don’t go. ’Twas but to testify, That I was sane and not to blame should here I come to die.

   That was the metre Sands wrote the poem in. DF: Could you talk a bit about Bobby Sands and address his significance to Northern Ireland, especially in terms of his influence as a political dissident? TM: Bobby Sands was the first hunger striker who became an MP as well – the youngest MP in the history of the British Parliament at that time. Christy Moore, the great Irish folk singer and songwriter, has written a beautiful ballad called “The People’s Own MP”: “He was a poet and a soldier he died courageously/And we gave him thirty thousand votes while in captivity [sic].” So Sands became MP for Fermanagh and South Tyrone while he was in prison, until Thatcher made it illegal for a convicted prisoner and felon to be an MP. Sands died after sixty-six days on hunger strike, on the 5th of May 1981. There was something like two hundred thousand people at his funeral in Belfast.    Sands was the first of ten hunger strikers who died: Patsy O’Hara, Francis Hughes, Raymond McCreesh, Bobby Sands, Kieran Doherty, Kevin Lynch, Joe McDonnell, Martin Hurson, Tom McElwee, and Mickey Devine.    So ten men dead and a pivotal moment in Irish history.    It was an incredible honour to have been given the job of helping these prisoners adapt Sands’ poem into theatre and another good example of my experience with intermedial adaptation – in this case involving the translation of the poem to the stage.    At the end of the play, in the H-Block, it was just silence, because the play was ninety minutes long and there was an incredible silence at the end of it. I remember the silence stayed and stayed, and then the one hundred men in that H-Block erupted in this explosion of emotion, because it was very close to their

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hearts, and we had used theatre to empower people to find their voices and tell their story.    And then the men conspired together to take their paroles at the same time between Christmas and New Year of that same year. They got out, the ten men, and instead of going to see their families for the two days they were out, they came to rehearse with me. We put the play on in St Agnes’s Parish Hall in West Belfast (27, 28, and 29 December 1996) and six hundred people came to see it: thirty-eight of the hunger strikers’ families were in the front two rows, and Gerry Adams (President of Sinn Féin) opened it. It was an incredible moment.19 And it set the seed for what was to come in adapting Macbeth in a prison context.    So then I went to work in Maghaberry Prison after they closed the Maze. Maghaberry Prison is a maximum-security prison, and when they closed the Maze in 2000, a lot of the maximum-security prisoners got moved to Maghaberry. I started working there in 2003 – one day a week basically. We made a short film called Inside Job. It was a fifteen-minute drama written by Sam, who then went on to play Duncan in Mickey B. Sam was instrumental in getting the drama group together at Maghaberry, and Sam has been a real supporter of this work. Without Sam, I could not have done it. Sam came from a Loyalist background and then we made another short film, and a thirty-minute documentary called The Big Question. It was about the impact of imprisonment on prisoners and their families.    The deputy governor of Maghaberry said, “What about getting some of the most difficult men involved?” At that time, I was looking for a new project. So one day I saw Sam walking down the corridor, and I said to him, “You’d make a good Duncan.” And Sam said, “Who’s Duncan?” And I said, “He’s the King of Scotland.” And he said, “Fuck, that would be an improvement!”    So I told him the story of Macbeth and he said, “That’s a good story.” And then he said, “I have just the guy for you to play Macbeth.” That was Davey, regarded as the toughest guy in the jail. Davey came over but initially didn’t take it seriously. Gradually, though, he got involved. Once Davey was involved and Sam was involved, it was easy. Davey used to say, “How many men do you want, thirty, forty, tell me.” It was great once we got the buy-in. But it brought its own problems because, as

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I said earlier, the twelve guys were basically called “the Dirty Dozen.” Anyway, that’s how Mickey B got going. DF: The film is the culmination of many different forms of mediation. In preproduction you’re using drawn images to storyboard the adaptation and then you move to photographs and stills, then it’s back to oral storytelling and then there’s all the other dramaturgical work prior to the filming and negotiating all the different cultural and political contexts from within and without the prison. The film crosses over so many mediatized and mediated contexts and it seems like the group evolved a way of figuring out the problems of crossing these boundaries on its own. Any thoughts on how all these forms of mediation allowed the group to address issues of violence, oppression, and problem solving? TM: As you know, I’m a great believer in the methods of Boal and Freire because they’re so connected to wider struggles for liberty from oppression and ignorance. Boal worked, for instance, on the Alphabetization literacy theatre project in Chaclacayo, Lima. If I’m not mistaken that project was based on Freire’s notion that the oppressed must be their own example in the struggle for their redemption. One of the ways at making that happen, as Boal and Freire’s work has shown, is to use problem posing in an artistic but also a political context. So I would say to the actors in Mickey B, “How do we do this? How do we get around that?” If you think about criminals – what is crime but another way of doing something?    Criminals are creative because they problem solve. Creativity comes so easily to criminals. That struck me. Creativity and criminality are interlinked I think. It’s like, “Okay look we can’t do this, how do we get around it,” and all of those heads together, they would work it out. All you have to do is pose the question, and they trusted me enough to allow me to facilitate the process. That’s what they did. I would say, “All right guys, what about this, how are we going to do this?” You can see some of that in the documentary about the making of Mickey B, just tiny bits of it. You see me working with the group and doing that. Allowing for choice empowers people and the very fact we had to work through so many forms of mediation to get to the final product allowed us to play with multiple ways of telling the story, which, ultimately, gave the guys a tremendous chance to voice the story in their own terms.

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   I learned this technique when we did the staging of The Crime of Castlereagh. I was so overwhelmed by the staging issues: How are we going to stage The Crime of Castlereagh on such short notice in a church? How are we going to construct the Castlereagh holding centre in this tiny section of a classroom in the H-Blocks? So one of the guys, Frankie, from Tyrone, who played Bobby Sands, grabbed a big bar of soap out of the sink and started drawing with it on the floor. And he said, “Right, there’s a corridor, there’s a holding cell, right …” and so on. So there we are. It’s like everything is possible in this form of theatre. We have infinite possibilities to choose from. That was a great thing I remembered from Boal. He said, more or less, that our dilemma as human beings is having infinite possibilities from which to choose. Don’t limit yourself because of your imagination. Make a virtue out of the poverty of your diminished circumstances.    As I discuss earlier, problem posing, then, drawing on the collective experience of the group, helped solve any number of problems and that’s how we did it in Mickey B where the circumstances for making the film were severely constrained. For instance, I didn’t come up with any of the adapted names in terms of the characters in the film. Banknote, Fleecer, Ladyboy, Cowardy Custard, Duffer, Peeper, Satan – it’s beautiful! Those were all the guys’ ideas. I didn’t come up with the idea of Bookies standing in for the Witches in Macbeth. That was their idea. I posed the question: “What kind of function do the Witches have? They’re like predicting the future. They’re like Bookies!” Beautiful! All I did was pose the questions: “How do we do this? How do we do that?” “I can’t think of a way to do this.” Sometimes I’d come up with a solution and I would ask, “So what about this?” And if they liked it they would say, “Yes” – and if they didn’t, they would say, “Tom, that is shite.” And they would tell me frankly. So that’s what it was, it was a co-creative dialogue that shaped the dramaturgy. It wasn’t me as the expert, because I’m not. I have certain skills but they had skills, so it’s a dialogue and that’s how we did it. DF: So Mickey B, besides adapting Macbeth, depicts violent offenders who find their voice in spite of being pegged as the “Dirty Dozen” and it’s a very powerful thing to have captured on film and part of the overall affective impact of the adaptation. They do in fact make a virtue of the diminished circumstances with which

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they had to create their performances. So the prisoners/actors are speaking in their own voices and there’s something remarkable that is happening there, not only for the speakers, but for those who witness the performance and all the obvious violence in the film that is tied to very real violent histories associated with the players in the film. The language in the film is incredibly rich and obviously very driven by actual prison discourse based on real experience as you’ve already noted. But that realistic language also gets at the brutal inarticulacy of some of the characters.    What are your thoughts on that now with a bit of distance from the production? I think you’ve said that violence is the last realm of the inarticulate. How did doing the film make those people reflect on their own circumstances and perhaps change them, make them address their own violence, or the violence that they’ve experienced? There’s that very disturbing moment where you have them actually on screen in the supplementary materials for the film saying, “This is where I had a spike driven through my leg, this is where I’ve been shot in the head, here’s a scar,” and they’re showing the marks of the violence they’ve had inflicted on them. TM: The language in the film, as we’ve discussed earlier, is the shorthand of lived experience, summarizing wisdom in a phrase. It is brutal in its simplicity and directness. I think in that way it is both shocking and compelling to an outside audience.    When you don’t have education you don’t have the words to communicate. This creates a vacuum and a silence, the silent vacuum of shame and denial. Self-hatred is born in this vacuum and grows into wounded pride. The inability to defend yourself with words leads to the expression of the only language you know – violence and the ecstasy of repressed physical eruption. Violence is the last realm of the inarticulate. Most people don’t want to be violent because they know the horrific guilt that follows an act of violence. This is a major theme I developed in Mickey B. But for many prisoners, whom the education system has failed, their choice of expression is very limited.    From my own experience I know that I became violent when I had no other means of expression. That’s when I was violent: when you have no means of expression left or none to begin with, then you will default to violence as a retort, as an answer, or as an expression. Jimmy Boyle, who was a prisoner in Scotland and wrote an incredible book, called A Sense of Freedom (1977), and

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who found his own redemption through art (both writing and sculpture), talks about violence and the art of violence and how when you get into violence, you can enjoy it. That’s a terrible thing to say but it’s also true and I know exactly what he’s talking about. So you enjoy dishing out violence and then experience a terrible comedown from it because it’s an awful thing to do. I suppose really that’s also to do with people who self-harm and people who harm others. There’s a price to be paid when you are violent and it’s a terrible price. It extracts a terrible price from you. Art and arts-based practices are one form of redemption, one form of confronting these realities because they give people whose only outlet has been violence another choice.    Doing the film, the men began to think about violence and they began to examine violence at a distance. And when you put that distance on violence then you begin to understand it. For example, there were amazing conversations with the men about the moment when Duncan is stabbed and the need for an accurate sound of being punctured: “That’s the sound.” They had this incredible knowledge of what the impact was. The same with the blood splattered on the walls when Duncan is murdered. It was the prisoners who did that because they said, “When you do this, this is what happens.”    So, I think doing that, in a safe environment and in a fictional environment, actually helped them to reflect upon the act itself. Because violence is usually done not in a safe environment but in a very, very unsafe, charged environment that is absolutely – there’s no reflection on it at all, it’s just fight or flight, and you almost have no conception of it because it’s instant.    And I think allowing these men – particularly these men – to have the opportunity to reflect upon violence and how violence comes about, what motivates violence, I think that’s really useful. And seeing the impact of violence – I think that’s useful too because it creates understanding of causality. How many times, if I had thought about the consequences of what I’d just said or done would I not have done it? I think opening up that space to have that discussion about violence, maybe for the first time in many of their lives, was really helpful because they are much more experts on violence. So they were leading us, and we were saying teach us more, so they were having to think about it differently, they were having to reframe violence, to explain it, and I think

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it actually led to much more understanding about violence than they would have had previously. JR: What you’ve described here reminds me of the phenomenon you’ve referred to as the Video Feedback Loop.20 How does this relate to your indebtedness to Boal, and to your application of his theatrical theories to the medium of film? TM: The Video Feedback Loop allows people to see themselves not as they imagine they are, not how somebody has said they are, but actually how they are. And it’s an incredible tool that might be related to what Boal calls the “multiple mirror,” reflecting back to you your own behaviour as well as alternative possibilities. J R : And if what is being depicted on camera is fictional, is this still in operation? In the case of Mickey B, you have a fictional narrative, but through viewing the film the participants are recognizing … TM: … themselves. That’s very true. JR: But at a remove? TM: Yes, that’s the important thing – that remove. Once we put that remove in, that distance, then things get a bit less heated and more clear for people to negotiate with in terms of clarifying meaning. JR: And one way to create the conditions for this self-­evaluative distance that you’ve found is through the adaptation of Shakespeare? TM: I think Shakespeare is too important to be used solely as a cultural sermon for the middle classes and the dwindling ancient congregations at Stratford (on Avon and Ontario). For me that’s Deadly Theatre and it’s operating in an enclosed, hermetically sealed world that I don’t think is very healthy, that I don’t think is very progressive, and is ultimately self-defeating. Eventually you need new life to make things happen, to change things. And I think Mickey B does that, and Prospero’s Prison will do that. It will challenge the conventions and it will say anybody can do Shakespeare given the right access and opportunity to participate with the text.    Shakespeare’s texts are too important. We can learn so much from these stories by engaging with them in multiple manners – and through multiple media. These stories shouldn’t be sealed off; people need to see them, people need to hear them, people need to participate in them at every level of society. Shakespeare

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belongs to us all. There’s such a variety of knowledge in his storytelling and we need to make that knowledge widely accessible in order to keep its inherent transformative potential alive today. NOTES 1 Magill played a lead role in Jonathan Gaunt’s anti-football (soccer) racism play Hooligans, which won a Fringe First Award in 1986 as well as the Perrier Pick of The Fringe Award at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe, the world’s largest arts festival. The play was later adapted for television by Yorkshire Television. 2 That Mickey B represents a challenge to conventional Prison Shakespeare is a point raised by Ramona Wray, who effectively summarizes the traditional features of the genre: it tends to be strictly theatrical, to offer conservative readings of the plays, and to be valued in terms that understand the experience as a unilateral exchange, with the works of Shakespeare figured as inviolable repositories of universal wisdom and prisoners figured as unquestioning recipients of the play’s therapeutic effects (2011, 341–3). As we argue below, both the development process of Mickey B and the resulting product are distinguished not only by their unique intermediality but also by the bilateral – or multilateral – engagement with the source text that informs this collaboratively developed, radical adaptation. For more detailed information on the scholarly literature about Prison Shakespeare, see Wray 2011, 341n6. Significantly, while Mickey B is the only full feature-length film instance of Prison Shakespeare to date, recent versions of Prison Shakespeare that introduce cinematic elements represent an emergent genre of Shakespearean adaptation with profoundly intermedial implications that parallel those emerging out of Mickey B, not only mixing theatre with film, but also prison culture with dramatherapy and rehabilitative justice outcomes with critiques of regressive incarceral policies.   Hank Rogerson’s 2005 documentary Shakespeare Behind Bars details the story of twenty male inmates who form a Shakespeare ensemble in a minimum-medium-security state prison in Kentucky and stage The Tempest. In 2008 a Prison Arts Project at the notorious San Quentin Prison in California put on a version of Much Ado About Nothing directed by Suraya Susana Keating. In 2012 the inmates (some of them high-security detainees) of Rome’s Rebibbia Prison and their docudrama film adaptation of Julius Caesar, Caesar Must Die (directed by Paolo and Vittorio

196  Daniel Fischlin, Tom Magill, and Jessica Riley Taviani), won the Golden Bear, the highest prize awarded, in the 62nd Berlinale, the Berlin International Film Festival. Rebibbia Prison is well known for its rehabilitative programs aimed at reintegrating inmates. Not to be forgotten in this array of Prison Shakespeares is HungarianCanadian Tibor Egervari’s Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice in Auschwitz (1999), “an imaginative reconstruction of what it might have meant to stage Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice in Auschwitz with Shylock performed as ‘a Richard III: a “truly evil” Shylock’” (Fischlin 2004, n.p.).   In addition to these film-related examples, there are multiple others of prisons where Shakespeare is used as a form of rehabilitative activity. These include the Actors Shakespeare Project in Cambridge, Massachusetts, which works with incarcerated youth, ages twelve to seventeen; Shakespeare behind Bars, which was founded by Curt L. Tofteland, director of the Kentucky Shakespeare Festival and the first North American Shakespeare Company, and is located in a medium-security adult male prison performing Shakespeare’s works (this company’s production of The Tempest is the subject of Rogerson’s film, mentioned above, which was shown at the 2005 Sundance Festival); the prison “Shakespeare Program” in the Wabash Valley Correctional Facility in Carlisle, Indiana, which in 2010 performed an adaptation of Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew to address domestic violence issues; and Shakespeare & Company/Shakespeare In The Courts out of Lenox, Massachusetts, which, in collaboration with the Berkshire Juvenile Court, helps juvenile offenders work with Shakespeare & Company’s artists, Àfocusing on scenes from Shakespeare’s plays. For a detailed, personal Àaccount of the work done by some of these (and other) groups, drawing on the author’s extensive observation of rehearsals and performances, as well as interviews with inmate performers, program directors, and prison officials, see Scott-Douglass 2007. 3 Linda Hutcheon’s work on adaptation theory hints at this connection between media and the contexts that feed into media when she states, “My emphasis on adaptation as process (as well as product) means that the social and communication dimensions of media are important too, even when the particular emphasis … is on form” (2006, 34). 4 See http://boxofficemojo.com/movies/?id=gnomeoandjuliet.htm. Multiple other examples of the massive economies associated with Shakespearean film adaptations exist. To cite a few, director John Madden’s 1998 Oscar-winning film Shakespeare in Love has netted ap­ proximately $300 million worldwide on a production budget of $25 million, and Baz Luhrmann’s 1996 Romeo + Juliet adaptation grossed about

Transgression and Transformation: Tom Magill  197 $150 million. Even lesser films like the 2006 adaptation of Twelfth Night, She’s the Man, netted close to $60 million, while the 1999 film adaptation of The Taming of the Shrew, Ten Things I Hate about You, grossed close to $55 million. In a global film context that has seen hundreds of film adaptations of Shakespeare, making him the “most filmed author ever in any ­language” (“List of William Shakespeare Film Adaptations” 2012), the economies associated with this form of intermedial adaptation are significant. Conversely, the austere production conditions and other constraints imposed on the making of Mickey B in its prison context, combined with its participation in the tradition of rehabilitative Prison Shakespeare, position Mickey B outside of this canon of commercial and international ­cinematic adaptations of Shakespeare. Amy Scott-Douglass aptly notes, “Mickey B is an extraordinary exception to the rule in that the film insists on being received not as a work of social improvement but, rather, as a work of art. And it deserves to be received as such” (2010, 111). Indeed, what ultimately sets Mickey B apart from cinematic adaptations operating within commercial economies is its operation more predominantly within political aesthetics. 5 See McCabe 2011. Also see McCaffrey (n.d.), who examines a number of deaths by suicide in Northern Ireland prisons – including those of Allyn Baxter, Samuel Carson, Frances McKeown, Roseanne Irvine, and Colin Bell – and presents harrowing details about the treatment of the prisoners within the prison system leading up their suicides. 6 See, for example, Weimann, who describes the Porter as the “one figure in the play that strongly revitalizes on the Elizabethan stage an equivalent of the unenclosed platea” (2000, 201), a space he identifies here and elsewhere with privileged proximity between audience and “actor-character,” of liminality between the fictional onstage world and the real world inhabited by spectators. Often marked by direct address, topical allusion, or other devices designed to engage spectators across the representational divide, this “strange threshold position” (205) is, significantly, understood by Weimann, quoting James C. Bulman, “to make ‘theatrical meaning a participatory act’” (Weimann 2000, 208; emphasis added). 7 We wish to thank Esmé Nandorfy-Fischlin and Alex Desrochers for their help in transcribing this interview. The interview itself took place in two stages: the first as a face-to-face interview in the fall of 2011, after Magill showed Mickey B and gave the plenary at the “Outerspeares: Transcultural/ Transmedia Adaptations of Shakespeare” conference held at the University of Guelph, 1 November 2011; and the second in a set of email exchanges in 2012 during which follow-up occurred.

198  Daniel Fischlin, Tom Magill, and Jessica Riley 8 This line quoted is from the script of Mickey B. 9 Thomas Cartelli offers this assessment of the language in Mickey B in an essay examining modern-language adaptations, for which Cartelli coins the term “prose Shakespeare” (2010, 28). Cartelli deems Mickey B the “­unsung hero” of the genre (31), citing the effect of the “strange” prison language in rendering the retained Shakespearean dialogue uniquely “natural” to the spectator’s ear. Moreover, following M.J. Kidnie’s notion of the “slanting proximity” to Shakespeare’s language that arises from, in Kidnie’s analysis, “strange television dialogue” (quoted in Cartelli 2010, 28; emphasis added), Cartelli’s argument seeks to redeem the “incomprehensible” prison language of Mickey B as in itself poetic and thus proximally Shakespearean. Notably, this praise privileges the reception of a wider, non-Irish, non-convict, audience – including, arguably in large part, the scholarly viewing community – and does not address the localized and political imperatives, intentions, and implications of the “thieves’ cant” beyond the general recognition of the revision “apparently having been generated by reasons other than the need for mass legibility” (28). It is worth noting, in Magill’s response, the emphatic assertion that the prison language of the film “is ‘differently literate’ but not ‘literary.’” 10 “The Troubles” (Irish: Na Trioblóidí) was a period of ethno-political conflict in Northern Ireland, which spilled over at various times into England, the Republic of Ireland, and mainland Europe. The duration of the Troubles is conventionally dated from the late 1960s and considered by many to have ended with the Belfast “Good Friday” Agreement of 1998. However, sporadic violence has been ongoing since then. The principal issues at stake in the Troubles were the constitutional status of Northern Ireland and the relationship between the mainly Protestant Unionist and mainly Catholic Nationalist communities in Northern Ireland. The Troubles had both political and military (or paramilitary) dimensions. Its participants included Republican and Loyalist paramilitaries, the security forces of the United Kingdom and of the Republic of Ireland, and nationalist and unionist politicians and political activists” (“The Troubles” 2012). For a more detailed historical account of The Troubles, see Coogan 2002. 11 In these contexts it is useful to remember Angela Davis’s arguments for prison abolition in Are Prisons Obsolete? Davis begins her book with references to “historical examples of efforts to dismantle racist institutions because they have considerable relevance to our discussion of prisons and prison abolition. It is true that slavery, lynching, and segregation acquired such a stalwart ideological quality that many, if not most, could not foresee their decline and collapse … It may help us gain perspective on the prison if we try to imagine how strange and discomforting the debates

Transgression and Transformation: Tom Magill  199 about the obsolescence of slavery must have been to those who took the ‘peculiar institution’ [of slavery] for granted – and especially to those who reaped direct benefits from this dreadful system of racist exploitation … the prison reveals congealed forms of antiblack racism that operate in clandestine ways” (2003, 24–5). Davis’s point, like Magill’s, gets at underlying structures of race-based or class-based power in which oppression and marginalization are the norm. 12 Skaghead is a slang term for heroin users, as reflected in the character name, Horse, a slang term for heroin. 13 Noting that the prisoners at Maghaberry Prison spent up to twenty-three hours a day in their cells with televisions, Magill observes: “They watch films, they like films, they discuss films [and] their thoughts and observations are frequently insightful” (Magill and Marquis-Muradaz 2009, 112). 14 The Theatre of the Oppressed refers to the range of theatrical approaches to social and political transformation developed by Brazilian theatre-­ maker and activist Augusto Boal, whose thinking was strongly influenced by the theories of his friend and countryman Paulo Freire, author of Pedagogy of the Oppressed. Theatre of the Oppressed is also the title of one of Boal’s books on the subject. 15 See McDonnell 2008, especially 101–16 and 143–61. The book studies grass-roots popular theatres that developed from within the working-class Republican and Loyalist communities of Belfast and Derry during the most recent phase of the four-hundred-year conflict between Ireland and Britain and devotes significant attention to The Crime of Castlereagh. 16 Gbakanda Afrika Tiata was founded in “1968 by Yulisa Amadu Maddy in Freetown, Sierra Leone [and] has worked on three continents; Africa, Europe and the USA. Committed to its aim of increasing understanding of Pan-African cultures through education, entertainment and elucidation, GBAKANDA has always worked with artists from different disciplines and cultures to develop a fusion of multicultural art forms” (The Gbakanda Foundation 2011). This influence on Magill’s work again highlights intermediation as a key trope spanning multiple art forms and cultures. 17 The report concluded, “The record shows that existing procedures and safeguards are inadequate to prevent the ill-treatment of detainees. International standards require that detainees be brought promptly before a judge; however, the government has opted out of its obligations under international standards to do so, with respect to detainees held under emergency legislation, who may be held for up to seven days without charge before being brought before a judge” (Amnesty International 1993, n.p.).

200  Daniel Fischlin, Tom Magill, and Jessica Riley 18 Diplock courts were created in response to a report submitted to the UK parliament in December 1972 by Lord Diplock. The report addressed the problem of Irish Republicanism via a strategy known as criminalization, in which the state eliminated the legal distinction between political violence and normal crime, thus ensuring that political prisoners were treated as common criminals. Diplock courts were formally instituted in Northern Ireland on 8 August 1973 during The Troubles. Diplock courts effectively abolished the right to trial by jury for what were called “scheduled offences” with only a judge presiding over the court. Despite being abolished in 2007, both Brian Shrivers and Colin Duffy (accused of the murder of two British soldiers during an IRA gun attack on the Massereene army base in Northern Ireland in 2009) were tried in a Diplock court in January 2012. The second part of Bobby Sands’s 1981 trilogy was titled Diplock Court (the other two being The Crime of Castlereagh and The Torture Mill – H-Block). Sands was convicted of possession of an unlicensed gun and of membership in an organization deemed illegal and was sentenced to fourteen years by a Diplock court, ultimately leading to the infamous Irish Hunger Strikes of 1981 that saw ten IRA members die protesting the criminalization policy of the UK government. 19 McDonnell and Reid aver that “One of the most politically significant theatrical interventions came from within the H Blocks in works created by IRA/Republican prisoners of war, which saw the uneven evolution of performance forms, from the early ‘commemorations,’ through the development of pageant dramas in the 1980s, to the work of the mid-nineties. This process culminated in the production The Crime at Castlereagh [sic], a remarkable piece of political physical theatre, directed by Tom Magill, and based on Bobby Sands’s epic trilogy comprising The Crime at Castlereagh, Diplock Court, and Torture Mill – H Block. The IRA’s H Block theatres were part of the broader development of a theory and praxis of cultural struggle within the Republican movement in the period 1981–1997. They would also provide important material for the work of community companies on the outside” (2010, 96). 20 Magill discusses this phenomenon in an interview on dramatherapy and social theatre, stating, “film is an extraordinary self-evaluation tool. People watch their onscreen behaviour (either as actors in narratives, or as themselves in a documentary), and learn from this ‘objective’ third party vantage point in a way that cannot be replicated in any other medium. We call this the ‘video playback loop’” (Magill and Marquis-Muradaz 2009, 112). See also the Educational Shakespeare Company website: http://esc-film .com/how/.

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WORKS CITED Amnesty International. 1993. “United Kingdom (Northern Ireland): Alleged Coerced Confessions during Ill-Treatment at Castlereagh Holding Centre of Eight Youths from Ballymurphy, Northern Ireland.” Amnesty International. http://www.amnesty.org/en/library/info/EUR45/010/1993/en. Boal, Augusto. 2000. Theatre of the Oppressed. London: Pluto Press. Boenisch, Peter M. 2006. “Aesthetic Art to Aesthetic Act: Theatre, Media, Intermedial Performance.” In Intermediality in Theatre and Performance, ed. Freda Chapple and Chiel Kattenbelt, 103–16. 2nd ed. New York: Rodopi. Cartelli, Thomas. 2010. “Doing It Slant: Reconceiving Shakespeare in the Shakespeare Aftermath.” Shakespeare Studies 38: 26–36. Coogan, Tim Pat. 2002. The Troubles: Ireland’s Ordeal and the Search for Peace. New York: Palgrave. Darroch, Michael. 2007. “Intermedial Theatre: ± Technology?” Canadian Theatre Review 131 (Summer): 96–9. Davis, Angela Yvonne. 2003. Are Prisons Obsolete? Toronto: Open Media. “Educational Shakespeare Company: Understanding through Film.” 2012. http://www.esc-film.com/. Fischlin, Daniel. 2004. “Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice in Auschwitz (1999).” Canadian Adaptations of Shakespeare Project. University of Guelph. http://www.canadianshakespeares.ca/a_auschwitz.cfm. Fischlin, Daniel, and Mark Fortier. 2000. Adaptations of Shakespeare: A Critical Anthology of Plays from the Seventeenth Century to the Present. London: Routledge. Freire, Paolo. 2006. Pedagogy of the Oppressed. Trans. Myra Bergman Ramos. New York: Continuum. The Gbakanda Foundation. 2011. http://gbakanda.wordpress.com/work/ theatre/. “Gnomeo and Juliet.” 2011. Box Office Mojo. http://boxofficemojo.com/ movies/?id=gnomeoandjuliet.htm. Hutcheon, Linda. 2006. A Theory of Adaptation. New York: Routledge. Lajos, Egri. 2004. The Art of Dramatic Writing. New York: Simon & Schuster. “List of William Shakespeare Film Adaptations.” 2012. Wikipedia. http:// en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_William_Shakespeare_film_adaptations. Magill, Tom, and Jennifer Marquis-Muradaz. 2009. “The Making of Mickey B, a Modern Adaptation of Macbeth in a Maximum Security Prison in Northern Ireland.” In Dramatherapy and Social Theatre: Necessary Dialogues, ed. Sue Jennings, 109–16. New York: Routledge.

202  Daniel Fischlin, Tom Magill, and Jessica Riley McCabe, Pauline. 2011. “Annual Report (April 2010–March 2011).” The Prisoner Ombudsman for Northern Ireland. http://www.niprisonerombudsman.com/current/publications.html. McCaffrey, Barry. N.d. “Suicides in Prison: Ombudsman and Families Speak Out.” thedetail. http://www.thedetail.tv/issues/13/hydebank-suicides/ suicides-in-prison-ombudsman-and-families-speak-out. Accessed 26 March 2012. McDonnell, Bill. 2008. Theatres of the Troubles: Theatre, Resistance and Liberation in Ireland. Exeter: University of Exeter Press. McDonnell, Bill, and Joe Reid. 2010. “To Speak Your Truth: Dialogues on Political Theatre and the Troubles.” Kritika Kultura 15: 93–112. Mickey B. 2007. Directed by Tom Magill. Belfast: Educational Shakespeare Company. DVD. Sands, Bobby. 1981. The Crime of Castlereagh. In Long Kesh Documents. https://sites.google.com/site/longkeshdocuments/the-crime-ofcastlereagh-1. Scott-Douglass, Amy. 2007. Shakespeare Inside: The Bard behind Bars. London: Continuum. – 2010. “Macbeth as Prison Film Noir: A Review of Mickey B.” Shakespeare Newsletter 60.3: 111–16. “The Troubles.” 2012. Wikipedia. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_troubles. Weimann, Robert. 2000. Author’s Pen and Actor’s Voice: Playing and Writing in Shakespeare’s Theatre. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Werner, Sarah. 2011. “Sarah Werner’s Interview with Mickey B Director Tom Magill.” Shakespeare Quarterly Forum. Folger Shakespeare Library. http:// titania.folger.edu/blogs/sq/forum/?p=399. Wray, Ramona. 2011. “The Morals of Macbeth and Peace as Process: Adapting Shakespeare in Northern Ireland’s Maximum Security Prison.” Shakespeare Quarterly 62.3: 340–63.

PART THREE “All the Uses of This World”: TV, Radio, Popular Music, Theatre, and the Uses of Intermedia

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Slings & Arrows: An Intermediated Shakespearean Adaptation Kim Fedder son an d J. Mich ae l R i c h a r d s o n

Slings & Arrows, a three-season television series produced in Canada between 2003 and 2007, sets itself the unfashionable task of revivifying the Shakespearean corpus – the plays, poems, and the evolving theatrical, literary, and critical traditions attendant on them – and acquainting or reacquainting contemporary audiences with what it pointedly ­regards as the “timeless” pleasures of Shakespeare’s art. A popular and  critical success, it is a consistently bardolatrous adaptation of Shakespeare, deriving many of its plots, characters, conventions, and themes from the plays and the backstage traditions informing their production. Not surprisingly, much of its considerable comic effect depends upon a passing familiarity with the plays and the histories of their performance. Audiences unfamiliar with Shakespeare, however, are through its three seasons provided a better than Coles Notes primer on the Bard’s greatest hits, especially as they were read in Canadian high schools and universities, and as they were performed in regional festivals, during the 1960s and 1970s. This romantic reconstruction of a particular form of Canadian Shakespeare is critically interesting, as it affords us an opportunity to examine how the carefully contrived pastoral space that the series constructs, and within which it situates itself, all but insulates it from the more radical winds of contemporary criticism and performance. By looking at what this remediated idyll includes (the Shakespeare of Frye and the Stratford Festival) and excludes (Shakespeare as “the consummate dead white male” [Royster 1998, 62]), we can learn something about its approach to Shakespearean adaptation. Slings & Arrows is also pedagogically useful: its redeployment of Shakespearean conventions within a contemporary setting and medium, and its often metatheatrical use of these conventions in its own

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construction, foregrounds them, making them more readily apprehensible by those for whom they are unfamiliar. In this respect, it can assist us in teaching the plays themselves. It is these two aspects of Slings & Arrows – its approach to adaptation and its remediation of a particular conception of the Shakespearean corpus – that we will focus on. Deliberately situating itself in that ambiguous space between sources and adaptations – where previous authors, here Shakespeare, meet new authors (Susan Coyne, Bob Martin, and Mark McKinney); where previous texts (A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Romeo and Juliet, Hamlet, Macbeth, and King Lear) commingle and propagate with new texts and media (workplace sit com, soap opera, episodic melodrama, Broadway musical); and where previous contexts (the early modern England of Shakespeare’s Globe) meet new contexts (a fictionalized version of Ontario’s Stratford Shakespearean Festival circa 2000) – Slings & Arrows creates an intricate little world filled with Shakespeare-inflected characters, motifs, conventions, and genres, styled inconclusively by one of its writers as “dramedy or commerama” (McKinney, quoted in Smith 2007). In its combining high cultural forms with popular ones, and its remediating sonnets, songs, play texts, workshops, and performances in televisual form, Slings & Arrows reveals its affiliation with other remediated Shakespeares (e.g., Shakespeare in Love, Luhrmann’s William Shakespeare’s Romeo+Juliet, McKellen’s Richard III, and many other cinematic adaptations over the last two decades). Unlike the first generation of intermedial artists, who frequently used new media and intermedia to challenge political and aesthetic orthodoxies, the creators of Slings & Arrows do not take issue with the canons of traditional Western art, or their institutionalization or commercialization. With the acknowledged assistance of the Government of Canada, the Canadian Cable Industry, the Ontario Media Development Corporation, the Toronto Film and Television Office, the HSDC Bank Canada, and others, the creators of Slings & Arrows have produced a commodity intended for an international marketplace, within which they hope – given the box office appeal of remediated Shakespeare projects – the cultural capital of the Shakespeare brand still has currency. Their project is essentially conservative, both in intention and in design. Resisting the impetus to bash the Bard, “to decolonize and re-interrogate the Shakespearean text” (Fortier 2002, 339), Slings & Arrows seems set upon restoring the value of Shakespearean currency, a value that, in their rather old-fashioned view, has been worn away by centuries of tired repetition in small theatres and festivals around the world, and by

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contrived attempts, alternately pandering to popular tastes or current theatrical fashions, to make the Bard relevant to contemporary audiences. In his “Statement on Intermedia,” Dick Higgins, taking characteristic issue with the enthusiasm for the high cultural art that informs much of Slings & Arrows, makes a passing reference to Hamlet’s “To be or not to be” soliloquy: “we do not ask any more to speak magnificently of taking arms against a sea of troubles, we want to see it done” (1966). Slings & Arrows, of course, takes both its title and its restorative project from the very same speech. Over three seasons, the protagonist, Geoffrey Tennant, confronts various “sea[s] of troubles” – business managers who hate Shakespeare, complacent prima donnas, bored and distracted audiences, burnt-out artistic directors, incompetent Hollywood actors, self-serving egomaniacal directors, toadying critics, corporate mercenaries, self-seeking government bureaucrats – which stand in the way of producing Shakespeare’s plays in what Geoffrey would regard as a “truthful” way. Slings & Arrows embraces a romantic liberal humanist conception of theatre, replete with the customary essentialist and universalist notions of the power of drama: the “truths” in the plays express “the ineffable tragedy of the human spirit that still resonates even today”; and, however remediated, they can make one “believe that love can be rekindled, that regimes could be toppled by the simple act of telling a story truthfully”(“Geoffrey Returns” 1.2). The refiguring of the Shakespearean corpus we encounter does not appear overly concerned with the ways in which this tradition has been used to buttress prevailing Eurocentric social, political, and cultural conventions; indeed, it almost normalizes them. Certainly, there are indications within of an awareness of contemporary critiques of Shakespeare’s works as timebound negotiations with prevailing early modern understandings of race, class, gender, and various ideological purposes. As we shall see, these concerns do not significantly trouble its genial reconstruction and recontextualization of Shakespearean narratives. Like other mock-heroic comedies before it – think Stephen Leacock’s Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town – the comic vision of Slings & Arrows’ well-mannered satire is only made possible by a narrowing of focus. By limiting centre stage to the internecine struggles and intrigues, both professional and personal, of the actors, directors, and backstage personnel of New Burbage Shakespeare Festival, larger, more serious threats to the reanimation of the Shakespearean corpus – e.g., accusations of its complicity with hegemonic conceptions of race, nation, and

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gender – are left largely in the wings. The plays and parts of plays selected for staging reinforce the comfortable provincialism of Slings & Arrows. Throughout the three-season run, we are given glimpses of ­productions of Hamlet, Macbeth, King Lear, Romeo and Juliet, and A Midsummer Night’s Dream, the traditional thematics of which would be familiar to anyone who came to know Shakespeare in Canadian high schools or universities of the 1960s or 1970s. Plays more likely to engage with issues related to current cultural politics, such as Othello, The Merchant of Venice, and Titus Andronicus, are kept safely off screen, or when referenced, as The Tempest is in the first episode of the first season, are often undercut. In a telling irony, Geoffrey Tennant’s production of The Tempest is undone by a power failure before getting to act 1, scene 2 – long before the spectres of the unassimilatable others begin to trouble Prospero’s plans. Over the course of its three-season run, the show nests a series of mini-productions and adaptations of three of the major tragedies: Hamlet, the tragedy in politics and love of a young man, for the first season; Macbeth, the tragedy in political and marital life of a middleaged man, for the second season; and King Lear, the tragedy in political and family life of an old man, for the third season. Each of these ­tragedies is counterpointed by lighter, sometimes comic, sometimes Shakespearean, mini-narratives or allusions that keep us pointed towards the series’ ultimate comic resolution – A Midsummer Night’s Dream in season 1, a comically resolved Romeo and Juliet motif in season 2, and a musical entitled East Hastings in season 3. The tragedies foreground the threats to the happy resolution intimated by the comedic counterpoints, but in this romance, comedy ultimately prevails. Indeed, the overall story arc for Shakespeare as a cultural institution is rather like the King Lear narrative’s being given a spin in the direction of romantic comedy. Like the imperious old king who does not relinquish his sense of entitlement despite creating space for a younger generation, Shakespeare the cultural icon is ill-treated by those persons and institutions who should be respecting and honouring his achievement. Lear is stripped of his retinue of one hundred knights and cast out of the homes of his daughters Goneril and Regan, while in Slings & Arrows, Shakespeare is stripped of his majesty and high seriousness, sincere and probing engagement of his texts being replaced by empty spectacle and technological gimmickry, first by the burned-out artistic director Oliver Welles and then more forcefully by the postmodern poseur Darren Nichols with his complete disregard for the text and

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the traditions of interpretation and performance based on it. In this ­environment, in which the burned out and the disrespectful are aided and abetted by the business manager, Richard Smith-Jones, Geoffrey Tennant, the loyal servant to the Shakespearean estate, labours mightily to restore Shakespeare to his rightful position: in the first season, by firing Darren Nichols from Hamlet and directing it himself; in the second season, by challenging Henry Breedlove, the overconfidant thespian playing Macbeth, not merely to repeat the performances on which his reputation has been built but to do something new and “true”; and, in the third season, by placing himself in the service of Charles Kingman in a final production of King Lear. When Richard Smith-Jones learns that Kingman is dying, he cancels the show. Driven from New Burbage and left in an artistic desert that offers no official place to mount his production, Geoffrey feels compelled, because of his sense of service and obligation both to Shakespeare and to Kingman, to seek refuge in the basement of a church (the show’s equivalent to the hovel that shelters Lear from the storm) and to stage the play there. Learning of his deceit, Smith-Jones fires him. Shakespeare as served by Geoffrey Tennant is expelled from New Burbage (which dishonourably retains “Shakespeare Festival” in its name, of course) but does not die like the broken King Lear. Rather, as in a romantic comedy, Shakespeare is restored. New Burbage may be lost to Shakespeare but he finds a new kingdom elsewhere, in Montreal, as Geoffrey, now fully restored both as a man and as a theatre professional, prepares to move there and establish a new theatre that will embody his vision of Shakespeare. As the series begins, the New Burbage Shakespearean Festival has passed its glory days, which culminated in, and were represented by, its “definitive” two-and-a-half-performance production of Hamlet. In the ensuing seven years, Oliver Welles, artistic director of the Festival, has grown world-weary, old, tired, and complacent, as have his productions. They used to challenge an audience, engage them imaginatively and intellectually, but are now, in the words an irksome critic, “comfortable – like an old boot” (“Oliver’s Dream” 1.1). Oliver has tired of the interminable quarrels with Richard Smith-Jones, the Festival’s chief ­administrator, a bungling philistine, who doesn’t like Shakespeare, or actors, and whose sole preoccupations are commercial: bums in seats. Oliver is very much aware of and regretful about the compromises he has made, which leads him to assess his life and career as a failure, albeit with a few outstanding moments such as his Hamlet, in which Geoffrey Tennant played the lead. Following the opening night party

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for his lacklustre “tenth Dream,” he passes out in the middle of the road and is dispatched by a truck carrying “Canada’s Best Hams.” He returns, however, like the ghost of Hamlet Sr, to haunt, torment, and guide his metaphorical son, Geoffrey Tennant. Following the nervous breakdown he suffered midway through the third performance of his and Oliver’s Hamlet, Geoffrey had left New Burbage and eventually established his own company, Theatre sans Argent (theatre without money). In contrast to Oliver’s Burbage, very much a “Theatre avec Argent,” which has become good at making money but has become enervated artistically, Geoffrey’s Theatre sans Argent maintains its artistic integrity but can’t pay the rent or the utilities. Eventually, the Theatre sans Argent is shut down, and following Oliver’s death, Geoffrey, still a damaged soul and unable to perform, returns to New Burbage as its new artistic director, where he begins a collaboration and contestation with the ghost of Oliver. Their labour in service to the Shakespearean corpus is their central concern. The concept of service to the Shakespearean corpus is, indeed, key to the show’s development over its three seasons. There was a considerable falling off from this service, presumably occurring gradually over the intervening seven years, and the show’s three seasons exemplify a return to it. Oliver and Geoffrey in Service to “The Tradition” Oliver had once been capable of producing works of theatrical genius that challenged and gripped an audience, and he gets, post mortem, a chance to do so again, to return to the proper service of Shakespeare. In 1.1 (“Oliver’s Dream”) this service is represented intermedially by a photograph of Oliver Welles, Geoffrey Tennant, and Ellen Fanshawe (the company’s lead actress and Geoffrey’s love interest throughout the series) kissing Yorick’s skull, a metonymic proxy not just for the play Hamlet but also for its author and the traditions evolving from his work. One might want to argue that since it is a skull they are kissing in adoration, they are simply dedicating themselves to something dead, as Darren Nichols, Geoffrey’s directorial rival, says when he picks up the script for Hamlet and says, “Let’s read this corpse” (“Madness in Great Ones” 1.3). But more important for the show, the skull represents not so much death as the persistence of something after death: Oliver wants his skull to be preserved for the company to use as Yorick’s skull, one expression of his drive for continued influence after his passing. He can exercise this influence only through Geoffrey, to whom he (as ghost)

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becomes a mentor, a surrogate father, a gadfly, and eventually a collaborator. It gradually becomes clear that the contestation between Geoffrey and Oliver, initially suggesting a form of anxiety of influence, is at its core an expression of the theme of succession, the generational struggle between two different versions of essentially the same theatrical tradition. Both Geoffrey and Oliver are in service to a tradition in which Shakespeare is regarded as the high point in Western drama, the touchstone by which all other dramatists are tested. In this tradition, to say that something is “Shakespearean” is to say that it embodies or expresses something profound, permanent, supremely important, and wellnigh universal in “the human spirit,” and that a “truthful” production of his plays in any medium will touch an audience deeply, putting them in contact with feelings, experiences, and ideas that have been buried and overwritten by the routines of our everyday life. Although some audiences may prefer staged productions that retain Elizabethan settings and costumes, there is nothing in the tradition itself that mandates that version of fidelity to the text or the initial historical circumstances of its dramaturgy. It acknowledges that there is more than one way to get at the truth of Shakespeare, and some of the productions that Geoffrey mounts in the series have a vaguely Renaissance look to them, while others, most notably his Macbeth, have a modernized setting. The tradition Geoffrey and Oliver both serve is essentially that also served by Ian McKellen, whether he goes for Elizabethan costuming and settings, for minimalist settings and costumes as in his RSC Macbeth, or for more modernized ones as in his film version of Richard III, and can be illuminated by some of McKellen’s commentaries on what he was striving for. In his “Introduction” to the screenplay for Richard III, he notes that moving the play to the screen is an act of translation, and we would add that since translation involves primarily the change from one system of representation to another, moving a play from the page to the stage or any other medium is also a form of translation. For McKellen, the important thing about translation is that it must convey the underlying reality of the original even if the surface appearance is radically different: Translation is an inexact art, carrying responsibilities to respect the author’s ends, even as you willfully tamper with the means. I hadn’t asked for Shakespeare’s permission to fashion a film from his play. The least I could do was, change by change, cut by cut, ask myself whether he would

212  Kim Fedderson and J. Michael Richardson have approved … Not having him present to consult, I think of his having just left the rehearsal room, soon to return with the gentle query I’ve sometimes heard from living playwrights: “What the hell do you think you’re doing to my play?” … [I] had to make sure that Shakespeare did not become overwhelmed and that, however it was decorated, the film would remain rooted in his words and intentions as I understood them. (McKellen 1996, 15, 27)

Here, fidelity is an avowed motive, but it is understood that there are many ways in which fidelity can be achieved. For instance, productions such as the Geoffrey-Oliver Macbeth, that use a new historical setting for a play originally set elsewhere, expect that new setting to provide a stabilizing context and hope that the intended audience will read the setting in essentially the same way. Historical settings are chosen with a presumption about the audience’s response to them: the intended audience is expected to attach particular significances, knowable in advance, to character types, clothing, gestures, manners, etc. For example, Ian McKellen’s Richard III, which posits an imaginary fascist takeover of Britain, is set in the 1930s because, as McKellen explains, “the 30s were … a decade of tyranny throughout Europe, the most recent time when a dictatorship like Richard III’s might have overtaken the United Kingdom, as it had done Germany, Italy, Spain, and the empire of the Soviet Union” (1996, 13). Clearly, the reading of this Richard III depends upon readers sharing a particular understanding of that part of the history of the 1930s. On the other hand, McKellen’s Macbeth, directed by Trevor Nunn, both the RSC stage version and the film later made of that production, is noteworthy for starkness and simplicity in the areas of sets and costumes, the intention being to ensure, in McKellen’s words, that “nothing got in the way of Shakespeare’s words and the impact they had on the audience” (1978a). McKellen claims that this film version accomplishes, even more effectively than previous elaborately staged versions, what Shakespeare himself would have wished, given that his original theatre was small enough that the actors could be ­easily seen, used simple scenery, had no artificial lighting effects, and employed workaday costumes, leaving only actors and language ­ (McKellen 1978b). McKellen says Shakespeare can be “overdesigned,” and that this is the kind of “betrayal” that happens when Shakespeare is put into a very large theatre in which the audience is too far away to see the actors well and thus needs the spectacle of costume, set design, and lighting effects (1978b). For him and for Nunn, an overly elaborate

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production that exploits spectacle, costumes, and scenery can seriously distract the audience from what he sees as the core of Shakespeare – language and characters. By attending properly to the words and the characters, says McKellen, “you can make an audience … see what is not just modern but eternal in these characters” (1978b). He even prefers productions that do not attempt to limit the characters to a specific historical period, and for him the chief strength of his Macbeth is what he calls its “emptiness” – its refusal to set itself in medieval Scotland, or indeed any readily recognizable time and place – because this means that “any audience, watching it anywhere in the world can relate it to their experience of politics” (1978b). Even though the mode of translation for Macbeth is quite different from that for Richard III, the justification for it, as presented by McKellen, is quite similar in that it focuses on the ability of the audience to grasp what McKellen sees as the essence of the play and to relate to it immediately. As in his Macbeth, he is not interested in the production’s being historically accurate, because “Shakespeare is writing about people with particular natures,” which in certain important respects transcend the particularities of nationality and era (1978b). Thus the McKellen Macbeth and Richard III are animated by the same philosophy of production, but this philosophy does not mandate either historical verisimilitude or bare stage simplicity. What it does mandate is sensitivity to the language and characters, a knowledge of how to use the available means of production to empower and support high-quality acting (not to overwhelm acting and script with unnecessary spectacle), and an awareness of the capabilities and needs of the audience. Verisimilitude if necessary, but not necessarily verisimilitude. “Macbeth belongs to the people who are doing it at this particular time. Even though we are aware of past traditions, we don’t want necessarily to repeat them, but to make it very much our own” (1978b). McKellen’s comments capture the attitude and approach to Shakespearean traditions and obligations that Geoffrey and Oliver share. Before his death, Oliver, in confessing his falling off from his obligations to this tradition, admits of his tenth Midsummer Night’s Dream that “there isn’t a moment’s truth” in it (“Oliver’s Dream” 1.1). All the discussions and arguments about the staging – whether they be exchanges between Geoffrey and Oliver, Geoffrey and the actors he is directing, Geoffrey and Darren Nichols, or Geoffrey and Richard ­ Smith-Jones – have to do with getting the “correct” reading of a play, a speech, a line, or a word and communicating that to the audience in

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the best way possible, the way that will be “truest” to this conception of Shakespeare. Oliver Welles and Geoffrey Tennant are similar in many ways because they exemplify versions of the same tradition of interpreting and staging Shakespeare. But they also differ in crucial ways, ways that are to a large extent generational. While the two men share the same artistic values, Geoffrey is much younger and lacks experience as an artistic director, a fact that some actors with different ideas about the plays they are in try to exploit in order to resist his direction. As a young, creative, and energetic man, not yet jaundiced by years of conflict and compromise with those who see New Burbage as essentially a business enterprise, Geoffrey is uncompromising, artistically demanding, idealistic, and largely indifferent to the material conditions of theatrical ­production, the demands of commerce, and other realities that might interfere with the unfettered expression of his aesthetic vision. Although he has enormous enthusiasm and love for Shakespeare, he has much to learn about bringing a “truthful” vision of a play to fruition on the stage. With Oliver’s haunting assistance over the three seasons of the show, Geoffrey learns how to deal with recalcitrant or inadequate actors (for Hamlet); with actors who, having achieved a measure of renown, have made it their mission to serve themselves rather than Shakespeare and resist all direction (Henry Breedlove, the actor hired to play Macbeth); with his own limitations as a reader and stager of Shakespeare (and hence the need to seek the guidance of his predecessors both via negotiating a reading of Macbeth with Oliver’s ghost and taking account of the eight banker’s boxes full of notes that Oliver had left for the play); and with those who may be imperious but whose knowledge of and dedication to both Shakespeare and humanity require that Geoffrey serve them as much as direct them. Geoffrey’s Hamlet The first episode of the second season opens with the final performance of the Hamlet that occupies the bulk of the first season and begins with a schoolteacher, the type of browbeating teacher who contributes to the death of Shakespeare as a cultural force, bringing a class to see the play. He tells his class that it is one of the greatest plays ever written, so they must “shut up and listen,” sit with their hands in their laps, and stare at the stage until it’s over. He does not tell them to get emotionally involved with the story or characters, to try to relate the play to their own

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lives, or to understand something of why the play is great. Interestingly, these instructions and what they lack make an interesting parallel to Gertrude’s uninvolved watching and reporting of Ophelia’s death and Geoffrey’s finally finding a way to get Ellen to play the speech the way he thinks it should be played, which comes up a few minutes later in  the episode. The teacher and students do not lift a finger to help Shakespeare any more than Gertrude does to help Ophelia, and are thus complicit in Shakespeare’s gradual demise. Backstage and during intermission of this final performance of Hamlet, Geoffrey is still providing notes to the actors, still striving to perfect the performance, to make it embody the truth of the play as he sees it. We stress “as he sees it” because the show does not see the “truth” of an individual play as being reducible to a single definitive reading, but as something open to discussion, compromise, and rethinking, which becomes clear in the arguments Geoffrey and Oliver have in season 2 about how to read and stage Macbeth. The representation of these notes moves, as do teachers, from the simple to the complex, and typify what Geoffrey has so far learned about eliciting the performance he wants out of the actors. First, he talks with the actors playing the guards in the opening scene, telling them that the audience has to see and feel the cold up there in the battlements. One of the actors immediately translates that into a formulaic way of signifying cold on stage: stamp your feet. That is followed by the much more complex discussion with Ellen of Gertrude’s description of Ophelia’s death. Geoffrey starts with the observation that Gertrude describes the death in great detail, and then proceeds (like a teacher trying to elicit ideas out of a student) with the question of why Gertrude does this. Ellen is reluctant to discuss the speech, since it is the last performance of the play, but says Gertrude saw a young girl drown and that kind of thing sticks with you, the simplest most superficial kind of answer. Pressing on, Geoffrey asks her why Gertrude did not try to save Ophelia, since she was on the scene and noted all the details. Ellen in frustration says maybe she did not want to ruin her dress. Geoffrey continues with more leading questions, just the way one does in a classroom when trying to lead the students gradually to a certain interpretation, or range of interpretations, rather than “giving them the answer” right away. Ellen suggests that Gertrude thinks that Ophelia was better off dead, since she was suffering. To which Geoffrey says, “Let’s take this a little bit further,” and asks what if Ophelia didn’t drown by accident, what if she killed herself. To which Ellen says that Gertrude said Ophelia was mad and incapable of making rational

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judgments. Geoffrey then asks what if Gertrude were lying. He stresses the fact that Gertrude watches Ophelia drowning and does nothing to help her and wants to explore, with the actress, why she does this and what psychological effect it has on Gertrude herself. The conclusion reached is that Gertrude does believe Ophelia was better off dead; but she also feels responsible for Ophelia’s madness and now for her death too, and so, as a final act of mercy, she lies about her death (saying it was an accident not a suicide) so Ophelia can be buried in consecrated ground. Geoffrey says that since this is the last performance, it is Ellen’s “last chance to get it right.” Like a teacher, he does have a specific conclusion to which he wishes to lead the student, but has learned that simply announcing that conclusion is less effective than making it appear that the student has arrived at that conclusion herself, or demonstrating a train of thought that leads to that conclusion. We return to the stage and get Ellen’s new and superior rendition of the speech. The audience is suddenly transfixed, including the students, who had earlier been throwing pennies at the actors. It is clear that they now feel they are getting something that is true, real, and timeless. Geoffrey smiles in the wings. The browbeating schoolteacher is now asleep, missing the very thing towards which he should have been leading his students. These scenes show Geoffrey’s skill to date in overcoming tired repetition, in restoring the value of Shakespearean currency. Geoffrey’s Collaboration with Oliver on Macbeth These scenes also show a further aspect of the tradition that Geoffrey and Oliver serve, the notion that dramatic art is essentially a transformative experience. Indeed, at the wrapping up cast party for Hamlet, Geoffrey announces that the next season will include Macbeth, which is famous for being very difficult to stage effectively as well as for being a “cursed” play. Geoffrey says in anticipation of this production that “there will be struggle, there will be sacrifice, there will be tears, there will be the occasional fist fight, and in the end there will be transformation” (“Season’s End” 2.1), and the series makes it clear that this transformation is not in the actors alone, but is also in audiences who are privileged to be part of a “truthful” production, and in people who learn how to read Shakespeare attentively and sensitively rather than merely mechanically. But, what Geoffrey probably did not anticipate, transformation also occurs in him and in his relationship with Oliver’s ghost. Oliver can be seen as an overbearing teacher, with Geoffrey as

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initially a reluctant student, who has to be led, as Ellen was in the example we cited above, to a greater understanding of his role. When directing Hamlet, Geoffrey relies largely on his own skills and resources as he learns how to get his own way, to, like Hamlet, “set things right,” or to his sense of right, and this makes him somewhat uncompromising, as in his statement cited above that the last performance of the play was Ellen’s last chance to get the speech “right” as opposed to performing it in a better, more complex and nuanced way than she had previously been doing. But when directing Macbeth in season 2, he gets stuck for ideas and learns that he can’t do everything by himself, that his own way may not in fact be the best way, that his readings are not necessarily “right,” and that he needs to engage creatively with predecessors by studying Oliver’s notes and collaborating with his spirit. He learns that he must take account of and compromise with Oliver’s reading to some extent while still producing one that is his own; as McKellen puts it, “Even though we are aware of past traditions, we don’t want necessarily to repeat them, but to make it very much our own.” In this Macbethlike struggle for control over the theatrical kingdom, for the ability to assert one’s will as the “King,” Geoffrey at first did not even want to look at Oliver’s eight boxes of notes for the play, and indeed mocked and scorned him, but when he is at a dead end for ideas and does take a look, he finds that many aspects of Oliver’s work were indeed sound (e.g., that adding a thrust to the stage will “erase the comfort barrier created by the proscenium arch” by creating the illusion that the audience is “complicit in the intrigue, and will move the action into the ­audience” [“Fallow Time” 2.2]). But he does not buy into Oliver’s vehement insistence that Banquo’s ghost must be physically present on stage and visible to the audience, and instead goes with an empty chair. Geoffrey, very much attuned to the psychosexual elements in the play, wants to have Lady Macbeth unclothe and wash the blood off Macbeth as he returns from battle. Oliver and the cast members, especially Henry Breedlove, the ironically named actor cast to play the barren King Macbeth, see this as gratuitous nudity and resist this reading. Breedlove had previously performed Macbeth to critical acclaim and sees no need to change anything from his earlier performances, no need to re-examine the play or his character. He embodies a form of self-love that does not really breed, that is infertile, impotent, and non re-­creative. We get from him mechanically reproduced art, exactly the same performance repeated over and over (until the last syllable of recorded time as it were), regardless of changing contexts. Like Oliver, he wants to see

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Macbeth as only a monster, and regards the bathing scene, which is part of Geoffrey’s idea of humanizing Macbeth, as too radical and, of course, massively disruptive to how he, Breedlove, wants to present the play and the character. Interestingly, an actor friend of Breedlove’s called Brian, whom Geoffrey refused to employ for the current season after he had ignored his notes for his role as Claudius in the preceding season’s Hamlet, sees considerable merit in the idea and encourages Geoffrey to stick to his guns, and the scene is eventually staged that way. A struggle with the past has become a creative collaboration with it. In order to deal with Henry Breedlove’s reluctance to take chances and embrace change, Geoffrey learns that tackling him head on, as he had with actors in season 1, produces no useful results: Breedlove ignores him. Geoffrey fires him, but is forced to rehire him because the understudy is not really up to the task. In order to jolt Breedlove out of his selfserving inertia, Geoffrey must trick him, working in collusion with the other actors, by changing blocking and entrances, etc., without telling Breedlove, thus making him find his own way to cope on stage – in effect turning a well-rehearsed play into a kind of improvisation of itself. Throughout the first two seasons, Geoffrey (and the viewer) gets a sense that he is the only one, at least among the living, who is truly dedicated to Shakespeare, a sense that produces a kind of egotism in Geoffrey, a sense of privilege in the Shakespeare business, the very kind of thing which, if left unchecked, could ultimately turn him into a version of Oliver Welles. Geoffrey’s Serving Charles Kingman’s Lear In the third season, Geoffrey as director of King Lear learns that he must move to the side and, like Kent in the play, serve the real king. When he encounters Charles Kingman, he finds himself working with an imperious and dying old man, whose theatrical career has had much more acclaim and renown than that of Henry Breedlove, but who is, nonetheless, committed wholeheartedly to Shakespeare, and to serving humanity (a possible implication of his surname) not his own ego. He is imperious in attitude because he is dying and it is important to him to reach the “truth” of King Lear, even if the effort kills him. Geoffrey learns humility: he has found someone whose knowledge of and dedication to Shakespeare is much greater than his own, is indeed all consuming. The other actors, although they find Kingman to be insufferable on occasion, do, again like Kent in the play, find that within him which

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they would “fain call master” and serve. To serve Kingman is, in effect, to serve Shakespeare. So, when Richard Smith-Jones threatens to fire anyone involved with Geoffrey and this play, the cast willingly abandons Richard and joins Geoffrey and Kingman to mount a technologically simple but artistically powerful performance of the play in a church basement. Geoffrey’s humble, loving, and faithful service to Kingman and Shakespeare (purged of the risk of excessive ego that could have been brought on by his successes to date) is rewarded – Geoffrey is also now able to return to the stage after a nearly ten-year absence, and does so as Kent, a choice of character that acknowledges that, as Brian says in season 2, “The play’s the thing. It’s bigger than any one actor. You know that. I know you do. You must stage the play the way you see it” (“Steeped in Blood” 2.5). It is fitting that the series end here, as Oliver’s work in educating Geoffrey is done. Geoffrey and Smith-Jones Geoffrey Tennant’s story arc over the three seasons of Slings & Arrows is that of a bildungsroman, as Geoffrey learns from his experiences, as well as from Oliver and Kingman. Richard Smith-Jones’s story arc is, in contrast, quite different. Despite numerous opportunities, Richard fails to learn from art, fails to learn about art, and fails to learn that, as a business manager in a Shakespeare festival, he is in service to art. He sees himself as only in service to commerce, and his approach to staging Shakespeare is to do a strictly materialist cost-benefit analysis. As a business manager he sees his function as limited to keeping New Burbage viable as a business, “an arts-skewed commercial venture” as a representative of a major corporate sponsor describes it (“Oliver’s Dream” 1.1). Hence, if it means getting more corporate or government money, he will ignore theatrical traditions like providing complimentary tickets to long-serving actors. At first he seems to have cordial enough relations with May Silverstone, an elderly board member who represents the idealized form of corporate presence that supports, without interfering with, the artistic goals of New Burbage. But she is pushed aside by Richard’s sometime girlfriend, Holly Day, a corporate mercenary who represents the sponsor Cosmopolitan Lenstrex, who increases the narrowing of Richard’s gaze to the commercial, and who has a scheme to turn New Burbage into a Shakespeare theme park. The theme park idea is one that sees Shakespeare as, at best, a commodity or a “brand” to be exploited for short-term gain rather than as a body of

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work that, if engaged with properly, has the power to humanize. When Oliver’s artistically sound plan for a thrust stage for Macbeth in season 2 requires a huge expense, plus the removal of fifty or more seats, Richard balks, but eventually gives in, only because the festival is committed to Oliver’s Macbeth (exploiting Oliver’s reputation for further profit), and it requires the thrust. In season 2, the quest to bring in younger audiences and more money, coupled with an offer of help for his own advancement in the company if he gets a Conrad Black–like corporate mogul on the board so that New Burbage can be run as a proper business, leads Richard to the disastrous plan of engaging the public relations firm Frog Hammer to rebrand New Burbage by erecting billboards that cruelly and tastelessly mock its current subscribers as sick old people on life support. For Richard and for his friends and acquaintances in the corporate world, the profit motive severs all other ties, obligations, and responsibilities. He has no interest in the real business of New Burbage, staging Shakespeare – indeed he doesn’t even like Shakespeare – and when it comes to things artistic, his real passion is musical theatre. So, he unsuccessfully auditions for a part in a Gilbert and Sullivan musical and ends up directing the vacuous musical East Hastings in season 3. Over the course of its own narrative arc, Slings & Arrows asks which set of stories provides the best set of answers to the questions facing the various individuals, including Richard Smith-Jones, who form the communities that intersect within New Burbage. Not surprisingly, it finds within the Shakespearean corpus a set of answers that it prefers to the readily available alternatives. Thematized through a playing and replaying of the “Tomorrow” speech from Macbeth, Slings & Arrows finds within the Shakespearean corpus the narrative alternatives to the meaningless world that Macbeth glimpses upon learning of his wife’s death, and to the equally meaningless world of those not open to the transformative powers of art. It rejects his conclusion that life is “a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing,” offering in its stead the familiar, and often contested, notion of lives told by a universal genius who wrote for all times and whose works contain one of  the greatest explorations of the human condition, whose words, if properly listened to, can put us into contact with feelings, experiences, and ideas that have been buried and overwritten by the routines of our everyday life. We first encounter the “Tomorrow” speech in season 1 when the ­Vice-President for Customer Care of Cosmopolitan Lenstrex uses it in a

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thank you speech he delivers on the opening night of Oliver’s “tenth Dream.” Reading awkwardly from prepared notes, he says, “I believe it was the immortal Bard who said ‘life is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.’ Well, we at Cosmopolitan Lenstrex disagree. Life, anyone’s life, regardless of their race …” (“Oliver’s Dream” 1.1). The camera moves to Holly Day, who makes a dismissive sound while rolling her eyes upwards and talks about matters like the gift shop revenue with a smirking Richard, who is paying scant attention to the speech. We can vaguely hear the vice-president droning on in the background. Sheer rhetorical ineptitude (his failure to grasp the rhetorical requirements of a thank you speech) and intellectual obtuseness (his failure to contextualize the speech and its concerns) confound the speaker’s efforts to ingratiate himself to his audience by quoting Shakespeare. He clearly does not realize that this is not the occasion to be taking issue, especially in a superficial way, with Shakespeare – he is after all receiving on his company’s behalf an award by an institution whose function is to promote and celebrate Shakespeare, it’s a Shakespeare festival. The underlying existential question raised by the speech (“What is the meaning of life?”) and the reasons underlying the inadequacy of Macbeth’s answer (“Life has no meaning”) are lost on him. No one attends to his vacuous observation that life is full of meaning, nor to the delusional idiocy that it is available to all, regardless of one’s race. He is unintentionally implicated by Macbeth’s words: just one of the “poor player[s]” that “strut and fret” and are then literally “heard no more.” Few listen, and those that do, like his boss, Holly Day, conclude it’s time to replace him. Our second encounter with the speech occurs in 1.3 (“Madness in Great Ones”). Upon his return to New Burbage, Geoffrey Tennant is given the task of leading a corporate strategy workshop to a group of marketers and an accountant. The overall comic arc of the series – in which the personal needs and desires of the characters are generally satisfied or fulfilled, and the enervation of theatre as art by the ascendancy of commerce is countered, not by expelling commerce in a kind of naive romanticism, but by enabling the enlarging of the perspective and the self-definition of individuals – is very neatly encapsulated here. Terry is an accountant, described by the others as “the numbers man.” His sense of self, internalized and reflected back to him by his corporate peers, has been circumscribed by his corporate role. The workshop that Geoffrey conducts leads him not to finding a way to be a better accountant, but to finding a much more capacious sense of self and of life. With

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Geoffrey’s guidance, he finds through the text of the “Tomorrow” speech a way of apprehending self and the world that had not occurred to him before. By opening himself to the questions Macbeth opens up, he gains the opportunity to engage the complex questions posed within the speech and the complicated answers it provides to those questions. In doing so, the “petty pace” of the routine moments, the unvarying “tomorrows,” which when tallied constitute a life are punctuated by moments of significance – moments like the one he has just experienced. His sincere engagement with the text, not incidentally, makes him a more interesting person, not only to himself, but also to others, as one of marketers in the workshop starts to flirt with him. Here we can see most clearly Slings & Arrows’ comfort with liberal humanist notions of canonical art as a liberating force that creates the possibility of selftransformation as opposed to seeing it as an instrument of oppression. Our next encounter with the speech occurs in season 2, the season dedicated to the main stage production of Macbeth. But we do not see the speech performed by Henry Breedlove. In 2.2 (“Fallow Time”), Geoffrey and Ellen go to an elementary school’s production of Macbeth, in which, of course, the play is stripped to the bare essentials required to tell the story and the language is modernized and scaled down. The children’s version captures Lady Macbeth’s badgering her husband to be a man by killing Duncan in his sleep; the play’s excessive amounts of blood (which the actors at the Burbage talk about at some length); the equivocal nature of the prophecies, etc. This little production gives us a very truncated “Tomorrow” speech, in which Macbeth says: “Now they tell me my wife is dead. I don’t understand life. It just keeps going on and on with no purpose. I am so sad.” This contextualized version of the speech exhibits a better grasp than the vice-president had. Oliver’s ghost appears next to the child Macbeth and says to Geoffrey, “Isn’t that poignant? This little boy captured the essence of Macbeth’s despair with those few lines: ‘I don’t understand life. It just goes on and on with no purpose.’” This scene also suggests that the drama teacher for these small children is doing a more effective job of introducing her students to the wonders and complexities of Shakespeare than did the authoritarian teacher whose students threw pennies at the actors in 2.1 (“Season’s End”). Our final encounter with the “Tomorrow” speech occurs at the end the series, and returns us to Richard Smith-Jones. Here, in the closing moment of the final episode (“The Promised End” 3.6), Anna, the ­company’s associate administrative director, is forced to choreograph

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her  own dismissal. Throughout the three seasons of Slings & Arrows, Richard Smith-Jones’s character has been continually in play. Awkwardly straddling the worlds of art and commerce, he is potentially the villain of the piece, the one who will sacrifice art to commerce, turning New Burbage into a Shakespearean theme park; or, alternatively, he is a potential hero in a bildungsroman subplot, the one who will put his financial skills in the service of theatre. At the outset of season 1, he primarily focuses on the bottom line, prefers ABBA to Shakespeare, and is susceptible to the charms of Holly Day, the corporate seductress. Nonetheless, and despite the inevitable frustrations of managing temperamental thespians, he appears genuinely committed to the New Burbage Festival. In season 2, the tensions continue, but he is increasingly drawn to the world of theatre, albeit musical theatre, which Slings & Arrows, as evidence of its own high culture prejudices, regards as artistically shallow, commercial, and populist entertainment. But it is an art form nonetheless, and the easing of the constraints that a corporately contained selfhood has imposed on Richard echoes Terry the accountant’s earlier encounter with the transformative power of art. Richard’s participation in the production of Gilbert and Sullivan’s HMS Pinafore opens up the possibility of his rebranding himself, a theme that is further developed in season 3 when he takes over the direction of the teen musical East Hastings. While the musical is framed as a bloated bathetic counterpoint to the sparse sublimity of the main company’s production of King Lear, it is unclear until this final scene with Anna where Richard Smith-Jones will finally land, and we learn in this scene that he has squandered the regenerative opportunity that was offered him: “You came so close, Richard, to becoming a human being. But you lost your soul.” Echoing the “Tomorrow speech,” Anna tells him, “And now you’re just a fool”; and he joins the ranks of those other fools whose “yesterdays have lighted … the way to dusty death.” The narrative of Richard Smith-Jones, unlike that of Geoffrey Tennant, is a failed bildungsroman, a story of the man who fails to learn. As we noted above, Slings & Arrows presents the narrative of Shakespeare as an institution or icon as a form of romantic comedy. But Shakespearean romantic comedy typically contains at least one character who remains at odds with the values that prevail at the end of the play and who thus is excluded from the concluding feasting and revelry. In Slings & Arrows, Richard, a Malvolio-like figure, plays that role. As business manager for the theatre company, Richard is, like Malvolio, in effect only a steward and not part of the artistically privileged inner circle, regardless of his

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attempts to enter that charmed circle via the musical. Indeed, like Malvolio’s yellow stockings and forced smile, the musical becomes a measure of Richard’s distance from the centre that he simultaneously envies, desires, and loathes. At the end of the series’ final episode, Geoffrey and Ellen marry and plan to move to Montreal to continue art in the tradition of the Theatre sans Argent, far away from the territory (literal and metaphorical) of New Burbage; now that Geoffrey has regained sexual as well as artistic potency, they may have the baby they were planning ten years ago. The final scene before the credits is of celebration and feasting in the theatre bar, with Ellen in her wedding gown performing the ritual tossing of the bridal bouquet, an ending that is instinct with new beginnings, as in Shakespearean romantic comedy. But in the very final image of Slings & Arrows, after the final run of credits that many viewers may in fact not bother to watch, we see the face of Richard Smith-Jones pressed up against the window of the bar, looking in, but remaining outside, shut out and unassimilatable. Geoffrey and Darren Nichols The trajectories of Geoffrey’s and Richard’s narratives are diametrically opposed. At the end of the series, the theatrical tradition that Geoffrey represents has been expelled from New Burbage. The commercial barbarians have upstaged the artistic heirs to the throne. Yet, though Richard Smith-Jones wins New Burbage, his victory is pyrrhic. His failure to learn from his experience leaves the kingdom with an animating vision that reduces it to being simply another commodity in the entertainment marketplace. Significantly, the character of Darren Nichols, Geoffrey’s directorial rival over the three seasons, is not implicated in either of these crisscrossing bildungsromans. At the conclusion of the series, he is just as he was at the outset – neither better nor worse in relation to the series’ implied standard of artistic value. Darren, while little more than a comic foil for Geoffrey (the two have been competing throughout their intersecting careers), provides the series with an opportunity to lampoon the contemporary theatrical avant-garde. In season 1, the company hires him to direct its Hamlet. In vivid contrast to the adoration of the skull, Darren Nichols declares Shakespeare to be dead and irrelevant. In his first meeting with the cast, he disassociates himself from the ­timorous bardolatry of “the common man”: “I don’t worship dead

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texts, but that doesn’t mean I don’t find interest in them. Let’s read this corpse” (“Madness in Great Ones” 1.3). His subsequent direction underscores the posturing, arrogant self-promotion of his apparent artistic radicalism. If anything, it’s the same as the sold-out Oliver Welles’s writ large and expensive. Where Oliver wanted some bleating animatronic sheep for A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Darren wants live horses on stage and lavish pyrotechnics for his Hamlet. More interested in theatrical spectacle than the language of the playtext, Darren doesn’t even register that the American movie star brought in to play the lead says “angles and ministers of grace” rather than “angels.” In season 2, recently returned from Germany, Darren takes on Romeo and Juliet. An early adopter of whatever avant-garde and postmodern theatrical practices hold sway in continental circles, he leads the cast through various arid and strained exercises during rehearsal, ignoring the text just as much as he had when directing Hamlet. In protest, the actors playing Romeo and Juliet seek help from Geoffrey, and their engagement with the text through him leads to their offstage passion as well as to that on stage. In season 3, Darren abandons Shakespeare entirely in favour of a banal pop musical, East Hastings, and he leads the vacuous teenage cast through tortuous rehearsals until they mutiny and replace him with the enthusiastic, but inept, Richard Smith-Jones. Clearly something of straw man in the debate between traditional and innovative theatre, there’s little that’s daring about Darren, and like Richard, he is, despite his seeming radical ideas, attitudes, and appearance, primarily concerned with money and status – nickels. The comic treatment notwithstanding, Darren’s hypocrisy quietly points to the curious alliance between postmodern cultural practices and capitalism. As Jameson and others have noted, critiques of logocentricism, foundations, and the hierarchies of value dependent on them can have a levelling effect, reducing all cultural objects to the status of commodities circulating, and competing for attention, within a global marketplace. There is little to suggest that Darren Nichols’s radical pretensions are in any way aligned with a progressive politics that might have an impact outside of the texts in which he takes interest. Thoroughly elitist and self-promoting, Darren, we learn, values only that which serves to advance Darren Nichols. In this respect, he and Smith-Jones are ­fully aligned. It makes perfect sense that, as the series concludes, Smith-Jones, now installed as the managing director, hires Darren Nichols to be the new artistic director of New Burbage. Darren enters

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proclaiming, “Let’s talk box office” (“The Promised End” 3.6). Together, they can now get down to the real “business” of theatre unfettered by all this romantic claptrap about “truth” and the “ineffable tragedy of the human spirit.” Nahum Oliver Welles is not the only the character that haunts New Burbage. Nahum, a Nigerian refugee – once a director of political theatre in Nigeria, now employed as a security guard/custodian in New Burbage – also haunts the entire series. Almost always depicted on the periphery of the action, whether watching the actions on stage and off from the vantage of his security monitor, or from the wings and backstage corridors, his very corporeal, as opposed to Oliver’s spectral, presence reminds the audience of the existence a larger reality beyond the little world of the New Burbage festival. His presence puts the quarrels about “art” and “truth” that inform Slings & Arrows’ mock-heroic pastoral into geopolitical relief, not trivializing those concerns but cautioning us as Swift famously does in Gulliver’s Travels (1726) that “nothing is great or little otherwise than by comparison” (Swift 1978, 289). Oliver, watching his listless opening night production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream with Nahum in the security office, despairs, “There’s not a ­moment of truth in this whole production” (“Oliver’s Dream” 1.1). Nahum, recalling his production of Ken Wiwa’s The Wheel that led to his imprisonment, reminds Oliver that “truth can be a very dangerous thing” (“Oliver’s Dream” 1.1). The brutalities of the postcolonial regime from which he has been exiled and his experiences with racism and underemployment in Canada have taught him hard truths, which the denizens of New Burbage, preoccupied as they are with the petty jealousies and rivalries peculiar to the world of the theatre, will likely never have to confront. Nahum is presented to us as a happy outsider, accommodated to his new home, and benignly amused by the endless strutting and fretting of its inhabitants. Though he never becomes much more than a “mechanical” in this world, he does by the end of season 3 get marginally closer to the action when he is pressed into service, shaking a piece of sheet metal backstage to create the sound of the storm in Geoffrey’s church-basement production of King Lear. Whether ensconced within New Burbage or exiled without, the Other’s social mobility in this closeted world of white privilege is on the whole rather limited.

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Nahum serves another purpose in the series and that is to remind us  of someone who shares his unfamiliar name: Nahum Tate, the ­eighteenth-century poet laureate who gained renown during his time for rewriting King Lear as a comedy. In Tate’s handling of the story, Lear is restored to the throne and Edgar and Cordelia wed. Like the Nahum of Slings & Arrows whose day job it is to keep the world of New Burbage secure, Nahum Tate’s treatment of King Lear as comedy keeps the horrors the play unleashes – arrogance, betrayal, violence, war, madness, and death – safely at bay. More so than Shakespeare’s audience, Tate’s can sleep securely knowing that the universe is still a place where justice prevails and the good live happily ever after. In a similar fashion, Slings & Arrows – by satirizing a culture in which the only values that count are economic ones and by romantically reasserting the primacy of cultural value – turns tragedy into comedy. Its revaluation of value turns what would otherwise be the tragedy of Geoffrey Tennant’s excommunication from the church of high culture into a comedic victory for art. Exile becomes homecoming. Similarly, it turns Richard Smith-Jones’s and Darren Nichols’s ascendance to the throne into a tragic indictment of its hollowness. Triumph becomes defeat. Shut out of the pub, but looking longingly at the celebrations within, it is Richard Smith-Jones who is banished. When the final curtain closes on Slings & Arrows, Nahum’s “ineffable tragedy of the human spirit” has been transformed into comedy of an almost divine kind. As we move through the three seasons, Death’s sting loses both the dread and angst of Hamlet’s “to be or not to be” and the absurdity of Macbeth’s “tale told by an idiot signifying nothing,” and instead, owing much to the same sensibility that gave us Tate’s feel-good King Lear, is reconceived as only a step in life’s journey as it moves into eternity. Oliver’s ghost, freed from his purgatorial haunting, joins hands with a vindicated Charles Kingman and the two ascend to their well-deserved place with theatre’s elect. Slings & Arrows reanimates the Shakespearean corpus: it does not regard the plays and the traditions as a dead body like Darren Nichols, nor as the desiccated relic of Oliver’s/Yorick’s skull that Geoffrey carries with him. True to the series’ conservative, avowedly bardolatrous, conception of Shakespeare, there is no corpse in need of resurrection. All that there is is an eternally vital and universally present body requiring the service of the faithful.

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WORKS CITED “Fallow Time.” 2005. Slings & Arrows. Season 2. Episode 2. Created and written by Susan Coyne, Bob Martin, and Mark McKinney. Directed by Peter Wellington. Acorn Media, 2008. DVD. Fortier, Mark. 2002. “Undead and Unsafe: Adapting Shakespeare (in Canada).” In Shakespeare in Canada: A World Elsewhere?, ed. Diana Brydon and Irena Makaryk, 339–52. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. “Geoffrey Returns.” 2003. Slings & Arrows. Season 1. Episode 2. Created and written by Susan Coyne, Bob Martin, and Mark McKinney. Directed by Peter Wellington. Acorn Media, 2008. DVD. Higgins, Dick. 1966. “Statement on Intermedia.” http://www.artpool.hu/ Fluxus/Higgins/intermedia2.html. Accessed 15 December 2011. “Madness in Great Ones.” 2003. Slings & Arrows. Season 1. Episode 3. Created and written by Susan Coyne, Bob Martin, and Mark McKinney. Directed by Peter Wellington. Acorn Media, 2008. DVD. McKellen, Ian. 1978a. “Introduction to Macbeth.” In On Macbeth, directed by Trevor Nunn and Philip Casson. Thames Television, 1978. DVD. – 1978b. “The Scottish Play: An Explanation.” In On Macbeth. Dir. Trevor Nunn and Philip Casson. Thames Television, 1978. DVD. – 1996. “Introduction.” In William Shakespeare’s “Richard III”: A Screenplay Written by Ian McKellen and Richard Loncraine, Annotated and Introduced by Ian McKellen, 7–37. Woodstock, NY: Overlook Press. “Oliver’s Dream.” 2003. Slings & Arrows. Season 1. Episode 1. Created and written by Susan Coyne, Bob Martin, and Mark McKinney. Directed by Peter Wellington. Acorn Media, 2008. DVD. “The Promised End.” 2006. Slings & Arrows. Season 3. Episode 6. Created and written by Susan Coyne, Bob Martin, and Mark McKinney. Directed by Peter Wellington. Acorn Media, 2008. DVD. Royster, Francesca T. 1998. “‘The End of Race’ and the Future of Early Modern Cultural Studies.” Shakespeare Studies 26: 59–69. “Season’s End.” 2005. Slings & Arrows. Season 2. Episode 1. Created and written by Susan Coyne, Bob Martin, and Mark McKinney. Directed by Peter Wellington. Acorn Media, 2008. DVD. Slings & Arrows. 2003–6. Created and written by Susan Coyne, Bob Martin, and Mark McKinney. Directed by Peter Wellington. Acorn Media, 2008. DVD. Smith, Lynn. 2007. “Theater of the Absurd to Them Is Just Life.” Los Angeles Times, 16 February 2007. http://articles.latimes.com/2007/feb/16/ entertainment/et-slings16. Accessed 21 March 2012.

Slings & Arrows: An Intermediated Adaptation  229 “Steeped in Blood.” 2005. Slings & Arrows. Season 2. Episode 5. Created and written by Susan Coyne, Bob Martin, and Mark McKinney. Directed by Peter Wellington. Acorn Media, 2008. DVD. Swift, Jonathan. 1978. The Portable Swift. Ed. Carl Van Doren. New York: Viking Press.

Your Master’s Voice: The Shakespearean Narrator as Intermedial Authority on 1930s American Radio A ndr ew Br etz

Rags on Shakespeare Radio in the early twentieth century represented a leap forward in terms of the ability of communications technology to reach vast new audiences, creating the first truly mass media enterprise that extended beyond national, cultural, and ideological borders. The extensive possible scope of the medium was inhibited in the early, experimental days of radio (pre-1920) by the lack of a commonly accepted set of aural and narrative tropes. Radio’s success as a popular dramatic medium in the United States from the 1930s to the 1950s is at least partially attributable to the establishment of these tropes of storytelling, many of which were drawn from other media forms. The authoritative voice of the narrator, a characteristic feature of the aural texture of radio that was deployed with increasing regularity through the Golden Age, was first perfected through radio’s early adaptations of Shakespeare.1 Radio adaptations of Shakespeare adopted narrative techniques and structures of authority from different media – from the stage and from aural media like the phonograph – and in doing so legitimated radio as a medium for the transmission of “legitimate” drama. Indeed, radio drama was first articulated as existing within the seam between the theatre and the new medium – not quite the stage, yet not wholly aural either – and it was with the advent of the authoritative voice of the Shakespearean narrator that the intermedial space of radio drama became its own unique genre. When radio adapted Shakespeare, it was not simply a case of remediation from one mediatized form to another – stage to radio. The gesture carried with it a social, political, and historical signification that shaped the intermedial effects of adaptation. Indeed, ideology, as much

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as technology, shaped the ways in which the radio structured its audience as related to Shakespeare. From the beginning of commercial radio in the United States, Shakespeare played a role in legitimizing the new medium and introducing audiences to the dramatic potential of radio, though it was originally an attempt to aurally reproduce a spectacular stage play. In September of 1922, portions of Romeo and Juliet were broadcast by WJZ in Schenectady, New York through a remote hook-up from Henry Miller’s Theatre on Broadway; this was only seven months after the same radio station had produced the first radio drama heard on American airwaves, “The Wolf.” Throughout the 1920s and 1930s, the institutions behind radio increased their investment in the works of Shakespeare, culminating in the so-called 1937 Summer of Shakespeare, where the two major networks, NBC and CBS, broadcast adaptations of Shakespeare’s plays in competing time slots. The growth and popularity of radio as viewed through its relation to Shakespeare encapsulate the growing complexity of the relationship between early twentiethcentury American audiences and the literary canon. Despite arguments that Shakespeare was perfectly suited to the new medium, the Shakespeare presented on radio was an ossification of theatrical representation. The mediation of a narrator – a professor, a noted actor, or other representative of authority – rendered Shakespeare comprehensible in the new medium, but only just. The authority of the narrator was usually established through some other medium, such as the theatre or literary studies, and then imported to radio.2 The presentation of Shakespeare over these early radio networks directly collocated the new medium with the cultural élite of other media and gave a greater voice to American culture’s already enfranchised. In the following essay, I argue that radio’s audience in the period from 1920 to 1940 was actively discouraged from engaging with the Shakespearean text by the mediating figure of the expert, who was to guide them through the ­exegetical process. Not merely an artefact of the translation to a new medium, the narrator structured the possible mode(s) of audience engagement, bridging between the raucousness of late nineteenth-­century theatre audiences and the domesticity of early twentieth-century radio audiences. Aural Art Long before radio ascended to become the dominant entertainment form in the early 1930s, far surpassing cinema and records in audience

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and impact, Shakespeare had already become culture.3 As Lawrence Levine notes in Highbrow/Lowbrow, “By the turn of the century, Shakespeare had been converted from a popular playwright whose dramas were the property of those who flocked to see them, into a sacred author who had to be protected from ignorant audiences and overbearing actors threatening the integrity of his creations” (1988, 72). Audiences ceased to view Shakespeare as an engaging popular entertainment, which they parodied, referenced, and deformed at will across both genre and media, and instead received his plays with refined, polite, theatrical attention, but little engagement. This sacralization of Shakespeare privileged certain social groups insofar as the trend towards spectacular presentation of the plays alienated those who could not afford to go to the theatre while at the same time associating reading Shakespeare with the leisured classes. “Aristocratizing the pit,” which was enabled by the increasingly spectacular mise-en-scène of Shakespearean productions of the late 1800s, had been riotously objected to by working-class theatre-goers in the mid-nineteenth century. The movement to render the theatre a place of refined attention was part of the widespread investment in self-improvement through exposure to “culture.” Shakespeare was lifted out of the barroom and ensconced firmly in the urban theatre. At the same time, Shakespeare ceased to be on the family bookshelf beside the Bible (Levine 1988, 18). Indeed, some American editions of Shakespeare reinforced the class ­divide by offering two sets of notes, one for the “average reader” and one for the “critical reader” (Levine 1988, 72). The rise of recorded sound was expected, in some ways, to remove the boundaries between the two audiences, as the “average reader” (or audience member) would finally be able to listen to the greatest Shakespearean actors of the day perform their greatest roles through the innovation of the phonograph. This early experiment in recording sound for general distribution and sale was itself an exercise in a deeply conservative and hegemonic intermediality as the aesthetic forms of the aural world of the theatre were supposed to be exactly recreated for the general public.4 As David Timson relates in the liner notes to Great Historical Shakespeare Recordings (2000), “With the development of Edison’s Phonograph in the 1880s, the ephemeral art of the actor found a little more permanence. Never again would a famous actor after his death be ‘heard no more,’ and future generations would be able to judge for themselves whether his reputation was justified.” Indeed, Edison was evidently keenly aware of the potential of Shakespearean

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recordings as both an economically and a culturally valuable product: only ten years after the initial invention of the phonograph, he sent a personal representative to England to record some of the most famous actors of the day. The phonograph and recorded sound had two effects, however, neither of which was expected. On the one hand boundaries between audiences became even more rigid, since the recordings were only available to those who had the money to spend on an expensive technological “drawing room entertainment,” and on the other hand the technology undercut the histrionic acting style of the time, leaving great actors such as Henry Irving literally “out of his voice” (Timson 2000). Rather than being in dialogue with an audience throughout a performance, rather than being able to use their bodies to signify, actors were asked to cast their voices down a “speaking tube.” Though actors such as Irving, Ellen Terry, and Edwin Booth recognized the importance of the new medium, these early recordings did little to change the location of Shakespeare as an example of high culture and, indeed, may have exacerbated it. The Edison phonograph recordings were an early example of remediation – transforming the cultural object from one media form (theatre) to another (the phonograph). The early recordings were what Brecht described in “The Radio as an Apparatus of Communication” (1927) as a “substitute” (2006, 2). In that remediation, however, there was no attempt to reconceptualize how Shakespearean texts might need to adapt to the constraints of the new medium. Indeed, this refusal to engage with the ways in which different media (especially radio and aural media) dictate the forms of Shakespearean expression is a problem that is still endemic to discussion of Shakespeare on the radio. As the radio age began, Shakespeare’s unique cultural location prevented his plays from gaining general popularity over the new medium. Douglas Lanier, one of the few scholars to have written on Shakespeare on American radio, notes that Shakespeare seemed remarkably well suited to a purely audio format.5 Similarly, Susanne Greenhalgh notes that “radio held out the promise of a new type of drama, no longer tied to the history and conventions of the theatre, but capable of evolving its own styles of dramaturgy and modes of performance” (2011, 544). With such techniques as stage directions embedded in the dialogue and rich visual language combined with generally known and broadly accessible characters such as Falstaff, Hamlet, and Richard III, an audio presentation of Shakespeare’s plays should have advantages over a theatrical presentation, from both production and

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artistic standpoints. Also, in terms of artistic advantages, the intimacy of the microphone allowed for a greater range of emotional expression than was available on stage, where the broadly declamatory style had dominated for over two hundred years. The advantages radio presents as a medium for Lanier, however, situate radio and aural media in terms of lack. As Lanier states, “the lack of the visual apparatus of performance – involving the hands of scene designers, costumers, and directors – placed emphasis back on the actors and the text, on vocal characterization and the verbal music of Shakespeare’s poetic language” (2002, 196). That is, in terms of the production, costumes were unnecessary, as the entire “visual” world of the play was taking place inside the listeners’ minds. Further, Lanier’s understanding of Shakespeare seems largely based on the plays as written documents rather than staged performances. This lack-as-fullness of the aural medium of radio is described by Greenhalgh as inherent in the medium of radio itself: “The ‘present-tenseness’ of the radio medium, the sense it gives of an experience still moving towards the future, even when its auditory codes remind us of its historicity, also paradoxically convinces us that its utterances are living and dynamic even when we know the speakers to be long dead” (2011, 544). Although very early performances of Shakespeare on the radio would have been live broadcasts, the complicated relationship between liveness and citationality remains. The aural medium that adapts Shakespeare orients itself to the past, even as the medium itself demands engagement in the present. The tension between radio’s insistence on liveness through the heard voice and the historical orientation of Shakespeare’s language opened up unique dramaturgical avenues for the first time. Pioneering radio producers echoed Lanier’s expression of hope for the possibilities of Shakespeare on the radio. Early attempts to bring Shakespeare to the radio, however, often did not consider the uniquely aural nature of the medium, instead offering an audio capture of a stage version. In doing so, these attempts at intermedia were taking as their direct object the theatrical piece, while situating radio as a derivative mode of representation. This representation of radio as subordinate to other performance media was particularly dissatisfying to those who worked in radio and recognized the possibilities of the new medium. In 1933, Hilda Matheson, the founder of the news division of the BBC, wrote of the frustrations of broadcasters with this form of presentation of Shakespeare in Broadcasting.

Your Master’s Voice: 1930s American Radio  235 Microphones have been slung in theatre wings to enable plays to be heard from an actual theatre; professional companies have given theatre plays in studios, or they have been given by specially selected players. With certain notable exceptions, and without certain definite precautions, this procedure is not usually a success; but the notable exceptions are important and significant. They include great plays which are also great poetry, and conspicuously the plays of Shakespeare; and they include also (with skilful adaptation and presentation) many plays of discussion, in which the dramatic interest is mainly centred in ideas rather than in incident. The plays of Mr. Bernard Shaw are examples of this class. (1933, 110–11)

Here, radio is theorized as the opposite of the spectacular tradition of late Victorian stagecraft, where only “great poetry,” Shakespeare, and plays of ideas are successful candidates for radio adaptation. Matheson recognizes that direct recordings of theatrical presentations generally do not work on radio because the visual codes of early twentieth-­ century naturalistic theatre are obscured by the medium. Shakespeare’s work lends itself to the radio because of its “poetic” or euphonic quality, and specifically not because of its dramatic quality, which is predicated on incident. As Matheson goes on to explain, the intimacy of the relationship between radio and audience precludes a drama of incident. The concentration upon one sense, the inevitable sharpening of the ear to catch fine shades of voice and meaning, the impression that the speakers are close beside one, may all help to emphasize the human element, to bring one more intimately into touch with the thoughts and emotions which the players are interpreting, and at the same time give a fuller weight to the beauty of language and cadence. (1933, 112)

In Matheson’s vision of Shakespeare’s role in broadcasting, intimacy does not act as an obstacle for the understanding of Shakespeare. Actual practice, however, differed from Matheson’s idealistic expectations by not offering an aural text available for audience interpretation. Indeed, networks and producers assumed that audiences would need guidance through the material being offered them insofar as the translation of a theatrical text to the new medium of radio would confuse audiences unprepared for the purely aural medium. Perhaps unsurprisingly, when Lanier describes Shakespeare’s language on the radio, he echoes the assumptions of the networks who introduced the controlling voice

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of the narrator to interpret and explain for audiences who could not possibly otherwise understand the material being offered to them. Lanier goes on to suggest that the “poetic density” of the Shakespearean canon was a stumbling block for radio listeners because the complexity of language was at odds with the highly colloquial vernacular of American English spoken at the time on the radio. To assume, however, that the audience would be unable to comprehend poetic language spoken over the radio underestimates the literary acuity of the listeners of the time. Further, such an assumption underestimates the ability of radio to create a form of disembodied theatre, or theatre of interiority, predicated on the melding of text, theatrical convention, and the technical requirements of the new medium. Poetry readings were common on the airwaves in the English-speaking world, albeit often relegated to less popular time slots. Although the earliest Shakespearean audio productions were merely recitations by great performers like Irving and Booth or audio captures of theatrical performances, by the mid-1930s directors created new mechanisms to situate these texts within a uniquely aural world.6 “Voodoo” Shakespeare While radio and Shakespeare were in the midst of an increasingly difficult relationship owing to preconceptions about the transition between media, Shakespeare on the stage was proving more viable than ever. Orson Welles, the “monstrous boy” of classical theatre in the United States, strongly argued for the commercial viability and accessibility of Shakespeare, and his “Haitian” or “Voodoo” Macbeth exemplified his philosophy of politically engaged and commercially successful Shakespearean production in the mid- to late 1930s, while at the same time articulating an intercultural and intermedial space for Shakespearean performance. The spoken text of the play was still recognizably Shakespearean, though it engaged in much liberal manipulation of the material at hand. The Witches were subject to the most significant alterations, with their lines reduced, relocated, and – what lines were left – repeated throughout the performance. Although the spoken words were Shakespearean, nothing about the rest of the production recalled or revivified the Elizabethan world. The as-lavish-as-they-could-afford production design placed the location in nineteenth-century Haiti, with all of the characters played by African American actors for the first time. Shakespeare was lifted out of a

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nostalgic identification with a lost past of unquestioned white dominance, and, through the presentation of black bodies using African ­music and Haitian spellcraft, this production anticipated the racial deconstruction of Shakespearean texts on the stage of the late twentieth century from Mumbai to London. Though the design evoked African drums and tribal warfare, the actors used Scottish terms like “thane” and “heath”; the only material change in the script other than transposition and cutting was the change from “pale Hecate” to “dark Hecate.” The production was deliberately grandiose, spectacular, and provocative, exemplified in the notes of a production script described by Michael Anderegg in Orson Welles: Shakespeare and Popular Culture: As Macbeth prepares to visit the witches, for example, “a low wind starts building.” “Build tympani,” we read, “thunder drums and sheet and wind, build up and up … Cellophane rain (Big), gong – 2 flashes of lightning – Rain – all voodoo drums (very loud).” Whoever wrote these cues into the manuscript got sufficiently carried away, at one point, to draw, in red block capitals, “RAISE HELL WITH EVERYTHING.” (Anderegg 1999, 25)

Welles’s production explicitly tried to upset any association of Shakespeare with élite, highbrow culture and encouraged the audience to engage with the text in a way that had not been seen since the midnineteenth century. His Macbeth eschewed the naturalist-spectacular traditions of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century production aesthetics for a symbolist-resistive aesthetic. In doing so, he relocated Shakespeare within the cultural imaginary to become an author who spoke through the racial other of 1930s America. As iconoclastic as the “Voodoo” Macbeth was in terms of race politics and the visual dramaturgy of American Shakespearean performance, its focus on the aural qualities of the theatrical performance anticipated the sophisticated audio adaptations of Shakespeare that Welles would offer on radio. “Voodoo” Macbeth ends not with Malcolm’s speech, re-establishing order out of the tragic world of the play, but with Hecate and the “Voices of Voodoo Women” drowning out the acclamation of Malcolm as King of Scotland. As Daniel Fischlin notes elsewhere in this book, the use of music (such as the African-inspired drums of Welles’s Macbeth) can threaten to overwhelm or “displace” the words, an intermedial effect that was a particular concern for Welles. Rather than eschew music altogether, Welles built the audio cues into the script, heightening the affective theatricality of the piece.

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Clara Fernández-Vara suggests that Welles’s use of sound effects in his radio work seems to have been influenced by his early work with The Shadow, yet in Macbeth, Welles showed a remarkable acuity to the ways sound could be interwoven with dialogue both to develop the sense of time and place and to create mood (2004, 70). The final scene exemplifies the close attention he paid to the aural texture of the play: MACD U F F. For so thou art. Behold where stands   The usurper’s curs’d head. (The Witches gleefully hold the head aloft.)   The time is free.   Hail, King of Scotland! VOIC E S O F VO O D O O WO ME N. All hail, Malcolm. (They are interrupted by a thunderous chorus from the army.) ARM Y. Hail, King of Scotland. VOIC E S O F VO O D O O WO ME N. Thrice to thine, and thrice to mine,   And thrice again, to make up nine. HECA T E. Peace! (The drums, army, music, voices of the voodoo women – all are instantly silent.)   The charm’s wound up. (Anderegg 1999, 87)

By returning aurally to the Witches’ charm and subjecting Macbeth, Malcolm, and Macduff all to the power of Hecate, Welles re-enacts the trauma of the tragedy and, at the moment of tragic reconciliation and order, establishes a chaotic universe subject only to the whims of a capricious god. As Richard France describes it, “No sooner was Macbeth dead, and his severed head tossed to the crowd, than it became clear that Malcolm would serve as terror’s agent” (2001, 14). The generic qualities of Macbeth that located it in the system of Elizabethan tragedy, such as the putative return to order, were stripped away by Welles as he subordinated the Shakespearean text in the name of theatrical effect. By playing with the generic conventions of the re-establishment of order, Welles was soliciting an audience response, evaluation, and engagement with both his theatrical text and his text in relation to the Shakespearean original. It is perhaps ironic that while Welles was, on the one hand, offering a Shakespeare that demanded audience reaction, interpretation, and engagement in the theatres of Harlem, he was at the same time deeply engaged in radio, a medium whose corporate dramaturgy of

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Shakespeare was predicated on the intermediary role of the voice of authority – a model Welles did not share. Welles’s model of engaging the audience through the use of aural theatrics was a view of the authority of the work of art where the artist, the interpreter, and the audience each had some value, though the interpreter was arguably the most important of the three. Shakespeare’s text existed to be interpreted; the audience was an audience insofar as they were engaged with the interpretation. When it came to radio, Welles’s views of the role of the audience and that of the interpretive artist were predicated on a cordial familiarity between the two. Any imposition of imaginative distance between the narrative voice(s) of the play and the audience (e.g., an announcer saying, “The curtain is now rising on a presentation of …”) imposed an interpretation upon the text, guiding the audience to a particular exegetical model. Welles would decry the use of the narrator/announcer – a technique to be described in detail below – as “hopelessly inadequate and clumsy” (quoted in Naremore 1989, 13). He understood that the audience was to be understood not collectively, but individually; that the relationship an audience had with the radio was a fundamentally intimate one. Radio’s audience was never wholly private, nor wholly public. For Welles, the dramaturgy of the theatre, which is predicated on the public consumption of the theatrical text, may be cited, yet the medium of radio privileges the interiority of the aesthetic experience. Thus, the medium requires a new set of dramaturgical practices that may be drawn from theatrical practice, but must adapt to the new relationship with the audience. Throughout the later 1930s, Welles became at least as famous for his radio work, such as The Shadow and The Mercury Theatre of the Air, as he did for his theatrical ventures such as Macbeth. As the major radio networks were providing Welles with a regular and steady series of paycheques, they were producing versions of the Shakespearean canon that totally reshaped the material – in terms of both content and formal presentation. That Shakespeare should be offered over the airwaves never seemed to be a question, but exactly how the plays were to be presented was a subject of some debate. In a blind (but intensely aural) medium, could actors “perform” the text without the traditional visual aids and histrionic styles that audiences had come to expect? Would it not end up sounding just like a reading? Or was the auditory experience of radio something utterly different from the theatre or the cinema or the act of reading? The answers to these questions point to the ways

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in which radio adaptations of Shakespeare were profoundly, challengingly intermedial – and played a key role in translating Shakespeare to new audiences. From Announcer to Narrator The position of narrator and the analogous role occupied by the announcer stretch back to the very earliest days of experimental radio in the United States, when companies such as AT&T, Westinghouse, and General Electric broadcast radio programs aimed at an ill-defined “public” for the first time. Though experimental and private radio broadcasts were popular before the First World War, in July 1917 the US government took over almost every radio broadcasting station in the country, with the exception of a few high-powered transmitters owned by large corporations. After the war was over, on 29 February 1920, the airwaves were again made public, and in anticipation of this action, the large corporations who had been allowed to retain their transmitters formed a monopolistic cartel, the Radio Corporation of America (RCA), in 1919. It was at this time that the first regular radio broadcasts were offered, with an announcer introducing phonograph recordings, reporting on the weather and news, or interviewing local and national figures. The first announcers were often engineers and electricians shoehorned into the role of announcer for the purposes of the broadcast; they were not trained in public speaking or elocution and their broadcasts were decidedly colloquial in tone. Announcers would regularly ask for anyone who was listening to write in to the station (care of the large corporation that ran the station, such as Westinghouse) as a form of audience polling. Audiences could ask for music to be played or for news items to be read, or simply say hello to the radio personalities that they heard regularly and came to appreciate like friends. Bertolt Brecht, who suggested in 1927 that radio’s possibilities as a communication medium were limited by its nature as a broadcasting technology, applauded this early engagement with the audience. The radio would be the finest possible communication apparatus in public life … that is to say, it would be if it knew how to receive as well as to transmit, how to let the listener speak as well as hear, how to bring him into a relationship instead of isolating him. (2006, 2)

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Brecht’s desire for truly two-way communication, though not possible with radio technology, recognized the conservative limitations of a medium that was widely hailed as revolutionizing how people engaged with culture. On the radio, rather than a chorus of voices jostling for attention, there was the single voice of the announcer and that voice was the representative of a corporation. The presence of the announcer routinely reminded the audience of the source of their entertainment, but also placed the announcer into the position of a corporate representative – the voice of a system of capitalist production. In 1921, several things happened at once that would in the coming years solidify the way radio positioned itself as an authoritative intermediary between the individual and the Shakespearean adaptation. First, Westinghouse set up and licensed a series of radio stations across the eastern United States, which meant that, although none of them were linked to the others through telephone lines, their mutual ownership scheme laid the groundwork for the network system. Second, in early 1921, the first Westinghouse station, KDKA in Pittsburgh, selected its first regular program manager and announcer, Harold W. Arlin, professionalizing the role of the radio announcer for the first time in the US. Third, on 10 March 1921, KDKA broadcast short excerpts from a play being produced at the local Davis Theatre, setting the precedent for dramatic radio productions. In 1922 and 1923, broadcasting started to take off as more consumers bought radio sets from producers who would then turn around and broadcast entertainment to the same sets that they had just sold. AT&T began to experiment with commercial radio; custom-built studios were designed for radio broadcast. As Marshall McLuhan reminds us, “The commercial interests who think to render media universally acceptable, invariably settle for ‘entertainment’ as a strategy of neutrality” (1964, 305), so it is unsurprising that it is at this time that KDKA broadcast a full-length drama from the stage, “Friend Mary”; and WJZ in Schenectady broadcast both the first written-for-radio drama, “The Wolf,” and the first full Shakespearean performance heard on American airwaves. In celebration of the three-hundredth anniversary of the publication of the First Folio, on Shakespeare’s birthday, 23 April 1923, WJZ broadcast the entirety of As You Like It from a remote hook-up on the 44th Street Theatre in New York, with the Broadway leading lady and later Hollywood character actress Marjorie Rambeau as Rosalind. Though the performance was not recorded and there is very little in the

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literature on radio discussing it, the broadcast serves as a seminal moment in the early days of radio for its attempt to broadcast the whole of a Shakespearean play. Shakespearean performance at the time, especially on Broadway, was largely spectacular in appeal and directed towards alienating a popular audience rather than incorporating that audience. By broadcasting the whole of As You Like It, WJZ was trying to participate in that same cultural economy of Shakespeare as a signifier of cultural value – to legitimate itself as a worthwhile medium for dramatic performance and entertainment – while the auditory nature of the medium stripped away the spectacular mechanism by which the alienation of certain audiences had been achieved. In order to re-­ establish mechanisms of interpretive guidance for a medium that rendered the spectacular impossible, those mechanisms would have to be altered. One of the ways to do this would be to privilege the visual over the auditory – situating radio as a deficient medium, unable to offer as rich an experience as the legitimate theatre and therefore utterly unsuited to Shakespearean performances – yet this strategy would have run counter to the business model of RCA and other radio parts and set suppliers who were trying to create a new market predicated on the desirability of the auditory entertainment experience.7 As noted above, the discourse around radio drama so reviled by Hilda Matheson was situated in terms of absence, yet, while the proponents of radio’s potential as a medium could not articulate their vision of radio in terms of presence, they did insist upon the difference of the medium. That is, although radio was described in terms of lack, the experiential difference rather than the superiority of any given performance medium, such as silent film and radio, was almost immediately recognized by writers at the time. In the following excerpt from a Radio Digest article from 27 October 1923, for instance, though the journalist describes radio in terms of lack and blindness, the medium itself transcends this lack through the imagination of the audience. The radio play, a new form of dramatic interest, is increasing rapidly in popularity. Go to a movie and then come home and listen to a Radario and you will have received two exactly opposite theatrical effects … Of course, scenes and acts from current plays are often broadcast, but many eastern stations now have their own theatrical groups and give plays especially adapted for Radio use. Pretend you are blind and listen to these plays, the better your imagination, the better the play. (Quoted in Maltin 2000, 13)

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Thus, the strategies by which Shakespeare had been appropriated and alienated from the popular audience did not and could not apply to the new medium. Audiences developed personal, intimate relationships with the plays, forming images in their own minds of what the characters looked like, and coming to their own conclusions as to what the plays were actually about. This much more intimate relationship between audience and work of art, ironically, also echoed the relationship audiences of early nineteenth-century America had with Shakespeare, when they literally talked back to the play, called out to the actors, and engaged with the  material rather than let the play wash over them. This form of Shakespearean presentation, which privileged the audience’s intimate relationship with the text, ran counter to both the presentation tradition of Shakespeare in the US, which was predicated on the alienation of certain audiences, and the radio industry’s business identity, where a single voice both mediated the aural world and represented the power of the corporation behind the radio at the same time. By 1927, the major networks were established, and the US government created the forerunner to the FCC, the FRC. At this point, a successful business model for radio advertising had largely been worked out. In this model, advertising agencies produced shows for their clients, which they would then pay the networks to broadcast, while the networks would guarantee certain blocks of time for sponsored shows and certain blocks of time for “sustaining” shows, which were not sponsored and generally served a cultural interest. The sustaining programs were a reaction on the part of the industry to encroaching government regulation. Rather than have the government take over the entire industry, as would happen in Great Britain, or even a part of it, as would happen in Canada, the American radio industry tried to prove that it was doing legitimate cultural work and not merely selling dish soap to housewives. Throughout the early 1930s, sustaining programs became an increasingly important part of the strategy for industry independence, as the success of such public radio monopolies in countries like Germany and Great Britain offered a credible alternative to the American model of broadcasting. Network production of Shakespeare’s plays was an easy rejoinder to the critics who argued that the commercialization of the airwaves was undesirable. Indeed, throughout the 1930s, almost a hundred different episodes were produced by various programs that were direct adaptations of ­ Shakespeare’s plays. The late 1920s saw “An Hour with Shakespeare”

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and “Scenes from Shakespeare,” but beginning in 1929, NBC produced the sustaining program “Radio Guild,” which broadcast versions of popular and classical plays and other literary adaptations (Balk 2006, 195). As sustaining programs were without sponsorship, they framed the narrative material in different ways from sponsored programs that required occasional interruption for commercial breaks. Whereas a narrator or announcer in a sponsored program would interrupt the narrative in a more or less intrusive way in order to sell the sponsor’s product, in a sustaining program the narrator or announcer could take on a different intercessory role. Unlike other programs such as “The First Nighter,” which produced versions of popular Broadway plays, or the sponsored “Lux Radio Theater,” which started producing radio versions of Broadway plays only to switch to Hollywood movies, the “Radio Guild” adapted its material for radio from literary sources. Enter the Expert “Radio Guild” was broadcast on NBC in the United States and across the CBC in Canada, so though the broadcasts themselves have not all survived, many of the scripts can be found in the CBC archives at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, Canada. These records are merely scripts rather than audio recordings; many of the earliest performances of radio have been lost because they were never recorded. The scripts represent another layer of intermedial representation and Shakespearean adaptation, for they are textual traces of performance pieces (sometimes even with the pencilled-in notes of actors and directors). They point towards the always absent radio play, yet themselves can never fully supplement the performance. Further, the records at McMaster are incomplete. For example, a script for Hamlet dated 3 August 1930 and described as “Part One” does not have a corresponding “Part Two”; similarly, a program note at the end of the 9 September 1930 performance of King Lear indicates that Othello would have been produced the following week, but that script does not exist in the archive. Many of these scripts predate the existence of the CBC, and often have indications that they were originally in the possession of WJZ, the pioneering broadcaster of Shakespeare in Schenectady. Despite their incomplete nature and somewhat murky provenance, the scripts offer a unique insight into the presentation of Shakespeare on the radio prior to the 1937 “Summer of Shakespeare” when the two dominant networks put on competing Shakespearean adaptations.

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“Radio Guild” mediated between the audience and the Shakespearean play through the voice of the announcer using one of two general strategies. First, the announcer noted changes in time and space, and introduced who was speaking. This form of mediation was more prevalent in the late 1920s and very early 1930s, when radio directors, producers, and audiences had not developed the sophisticated repertoire of auditory cues that indicated changes in scene. It was also the easiest way to distinguish between various similar-sounding voices on early radio sets, effectively sidestepping reception and audio problems. These announced changes in time and space, though carried over from certain theatrical and editorial traditions, are often not called for in Shakespeare’s plays. As noted above, owing to the spare visual nature of the Elizabethan stage, as a play or a scene began, characters would often describe their own location – spatially and temporally – and offer background, such as in the opening speeches of The Winter’s Tale, All’s Well That Ends Well, and Measure for Measure. In another solution to the problem of introducing an Elizabethan audience to the scene, Shakespeare would offer a prologuecharacter, such as the Chorus in Henry V, Rumour in 2 Henry IV, Gower in Pericles, or Prologue in Romeo and Juliet and Troilus and Cressida. In both cases, Shakespearean texts obviate the need for modern narratorial intrusion. When the narrator of “Radio Guild” intervened in this mode, the intrusions mimicked the kind of stage directions that one would expect to find in an edition of Shakespeare, rather than a radio re-­enactment or adaptation of a theatrical performance. The second form of announcer mediation, and by far the more prevalent form, is exegetical in purpose. In early 1930, “Radio Guild” secured the American drama critic, playwright, and scholar Clayton Meeker Hamilton to introduce and narrate the Shakespearean adaptations on the program. The introduction of Hamilton at the beginning of the 7 November 1935 adaptation of King John, for example, established his pedigree and the authority of his particular reading of the text in terms of his specialized knowledge. The National Broadcasting Company has made arrangements with Mr.  Clayton Hamilton to act as commentator throughout this series. Mr. Hamilton is the well-known playwright and dramatic critic, and is one of the country’s outstanding authorities on plays, their writing, and their writers. (“Radio Guild”)

By situating Hamilton in terms of his erudition, the “Radio Guild” authorizes his speech in terms of his ability (and his ability only) to

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comprehend and make clear to the audience the plays in question. The expectation therefore is that the plays must be only comprehensible to those who have the training, knowledge, and expertise to make sense of arcane language. Hamilton’s position as a critic does not guide the audience through a reading; does not help the audience to understand more obscure references; does not open possible readings and foster engagement. Through establishing Hamilton’s position as a critic, “Radio Guild” positions him as an intermedial intercessor, whose privilege as a “playwright and drama critic” brings authority not only to himself but to radio as a medium, while at the same time the medium of radio lends structural authority to his single voice as ­ announcer-narrator. Reading For, Reading With Before each play began, Hamilton would offer a short reading of the play, imposing a thesis on the individual play and situating it within a larger conception of who Shakespeare was, and what Shakespeare meant. In one of the earliest “Radio Guild” broadcasts, on 21 September 1930, Hamilton offered a reading of Richard III that clearly harked back to the character-oriented readings of the late Victorian period. In this opening announcement, he declares that self-transformation is a “tragedy of conscience.” In an exegesis that has disturbing resonances with the fascist model of the self being promulgated at the time, Hamilton equates Richard III’s evil with weakness. Always in Shakespeare, like some precious pearl, may be found beneath the progress of each play, some motivating human truth. The passage of years, the change of customs, may never entirely dim its lustre. Tonight, we encounter perhaps the most evil character in Shakespeare – and the truth; to succeed in a given course in life one must devote oneself consistently thereto. To attain success, a good man must not become evil, nor an evil man, good. Tonight we present a man who weakened in his course. It may be called a tragedy of conscience. (Hamilton 1930, 1)

This opening announcement is remarkable for many reasons, and I want to focus on Hamilton’s equation of the stability of the self with success. In order to succeed in the world, the individual must not allow him/herself to be transformed, lest he or she become like “the most evil character in Shakespeare.” Describing the tragedy of Richard III in terms

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of a single, universal “human truth” that is accessible through the voice of the intercessory narrator forecloses on ambiguities of meaning. It is these ambiguities, and how individual audiences and actors resolve them through the engagement between character and audience, that provide much of the performance pleasure of Richard III. In effect, Hamilton asks the audience to let the play wash over them, to stay their own courses, rather than engage the play and possibly let it weaken their resolve. In this reading, there can be no act of self-sacrifice in the listening of this play, because to do so would be to mimic Richard himself. Richard loses himself, both his life and his crown, at the Battle of Bosworth Field, and Hamilton turns the play into an illustration of moral constancy, pruning the text to support his argument. The intercessory narrator structures the possible mode(s) of engagement for the radio audience, but does so drawing on a tradition of theatrical adaptation that stretches back into the late seventeenth century. The play itself shows signs of heavy adaptation: new dialogue has been written and speeches from 3 Henry VI have been wilfully inserted. Indeed, the version of Richard III presented on “Radio Guild” was itself a half-hour-long adaptation of Colley Cibber’s 1699 rewriting of Richard III, thus presenting several layers of mediation even before the audience heard the piece. The reliance on Cibber’s text is unheralded, even though by the early twentieth century his version had long since passed out of fashion in the theatre. The use of Cibber’s heavily edited text is apparently in keeping with the essential quality of radio adaptations, as suggested by Linda Hutcheon in A Theory of Adaptation, which is “distillation” (2013, 41). However, such distillation is inevitably presenting a political as well as an aesthetic argument. Here, the expert announcer is not merely presenting the text of Shakespeare and offering a possible exegesis, but disingenuously presenting what had become an ideologically deeply conservative historical oddity as Shakespeare and also offering a possible exegetical model for the play. Even in cases where the mediation of the announcer is largely descriptive rather than exegetical, the script resituates certain characters’ lines to suggest interaction between the characters and the narrator. These resituated lines modulate the relationship between Richard and the audience by naturalizing the position of the narrator within the play. Richard’s soliloquies cease to address the audience with these additions and turn to the intercessory narrator, further increasing the mediation of an already highly mediated experience and subverting the intimacy of radio that Hilda Matheson theorized only three years following this production.

248  Andrew Bretz ANNOUNCER: Richard’s ambition does not stop with the murder of Henry – nor with the contemplated taking off of Clarence and Edward. He immediately takes steps to ingratiate himself with Lady Anne, widow of the young son of Henry. She has obtained permission to bury the murdered King, her father-in-law, and we find Richard waiting to intercept the burial procession. Anne has pleaded illness to avoid him. GLOS: ’Twas her excuse to avoid me. Alas! She keeps no bed: – She has health enough to progress far as Chertsey, though not to bear the sight of me. I cannot blame her: – Why, love forswore me in my mother’s womb … (“Radio Guild”)

Instead of Richard’s soliloquy appealing to the unseen radio listeners, “’Twas her excuse to avoid me” seems to directly respond to the words of the announcer. This strategy of deformation differs significantly from that employed in Welles’s “Voodoo” Macbeth insofar as Welles’s stage version hailed audiences as an adaptation and in terms of its adaptation. Welles’s version invited commentary and participation from the audience, never claiming to be the single, true Macbeth. It was a form of engagement with the tradition, which encouraged greater familiarity with the Shakespearean original.8 Here, the announced “truth” of the play, which is foregrounded in the opening lines, and the authorized voice of the intercessory narrator both serve to discourage individual engagement with the play. General radio audiences were not to presence the play, but to accept it as a distant, distinct representative of a universal and true culture of which they were not a part. Throughout the 1930s, radio adaptations of Shakespeare’s plays employed similar techniques of exegesis. These techniques remained in place (with difference) through attempts to reinvent radio Shakespeare later in the decade, though there were a few notable exceptions to the general trend of narratorial guidance. CBS’s “Columbia Workshop,” which began broadcasting on 18 July 1936, was explicitly “devoted to experimental radio” (Welles 1936a) and in a month, on 19 August 1936, the “Columbia Workshop” turned to Hamlet. The performance starred Orson Welles and covered only the first two acts of the play. In this version, the intercessory narrator position is occupied by Welles, who introduces the play and offers an explanation for the two-act-only format. This explanation does not foist an exegetical framework on the audience, but invites the audience to engage the play. The two-act-only structure was designed to “Giv[e] you, we hope, a clear, dramatic statement of the causes of Hamlet’s tragedy.” This invitation to engage the

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play was taken up by the audience and a letter campaign caused the  “Columbia Workshop” to finish Hamlet a few months later on 14  November 1936. As Fernández-Vara notes, “Welles integrated the discursive framing into his radio drama, trying to efface it and make the narrative content closer to the listener” (2004, 77). Though the second half of Hamlet does not have the same overt appeal to the audience as the first, the two parts stand as an attempt to moderate narratorial exegesis. The techniques of moderation came back – though with diminished force – less than a year later in the “Summer of Shakespeare.” When CBS announced in early 1937 that it was going to present “The Shakespeare Cycle,” it claimed that it was the first major attempt to put Shakespeare on the radio in United States history. In doing so, CBS completely sidestepped “Radio Guild” and earlier experimental performances by broadcasters like WJZ. CBS’s “Shakespeare Cycle” was to involve a cast of Hollywood celebrities such as Walter Huston, Leslie Howard, and Humphrey Bogart, trading on the authority of the celebrities’ status to legitimize the CBS production. Shortly thereafter NBC announced its own Shakespearean series, “Streamlined Shakespeare,” featuring the falling star of the Shakespearean actor John Barrymore, as an attempt to recapture the mantle of legitimate radio theatre. Both “Shakespeare Cycle” and “Streamlined Shakespeare” engaged in a kind of intermedial piracy of sorts, as the “Streamlined Shakespeare” series turned back to the high art of the New York theatre for its primary star, while “Shakespeare Cycle” took its cast from the populist world of Hollywood film. Neither the “Shakespeare Cycle” nor “Streamlined Shakespeare” showed any interest in allowing the audience to engage the works themselves. For example, the actors, though drawn from Hollywood, speak “Shakespearean” rather than using their native accents. The unique and instantly identifiable voices of Edward G. Robinson, playing Petruchio, and Humphrey Bogart, as Hotspur, were muddled behind a mid-Atlantic accent in the CBS series, while John Barrymore, whose British accent locates his characters firmly in a high culture not shared by the general population, headed the NBC series. The narratorial intrusions by Barrymore himself also served to undermine the intimacy of the audience’s relationship with the play, resisting audience engagement with the text. As in the “Radio Guild” series, the narrators provide not only background but also close interpretive avenues for the audience. For example, the introduction to the CBS “Shakespeare Cycle” version of Julius Caesar

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offers a character reading of Caesar that harks back to Victorian criticism, closing off possible counter readings of the character. Rome. When Rome was the world, and Caesar was the mightiest Roman. Caesar the conqueror, Caesar the lawgiver. Wise Caesar. Vain Caesar. Brilliant Caesar. Superstitious Caesar. Tomorrow he will be dead, but today he lives and the world is his for the taking. (Julius Caesar 1937)

Howsoever the narrator served to close doors, the encouragement of the audience to presence Shakespeare in the “Columbia Workshop” experiment must have affected the construction of the mediation of the play by the “Shakespeare Cycle” narrator. Instead of claiming authority from external sources such as the academy or the theatre, the narrator of “Streamlined Shakespeare” situated himself in the role of eyewitness. He continues, placing all of the verbs in the present, shifting the story from irretrievable past to the accessible future-present. Today is the Roman festival of the Lupercal. In a few moments, the sons of noblemen will run naked through the streets, striking all they may meet with leather thongs. In this manner will they symbolize for the gods the purification of the city. All Rome will line the course to witness the holy race, and none more prominent than Caesar with his wife Calpurnia. (Julius Caesar 1937)

Read in a manner not unlike the phrasing of journalists at the time, though with classical music underscoring it, the narrator’s script here emphasizes the presence of the Shakespearean story even as it explains the cultural difference. By locating the ancient Roman world in the present – i.e., “Today” – “Shakespeare Cycle” gives the narrator a position of an eyewitness. As Edward Miller describes, eyewitnesses have authority not because of access to the specialized knowledge of a Clayton Meeker Hamilton or a John Barrymore, but by virtue of their accidental position in the world. The eyewitness has a particular and peculiar relationship with knowledge; however, this knowledge is neither empirical nor learned. It is a knowledge of proximity, a knowledge of history as it is happening, a purported liveness. The listener is in the audible presence of the eyewitness whose voice surmounts distance. This voice transmits earth-shattering events into language, knowing that he is in the presence of history being

Your Master’s Voice: 1930s American Radio  251 made. This voice trusts that words and the medium can succeed and survive any event, even the most disastrous. (2003, 62)

The “Shakespeare Cycle” posited the relationship between audience and narrator in a slightly different way from Barrymore’s “Streamlined Shakespeare.” The difference is subtle, as the medium’s reliance on a narrator to articulate authority remains the same, yet the epistemic structure of authority has here shifted. It remains true that the intercessory voice of the narrator structures the ways in which the audience can engage with the Shakespearean text. With the “Shakespeare Cycle,” however, the remediation of the text to radio is predicated on an appeal to direct knowing, whereas with “Streamlined Shakespeare” the remediation is based on privileging the theatrical experience of John Barrymore over the individual experiences of the listeners. The year following the “Summer of Shakespeare,” Orson Welles continued the modulation of the relationship between the authoritative intercessory narrator and the audience in his “Mercury Theatre of the Air” production of Julius Caesar, where he brought in the radio news anchor H.V. Kaltenborn to narrate the production. The choice of Kaltenborn was unique. As a news anchor, he had the privilege of the eyewitness, but also, as the most popular news anchor on CBS, his was a representative voice for the network. Further, as Fernández-Vara discusses, Kaltenborn was the journalist charged at that moment with reporting the developments of the Munich Conference (2004, 95). In choosing Kaltenborn, Welles situated the version of Julius Caesar by “The Mercury Theatre” in both the present of the Munich Conference and the past of Shakespeare’s vision of Rome. The Intercessory Voice The famous RCA logo of a small dog listening to a phonograph, amazed at hearing “His Master’s Voice,” encapsulates the capitalist medium’s ideal relationship between early radio pioneers of Shakespearean adaptation and the audience. Further, the image articulated the technological deficiencies of a broadcast medium like radio, which systemically discouraged audience engagement. Interestingly, however, that logo was not created for radio, but for the sound recording industry, offering an originary and concluding site of intermedial adaptation for this paper. The relationship between Shakespearean performance and emerging media such as radio and audio recording from 1880 to 1950 has been largely overlooked by scholars, partially because, until the rise

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of the internet, the technological limitations of disseminating audio recordings have precluded them as an object of study. Nevertheless, radio was by far the single most popular medium of the 1930s–1940s, well outstripping the infant television and the far more studied film. Defining the relationship between this most popular of media and Shakespeare can illuminate the cultural position of both. By the turn of the century, Shakespeare had come to be associated with high culture and, as the decades wore on, private radio interests such as NBC and CBS appropriated Shakespeare to justify their positions on the air as more than merely selling soap flakes and other domestic goods. The position of the announcer developed into that of the narrator, whose intermediation between the radio audience and the purported Shakespearean text was predicated on his position as an authority in the academy or on the stage. Throughout the 1930s, this logic of authority broke down as radio structured the intercessory narrator as less a kind of expert by training and more an expert by virtue of his position as eyewitness. While still a sign of a kind of expertise, the voice of the intercessory narrator remained absolute, mediating between the text and the audience. In this sense, the ways in which radio presented and performed authority in the form of Shakespeare became increasingly complex as the Golden Age wore on. Radio could never recover the immediacy and riotousness of the theatrical experience of the nineteenth century (nor, in many ways, would the radio networks have wanted to). Nevertheless, in relocating the authority of the intercessory narrator from specialized expertise to the engagement of the eyewitness, radio modulated the relationship between audience and medium envisioned in the RCA logo. No longer was it his master’s voice that the dog heard, but a voice like his own, yet different. It was still not his own voice – such radical interpretive freedom would be only possible with the internet and technologies like YouTube and mobile computing, explored elsewhere in this book – but it was a voice that the radio industry developed to sound like his. That is, his master’s voice had begun to give way not to our master’s voice, but to your master’s voice. NOTES 1 Though Rick Altman has suggested that Orson Welles may have invented “the intrusive episodic narrator, the one who bridges each pair of scenes

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rather than appearing only at the beginning and the end of the program” (1994, 12), this paper will show that the intercessory narrator existed long before Welles’s rise to prominence in the late 1930s. 2 In other words, these interventions were intermedial, where the terms of intermedial adaptation both structure and are structured within a unique cultural context, as explored elsewhere in this book in the interview with Tom Magill in reference to Northern Ireland. 3 1933 is usually considered a landmark year in terms of American radio insofar as both the music publishing industry and the cinema were suffering heavy losses from the Depression while the radio industry not only maintained its popularity but reached approximately 50% of the American population (McElvaine 1984, 141). For instance, 1932–3 saw the birth of many of the most popular radio programs of the golden age: “The Jack Benny Program,” “The Lone Ranger,” and the first of Roosevelt’s “Fireside Chats.” By 1933, corporations saw the benefits of radio as an advertising medium and hailed and constructed audiences as consumers of material as well as cultural products (Lenthall 2007, 63). 4 Intermedia scholars have largely ignored early audio media, as they tend to look at the emergence of media in the postmodern world rather than the 1910s and 1920s. For example, though G.H. Hovagimyan’s essay “On ***** Media” recognizes the political uses of radio by totalitarian and democratic states in the early twentieth century, it largely ignores the tropes used by dramatic presentations on radio as a set of borrowed or intermedial forms (Hovagimyan 2005). 5 Lanier’s work in Shakespeare after Mass Media (edited by Richard Burt) has not been alone in commenting upon radio and Shakespeare. Indeed, in recent years a number of articles have looked into the phenomenon. Susanne Greenhalgh’s article in The Edinburgh Companion to Shakespeare and the Arts (2011) looks into English-speaking radio history through versions of Hamlet. The recent work in McKernan, Oesterlen, and Terris (2009) shows the enduring relevance of the medium within a largely digital world. Nevertheless, the field of research is still largely understudied. 6 Also, to claim that the density of Shakespearean language was itself a stumbling block to the general popularity of Shakespeare on the radio ignores the growing commercial viability of Shakespeare throughout the period, both on the radio and in other media such as film and the stage. Shakespearean language was neither inherently inaccessible, nor was it a guaranteed failure at the proverbial box office. If Shakespeare could still be a success at the box office, then Shakespeare’s marginalized position on

254  Andrew Bretz radio – as neither wholly theatrical performance nor wholly born on the radio performance – needs further unpacking. 7 By the 1930s, radio broadcasters and producers had long since recognized the attractiveness of a visual medium like television. Serious efforts had begun to make the technology marketable, yet until the 1950s (when broadcast television became feasible in the United States), the broadcasting industry was bound to market the auditory medium as an equal but different experience. It was only in the decades following the rise of television that the spectacular regained ascendancy in home entertainment, and radio has since been figured as somehow deficient. 8 The irony is twofold regarding Shakespeare’s original text. On the one hand, the editorial history of Richard III is fiendishly complex, since scholars consider two independent texts (the Folio and the Third Quarto) equally authoritative. That is, there is no single original text of Richard III that can be reliably ascribed to Shakespeare, but two forms of the play with equal claim to authority. Further, Shakespeare’s Richard III was itself an adaptation and response to an earlier set of texts, both printed histories (such as Edward Hall’s Union) and plays (Richardus Tertius; The True Tragedy of Richard the Third). Richard III was an adaptation or remediation of previous materials, later adapted by Cibber and then further remediated by Hamilton to the radio.

WORKS CITED Altman, Rick. 1994. “Deep-Focus Sound: Citizen Kane and the Radio Aesthetic.” Quarterly Review of Film and Video. 15.3: 1–33. Anderegg, Michael. 1999. Orson Welles: Shakespeare and Popular Culture. New York: Columbia University Press, 1999. Barrymore, John. 1937. Streamlined Shakespeare. Performed and Directed by John Barrymore. NBC Radio. June–July. Radio Broadcast. MP3 format. Balk, Alfred. 2006. The Rise of Radio, from Marconi through the Golden Age. Jefferson, NC: MacFarland & Co. Brecht, Berthold. 2006 [1927]. “The Radio as an Apparatus of Communication.” Communication for Social Change Anthology: Historical and Contemporary Readings, 2–3. South Orange, NJ: CSFC Consortium. Fernández-Vara, Clara. 2004. “Orson Welles’ Intermedial Versions of Shakespeare in Theatre Radio and Film.” MSc, MIT. France, Richard. 2001. Orson Welles on Shakespeare: The WPA and Mercury Theatre Playscripts. New York: Routledge.

Your Master’s Voice: 1930s American Radio  255 Greenhalgh, Susanne. 2011. “Shakespeare and Radio.” The Edinburgh Companion to Shakespeare and the Arts. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Hamilton, Clayton Meeker. 1930. Introduction to “King Richard III.” An Hour with Shakespeare. CBC Archives Transcript. McMaster University Library. Hovagimyan, G.H. 2005. “On ***** Media.” In Intermedia: Enacting the Liminal, ed. Hans Breder and Klaus-Peter Busse, 117–20. Dortmund: Dortmunder Schriften zur Kunst. Hutcheon, Linda, with Siobhan O’Flynn. 2013 [2006]. A Theory of Adaptation. 2nd ed. New York: Routledge. Julius Caesar. 1937. Shakespeare Cycle. By William Shakespeare. Narrated by Conway Turrell. Performed by Claude Rains, Thomas Mitchell, Walter Abel, Reginald Denny. CBS Radio. 26 July. Radio Broadcast. MP3 format. Lanier, Douglas. 2002. “WSHX: Shakespeare and American Radio.” In Shakespeare after Mass Media, ed. Richard Burt, 195–220. New York: Palgrave. Lenthall, Bruce. 2007. Radio’s America: The Great Depression and the Rise of Modern Mass Culture. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Levine, Lawrence W. 1988. Highbrow/Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Maltin, Leonard. 2000. The Great American Broadcast. New York: New American Library. Matheson, Hilda. 1933. Broadcasting. London: Thornton Butterworth. McElvaine, Robert S. 1984. The Great Depression: America, 1929–1941. New York: Times Books. McKernan, Luke, Eve-Marie Oesterlen, and Olwen Terris, eds. 2009. Shakespeare on Film, Television and Radio: The Researcher’s Guide. London: British Universities Film and Video Council. McLuhan, Marhsall. 1964. Understanding Media. New York: McGraw-Hill. Miller, Edward D. 2003. Emergency Broadcasting and 1930s American Radio. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Naremore, James. 1989. The Magic World of Orson Welles. Dallas: Southern Methodist University Press. “The Radio Guild.” N.d. CBC Archives Transcript. McMaster University Library. Shakespeare, William. 1988a. “Hamlet.” In Four Tragedies, ed. David Bevington. New York: Bantam. – 1988b. “Julius Caesar.” In Four Tragedies, ed. David Bevington. New York: Bantam. Smith, Judith E. 2002. “Radio’s ‘Cultural Front,’ 1938–1948.” In Radio Reader, ed. Michele Hilmes and Jason Loviglio, 209–30. New York: Routledge.

256  Andrew Bretz Timson, David. 2000. Great Historical Shakespeare Recordings. Naxos Audiobooks, NA 220012. Liner notes. Welles, Orson. 1936a. “Hamlet, Part One.” Performed by Orson Welles, Alexander Scorby, Rosamond Pinchot, Edgerton Paul, Sidney Smith. Columbia Workshop. Internet Archive. 19 September. http://ia700200 .us.archive.org/20/items/ColumbiaWorkshop/360919_Hamlet_Part_1 .mp3. – 1936b. “Hamlet, Part Two.” Performed by Orson Welles, Joseph Cotton, Virginia Welles, Laura Strob, Whitford Cane, Sidney Smith, Edgerton Paul, Edward Jerome. Columbia Workshop. Internet Archive. 14 November. http://ia700200.us.archive.org/20/items/ColumbiaWorkshop/361114_ Hamlet_Part_2.mp3. – 1990. Orson Welles on Shakespeare: The W.P.A. and Mercury Theatre Playscripts. Ed. Richard France. New York: Greenwood Press.

Sounding Shakespeare: Intermedial Adaptation and Popular Music1 D a n i el Fi sc hl in

Preamble If music be the food of love, play on William Shakespeare, Twelfth Night, or What You Will (1.1.1; emphasis mine) See I’m a poet to some, a regular modern day Shakespeare Jesus Christ the King of these Latter Day Saints here To shatter the picture in which of that as they paint me as a monger of hate and Satan a scatter-brained atheist But that ain’t the case, see it’s a matter of taste We as a people decide if Shady’s as bad as they say he is Or is he the latter – a gateway to escape? (Eminem, “Renegade”)2

Count Orsino’s opening declamation in Twelfth Night encourages musical “play” and links that play, by paronomasia, to theatrical play and to erotics – as if to suggest, in a single suppositious witticism, the inextricable links among music, play, whether musical or theatrical, and love. The highly quotable comment is precisely so because it gets at an ­underlying relationship reiterated in Shakespearean theatre. In that relationship, musical and theatrical play are empowered as forms of performance that cannot help but be popular, if not “universal,” because they are inextricably linked to erotic play. Moreover, Orsino’s words anticipate what is a fundamentally intermedial relationship, suggesting that music stands in for something

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other than itself, crossing over into other forms of mediation that make it at once ludic (“play on”) and erotic (“the food of love”). Music in this context enables play, with a sly pun on both theatrical and erotic play by way of a “food” trope that is sufficiently open-ended to imply both necessary nourishment and pleasure. But Orsino’s line also indirectly addresses a determining feature of adaptation in relation to intermediality: namely, that adaptations in which crossovers occur from one medium into another tend towards proliferative play. They are resolutely generative of meaning as a function of playing across media. The very term “intermedial adaptation” implies that intermedial techniques are also adaptive techniques. Intermediality always already suggests the transformation, remediation, or hybridization that occurs when one form of media enters into dialogue with another. Hence, intermedial interventions adhere to adaptation’s primary function to proliferate meaning using whatever techniques – intertextual or intermedial – are readily available and, presumably, aesthetically compelling. The insight is the opposite of what musico-literary critic Walter Bernhart describes as “one particular aspect of the intermedial relationship between words and music, namely the possible danger that the music, when it is combined with words, may in some way ‘destroy’ the words. This implies that music, in a multimedia situation, as far as its effect on an audience is concerned, possibly overrules, displaces, absorbs the words and what they have to say” (2002, 247). Intermediality, in the Shakespearean context cited above, implies combinatory, hybridized, multiple forms of meaning arising from the collision of signifiers that makes Orsino’s words so memorable. The line reminds readers that music is always already implicit in the language of theatre, the iambic pulse of the first four feet of the line giving way to the emphatic spondee of the last foot, “play on.” The intermedial music of the line (it is at once aural and textual) literally enacts its substantive meaning and its injunction to “play” across the rich possibility of meaning that a single line such as this can make possible. By contrast, Eminem’s rap duet with Jay-Z, “Renegade,” from JayZ’s sixth album The Blueprint (2001) was released on September 11 coinciding with the attacks by Al-Qaeda on the US. The duet explicitly makes over-the-top connections between Eminem’s status in popular culture as “a regular modern day Shakespeare/Jesus Christ the King of these Latter Day Saints here.” It does so while also launching a scathing attack on religious dogmatism, the lame-brained criticism of Eminem’s music by people whose own hypocrisy he attacks, and those

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who simply do not understand how his music expresses the rage and frustration of stymied youth in America and how that music offers “a gateway to escape” that is of the people. The lyrics invoke Shakespeare as a double signifier: first, of the parodic rhetorical excess that produces both celebrity and the false perceptions and criticisms that Eminem rails against; and second, as a conduit for the poetic power invoked by Eminem as a means to achieve artistic autonomy, a conduit whose performance provides a “gateway to escape” from the constraints of people whose “taste” dictates otherwise. The “gateway to escape” trope invokes anarchic creative powers associated with rap: its ability to unleash the collective intermedial aesthetics of textual and musical signifying. The phrase “We as a people decide” invokes the Preamble to the United States Constitution3 and its opening proclamation, which suggests that state sovereignty arises by will of the “people.” Eminem’s sly allusion locates the “people” as the fount of decision making, the very place where the “popular” in “popular culture” originates. In a country increasingly governed by political oligopolies and corporate self-interest, such a declamation is not without a much wider political resonance than “Renegade” has, with its extended defence of ghetto culture, as Jay-Z declaims at the beginning of the piece: Do you fools listen to music or do you just skim through it? See I’m influenced by the ghetto you ruined That same dude you gave nothin, I made somethin doin what I do through and through and I give you the news – with a twist it’s just his ghetto point-of-view The renegade; you been afraid I penetrate pop culture, bring ’em a lot closer to the block where they pop toasters and they live with their moms got drop roasters from botched robberies niggas crouched over mommies knocked up cause she wasn’t watched over … (“Renegade ­Lyrics”)

The giving of the “news,” with its combination of New Testament and media resonances, and the penetration of pop culture by the renegade “ghetto point-of-view” combine to attack pop and media cultures that have excluded this view while showing how any reductive notion of a monolithic popular culture is riven by contradictions, here driven by class and ethnicity. Rap’s intermediality is based on both its cultural

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difference and its use of musico-poetic tropes to access “pop culture.” Jay-Z’s words imply that rap has adapted to the conditions of oppression that exclude the ghetto and used the very tools of the oppressor to travel across cultural divides, here signified by the split between the ghetto and the suburbs. The US Nielsen SoundScan ranks Eminem (Marshall Bruce Mathers III) as the best-selling artist of the first decade of the twenty-first century, having sold more than 80 million albums worldwide, making him one of an élite handful of best-selling popular music artists in the world. Likewise, Jay-Z (Shawn Corey Carter) is one of the most successful hip hop artists and pop music entrepreneurs in the US with a net worth of some $450 million (as of 2010) and album sales of approximately 50 million units worldwide. Both artists have had, in other words, remarkable success in “penetrating” pop music markets – and have corresponding financial and artistic clout as a result, even as they have built that clout on the kinds of renegade, “outsider” comments that the above-cited lyrics demonstrate. Shakespeare’s name, then, sits comfortably in this context both as a signifier of financial and artistic achievement and as an iconic presence. Shakespeare’s literariness helps validate the renegade perspectives, which simultaneously critique a pop culture that excludes ghetto culture and empower a pop culture of the people who “decide” on what is to be successful. Moreover, Shakespeare’s canonic centrality (the power of his global brand) has now travelled into the urban musical contexts of “renegade” black culture, a clear indicator of intermediality as both a crossing over of media and a crossing over of cultures interpellated by media. Both epigraphs outline a set of relations between popular culture, as a monolithic entity riven by internal contradictions and dissonances, and Shakespeare, as a touchstone reference for both artistic achievement and popular appeal, whose presence can be appropriated to popular culture as the need fits. Gianni Sibilla reminds us, “Pop music is an intermedial and intertextual phenomenon defined by its position in the contemporary mediascape” (2004, 124). Shakespeare, as an iconic global intermedial brand, is situated in a similar relation to the mediascape, endlessly appropriated to whatever uses the mediascape dictates, endlessly interwoven into intertextual and ever-proliferating representative strategies that run the gamut of advertising through multiple genres of media and intermediality. In short, Shakespeare’s adaptation into intermedial contexts associated with the power of popular song

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produces new contexts and resonances that sound Shakespeare’s capacity to mutate, to remain endlessly protean, as the pressures of new media and new intertexts are brought to bear on his presence as an avatar of proliferative meaning. “Being Popular”: Defining Popular Music? Definitions of popular music are problematic because they often fail to distinguish between the multiple genres of what “popular” can mean and the remarkably diverse activities of musicians whose work is “popular” but flies under the radar of what gets presented as mass culture. Popular in this sense is not to be equated with mass culture, though it frequently is. And popular, in this sense, references a broad range of musical practices that cross over multiple genres, activities, and media – not all necessarily represented in mass culture (though not all necessarily excluded from mass culture either). Intimate practices of music making that are widely occurring but largely ignored or underrepresented in mainstream media are as important an aspect of popular music as are its more commodified outputs. Popular music, in this view, may reference genres as diverse as punk, grunge, alternative, gospel, blues, Broadway song, rock, turntabling, hip hop, and the like, while simultaneously referencing the practices of a broad segment of noncommercial musicking4 that occurs in homes, local community contexts, and specific cultural and ethnic contexts in which music making is an integral part of the fabric of everyday life that unites, and even defines, community and the individuals who make it up. If one includes in this context multiple forms of dissemination across diverse forms of media – think cassettes, vinyl, CDs, digital filesharing, radio, TV, internet outlets of various kinds including social networking sites, archival sites, and so forth – it becomes clear that intermediality is always already in practice as a precondition for understanding popular music’s intersections with media culture writ large. “Popular,” then, references not only the contexts that produce the music and allow for its dissemination but also audience reception, the access of the musicians to cultural bandwidths that are more or less travelled (think Clear Channel5 dissemination as opposed to Indie [Independent], DIY [Do-It-Yourself], or local community practices and aesthetics), and the activities of the musicians themselves as self-­ defining, autonomous makers of popular culture, regardless of the attention paid to it by mass culture. Moreover, because subjective notions

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of value and status are so often a key aspect of self-fashioning in popular culture generally, one person’s notion of popular may be another person’s notion of marginal or irrelevant. The jazz purist may eschew notions of jazz as a popular form of music as much as the punk fan finds the so-called popularity of jazz incomprehensible or risible – and some listeners may find both forms to be wholly unthinkable as popular music while others have no problem reconciling the two forms as different aspects of what popular music can mean. Intersubjective notions of value, then, are a crucial aspect of the definitional problems associated with precisely defining what popular music may mean in different contexts. Intermediality in its proliferative, adaptive, protean incarnations is as much an expression of those intersubjective values associated with pop music as it is of anything else. “Being” popular in a mass cultural context means something entirely different from “being” popular in a lived everyday sense shared across communities for whom popularity derives from practices that are quotidian, continuously evolving, yet deeply rooted in identity structures to which mass culture pays little heed. The ways in which these multiple communities of practice engage with either pop music or Shakespeare across multiple forms of culture, media, and meaning assure that the intermedial effects, which one must also recognize as adaptive effects, are consistently associated with the attempt to generate new meaning through novel cultural practices. Pop music implies an aesthetics that eludes easy definitions and is grounded on the paradox that assumes both centrality and marginality as its key attributes. So hip hop sells as ghetto music to suburban white males as part of a phantasy of rebellion. The music industry capitalizes on “insider” cultural capital associated with alternative music scenes that are trans-mediated into new markets. But the marketing hypocrisy of selling the ghetto to bourgeois consumers can in itself cause a plummeting of cultural capital’s stock when the putative authenticity of the scene is compromised by the realization it has been co-opted and is no longer in antagonistic opposition to the corporate values by which it has been overtaken. Torn between public commons notions of music as outside commercial economies of exchange and the creation of music for profit, popular music entails contradictory notions of the function of music generally. It is also thoroughly implicated in discourses of class that distinguish low- and highbrow music by canonical choices associated with repertoire, style, education, institutionalization. Moreover, British pop music scholar Timothy Warner argues, “pop mu-

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sic is inextricably bound to developments in audio technology and the working practices [that] ensue” (2003, xi). Manipulation of technology in ways that generate new forms is a key aspect of popular music. This rule of thumb applies as much to the introduction of radio as to the invention of the electric guitar in the first half of the twentieth century (and subsequent practices like Frippertronics6 that explore the potential of that medium of expression via layering on newer technologies like tape looping) – and to the more recent use of turntable technology in the latter half of the twentieth century as a retro way of making new music via scratching, beat juggling, and beat mixing and matching. The persistent engagement with new technologies for generating meaning is one reason why pop music remains so remarkably intermedial. British sociologist and rock critic Simon Frith elaborates five criteria for defining popular music: commercial music that participates in an economic system; music that is attuned to changes in technology especially with regard to both storage and recording; music that is “experienced as mediated” and bound up with the mass media of radio, TV, cinema, and, more recently, the internet and the digital revolution; music made for pleasure and entertainment; and music that is formally hybridized, crossing “social, cultural, and geographical boundaries” (2004, 3–4). Frith’s paradigms work well generally, though they largely focus on the commercial and commodity status of popular music while neglecting music that is “popular” in the etymological sense of the Latin adjective and noun popularis (meaning by, of, or for the people or compatriot, comrade) and populus (people or nation). In this latter more generalized sense of “popular,” music may be more closely tied to social and c­ ommunity functions that strengthen structures of identity, history, memory, storytelling, and community affiliation. In such a sense, the commodity- and economic-centred definitions of popular music evade the larger question of popular music as a key site for articulating public commons notions of community and individual selffashioning. Moreover, as British sociologist Georgina Born argues, “within commercial popular music there is a proliferation of markets and of production processes [that] is remarkable compared with other mass media. Television, cinema, the press and radio are by comparison large-scale, centralized and oligopolistic forms of cultural production, with little entry or influence by small-scale producers and distributors” (1987, 1). So a key aspect of any understanding of intermediality in relation to pop culture and its interpretation of an iconic presence like

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Shakespeare is that pop culture cannot be dissociated from the full spectrum of cultural productions that produce ongoing intermediation. In short, intermediation is a defining aspect of new adaptive forms of intertext that recycle, mutate, and shapeshift as a defining element of their creative process. For our purposes, then, popular music may be understood as intrinsically tied to notions of class (in the sense of “who” and “how” the populus or people may be defined); access to and use of technology (from choice of instrument through to performance, recording, and dissemination techniques); hybridization, permeability, and intermediality in both commercial and non-commercial structures of creation and dissemination; and public commons notions of identity and self-­ fashioning that arise as an expression of both community and individual identities. The function of popular music is to be dissociated from any one singular telos (like simply pleasure or entertainment), as there are too many ways in which music creates meaning as an art form that relies on sounds whose representations cannot always be determined or reduced to singular meanings. This ambiguity, along with the fact that so much popular music is tied to either words or to dance forms, makes for interesting parallels with the performative practices associated with Shakespearean theatre, which in their own contexts were already tending towards the proliferative meanings associated with intermediation. Shakespearean Contexts and Connections The aesthetics of Shakespearean theatre have, from their inception, been profoundly tied to popular music, whether in Shakespeare’s own  historical moment or in subsequent historical moments that fuse  Shakespearean tropes with popular musicking of various sorts. Shakespeare’s plays make use of multiple musical moments in which popular musics are deployed as performative and affective structures that often play a meta-diegetic, intermedial role in the plays: the musical moments that are part of the play structures, in other words, comment upon the larger narrative structures in the plays in ways that unite verbal and musical affect. Shakespeare’s plays were written during a time that overlaps with the height of the Elizabethan lute song phenomenon (approximately 1596–1622 and comprising a corpus of about 650 songs [Fischlin 1998, 42]), in which this remarkable form of cultural production anticipated

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the waves of popular song styles that have become an inescapable feature of Western culture generally. As both a courtly and a private domestic entertainment governed by a poetics of intimacy that appears to have been widely shared and remarkably popular, the lute song is but one of many historical factors that make Shakespeare’s association with popular music unavoidable. As I have argued elsewhere, “The public representation of interiority is rife with tensions between the conventions of external display and the hermetic display of private contemplation” (Fischlin 1998, 267). The staged representations of song in Shakespearean theatre partake in this tension as much as do currentday popular musical performances in which staging the interiority of the artist plays a crucial role in producing affect. The very insertion of song into a theatrical text suggests, in this context, an intermedial affect only possible as a function of the intermediation. A culture in which the staged representation of affective intimacy was a key trope was capable of producing such a trope through nascent forms of intermedial making. Christopher R. Wilson and Michela Calore’s Music in Shakespeare: A Dictionary notes how “Music pervades Shakespeare’s plays and poems. In addition to numerous stage directions for music and sound effects and the many vocal songs in the plays, Shakespeare’s dramatic and poetic work is permeated by references to music, involving over 300 terms” (2005, 1). And as the English organist and composer Edward Naylor reminds us, “Out of thirty-seven plays of Shakespeare, there are no less than thirty-two which contain interesting references to music and musical matters in the text itself” (1896, 17). In addition, Wes Folkerth has argued in The Sound of Shakespeare that writing was the “most sophisticated technology for recording sound events in Shakespeare’s England” and Shakespeare “learned to push that representational technology to its mimetic limits … Shakespeare’s playtexts record past acoustic events, vivifying the past presences of different voices, tones, and intonations in the early modern theatre. The sounds embedded in these playtexts ask us to assent to the fullness and reality of their temporal and cultural otherness. At the same time, they also express, at various registers of theatrical and linguistic representation, their author’s understanding of sound” (2002, 7). As a register of acoustic memory beyond the mere referencing of musical events and concepts, then, Shakespeare’s playtexts are always already reminding us of their intermediality, with script and typography pointing us back to sonic events, acoustic presences.

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Moreover, understanding the fullness of the plays’ indebtedness to musical and sonic contexts requires that we attend to how they were preceded by musical performances and occasionally by inter-act performances. Bruce R. Smith cites Andrew Gurr’s view that “the musical consort ‘brought the largest single alteration to the King’s Men’s practices when they took over the Blackfriars playhouse,’” a change that “proved so popular that the company retrofitted the Globe to include a  curtained music room in the balcony above the stage” (1999, 221). Consort music’s popularity during Shakespeare’s time imitates the complex relations of Shakespearean theatre’s popularity to different classes and audiences, both as a popular and a courtly entertainment. Consort music was as likely to be heard at a play or a masque as at a banquet or outdoor entertainment, and was an important aspect of domestic music making: “By the late 16th century, viol consort playing was a major form of domestic musical recreation and education, as many households possessed a chest of viols” (Randel 2003, 211). The proximity of street ballad culture to the sites of Shakespearean theatrical production also indicates an inevitable connection between Shakespearean theatre and the popular music of its day. American early modern scholar Bruce R. Smith notes, in a discussion of popular ballads, how from the street to the stage was only a matter of steps, in fact, if the Globe was 99 feet in diameter. On the stage, ballads might be not only commented upon and quoted, but performed and metaperformed. Shakespeare’s Cleopatra is only the most famous of the characters who voice contempt for “scald Rimers” who will “Ballad vs out a Tune” – in the same breath that she scorns the “quicke Comedians” who “extemporally will stage vs” … Such ritual snubs to a commercially rival medium do not, however, prevent [Shakespearean] characters from seizing on popular ballads in moments that require lyric intensity, as Desdemona does with “Willow, willow” just before her death or Benedick with “The god of loue that sits aboue” in the throes of his love for Beatrice … Performance of ballads onstage did not stop with quotation, however … Metaperformances of ballads onstage – that is to say, performances of performances of ballads – occur most famously in The Winter’s Tale and Bartholomew Fair, where Autolycus and Nightingale ply their wares to rural and to urban customers who are alike in their eager gullibility. (1999, 168–9)

It is important to remember that ballads were both folk and street forms, circulated as printed broadsheets that were read aloud or, in the

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case of folk ballads, sung or recited from memory. Ballads themselves emerged from a variety of sources, spanning folk songs, popular songs, working songs, and courtly or art songs (Wilson and Calore 2005, 34) – and an important aspect of their popularity was the very hybridity of origin to which they gave voice. Ballads, in short, were profoundly intermedial musico-textual forms not only because they blended multiple cultural sources but also because they circulated as both text and song in multiple formats. Just as ballads were a form of Elizabethan popular music integrated into Shakespearean theatre so too was dance music. F.W. Sternfeld notes in Music in Shakespearean Tragedy (1963) that the “great bulk of extant Elizabethan and Jacobean music for solo instruments, such as virginals or lute, and for consorts, whole or broken, consists of dance music, largely in the form of pavans and galliards” (2005, 251). And Shakespeare’s plays are replete with references to dance, “contain[ing] numerous allusions to dance, using terms that would have been as immediate and striking in their imagery to audiences as they are obscure today” (Dobson and Wells 2004, 105). Dancing in Shakespeare’s historical context “formed a part of people’s lives at all levels of society in a way that we can scarcely conceive now, and the ability to dance ­proficiently was an expected social accomplishment for the gentry and nobility” (Dobson and Wells 2004, 105). The fusion of song, ballad, ­instrumental musicking, dance – all part of Shakespearean theatrical ­representations – marks the degree to which Shakespearean theatre in its own historical moment was intensely linked to, and reflective of, popular trends in intermedial musicking at that time. Popular music’s relationship to Shakespeare is complex, not the least because it oscillates between piggybacking upon Shakespeare’s iconic status and deploying popular music’s own current-day iconic status to resituate him in relation to new (potentially global) audiences for whom his cultural currency is only distantly present. This curious relationship in which celebrity status and popularity (both of Shakespeare and of major figures in popular music) are intermixed and mutually reinforcing is a highly problematic aspect in any discussion of Shakespeare and popular music. As British literary scholar Julie Sanders points out: “while the influence of Shakespeare on music has been considerable, the domain of musical interpretation, not least opera, has had its impact in turn on the performance and understanding of many Shakespearean plays” (2007, 108). This aspect of the Shakespeare effect’s impact on popular culture generally is profoundly tied to theories of adaptation, reinscription, deformation, sampling,

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allusion, translation, bastardization, and citation as Shakespearean sources are transmuted and shapeshifted into vastly different intermedial contexts driven by the imperatives of contemporary aesthetics, historical contexts, and economies of self-fashioning. Sanders argues: The most fractured and fragmented Shakespearean presence of all is perhaps to be found in contemporary popular music, especially the compressed form of the popular song lyric, to the extent that terms like “adaptation” seem inaccurate, even irrelevant, when applied to the glancing references or invocations that these frequently involve. It is difficult in the same context to be confident, therefore, about the extent to which these fleeting references or allusions require recognition – “deep,” fully contextualized, or otherwise – on the part of their receiving audiences of their Shakespearean origin or inspiration for the production of their meanings and effects. (2007, 182)

The sheer fragmentary pervasiveness of Shakespearean referents in popular music defies easy understanding. That said, it is worth noting that this pervasiveness does indeed signify as an aspect of the Shakespeare effect, defined as the capacity to do things to (and with) Shakespearean source materials in ways that are anarchic, unpredictable, and not necessarily coherent or reducible to singular meanings. Doing things to Shakespeare via popular music, as with other aspects of popular culture generally, can produce an inverted relationship to Shakespeare’s historical position as an iconic, universal cultural presence. Access to Shakespeare is frequently mediated by popular culture with cinematic and musical representations of Shakespearean citation and adaptation preceding the original source material in terms of how audiences first access Shakespeare. In these contexts it is impossible to address the range of presence the Shakespeare effect has in and across cultures without addressing how Shakespeare has been intermediated. Case Study: Popular Song and Shakespeare in Canada The Canadian Adaptations of Shakespeare Project (CASP) website devotes a significant portion of its multimedia pages to Shakespeare and popular music in Canada (Fischlin 2004).7 The online resource provides a useful point of departure for understanding the contemporary array of ways in which Shakespeare intersects with popular music. The fact that the CASP site heavily relies on multiple forms of media to show

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how Shakespeare has been adapted into diverse popular music contexts is in itself an indicator of Shakespearean intermediality. The internet as a portal that collides content with multiple forms of intermediation is perhaps the ultimate expression of intermediality: it allows for virtually any form of media presencing via convergences that the internet’s technologies and infrastructure have steadily been evolving.8 Mark Williams notes how The attention to intermedial issues is also in part a historiographic response to the contemporary media environment of convergence. If we are to understand the many and continuous changes in our media environment and ecology, studies that afford a better reckoning of the scale and complexity of prior relations between and across “media” (understood in as complex and multiple a sense as required) will be important in media history. (2009, 46–7)

Convergence is a key trope for understanding intermedial adaptations and permutations. This is so because in the new “configurable world,” as Aram Sinnreich calls it, “Creative transformation and aesthetic innovation … [are] markers of artistry among configurable musicians” (2010, 100). Intermedial transformations and innovations are tropes for “doing things to” received modes of configuring aesthetic realities, tropes that ineluctably align with adaptation tropes. Shakespeare, for better or worse, and because of his iconic presence in global media culture as an avatar of literary and creative excellence, is one focal point for intermedial experimentations with the transition from embodied (theatrical) to virtual (and hybridized) digital, configurable representations. The audio portion of the CASP site, for instance, is divided into sections that include audio installation/experimental; music performance; songs for stage; and theatre/archive recordings – a breakdown that encompasses a remarkable range of musical performance practices and media associated with Shakespeare in Canada. Though not all fall under the rubric of popular music, there are, nonetheless, a significant number of examples from the site in which popular music is a defining factor. Western Canadian playwright and author Ken Mitchell’s 1976 Cruel Tears, for instance, is a country and western adaptation of Othello, in which six country songs are performed by the country-folk group Humphrey and the Dumptrucks, a group active from 1967 to 1981 largely in Western Canada, where their mix of

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aspects of folk, country, and rock music spoke to issues faced by rural Canadian communities. Canadian director Antoni Cimolino commissioned songs composed by the Canadian supergroup The Barenaked Ladies for his 2005 Stratford (Ontario) production of As You Like It. In both Mitchell’s adaptation and Cimolino’s staging, the plays become a means for deploying the representational affects associated with popular music. In the case of Cimolino’s production, the play was imagined in a “summer of love” setting during the late 1960s, with Cimolino paralleling the themes in the play with the social and political issues of the decade. But at the same time, by importing the popular cultural prestige of the wildly successful Barenaked Ladies, Cimolino (as general director of the Stratford Shakespeare Festival in Ontario, which was founded in 1952) was clearly seeking to revitalize stagnant and aging audiences at the largely conservative, but institutionally important, festival. Both examples speak to the wide spectrum of audience that the mix of Shakespeare and popular music can address: from rural communities in Western Canada through to elite audiences associated with one of Canada’s premier cultural institutions. By contrast, Canadian performance and multimedia artist Dawn Matheson’s 2007 Tongues in Trees was an outdoor audio installation created specifically for the Shakespeare Made in Canada Festival at the University of Guelph. For the piece, seven adult learners from Action Read Guelph (an adult literacy centre) each selected a Shakespearean monologue that best described their lives, and then performed the monologues with their own unique voicings. The installation pared down the Shakespearean text to a level of open expression understandable by all, regardless of class, educational standing, or ability – and is at once recognizable in its sonic, acoustic properties as both popular and populist: a choice of popular (read: instantly knowable) monologues and of performances that are populist in the sense that the untrained voices of the adult literacy learners speak in the everyday inflections of a cross-section of people from a localized community. Matheson’s intermedial experiment literally ended up in the trees outside the art gallery with the performers’ taped, then digitized, performances of Shakespearean monologues broadcast through loudspeakers hidden in the gardens around the gallery and activated by photoelectric sensors triggered by gallery-goers. This audio performance, while never marketed to a mass audience, marks a breakdown of what “popular” means in relation to Shakespeare,

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with the music of the language transmuted and shaped by the very personal conditions of the performers dealing with literacy issues in a remarkably creative way. The piece reminds us that even a recitation of a Shakespeare text has remarkable musical qualities that reflect upon the nature of the performer and his or her context. Here, “popular” references class, education, widespread learning disabilities, and the biases that must be overcome to be capable of giving oneself voice, while evoking the groundlings who stood in front of the Elizabethan stage because they were too poor to sit on one of the three levels of the Globe. Matheson’s work poses useful questions about who gets to voice Shakespeare and how the kinds of voicings her work articulates, though arising from how popular culture intersects with Shakespeare at a “ground” level, are also excluded from the strategies of celebrity and mass cultural power so frequently thought of as the defining framework for all popular culture. Other examples from the CASP site include Canadian composer, singer, and harpist Loreena McKennitt, who has sold some thirteen million “world music” records worldwide. The popular Canadian Celtic singer’s version of Prospero’s epilogue speech (“Prospero’s Song”) is part of a long musical association with Shakespeare. In 1981, she moved to Stratford (Ontario) to perform in the chorus of Gilbert and Sullivan’s HMS Pinafore. And in 1982 McKennitt sang the part of Ceres in The Tempest and understudied Portia in Julius Caesar, while in 1984 she ­composed for and performed in Two Gentlemen of Verona. In 2001, she returned to Stratford to write the music for The Merchant of Venice production of that year. The version of Prospero’s speech sung by McKennitt represents the way in which culture travels across and through colonial and postcolonial spaces, popular music being an effective conduit for marking relations of influence and affect as they hybridize into new historical and cultural contexts and then represent those contexts in new formations to a global audience. Here, it is important to underline how intermediality is as much a function of travelling across media as it is of travelling across cultures that are literally intermediated by new aesthetic forms. Canadian singer/songwriter Rufus Wainwright is also represented on the CASP site with a remarkable interpretation of Sonnet 29, “When in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes,/I all alone beweep my outcast state.” Wainwright was invited in 2002 to participate in a fundraising project for the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in London. The  EMI compilation When Love Speaks is a recorded collection of

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Shakespeare’s sonnets performed by a prominent group of British stage and screen actors including Alan Rickman, Kenneth Branagh, Richard Attenborough, and Juliet Stevenson. The appearance of Rufus Wainwright in this élite club of performers is an example of the Shakespeare “effect” being appropriated to popular culture that, in the case of Wainwright’s interpretation, becomes a highly politicized exploration of gendered identity based on difference. CASP researcher Ben Walsh argues that The speaking “I” of Shakespeare’s Sonnet 29 addresses the “fair-complexioned man” as his beloved: such desire possibly being the source of his disgrace … Raising this experience from the page and a context now 400 years past, Wainwright’s persona as a queer pop star emphasizes a queer reading while de-emphasizing other readings that have thus far been privileged. The intensity of Wainwright’s voice increases as the text shifts from despair to the hope he finds in his beloved. Wainwright’s performance and thus Shakespeare’s text can be understood as an affirmation of a queer identity, which is why the speaking “I” is able to resolve this self-reflection with the couplet: For thy sweet love rememb’red such wealth brings, That then I scorn to change my state with kings. While some would note a certain irony in the final signifier “kings,” “queen” being a term both of derision and pride in a modern queer community, what is most significant in this final couplet is the way in which the descending scale and very articulated diction bring the words to the fore heightening this conscious decision to continue identifying and being identified with the term “disgrace.” This choice to remain in disgrace or to remain apart from dominant structures of power rather than accept the demands of a dominant social order is a choice the speaking “I” has made. Wainwright is clearly making the same choice through his singing of Sonnet 29 as emblematic of liberatory queer discourse. (2004)

The pop icon, in other words, brings his own and Shakespeare’s celebrity to the performance, which then unpacks a critique of previous readings of the sonnet that fail to recognize its queerness and that normalize or generalize its content in ways that elide its homoerotic affect. The centre thus speaks to the margin, if such terms mean anything at all

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in as complex a representation spanning centuries of artistic relations involving Shakespeare and gender. Wainwright’s interpretation of the sonnet exemplifies popular music’s capacity to animate from a position of relative cultural importance a more marginalized aspect of its being. The politics of such a representation are significant not only for how they illuminate and reread Shakespeare but also for how they reflect on pressing contemporary issues of intermedial representation, in this case related to centuries of  oppression and marginalization associated with queer gendering. Wainwright’s association with Shakespeare does not end with this performance. His CD All Days Are Nights: Songs for Lulu (2010) features interpretations of three Shakespeare sonnets, and ongoing work on a song cycle will focus on five orchestrated sonnets to be performed with the San Francisco Symphony. Wainwright avers that “I knew a little bit about the sonnets, but I’d never immersed myself in them before, and I really did for this project … Once you dip into that stream you’re pretty much rushed down the river by the beauty of it all. There is an innate musicality within the vowels and the consonants and the spaces and so forth. My life changed after the sonnet, so I thought it was necessary to present that new addition to my lexicon” (Graff 2010). Other examples from the CASP site show the remarkable range of genre and style that emerges when Shakespeare collides with popular music. American jazz composer and bandleader Duke Ellington’s (1899–1974) Such Sweet Thunder was commissioned in 1956 by the Stratford Shakespeare Festival (Ontario), where in July of that year the Ellington Orchestra performed it. Such Sweet Thunder is considered among the most accomplished of the many suites composed by Ellington and Billy Strayhorn (1915–67), his most frequent and significant collaborator. In paying tribute to Shakespeare, Ellington and Strayhorn painted a series of finely drawn portraits of some of the Bard’s most memorable tragic, comic, and heroic figures, including “Sonnet for Caesar,” “Sonnet to Hank Cinq,” “Lady Mac,” and “Madness in Great Ones.” John Edward Haase notes, in his essential study of Ellington, Beyond Category – The Life and Genius of Duke Ellington: “As did Shakespeare, Ellington deployed his players like great actors on a stage. For nineteen years, Shakespeare was part owner of a repertory company, and wrote ONLY for that company. Likewise, Ellington had HIS own repertory company – for fifty years – and wrote almost exclusively for its players. Shakespeare’s plays have outlived the actors

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for whom they were conceived. Ellington’s music may, as the centuries pass, attain the same achievement” (cited in Duke Ellington and His Orchestra 1957, liner notes). Ellington’s influence on American music across multiple genres is singular and he is widely considered to be one of the most important and influential American composers in any genre. Ellington also ­composed incidental music for a Timon of Athens production at the Stratford Festival in 1963, thus bringing yet another form of intermedial presencing (jazz) to the Shakespearean theatrical context. Remarkably, Ellington’s sketches and partial score remained in the Stratford archives since then and have only recently been recuperated, reconstructed, and recorded by Stanley Silverman and an ensemble of musicians associated with the Stratford Festival. Consisting of twenty pieces – including numbers like the “Overture: Black and Tan Fantasy”; “Market Crash”; “False Friends: Banquet Theme”; “Revolutionary March”; and “soured for the Second Banquet: Creole Love Call” – the music blends Afro-American jazz stylistics and social consciousness with the themes of Shakespeare’s play: greed, generosity, betrayal, revolution, reconciliation, and resurrection. At the time of Ellington’s association with the Stratford Festival, it had already established an international reputation for its music festival over and above its theatrical one. As Silverman notes in his commentary for the full recording of the incidental music from Timon of Athens: “A typical day might include a concert of Beethoven played by resident musician Glenn Gould followed by a performance of Antony and Cleopatra starring Christopher Plummer and Zoe Caldwell. Through those years Ellington frequently visited Stratford with his band and became infatuated with Shakespeare. In sold-out performances, confronted with no place to sit, he could be seen sitting on the stairs in the theatre’s aisles” (Duke Ellington’s Incidental Music for Shakespeare’s Play Timon of Athens 1993). Coincident with his scoring of the music for Timon, Ellington was also working on My People, written for the Century of Negro Progress Exposition in Chicago and inspired by Dr Martin Luther King Jr. My People was both an exploration of religious and historical themes related to the African diaspora and an appeal for racial harmony, and it is interesting to speculate on the degree to which these influences also found their way into the score he composed for Timon of Athens. Examples like these from the CASP site show an astonishing breadth of the creative, intermedial practices that interlink Shakespeare and

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popular music in a specifically Canadian context. Moreover, they demonstrate the characteristic interpenetration and hybridity of popular musical culture as it finds renewed expression in unexpected global venues and relations, whether in McKennitt’s Celtic and Middle Eastern world music or in Ellington’s Made-in-America vision of Shakespeare for a Canadian stage. These examples are far from comprehensive. Study of other national sites, especially in the English-speaking world, will produce similar outcomes in terms of the degree to which popular music is a conduit for refashioning Shakespeare across a wide range of media techniques and aesthetic strategies that sample, adapt, reference, slyly undercut, translate, and fearlessly refashion Shakespeare. It is to further examples of these that this essay now turns. Globalizing Shakespeare through Popular Music Shakespeare’s historical moment is associated with the early modern European age of “discovery,” an emergent stage in the ways in which global relations were being reconfigured by trade, economy, and technology associated with the “New” world and the shift of capital to Europe. In that sense, Shakespeare always already partakes of what might be called globalized culture, as surely as his historical moment coincides with imperial, state, or diasporic culture. Anston Bosman notes that the term globalization “names a condition as ancient as the experience of empire and diaspora, of nations and the states they create” and that Shakespeare himself “lived in the age when all the world’s populated continents were first permanently linked by trade … During his lifetime, cultural exchanges multiplied not only among European nations, but between Europe and the Atlantic and, more slowly, Pacific worlds. Many of these growing interdependencies left their mark on Shakespeare’s writing and theatre, from advances in stage design to an explosion of literary sources in print” (2010, 285). Globalization and imperial culture are inextricably linked with the explosion of technologies and media without which intermedial adaptation would be unthinkable. As I argue elsewhere, Shakespeare’s roots in Elizabethan popular culture and his skill at making money were not unrelated to the ways in which his work has, from the start, intersected with notions of globalization, cultural border-crossing, and the confrontation with difference. The Globe Theatre, in which Shakespeare had a share, was one of the first joint stock companies – now referred to as corporations, mutatis

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mutandis – alongside the British East India Company, whose history of imperial trade extended over the centuries following its establishment by Royal Charter on 31 December 1600. The British East India Company played a key role in establishing the British Raj in India, a colonial enterprise only undone by Mahatma Gandhi, after years of struggle, in 1947. The Globe Theatre was founded as a joint stock venture in 1599, and played its own role as a conduit for popular culture, which staged forms of theatrical nationalism that commented (not always positively) on historical genealogies related to British self-interest. Henry V’s culminating moments at Agincourt (1415), as depicted by Shakespeare, resound with the triumphal rhetoric of enacted power – remember that the English were fighting in France, a country they had invaded long before they got to India (Fischlin 2006, 1). The point to be remembered here is that popular culture, both generally and in its specific, localized manifestations, is thoroughly imbricated in both business and imperial structures of power. These structures, in turn, cannot be separated from globalization as an expression of both imperial power and its cultural offshoots. In pop music this point often gets lost as a function of its practitioners frequently positioning themselves outside of such power structures – subversive, dismissive, or critical of them – even as such a seemingly radical positioning becomes one of the ways in which their music becomes marketable. This paradox is closely connected to Theodor W. Adorno’s insight that “The production of popular music [which he thought of largely in mass cultural terms] is highly centralized in its economic organization, but still ‘individualistic’ in its social mode of production” (2002, 443). The concept of individualist production that manifests exceptional qualities is crucial to popular music generally (think Ellington, Dylan, Johnny Rotten, or the previously cited Eminem, all of whom have had impressive impact on popular musical culture in their respective ways and historical contexts) and is closely tied to ways in which popular music appropriates, or does things to, Shakespeare. Shakespeare is perhaps the ultimate touchstone, however problematically, for the power of the individual to self-fashion and in turn to influence popular culture as a “universal” expression of genius. Adorno gets at precisely this point by noting how at the “end of the bourgeois era, the capacity to bring forth the entire world aesthetically from within oneself, from the subject, was embodied, once again, in a few individuals; as it had been vouchsafed to the greatest artists at the beginning of the epoch, to Michelangelo, or Shakespeare perhaps” (2002, 627). This “capacity to

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bring forth the entire world” is an allegory for intermedial adaptations, the fluidity with which media shapeshift across boundaries to become hybridized and ceaselessly protean. Self-fashioning in an age where multiple media are available to individuals for aesthetic play cannot help but be intermedial. What Adorno had not quite understood (or seen as a function of his own historical moment) was the degree to which this “capacity to bring forth the entire world aesthetically from within oneself” had been appropriated by popular culture away from so-called serious culture with a vengeance – especially so in the mass media culture that developed exponentially in the latter part of the twentieth century. The aesthetics of representation that popular culture, understood in this perspective as a primary aspect of mass culture, embodies is a triumphal union of personality, content, and technology widely disseminated as a singular expression of the economy of “greatness.” In such a context, it is not surprising that Shakespeare’s iconic status as perhaps the “greatest” literary artist ever happily coincided with popular music’s own aesthetics of celebrity self-fashioning within economies of scale never achieved before. These economies of scale are tied to intermedial aesthetics that allow for remarkably efficient dissemination practices embodied in, for instance, pop songs. These fuse words and music with dance, videos, film, YouTube and social networking presencing (think Facebook and its ability to make aesthetic objects go “viral”), and a host of other mediatized representations that incrementally intermediate as a function of the diversity of media through which an aesthetic object can be interpellated, refashioned, adapted, and disseminated. The latter half of the twentieth century saw a remarkable proliferation of the ways in which popular culture in all its manifestations engaged with Shakespeare via a number of techniques already mentioned in this essay. Scholarship on the particulars of this engagement is increasing, yet, interestingly, the scholarship on popular music’s engagement with Shakespeare, aside from the work of Julie Sanders and more recently Adam Hansen, is spotty. Hansen’s Shakespeare and Popular Music is a welcome and informed intervention into the field that begins by warning against overestimating “the frequency of pre-existing popular songs in Shakespeare’s plays” (2010, 16) while nonetheless acknowledging the “shared bond between Shakespeare and early modern popular music, and the popular cultures they both give voice to” (20). Hansen’s work argues that “Shakespeare helps popular music assume different forms” and that “popular music makes Shakespeare mean

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different things too, putting a new spin on his words in new contexts. Sampling and remixing Shakespeare changes [sic] him, but also develops existing potentials in his work. Popular music amplifies ambiguities and contradictions in this work, and between it and the dominant discourses of Shakespeare’s period and our own. At the same time, popular music’s use of Shakespeare realizes contradictions within such music, and within its relations to the contexts in which it is made and consumed” (158). The assumption of different forms that Hansen ­mentions is a key aspect of pop music’s intermediality. Moreover, that intermedial capacity to shapeshift is productive of new forms of representation that proliferate the Shakespeare effect as an unstable adaptive form restlessly seeking out new ways to cross over into other forms and generate new meaning. It is important to recognize the degree to which various genres of entertainment with varying degrees of relation to popular markets and cultures all make use of Shakespeare, whether glancingly or in more profound, deeply rooted ways. Cinema, dance, theatre, and their many subgenres and styles reference and sample Shakespeare with surprising regularity if they are not performing all-out adaptations of his work. Music figures in many of these forms of representation as a key element: in Broadway musicals (both on and off) alone, Shakespeare is widely represented in such productions as Rogers and Hart’s 1939 The Boys from Syracuse, based on The Comedy of Errors, Kiss Me Kate, West Side Story, Rockabye Hamlet, and The Lion King.9 All these examples associate Shakespeare with popular music in multiple ways. Consider, for instance, the memorable tunes and lyrics of Stephen Sondheim and Leonard Bernstein’s 1957 Romeo and Juliet Broadway musical adaptation, West Side Story. West Side Story went on to be reconfigured as a highly successful 1961 movie, winner of ten Academy Awards (in addition to being the second highest grossing film of that year), and is a classic example of the staying power and cultural presence of this form of popular musical entertainment’s association with Shakespeare. The incremental effect of these sorts of creative outputs as they travel across media, national sites, and audience reception, though difficult to calculate with precision, is an important aspect of the ways in which popular music’s investment in Shakespearean presence can be understood. The thousands of hits that occur when one punches the terms “Shakespeare” and “music” into a YouTube or Google search function attest to the ways in which Shakespeare and music circulate as one aspect of a much broader popular culture scenario in which sampling,

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remixing, citation, and marketing of brands are determining features of online culture as it morphs and intermediates source materials for a (potentially) global audience. In this scenario it is possible to speak of the Shakespeare effect in terms that recognize his widespread cultural currency and iconicity, his presence and influence, even as the global and universal elements of that popular presence remain not wholly knowable as a function of networks of dissemination and mediation that are too complex, too marginal, or too marked by cultural differences that no single critic can encompass. That said, in cinema and film culture, and especially in those films where the score is a crucial aspect of how the film creates meaning, popular music is a key element in globalizing Shakespeare’s cultural presence. In the case of cinematic adaptations of Shakespeare this is evident in such films as Australian director Baz Luhrmann’s William Shakespeare’s Romeo + Juliet (1996), with a soundtrack by artists that range from Radiohead to Garbage and the Butthole Surfers, and Indian director and composer Vishal Bhardwaj’s Macbeth adaptation Maqbool (2004), which takes place in the Mumbai underworld and has a score (composed by the director) that features elements of Indian classic, popular, and Bollywood musicking. Both films make explicit use of a meta-diegetic effect, in which the music of the film is a necessary accompaniment to the interpretation of the film and is not just background sound (see Sanders 2007, 159). Luhrmann states, “[Shakespeare] would just stick the popular song of the day in the middle of the show. You know, to advance the story, but also to engage people through song” (York 2006, 61). Both examples point to the range of national sites and musical styles that meta-diegetically associate popular music with Shakespeare as a crucial feature of film adaptations. Moreover, these films exemplify how theatre transmutes into film, which is then further mediated by the music that accompanies the film, encapsulating intermedial adaptive strategies that link Shakespeare to multiple forms of popular music. Beyond these, in a far wider field of potential examples from which to choose, is any number of pop music artists who cite, re-cite, sample, reference (consciously or unconsciously), and generally “play” with Shakespearean referents within their artistic ambits. Though it is not within the scope of this essay to exhaustively cite examples of how popular music and Shakespeare intersect, a few instances are worth noting for how they show the range of ways in which Shakespeare and popular music collide to make meaning.

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British rock musician Elvis Costello, for instance, in his Il Sogno [The Dream], a 2004 score commissioned by an Italian ballet company, created a dance adaptation of A Midsummer Night’s Dream with music that derives from not only the French impressionists but also Duke Ellington, George Gershwin, and Igor Stravinsky, among others. In 2006 Costello collaborated with the Brodsky Quartet to write a suite of songs called The Juliet Letters inspired by a literature professor who answers letters written to Shakespeare’s Juliet. Though not specifically popular music with their aspirations of classical formalism, both projects are inseparable from Costello’s place in the pop music pantheon. And elsewhere in Costello’s oeuvre are multiple references to Shakespeare, including the twelfth track on his 1989 album Spike entitled “Miss Macbeth,” “Crimes of Paris” (on Blood & Chocolate, 1986), and “Mystery Dance” (on My Aim Is True, 1977), all songs that reference Romeo and Juliet.10 Adam Hansen notes how Costello invokes “Shakespeare again and again to bring about the comparable kind of distinction in or from popular music that ‘Mystery Dance’ heralded so ambiguously” (2010, 115), and Hansen further underlines that, with The Juliet Letters, “Costello ‘distanced himself from youth-centered pop culture and from massmarket appeal’” (115).11 The very fact that Costello was experimenting with genre crossovers like Il Sogno and The Juliet Letters, and doing so using Shakespeare, suggests how Shakespeare functions in ambiguous relation to both popular and high culture simultaneously, thus becoming an effective vehicle for such experimentations from an artist perhaps more comfortable with the former. In 2011 Wadada Leo Smith, the American creative improvising musician and member of the Chicago-based Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM), released the Dark Lady of the Sonnets CD with TUM Records and his Mbira trio, featuring Pheeroan akLaff on drums and percussion and Min Xiao-Fen on the Chinese stringed instrument known as the pipa. The liner notes and the TUM Records site make no explicit mention of Shakespeare or Shakespearean sonnets other than in the title, which obliquely references the so-called Dark Lady sequence (sonnets 127–52) in Shakespeare’s Sonnets. Listeners to the recording soon discover, however, that the “dark lady” in Smith’s context is a reference to Billie Holiday, the character in an elegiac text from 1962 by African American poet Amiri Baraka entitled “The Dark Lady of the Sonnets” found in his book Black Music: “Nothing was more perfect than what she was. Nor more willing to fail. (If we call failure

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something light can realize … ). Sometimes you are afraid to listen to this lady” (2010, 31–2). Smith (2011), in a poem included in the liner notes to the recording, states of Holiday that she had “A voice larger than our world … A pure music/flowing through the air/Connecting/ the hearts of Lovers.” The spectral presence of Shakespeare is here in ways that make Smith’s transformation of the dark lady trope a compelling reclamation of African American contexts. Intercultural adaptation of a familiar trope associated with the Shakespearean canon occurs in a radical improvisatory context. That context brings together very different forms of musical expression in the name of this adaptation, haunted by a Shakespearean presence that has all but been effaced from the new work. Intermedial adaptation here works across cultures, across musical styles and textual forms, and across expectations about how cultural references (like Shakespeare or Billie Holiday) resonate in very different ways when this form of adaptation is deployed. A far different relation to Shakespeare is at work in British rap and hip hop artist Akala (Kingslee James Daley, also known as Black Shakespeare). Akala released a 2006 single entitled “Shakespeare” that features the following lyrics explicitly linking Akala (a Sanskrit term that means “immovable” but also “unskilled in the arts” and “out of joint” with time) with the Bard: Nigger listen, when i spit on the riddem, I kill em, raw like the Ball of Brazilians, you don’t war, cor the kids brilliant, blood, im the heir to the throne, not William, Akala, smart as King Arthur, darker, harder, faster, rasclaat, I kick the illa shit, it’s like Shakespeare, with a nigger twist, lyricist, im the best on the road, nitro flow, oh-so-cold, I’ma blow yo … I’m similar to William, but a little different, I do it for kids that’s illiterate, not Elizabeth, stuck on the road, faces screwed up, feel like the world spat em out, and they chewed up, its a matrix, I try and explain it …  (“Akala: Shakespeare Lyrics” n.d.)

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The lyrics, with their typical hip hop strategy of the speaker’s enhanced and often parodic self-esteem as a front-and-centre rhetorical performance strategy, are also densely political with their explicit linkage of Akala’s “riddem” to Shakespearean lyrics – but with a “nigger twist.” Akala himself describes the song as a “comedic parody that I was the rapping reincarnation of Shakespeare,” while noting that “Rap gets a hard time based on this new school of MCs from America who only rap about tits and arse and jewellery. But if you look at real hip-hop, your KRS-Ones, your Chuck Ds, it’s poetry, it’s social commentary, it’s documenting history. And in three or 400 years, people will probably look upon it as such. There were those who frowned upon Shakespeare’s work in his time, but it was a reflection of reality” (Emery 2009). The compression of meaning that Akala sees rap performing – its capacity to span multiple contexts literary, musical, and otherwise – exemplifies how sounding Shakespeare inevitably links to intermedial adaptation. This sort of politicized lyricism, mediated by a Shakespearean presence, is also evident in American rapper, actor, and poet Saul Williams’s “Act III scene 2 (Shakespeare),” co-vocalized with rap metal band Rage Against the Machine’s lead singer Zack de la Rocha (ranked thirtythird on VH1’s 100 Greatest Artists of Hard Rock list) and the fourth track on his eponymously titled second album Saul Williams (2004): This is a call out to all the youth in the ghettos, suburbs, villages, townships. To all the kids who download this song for free. By any means. To all the kids short on loot but high on dreams. To all the kids watching T.V., like, “Yo, I wish that was me.” And all the kids pressing rewind on Let’s Get Free. I hear you. To all the people within the sound of my voice. … Spit for the hated, the reviled, the unrefined, the no ones, the nobodies, the last in line … … I didn’t vote for this state of affairs. My emotional state’s got me prostrate, fearing my fears. In all reality I’m under prepared. ’Cause I’m ready for war but not sure if I’m ready to care. And that’s why I’m under prepared. ’Cause I’m ready to fight, but most fights have me fighting back tears. ’Cause the truth is really I’m scared. Not scared of the truth, but just scared of the length you’ll go to fight it. I tried to hold my tongue, son. I tried to bite it. I’m not trying to start a riot or incite it. ’Cause Brutus is an honorable man. It’s just coincidence that oil men would wage war on an oil rich land. And this one goes out to my man, taking cover in the trenches

Sounding Shakespeare: Adaptation and Popular Music  283 with a gun in his hand, then gets home and no one flinches when he can’t feed his fam. But Brutus is an honorable man … … If you have tears prepare to shed them now. For you share the guilt of blood spilt in accordance with the Dow Jones. Dow drops fresh crop skull and bones. A machete in the heady: Hutu, Tutsi, Leone. An Afghani in a shanty. Doodle dandy yank on! An Iraqi in Gap khaki. Coca Coma come on! Be ye bishop or pawn, in the streets or the lawn, you should know that these example could go on and on and what since does it make to keep your ears to the street? As long as oils in the soil, truth is never concrete. So we dare to represent those with the barest of feet. ’Cause the laws to which we’re loyal keep the soil deplete. It’s our job to not let history repeat.

As with Jay-Z and Eminem, popular and populist coexist on the same plane of artistic expression, with Akala’s lyrics addressing youth illiteracy, alienation, and a complex matrix of circumstances in which they’re caught that needs to be explained and refashioned. Williams’s lyrics invoke a global vision of disintegration (Rwanda, Afghanistan, Iraq) as they situate this vision within a reading of Julius Caesar’s Brutus as an honourable man for having slain a tyrant and hegemon. The rap specifically references Julius Caesar 3.2, the locus of both Brutus’s “Be patient to the last” and Antony’s infamous “Friends, Romans, countrymen.” These Shakespearean speeches are explicitly refashioned and contemporized by Williams and de la Rocha’s rap. The political content, the address to disaffected youth, the lyrics with their explicitly global historical contexts, the populist appeal to all (whether “bishop or pawn”), and the Shakespearean referents are a potent mix that stages popular music’s anarchic, critical energies as much as it enacts its literariness in relation to Shakespearean intermedial contexts. Akala had posed the provocative question in a 2009 interview with the Guardian magazine: “If Shakespeare was alive today, would he have been a rapper?” (Emery 2009), an association echoed in African American music critic and New Yorker staff writer Kelefa Sanneh’s description of Eminem in the New York Times as the “Hamlet of hip hop” (2005). These sorts of associations link Shakespearean tropes with popular musical self-fashioning that always already has a potential global reach. They point to the remarkable ways in which both Shakespeare and popular music coexist as collided entities mutually generating meaning for each other in the crucible of contemporary popular cultures as they take shape within a global context.

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NOTES 1 I am indebted to graduate student Christie Menzo – whose superb work on Akala and Shakespeare provided me with much food for thought – and to fellow co-organizers and participants in the September 2010 Shakespeare and Popular Music Conference held at the University of Guelph and sponsored by the Canadian Adaptations of Shakespeare Project (CASP), the School of English and Theatre Studies, and the College of Arts Dean’s Office. Portions of this essay, mutatis mutandis, will be published in The Cambridge Shakespeare Encyclopedia, Volume II: The World’s Shakespeare, edited by Bruce R. Smith (forthcoming). 2 Note that Slim Shady is Eminem’s alter ego, who often gets blamed in lyrics for what goes wrong in Eminem’s life. 3 “We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.” 4 Musicking is defined by music educator Christopher Small as taking part, “in any capacity, in a musical performance, whether by performing, by listening, by rehearsing or practicing, by providing material for performance (what is called composing), or by dancing” (1998, 9). For Small, the term references activities “in which all those present are involved and for whose nature and quality, success or failure, everyone present bears some responsibility” (10). The concept is important for how it addresses the full contexts that bear on any musical representation and has important implications for thinking through the range of meanings associated with the term “popular music.” 5 Clear Channel Communications, Inc. is an American media conglomerate company that is the largest owner of full-power AM and FM and shortwave radio stations (including twelve radio channels on XM Satellite Radio) and is also the largest pure-play radio station owner and operator with some 18,000 employees and revenue (in 2007) of some $7 billion. As a result of what is largely a monopoly control of market access, it has significant control over who and what kind of music gets disseminated as “popular”: Clear Channel was responsible for, among others, the banning of the Dixie Chicks for anti-war comments made in 2003 just prior to the invasion of Iraq by the Bush regime, and the banning of numerous peace-­ related popular songs, including John Lennon’s “Imagine” and Jimi Hendrix’s “Hey Joe,” after the 9/11 attacks in 2001 (see Deitz n.d.).

Sounding Shakespeare: Adaptation and Popular Music  285 6 Developed by the English guitarist Robert Fripp of King Crimson fame (and named as such by the poet Joanna Walton), Frippertronics “is an analog delay system consisting of two reel-to-reel tape recorders situated sideby-side … Fripp used this technique to dynamically create recordings containing layer upon layer of electric guitar sounds in a real time fashion. An added advantage was that, by nature of the technique, the complete performances were recorded in their entirety on the original looped tape” (“Frippertronics” 2011). Frippertronics is associated with both experimentalist, avant-garde composers like Terry Riley and Pauline Oliveros, whose experiments with tape looping in the 1960s laid the groundwork for this form of electronica, and ambient music composer Brian Eno, who collaborated with Fripp on two Frippertronics albums, No Pussyfooting (1973) and Evening Star (1975). 7 For more complete listings and discussions of these and other examples, see the Streaming Audio section of the CASP site located at http://www .canadianshakespeares.ca/multimedia/m_audio.cfm. 8 The 2011 release of Icelandic pop star and singer songwriter Björk’s app album Biophilia, the first app album ever produced, heralded yet another step in the evolution of intermedial online, digital forms predicated on multiple forms of (inter-)mediation. Recorded in part on an iPad, Biophilia was described by Björk as a “multimedia collection ‘encompassing music, apps, Internet, installations, and live shows’” (“Biophilia, album” 2011). 9 For a more complete listing of on and off Broadway plays please consult the Shakespeare and Popular Music website at http://sites.google.com/site/ shakespeareandpopularmusic/shakespeare-on-broadway# TOC-Off-Broadway. 10 A full list of songs by pop artists who reference Shakespeare would be extremely long and is a near impossible task to fulfil, especially if one takes into account global, alternative, and independent forms of pop that have little presence in mainstream media. A useful catalogue, nonetheless, is to be found in Folkerth 2006. A shortlist that is non-comprehensive but that nonetheless shows the range of artists who have adapted Shakespeare to a popular music context might include, in no particular order, Udo Lindenberg and Nina Hagen, “Romeo und Julia”; the Smiths’ references to Antony and Cleopatra in “Some Girls Are Bigger Than Others”; Elton John, “The King Must Die”; Metallica, “Damage, Inc.”; Rush, “Limelight”; Cleo Laine’s “Wordsongs” album; Morrissey, “King Leer”; Sammy Hagar, “Rock ’n’ Roll Romeo”; Tom Waits, “Romeo Is Bleeding”; October Project, “Ariel”; the Tragically Hip, “Cordelia”; Barclay James Harvest, “Lady Macbeth”; John Cale, “Macbeth”; the Eagles, “Get Over It”; Sting,

286  Daniel Fischlin “Nothing Like the Sun” and “Consider Me Gone”; “What a Piece of Work Is Man” from the musical Hair; Loreena McKennitt’s previously mentioned “Prospero’s Song”; Blue Oyster Cult, “Don’t Fear the Reaper”; Dire Straits, “Romeo and Juliet”; Tonio K, “Romeo and Jane”; Lennon and McCartney, “I Am the Walrus” (where loops of dialogue from Henry IV are introduced at the end of the song); Melissa Etheridge, “Juliet, Where’s Your Romeo?”; the Indigo Girls’ CD/concert tour, “Swamp Ophelia”; Nick Lowe, “Cruel to Be Kind”; Sparks (Ron and Russell Mael), “Here in Heaven”; Madonna, “Cherish”; Bruce Springsteen, “The Rising” with its evocation of the “garden of a thousand sighs” from Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night; Lou Reed, “Romeo Had Juliette”; and Laurie Anderson, “Blue Lagoon.” 11 For the complete discussion of Costello in Hansen 2010, see 115–18.

WORKS CITED Adorno, Theodor W. 2002. Essays on Music. Selected with introduction, commentary, and notes by Richard Leppert. Trans. Susan H. Gillespie. Berkeley: University of California Press. “Akala: Shakespeare Lyrics.” N.d. http://www.lyriczz.com/lyrics/akala/ 23773-shakespeare/chartzz.php. Accessed 1 January 2011. Baraka, Imamu Amiri (Leroi Jones). 2010. Black Music. New York: Akashic Books. Bernhart, Walter. 2002. “The ‘Destructiveness of Music’: Functional Intermedia Disharmony in Popular Songs.” In Cultural Functions of Intermedial Exploration, ed. Erik Hedling and Ulla-Britta Lagerroth, 247–53. New York: Rodopi. “Biophilia, album.” 2011. Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia. Wikimedia Foundation Inc. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ Biophilia_%28album%29#cite_note-Smith-8. Accessed 30 March 2012. Born, Georgina. 1987. “Modern Music Culture: On Shock, Pop, and Syntheses.” New Formations 4 (Summer): 51–78. Boschman, Siscoe, Vanessa Page, Jennifer Schamehorm, and Janet Williams. 2010. “Shakespeare and Popular Music.” http://sites.google.com/site/ shakespeareandpopularmusic. Accessed 1 January 2011. Bosman, Anston. 2010. “Shakespeare and Globalization.” In The New Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare, ed. Margreta De Grazia and Stanley Wells, 285–302. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. “Clear Channel Communications.” 2011. Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia. Wikimedia Foundation Inc. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clear_Channel_ Communications. Accessed 30 March 2012.

Sounding Shakespeare: Adaptation and Popular Music  287 Deitz, Corey. N.d. “The Clear Channel Banned Songs List.” About.com. http:// radio.about.com/library/weekly/blCCbannedsongs.htm. Accessed 1 January 2011. Dobson, Michael, and Stanley W. Wells. 2004. “Dance in the Plays.” In The Oxford Companion to Shakespeare, ed. Margreta De Grazia and Stanley Wells, 105. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Duke Ellington and His Orchestra. 1957. Such Sweet Thunder. Columbia Records; reissue 2008, CL 1033. CD. Duke Ellington’s Incidental Music for Shakespeare’s Play Timon of Athens. 1993. Music adapted by Stanley Silverman. Liner notes by Stanley Silverman. Varese Sarabande Records. Emery, Andrew. 2009. “Shakespeare: How Do I Compare Thee to Hip-Hop?” Guardian. 1 April. http://www.guardian.co.uk/stage/2009/apr/15/ shakespeare-hip-hip-rap. Accessed 2 April 2012. “Eminem.” 2011. Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia. Wikimedia Foundation Inc. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slim_shady#cite_note-3. Accessed 30 March 2012. Fischlin, Daniel. 1998. In Small Proportions: A Poetics of the English Ayre 1596– 1622. Detroit: Wayne State University Press. – 2004. Canadian Adaptations of Shakespeare Project. University of Guelph. http://www.canadianshakespeares.ca. Accessed 2 April 2012. – 2006. “The Bard Gets Sporty: Shakespearean History as Comedic Blood Sport or, Canadian Adaptations of Shakespeare Score on the Fringe.” In Shakespeare’s Sports Canon, ed. Chris Coculuzzi and Matt Toner, vii–xi. Toronto: Upstart Crow Publishing. – Forthcoming. “Shakespeare and Popular Music.” In The Cambridge Shakespeare Encyclopedia, Volume II: The World’s Shakespeare, ed. Bruce R. Smith. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Folkerth, Wes. 2002. The Sound of Shakespeare. New York: Routledge. – 2006. “Shakespeare in Popular Music.” In Shakespeares after Shakespeare: An Encyclopedia of the Bard in Mass Media and Popular Culture, ed. Richard Burt, 366–407. Westport, CT: Greenwood. “Frippertronics.” 2011. Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia. Wikimedia Foundation Inc. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frippertronics. Accessed 30 March 2012. Frith, Simon, ed. 2004. “General Introduction.” In Popular Music: Music and Society, 1–7. Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge. Graff, Gary. 2010. “Rufus Wainwright Has Future in Shakespeare.” Billboard .com. 5 April. http://www.billboard.com/news/rufus-wainwright-hasfuture-in-shakespeare-1004080678.story#/news/rufus-wainwright-hasfuture-in-shakespeare-1004080678.story. Accessed 1 January 2011.

288  Daniel Fischlin Hansen, Adam. 2010. Shakespeare and Popular Music. London: Continuum. “Jay-Z.” 2011. Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia. Wikimedia Foundation Inc. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jay-z. Accessed 30 March 2012. Naylor, Edward W. 1896. Shakespeare and Music. London: J.M. Dent. “Preamble to the United States Constitution.” 2011. Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia. Wikimedia Foundation Inc. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ We_the_people. Accessed 30 March 2012. Randel, Don Michael. 2003 [1986]. The Harvard Dictionary of Music. 4th ed. Cambridge, MA.: Harvard University Press. “Renegade Lyrics.” N.d. http://www.sing365.com/music/lyric.nsf/­ renegade-lyrics-eminem/69641e4090b8d3e948256bdd0007ca9d. Accessed 1 January 2011. Sanders, Julie. 2007. Shakespeare and Music: Afterlives and Borrowings. Cambridge: Polity Press. Sanneh, Kelefa. 2005. “A Hamlet of Hip-Hop and His Pal, Dance Man.” New York Times, 10 August. http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/10/arts/ music/10eminem.html?_r=1&ref=50cent. Accessed 1 January 2011. Shakespeare, William. 1974. Twelfth Night, or What You Will. In The Riverside Shakespeare, ed. G. Blakemore Evans, 403–42. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company. Sibilla, Gianni. 2004. “‘So Empty without Me.’ Intermediality, Intertextuality and Non-Musical Factors in the Evaluation of Pop Music: The (Not So) Strange Case of MTV and Eminem.” Volume! La Revue des Musiques Populaires 3.2: 123–41. Sinnreich, Aram. 2010. Mashed Up: Music, Technology, and the Rise of Configurable Culture. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press. Small, Christopher. 1998. Musicking: The Meanings of Performing and Listening. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press. Smith, Bruce R. 1999. The Acoustic World of Early Modern England. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Smith, Wadada Leo (with Mbira). 2011. Dark Lady of the Sonnets. TUM Records. Sternfeld. Frederick W. 2005 [1963]. Music in Shakespearean Tragedy. Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge. Walsh, Ben. 2004. “Sonnet 29 by Rufus Wainwright.” Canadian Adaptations of Shakespeare Project. http://www.canadianshakespeares.ca/multimedia/ audio/wainwright.cfm. Accessed 1 January 2011. Warner, Timothy. 2003. Pop Music – Technology and Creativity: Trevor Horn and the Digital Revolution. Aldershot: Ashgate. Williams, Mark. 2009. “Rewiring Media History: Intermedial Borders.” In Convergence, Media, History, ed. Sabine Hake and Janet Staiger, 46–56. New York: Routledge.

Sounding Shakespeare: Adaptation and Popular Music  289 Williams, Saul. N.d. “Act III, Scene 2 Shakespeare.” SaulWilliams.com. http:// saulwilliams.com/act3.html. Accessed 1 January 2011. Wilson, Christopher R., and Michela Calore. 2005. Music in Shakespeare: A Dictionary. London: Continuum. York, Robert L. 2006. “‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’ Or, the Shakespearean Films of Julia Stiles.” In Shakespeare and Youth Culture, by Jennifer Hulbert, Kevin J. Wetmore, Jr, and Robert L. York, 57–116. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

“Playing the Race Bard”: How Shakespeare and Harlem Duet Sold (at) the 2006 Stratford Shakespeare Festival Ja m es Mc K i n n on

In Reading the Material Theatre, Canadian theatre critic Ric Knowles examines the Stratford Shakespeare Festival and asks, “what, and more importantly how Shakespeare means at the Stratford Festival” (2004b, 106). Applying a method which will be elaborated in more detail below, Knowles concludes that the both the productions and “the discursive and material contexts from which those productions emerged” worked together to construct “Shakespeare” as a “multinational, historically transcendent product presented for the pleasure of a privileged and culturally dominant group of consumers” – particularly those consumers represented by the “exclusively white, male, and middle-aged” corporate sponsors depicted in the Festival program (111). In light of Knowles’s rather depressing assessment of what and how Shakespeare meant at the 1993 Stratford Festival season, I want to examine a more recent performance – and, following in Knowles’s footsteps, the discursive and material contexts surrounding it – in order to ask whether things have changed. This essay examines how Shakespeare means in the production and reception of Djanet Sears’s Harlem Duet at the 2006 Stratford Festival, focusing on the ways in which “Shakespeare” was adapted, appropriated, and read in the play’s public discourse – including Stratford’s publicity material, which seemed to be encouraging readers and spectators to actively consider the question. My essay implies a connection between reception contexts and marketing contexts that mediate Harlem Duet as an adaptation, and that make use of that intermedial relationship for specific ends. In that context, I examine the ways in which the Festival used Shakespeare to construct Harlem Duet as a symbol of its new commitment to cultural diversity. I will also show how critics and commentators responded to the play, and how

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the material conditions of producing theatre at Stratford may have thwarted the “best” intentions of the Festival and the artists – just as Knowles suggests in his book. My objective is not to determine what Harlem Duet means, but how; and more specifically, how Shakespeare figures in its reception. This essay does not analyse Harlem Duet as Sears’s response to Shakespeare.1 Rather than viewing the play as the product of the adaptive work of a particular author or auteur, I want to consider the continuing and diffuse process of adaptation, which neither begins nor ends with a particular author, but permeates the play’s reception.2 Diffusion in and across various reception contexts lies at the heart of intermedial adaptation, the very diversity of reception contexts and, in this case, marketing tools contributing to the intermedial diffusion of the play. My primary sources, then, are neither plays nor examples of dramatic/theatrical media, but advertisements, publicity materials, and reviews. Scholarship on intermediality tends to focus on relationships and negotiations between film, screen, stage, and/or page, privileging texts that conform to conventional notions about art. For example, none of the various schema and taxonomies surveyed by Freda Chapple and Chiel Kattenbelt in their thorough “mapping” of intermedial discourse accounts explicitly for the ways in which theatre and publicity discourse (in various media) shape each other (2006, 11– 25). I would argue, however, that this tendency reflects cultural biases that confer higher esteem upon “pure” or fine art than upon overtly commercial or critical media. If one looks past these biases, it becomes clear that artworks (in any media) rely just as much upon marketing and publicity discourse as the reverse, and that the reception of the former is significantly influenced, if not determined, by the latter. Moreover, with the rise of blogging and social networking, publicity discourse is becoming increasingly intermedial: is a theatre production’s Facebook page based on its print advertising campaign, or is it the other way around? Hence I do not focus on Harlem Duet itself, nor on its intertextual relationship with Othello, so much as on its intermedial paratextuality. Paratexts is the name Gérard Genette gives to all the “titles, prefaces, postfaces, epigraphs, dedications,” etc. that “come to surround the text and [may] become virtually indistinguishable from it” (1982, 28). Paratextuality is an important category of intermedial adaptation, because adaptations often rely on paratexts in various media (publicity blurbs, reviews, video trailers, etc.) both to signal the presence of an

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adapted text and to tell us how to interpret it. While literary critics have often warned against relying on external evidence to make interpretations of texts, in practice readers and spectators do this all the time, and as Linda Hutcheon points out, once we know things about a text or its author – whether by way of a poster, a trailer, an interview, or a review – they are bound to influence our reception (2006, 110). In this essay, I focus on the ways in which Sears, Stratford, and media pundits used Shakespeare and Shakespearean signifiers, in various media and types of public discourse, to construct a frame of reference through which spectators would interpret the significance of Sears’s adaptation of Shakespeare. In particular, I will show how the production’s publicity paratexts used Shakespeare to encourage spectators to read the production as an emblem of African Canadian culture, to encourage intercultural engagement, and especially to promote a vision of the Stratford Festival as a (newly) inclusive, multicultural institution. Knowles’s analysis of how “Shakespeare” means at the 1993 Stratford season offers a useful point of departure. Resisting the conventional assumption of many spectators (and critics) that plays simply “contain” meaning, which their performances transmit directly to the passive spectators who watch them, Knowles looks carefully at the material and ideological conditions which the performance both shapes and is shaped by, including theatre architecture, ticket prices, working practices, and public discourse – all of which will figure prominently in my account of how Stratford marketed Harlem Duet (and vice versa). Knowles concludes that given Stratford’s “brass, glass, and class” aesthetic, its universalist public discourses and publicity material, its patriarchal and corporate management structures, and its traditions and training function … with remarkable directness as an Ideological State Apparatus, funded by government and corporate grants and catering to an audience it construct[s] as monolithic, the production of Shakespeare is necessarily the reproduction of a complex … but nevertheless conservative, affirmative culture, endorsed by the appropriated, high-cultural image of a universalist “bard of Avon.” (2004b, 128)

Here, and throughout Reading the Material Theatre, Knowles argues that the material and ideological conditions of production and reception often blunt or undermine the “transformative potential of a particular script or production” (10). His pessimism makes the 2006 production of Harlem Duet particularly fascinating, because, as Harlem Duet’s critics

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– including Knowles himself – have consistently acknowledged, Sears and her play are explicitly and vocally “transformative.” The convergence of Sears and Stratford in 2006 thus offers a unique opportunity to ask whether it might be possible to change how Shakespeare means at the Stratford Festival – and, simultaneously, the extent to which that meaning is fundamentally intermedial, insofar as it is always dispersed through numerous (print, web, dramatic, theatrical, etc.) media and not lodged in any of them. Horizon of Expectations: Harlem Duet’s Initial Reception Although Harlem Duet’s relationship with Shakespeare was undoubtedly a major factor in Stratford’s decision to produce it, Sears’s play is not a retelling or version of Othello. Sears’s characters are linked to Shakespeare’s by their names, but her plot, dialogue, and settings are her own.3 The plot focuses on Othello’s first wife, Billie, and on what happens to her after Othello leaves her for a white woman, a trauma which Harlem Duet repeats in three distinct and distinctively African American chronotopes, each haunted “by the spectre of inter-racial ­desire” (Kidnie 2001, 30). In the 1860s, Othello and Billie are slaves or servants4 to the father of Desdemona (a.k.a. “Miss Dessy”); in the 1920s, Othello is a stage actor in the midst of the Harlem Renaissance, and “Mona” is a director who offers him the role of Pericles; and in contemporary Harlem, Billie is a graduate student, and Othello and Mona are English professors at Columbia University. The contemporary storyline is fleshed out, as it were, with other on-stage characters, including Billie’s friend Magi; her father, Canada; and her sister-in-law, Amah. Othello’s new wife is pointedly absent from all three storylines (as are all white characters), which Sears weaves together with a soundscape of live music and recorded excerpts of famous speeches from African American history, such as Martin Luther King Jr’s “Dream” speech. Intermedial paratextuality has been a significant factor in the play’s cultural work since its 1997 premiere. Critics almost instantly canonized Harlem Duet when it appeared in 1997, and the terms with which they described and defined it would create the aura of prestige that helped it earn further productions and numerous awards and that would later form an important context for the 2006 production. Harlem Duet’s first critics were nearly unanimous on two points in particular: they all associated it with Shakespeare, and they almost all declared it to be a play of great significance. The play was produced by Nightwood

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Theatre, an independent feminist company already well known for launching Ann-Marie MacDonald’s Goodnight Desdemona (Good Morning Juliet), another Shakespeare adaptation, and widespread critical acclaim for the premiere attracted the attention of the much larger Canadian Stage Company, which remounted Harlem Duet at its larger, more opulent theatre in downtown Toronto. Within a year of its premiere, Harlem Duet was transformed – largely in and through public discourse – from a subversive indie show to a landmark cultural event: the CanStage production won several local awards, and the play won the 1998 Governor-General’s Award for English Drama. Over the next few years, it was produced in Halifax and New York, and anthologized multiple times, and thus had acquired a considerable reputation by the time Stratford began negotiating with Sears in 2005.5 Shakespeare figures prominently in paratextual promotions and assessments of Harlem Duet, even though it contains few explicit references to Shakespeare. Every written response to Harlem Duet since 1997, including reviews, previews, interviews, and scholarly essays, calls attention to Sears’s relationship with Shakespeare, often signalling this connection with titles such as “There’s Magic in the Web of It” (Kidnie 2001), “Othello in Three Times” (Knowles 2004a), “Playing the Race Bard” (Cushman 2006), and so on. In addition, two of the anthologies Harlem Duet appears in are primarily Shakespeare anthologies. So the reputation of Sears’s play is inextricably tied to Shakespeare through print media – even though the play itself contains only faint allusions to Shakespeare. Moreover, these responses – which frame the reception of the play for spectators who read them – never use the conventionally negative language that critics often reserve for adaptations, which Hutcheon and others call “fidelity criticism”; that is, no critic has ever accused Sears of copying, betraying, or riding on the coattails of Shakespeare. In fact, even though the word “Shakespeare” appears in almost every documented response to Harlem Duet, the word “adaptation” never appears, which is rather surprising for a play which includes characters named after Othello and Desdemona.6 On the contrary, as the aforementioned titles imply, rather than accusing Sears of tampering with Shakespeare’s masterpiece, critics approvingly portray her as cheekily or boldly challenging him. Reviews of the Nightwood/CanStage productions bristle with synonyms for “important,” describing Harlem Duet not merely as a good play but as a major “achievement.”7 Geoff Chapman’s review in the Toronto Star is

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exemplary, not extraordinary, in proclaiming Harlem Duet as a “major achievement … a powerful, fresh statement of familiar themes … that has special significance for black culture” (1997). Throughout Harlem Duet’s reception history, newspapers, anthologies, and essays have emphasized this sense of “special significance,” occasionally more than the play’s dramatic value; and as we will see below, the tendency of critics to focus on the play’s symbolic importance more than the play (or performance) itself was, if anything, even more pronounced in 2006. Why, given that Harlem Duet is neither a Shakespeare play nor what most would call an adaptation of one, do critical paratexts focus on this aspect of the play (and consequently neglect its other fascinating intertextual conversations, as Peter Dickinson argues)? Most likely because Sears herself directly encourages readers and spectators to do so. While Sears’s inventive appropriation of Shakespeare undoubtedly influenced Harlem Duet’s instant recognition as an “important” play and thus Stratford’s decision to produce it eight years later, the appropriation in question is not restricted to intertextual references in the play, but also occurs in other media.8 In particular, the play’s reception has been powerfully influenced by a poem/essay, “nOTES oF a cOLOURED gIRL: 32 rEASONS wHY i wRITE fOR tHE tHEATRE,” which has accompanied both the print and performed versions of Harlem Duet since its premiere, and which plainly states the play’s connection to Shakespeare and Othello with a moving personal anecdote:9 As a veteran theatre practitioner of African Descent, Shakespeare’s Othello had haunted me since I first was introduced to him. Sir Laurence Olivier in black-face. Othello is the first African portrayed in the annals of western dramatic literature. In order to exorcise this ghost, I have written Harlem Duet. (Sears 1997, 14)

Sears connects this experience to her desire to challenge and rectify the absence of black faces and voices in mainstream Canadian culture, and to ensure that her “nieces’ experience of the world will … be different from [her] own”: 5 I was already eighteen when I saw Ntozake Shange’s For Coloured Girls Who Have Considered Suicide When The Rainbow Is Enuf in New York City. This was the first live production by a writer of African descent I had ever seen. 6 This will not be Qwyn’s fate. 7 She must have access to a choir of African voices, chanting a multiplicity of African experiences. (1997, 14, 12)

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There is an implicit irony in Sears’s alleged desire to “exorcise” Shakesepeare’s ghost, because the effect of uttering this desire is to conjure Shakespeare, not to dispel him: although it is the only part of her “nOTES” to mention Shakespeare, this passage is widely cited in the play’s critical and publicity discourse,10 which invariably links it to Shakespeare. Spectators and critics who read that Sears wrote the play as a response to Othello can’t help but respond to it as such. Like Sears herself, both newspaper reviews and scholarly articles (including this one) use Shakespeare references to portray Harlem Duet as a challenge to the dominant whiteness of Canadian theatre. They often cite Sears’s essay, and tend to focus on issues that it draws attention to, while perhaps neglecting other aspects of the play (e.g., critics rarely discuss Sears’s choice to set the play in Harlem yet pepper the dialogue with explicit references to Canada). So even though Harlem Duet contains few direct references to Othello or Shakespeare, Shakespeare has always been an important factor in how Harlem Duet means – and so has intermediality, because the “Shakespeare” that spectators respond to, or imagine Sears responding to, is the one invoked by the play’s publicity discourse. Stratford 2006: Pre-Show Publicity and Marketing In retrospect, Harlem Duet was an obvious choice for a Stratford Festival eager to reach out to new audiences in the twenty-first century. In fact, as early as 1998, Ric Knowles suggested that a Stratford production would provide a fitting climax for Harlem Duet’s cultural rags-to-riches narrative. In an interview with Sears and Alison Sealy-Smith (the original Billie), which focused largely on their attempt to develop an African Canadian theatre aesthetic, Sears and Sealy-Smith acknowledge the symbolic significance of the CanStage production, which broke a perceived colour barrier: “Before Harlem Duet, Canadian Stage had never produced a work by an author of [black] African descent. And the problem with Canadian Stage is that it’s called Canadian Stage, and it represents Canada, and I’m thinking, ‘I’m Canadian, so it must represent me’” (Sears and Sealy-Smith 1998, 30). In response, Knowles invites Sears to speculate on her next symbolic triumph, asking, “at what point does Harlem Duet change Stratford?” (30). Knowles’s question turned out to be prescient – but in hindsight, also ironic, because by the time Sears was invited to break the same perceived colour barrier at Stratford, Knowles had already answered his own question in Reading

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the Material Theatre, where he suggests that it would be difficult, if not impossible, to challenge the conservative ideological and material conditions of the Stratford Shakespeare Festival. Shakespeare – or conflicting notions of “Shakespeare” – figured prominently in the production and reception of Harlem Duet at Stratford. Sears designates “Shakespeare” as a symbol of the cultural and historical forces that privilege white experience and marginalize other voices. For the Stratford Shakespeare Festival, on the other hand, “Shakespeare” symbolizes the allegedly universal values and creative achievements of humanity, and functions as the primary channel through which the festival receives and transmits cultural capital. And yet, notwithstanding the universalist discourse permeating Stratford’s public discourses and marketing,11 its repertory is predominantly white,12 and its ticket prices ($50–$85 per ticket in 2012) and rural location limit attendance to spectators with access to transportation, accommodation, money, and leisure time. As soon as the production was announced – and well before it actually opened – journalists covering the Festival’s 2006 season used references to Shakespeare to point out the implicit conflict between Sears’s transformative politics and the Festival’s conservative image, highlighting the contrast between the play’s all-black cast and the Festival’s all-white image. The CBC’s Martin Morrow boldly predicted that Harlem Duet would shake things up: Stratford’s Shakespearean festival is one of Canada’s oldest and most distinguished theatrical institutions. It’s also about as multicoloured as a loaf of Wonder Bread. That’s [why], amid the usual classics by the Bard and a bunch of other dead, white European and American males, Djanet Sears’s Harlem Duet sticks out like an African violet in a patch of daisies. … It’s a Stratford milestone – three, in fact. The show … is the first black work to be produced in the festival’s 54-year history; the first to be directed by a black woman (Sears); and the first with an all-black cast. (Morrow 2006)

Morrow goes out of his way to insert “Shakespeare” into his phrasing – at this point in time, “Shakespeare” had not been a part of the Festival’s official name for three decades.13 Globe and Mail critic Kamal Al-Solaylee opens with the same catalogue of milestones, and expresses the same confidence that Harlem Duet will signify positive change:

298  James McKinnon At Stratford, there’s a feeling that the end of Richard Monette’s reign and changes in the festival’s artistic directorship structure will bring about more culturally diverse programming. “Things are changing, people are looking around and saying ‘The world doesn’t look like us here,’” Sears acknowledges. (2006b)

These previews, and many subsequent responses to the play, invite the reader to think of Harlem Duet as challenging what Morrow calls “Stratford’s status quo.” Although the media dramatized the implied conflict between Sears’s vision and Stratford’s reality, it seems likely that the Festival actually encouraged them to do so. For one thing, the Festival went out of its way to accommodate Sears, negotiating for months before announcing the play as a late addition to the 2006 season.14 Moreover, similarities in the  wording and content of the media reports strongly suggest that Stratford’s publicity team played up the implied conflict because they wanted to stir up a sense of tension and excitement – while still emphasizing some important milestones. Numerous critics described Stratford as “whitebread,” and cited the same symbolic achievements (Stratford’s first black play, playwright, and director). At least three reports (AlSolaylee, Morrow, and Evelyn Myrie) raise the spectre of “tokenism,” only to follow it up with Stratford’s general director Antoni Cimolino’s reassurance that the goal ultimately is not to have a diverse show here or there. The goal is to make it so that someone comes here and they look around the audience and they see a wide spectrum of humanity seated [and] they look on the stage and they see a wide spectrum of humanity in all the parts. (Quoted in Myrie 2006)

Both Morrow and Myrie also quote Stratford’s head of new play development, Andrey Tarasiuk, who reveals that Stratford had already c­ommissioned new plays by other prominent non-white Canadian playwrights, Andrew Moodie and Daniel David Moses. The similarities between these reports imply that the Stratford Festival deliberately projected a “whitebread” image of itself in order to encourage the public to view Harlem Duet as “part of [its] movement to better reflect the face of Canada” (Myrie 2006). By encouraging critics to depict Harlem Duet as somehow challenging its own producer, the Festival presumably hoped to arouse curiosity and excitement among prospective spectators – particularly those

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who might consider Stratford too staid and conservative (or white) for their tastes. At the same time, however, both the Festival and the media used “Shakespeare” – in print and online advertising, images, and public discourse – to reassure readers and spectators that Harlem Duet would not threaten Stratford’s identity as a Shakespeare festival. Stratford’s print ads deployed Shakespeare as a quality assurance representative, reassuring more traditional Stratford spectators that the racy image in the ads, posters, and programs was not some sort of mistake. The image in question reveals Karen Robinson (Billie) and Nigel Shawn Williams (Othello) in an implicitly naked embrace, with Williams standing behind Robinson, his arms intertwined with hers around her torso, and both gazing off to the right (reader’s left), cheek to cheek.15 The sexiness of the pose is tempered somewhat by the actors’ rather solemn shared gaze off towards the source of the light (which contrasts the actors against a velvety black background). Overlaid on the upper right corner of the image are the words “Love, revenge,/loyalty, madness,” and at the bottom right corner, graphically positioned to serve as a punctuation mark, Shakespeare’s head appears, beside the words “{Othello, the prequel},” bracketed to suggest that Shakespeare himself is whispering them. The image of Shakespeare is a reproduction of the iconic Folio title page, and thus evokes traditional notions of Shakespeare as a universal paragon of creative achievement and dramatic authorship. Its effect is  that of a seal of approval or official endorsement (“I’m William Shakespeare, and I approve this message”). Taken as a whole, the ad blends erotic suggestion (of the muted, tastefully lit sort) and diversity (black actors plus white Shakespeare and the Stratford logo) with the universal themes (“Love, revenge, loyalty, madness”) typical of Stratford’s public discourse (see, e.g., Knowles 2004a, 107–8). The ad uses Shakespeare to guarantee Harlem Duet’s high-cultural pedigree without explaining too much: if you want to see what naked black people have to do with Shakespeare, you’ll have to see the play. The previews and reviews discuss the play in similar terms, which suggests that Stratford succeeded in marketing Harlem Duet as a tantalizing combination of timeless themes, sex, Shakespeare, and cultural diversity. Significantly, Harlem Duet had never been described as a sexy play before. Previous critics had focused on the play’s treatment of “sexual politics” (Nemetz 2000) – a decidedly unsexy topic – but at Stratford, it was as if the critics noticed for the first time that there is  a  “steamy sex scene smack in the middle of it” (Elliott).16 Morrow

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8.1  Harlem Duet poster, Karen Robinson (Billie) and Nigel Shawn Williams (Othello). Photographer: David Hou. Courtesy of the Stratford Festival

exploits the implicit tension between sex and serious subject matter in a pre-production interview with Sears, Robinson, and Williams, which establishes both the cultural significance of the play and its titillating aspects: [R]ace is only one part of the play, notes Sears … “The [racial] stuff is good, it engages the intellect, but it’s also a good love story, sexy and racy. And,” she goes on to confide in a half-whisper, “this is the sexiest version I’ve ever done. It’s hot. It’s contentious.”

“Playing the Race Bard”: Harlem Duet 301 Just how torrid does it get? “There’s a reason I’m eating salad,” says Robinson coyly. “And I’ve stopped drinking beer,” adds Williams. The three burst into laughter. Contrary to what the promotional photo suggests, Robinson and Williams won’t be nude, but they will appear in a state of semi-undress. “Yeah, sexy and racy,” says Sears. “That’s what I like … Yeah, this play is really just Coronation Street with black people in Harlem,” she sums up. “Well, OK, maybe not. But if you like Coronation Street, you’ll love Harlem Duet.” (Morrow 2006)

Stratford and sex; universal themes and contemporary issues; the erotic and politic; black (actors) meeting white (Stratford’s traditional audience); Coronation Street with black people in Harlem: like the aforementioned ad, Morrow and Sears attempt to pique curiosity by juxtaposing conceptual opposites – all linked with and through Shakespeare. It is worth pausing to consider the intermedial juxtaposition implied in and between the aforementioned examples. The ad, with its juxtaposition of various layers of reality and fiction, exemplifies how and why intermediality discourse applies to marketing and publicity discourse. What does one perceive when confronted with such an ad: a photograph of the “real” actors or the fictional characters? To borrow from Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin’s taxonomy of “remediation,” this ad exemplifies “hypermediacy”: the convergence of the “real” actors, the fictional characters they play, and the cartoonish, cross-hatched, disembodied head of Shakespeare seems to deliberately draw our attention to the medium (see Bolter and Grusin 1999, 45–9). But then another level of intermedial confusion is added when in the interview, Williams and Robinson discuss the ways in which they, the real actors, are mediated or mediatized by the “fake” ad – all in the service of offering Morrow’s readers an “authentic,” intimate moment with two individuals who are – simultaneously – ordinary people, the stars of a play, and the key participants in a historical cultural milestone. All of which is rendered “newsworthy” by its relationship(s) to Shakespeare. Reception: How Shakespeare Means in Stratford’s Harlem Duet (and Vice Versa) Responses to the Stratford Harlem Duet suggest that the conditions of production and reception did (as Knowles might have predicted) curtail the play’s attempt to transform how Shakespeare means at Stratford.

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However, it would be overstating the case to suggest that the Festival’s material and ideological conditions utterly neutralized the play. In fact, documents of reception suggest that in some ways it was unusually effective. First, many of the reviews suggest that the play did change “how Shakespeare means” at the Stratford Festival. Second, responses suggest that those who attended the production perceived it as a significant social and cultural event. At the same time, responses to the production hint at the ways that the conventional practices of both the Festival and its spectators – particularly the critics – worked against its attempt to recruit Shakespeare as an agent of cultural diversity or intercultural exchange. Harlem Duet’s generally positive reception at Stratford reiterated the familiar themes of the play’s initial reception in 1997–8. That is, the critics typically acknowledge the importance of the production, and use “Shakespeare” to draw interest and to lend significance and credibility. The reviews depict Sears’s treatment of Shakespeare as especially meaningful in the context of the Stratford Shakespeare Festival, and unanimously approve of Sears’s treatment of Shakespeare. However, the generally positive assessments are tempered by disappointment that the show did not live up to the fanfare that preceded it. Several of the critics claimed to be big fans (and readers) of the play, but not of the production, which they found mildly disappointing and lacking in “sexual tension” (Al-Solaylee 2006a). Al-Solaylee, who had helped create the pre-show hype (see above), found the real thing a bit anti-climactic: With all the excitement greeting the current revival of Djanet Sears’s Harlem Duet at the Stratford Festival … it would be wonderful to report that Thursday’s opening-night performance was equally as exciting and groundbreaking. (2006a)

But, sadly, it wasn’t; Al-Solaylee claims the “great story told by Sears the writer [is] nearly botched by Sears the director,” a judgment echoed by John Coulbourn: It would be nice to report that Sears’ script – which won both Governor General and Chalmers Awards – opened in triumph. But let us be content with celebrating the fact that it opened at all, marking a series of firsts for a festival that has clung too tenaciously to its lily-white roots. (2006)

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Al-Solaylee, Coulbourn, and others explicitly acknowledge how desperately they had wanted the play to live up to the hype, because of what it would signify in the world beyond the theatre. The reviews not only consider the quality of the play; they imagine “the public” watching the entire event, viewing the play within an intermedial frame they themselves helped create. In the terms of print media, responses to Harlem Duet at Stratford implicitly address not only the “Entertainment” section of the newspaper, but also the “News.” The critics (some of whom acknowledge having seen the play before) were careful to focus their misgivings on the mise en scène and design, while emphasizing their admiration of the play itself. Some noted that the stage did not easily accommodate the play’s several distinct spatial/temporal areas (i.e., the 1860s smithy, the 1920s theatre dressing room, and the 1990s apartment). Robert Cushman claims that the play, which was written for a proscenium theatre, “does not … sit very happily” on the Studio Theatre’s thrust stage, which he describes as inhospitable to domestic drama, which this essentially is, and to the kind of buttoned-down acting it naturally summons forth … one of the crucial images – the stripping-down of a home – doesn’t count for much in a setting that never looked lived-in in the first place. (2006).

Al-Solaylee, too, felt that the production was “[c]learly … set for a stage with a proscenium arch,” and that the necessary “re-tool[ing]” failed to exploit “the wonderful immediacy that a small, open space like the Studio can create” (2006a). Such criticisms suggest that Sears, taking her fourth turn as director, struggled to adjust to a thrust. In this, she was not alone: John Coulbourn sensed that the play also suffered from “inexperience … with the demands of” the thrust, and observed that set designer Astrid Janson (also in her third tour of duty on the show) didn’t help matters by trying to “stage a kitchen-sink drama without a kitchen sink” (2006). These reviews bear out Knowles’s prediction that material and ideological factors, including Stratford’s mammoth scale and operating practices and its universalist public discourse, would contain and neutralize the transformative potential of a play like Harlem Duet. First, as the reviews note, Harlem Duet played at Stratford’s smallest venue, the Studio Theatre, a space designated for the Festival’s more challenging plays, “including new and experimental works [and] rarely produced

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classics” (“Studio Theatre”).17 Although this decision did allow Stratford to minimize financial risk while exploiting the media hype around the production, the venue also was supposed to benefit the play by creating an exciting environment of relatively small but packed houses of interested spectators. (While welcoming the cast on the first day of rehearsals, then–artistic director Richard Monette said, “You’ll like the audience here. It’s different from our other audiences. They’re open-minded.”)18 However, as the reviews suggest, the shape of the venue was more problematic than its size. Harlem Duet had never appeared on a thrust stage before, and the presence of many veterans in the cast, including the original director, designer, and Othello, which should have been an asset, may have become a liability, as habits formed on the proscenium arch transferred awkwardly to the thrust. The perceived inappropriateness of the venue may also be symptomatic of Stratford’s corporate structures and institutional hierarchies, which, as Knowles says, create “a certain institutional, structural, and procedural inertia … that can defeat even the best-intended creative efforts at change, resistance, or subversion” (2004b, 112).19 The creative environment at Stratford contrasted visibly with that of previous Harlem Duet productions. Sears claims that the first productions were special for all the participants because they provided the rare experience of a creative atmosphere with “all Black people in a room” (Sears and Sealy-Smith 1998, 28). The conditions at Stratford were very different. From day one (when Monette showed up with an enormous contingent of Stratford Festival staff to welcome the cast) there was an acute awareness of racial difference in the creative environment. In addition, the cast and director were only rarely all in the room together, for reasons described below; and when they were, they were supervised by a triad of (white) stage managers and frequently visited by the design team and the various production and administrative personnel. It was also immediately evident that the creative process would not be ruled by the artists themselves – who were now a small subcolony of Stratford’s hive of worker bees – but by a code of externally imposed institutional policies and labour practices, union regulations, and a rigorous schedule of meetings, design presentations, costume fittings, and so forth. None of the designers, technicians, or stage management team who introduced themselves at the first rehearsal of Harlem Duet expressed any passion about or interest in creating “change, resistance, or  subversion.” The tone cultivated in the rehearsal hall by the stage ­managers was rather one of following rules and procedures, obeying

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administrative hierarchies, maintaining stability and continuity, and ensuring not the production of art so much as the constant reproduction of the conditions of production. Moreover, although Harlem Duet enjoyed a relatively high profile in the media, it had much lower status in Stratford’s production hierarchy, which prioritizes the big shows, including 2006 headliners Oliver!, Much Ado about Nothing, Twelfth Night, The Glass Menagerie, 1 Henry IV, and The Duchess of Malfi.20 Speaking in general of the conventional labour practices of North American professional theatre, Knowles writes, “it is too often the case that productive rehearsals are interrupted mid-flight by the need for a required Equity break, or that theatre workers are strait-jacketed by the requirement that they contribute only according to their job descriptions” (2004b, 60).21 This is exactly what happened to Harlem Duet at Stratford: the designs were pre-approved before the rehearsals began, leaving little margin for error or flexibility, and the play’s low priority meant continuous disruption to the rehearsal schedule, because Harlem Duet’s actors were frequently pulled from rehearsal to accommodate The Duchess of Malfi, in which most of them had minor supporting roles. These disruptions were severe; after the first rehearsal, the whole cast was not together in the same room again until tech week.22 It is possible that the company was aware of the problems cited by the reviewers but had no opportunity to fix them, having neither the power to alter the set design (to better suit the thrust) nor the rehearsal time to rethink the mise en scène. Staging problems aside, most reviewers praised the play and acknowledged the significance of its staging at Stratford. But many of these responses exemplify the tendency of even positive reviews to contain potentially disruptive or provocative performances. For one thing, the reviewers who praise the play but critique its execution invoke a conceptual model of theatre which privileges print media over live performance, whereby the performance transmits (imperfectly, in  this case) the transcendent “meaning” of the text to the audience (Knowles 2004b, 49). The responses also tend to draw on the essentialist, universalist discourse which, Knowles claims, is typical of theatre criticism in general and Stratford’s public discourse in particular. AlSolaylee, for example, hails Harlem Duet as “a rich, significant modern Canadian play,” emphasizing that “[t]he intellectual reach of the text is breathtaking.” Like many critics (especially of Shakespeare performances), Al-Solaylee directs those disappointed by the performance to take reassurance from the transcendent text. Others echo Jon Kaplan’s

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position that the production is important because it is a good play, not because it is a black play; this approach seeks to pre-empt any suggestion that Stratford might be bowing to political correctness by putting “cultural diversity before excellence” – as Kate Taylor claimed when the play won the Governor-General’s Award.23 But such assurances of the play’s excellence resort to familiar essentialist clichés about “the timeless cancer of racism” (Kaplan 2006). John Coulbourn, similarly, praises Sears for creating “a back-story to Shakespeare’s classic that is perhaps as timeless as the play that inspired it.” And Chris Hoile claims (in an otherwise exceptionally sensitive review) that “Sears sets the play in three distinct” times “in order to show the timelessness of the situation” (n.d.). In fact, as the history of Othello’s production and reception proves, racism is hardly timeless. Another critic opens with a provocation, but falls back to the same comfortable reassurance that good plays are timeless and universal: It’s pretty iconoclastic. A play by a black female is taking centre stage at Stratford. Canada’s major whitebread playhouse is finally making the effort to be more inclusive and to reflect … a country that is no longer a replica of white Europe … In the end, Harlem Duet isn’t good because it’s a play about blacks produced for the first time on the Stratford stage. No, it’s good because it’s good. Theatre shouldn’t really be pigeonholed as black and white, gay and straight, European or American. A good play is a good play. And that ought to be the end of it. (Smith 2006)

Critics repeatedly applaud Harlem Duet for challenging monolithic, Eurocentric, dead-white-male values; and yet, having done so, they must hasten to defend the play as universally good, as if to reassure readers that the play is for white audiences too. Such responses hint at the subtle influence of publicity discourse, such as an anecdote in the program describing Sears’s encounter with a woman who praised Harlem Duet by saying, “This is not a Black play. This is an extraordinary human play!” Sears responds, While I undoubtedly accepted the praise, I was struck by the idea that Black plays and human plays were completely different entities … I mean, all Black plays are human plays! What part of the Black experience is not part of the human experience? (Harlem Duet Program 2006, 10).

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Sears’s anecdote inoculates its readers against unwittingly excluding black people from humanity.24 Although the assessments of the performance were mixed, most critics devoted significant effort to praising the play, and they did so in terms that encouraged their readers – whether or not they would see the play – to rethink the significance of Shakespeare. Even the critics who, in their anxiety to defend Harlem Duet as a great play and not just a black one, described the play in universalist terms often did so in ways that asked their readers to reconsider what “universal” means and to whom it applies. Both Morrow and Gary Smith, for example, cite Sears’s Laurence Olivier anecdote (which was also included in the program) to remind their readers that seeing familiar faces on stage is a privilege that white audiences have taken for granted, particularly at Stratford. Such reviews and other documents of reception indicate that the play achieved some of its transformative objectives, particularly in regard to changing “how Shakespeare means” – however subtly. Moreover, such responses actually perform some of that work themselves: the process of adapting what and how Shakespeare means continues in the writing of theatre critics and others who were affected by the play. While theatre criticism may influence spectators, it also influences readers who do not actually see the play, and whereas performance is ephemeral and local, criticism is somewhat more durable and more far-reaching. For example, Robert Cushman’s review in the National Post, which circulated across Canada (and continues to circulate online), both perceives and communicates with admirable economy how Harlem Duet attempts to change “how Shakespeare means”: Shakespeare’s black Othello married a white woman, and his play has much to say on how her white friends felt about it. It tells us nothing about the reactions of his black friends; it doesn’t even tell us if he had any. (2006)

Cushman’s review exemplifies the symbiotic relationship between Sears, Shakespeare, and critics: it uses Shakespeare references to attract attention (the review is titled “Playing the Race Bard”) but gives Sears the spotlight, explaining Harlem Duet’s significance as a production which continues, but also intervenes in, Stratford’s tradition of Shakespearean performance:

308  James McKinnon Sears’ play, much feted in Toronto in 1997, earns its Stratford revival, directed by the author, on grounds both textual (it’s superbly written) and contextual (Shakespeare and all that jazz, the jazz being nearly as important as the Shakespeare) … Harlem Duet does more than supply a new context for the Othello story. It also spins out variations on the play’s existing elements. Some of these are just facile nudges … Others cut deep; if Shakespeare’s Othello might be seen as an outsize representation of a black man “trying to pass,” then that is certainly how Billie comes to regard her Othello; the more he seems to reject his heritage, the more she embraces hers. (2006)

Cushman focuses on Sears’s originality and cleverness – what she adds to the story. There is no suggestion that Sears has betrayed or abused a masterpiece. Although he reads Harlem Duet through Othello, he also encourages us to see Othello through Sears’s (or Billie’s) eyes. Encouraging spectators and readers to revise their impressions of canonical masterpieces is perhaps the most important work that adaptations do, and Cushman’s review shows both how Harlem Duet performs this work and how public discourse can extend it. Some responses indicate that Harlem Duet also performed significant cultural work by transforming its spectators into performers, both inside the theatre and in the public space of Stratford. Watching a play at Stratford, after all, is only part of an encompassing experience that might include shopping, dining, and strolling around the town, and seeing other spectators watch and respond to the play. Evelyn Myrie’s account of her trip to see Harlem Duet – even though it says very little about the play itself – establishes the significance of the event. For the past few summers, I have made numerous unkept promises to myself to go to the Stratford Shakespearean Festival. It was Djanet Sears’ new and exciting play Harlem Duet that finally got me there. … As we walked through downtown Stratford … we came across three local young black women who observed us with curiosity … “Hello, Hello,” they said. “It’s good to see you all … we don’t see many of us around here.” We chuckled as we walked along to be a part of Stratford history. … This encounter reminded me of a story my mom recounted many times to us … One day she ran into a black woman in a local store and was overcome with joy. Without knowing the woman, my mom rushed up to her

“Playing the Race Bard”: Harlem Duet 309 and gave her a big hug. “I was just so happy to see another black person in town.” … I guess that’s how those young women felt as they met us heading toward the theatre. … As we entered the theatre where Harlem Duet was being staged, we acknowledged the significance of our journey … to Stratford. We knew we were participating in breaking new ground. We were making history – we were on our way to see the first black work to be produced in the festival’s 54-year history and the first to be directed by a black woman and the first with an all-black cast. (Myrie 2006)

To Myrie’s relief, the performance doesn’t disappoint, but as her narrative indicates, much of its cultural work had already been done before the house lights dimmed. Simply visiting Stratford made her and her companions feel like performers in an important cultural event, and seeing and being seen by others reinforced the feeling that they were “making history.” The power of intermedial paratextuality is significant here: the print and online paratexts, through their ease and speed of dissemination, allowed the play to do its cultural work outside the immediate time and place of the theatre in which it was performed. Thousands of people, even if they did not experience the play, thereby became aware of its significance. The print and online media effectively help compensate for the inherent weaknesses (in terms of dissemination) of theatre, ensuring that its impact can be perceived (and remembered) both far away from and long after the performance. Black spectators were not alone in seeing the play as just one component of a larger performance. Gary Smith, too, responds to both the play and the equally significant “performance” of the audience: There is little doubt the play is attracting black people to Stratford. The day I saw it the theatre was almost full and there were far more people of colour than us pale-faced whites. … It reminded me of the days in New York when I’d go to see the early plays of James Baldwin and sit in a theatre full of blacks who cheered that anti-white sentiments in Baldwin’s dramas, making me feel decidedly uncomfortable. So this is what it feels like to be in a minority I thought. (2006)

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Although Smith defeats his purpose by constructing his readership as exclusively white, his anecdote forces potential spectators (at least “us” pale-faced ones) to confront, perhaps for the first time, both the feeling of being excluded from the “universal” and the uncomfortable realization that many people experience that feeling on a regular basis. Smith recognizes that, by making him feel uncomfortable about his skin colour, and thus forcing him to confront the experience of exclusion, the play is not failing but succeeding – an insight that may resonate with readers whether or not they attend the play. Responses such as Smith’s and Myrie’s indicate that Harlem Duet had positive effects in spite of the aforementioned barriers obtaining from the material and ideological conditions of working and spectating at Stratford. The character of these effects depends to an unusual degree on the identity of the spectator, because Harlem Duet targets two distinct audiences who experience the same play in different ways. The production offered black spectators the opportunity to “make history,” as Myrie puts it, just by showing up at the theatre. Moreover, those spectators not only saw, but were seen, and in this regard the thrust stage did serve the play well, by making the spectators as visible as the play. This visibility enhanced one of the play’s more potent effects, which, as several scholarly appraisals of the play have noted, is to “[force] the audience, regardless of who they are, into viewing the play from the perspective of Black audiences” (Leslie Sanders 2000, 558), and to consider, simultaneously, how rarely this perspective is acknowledged in the theatre. White spectators, put in the position of eavesdroppers, may be jolted into the uncomfortable realization that other spectators see things differently; black spectators may suddenly realize how unusual it is to confront a space dominated by people who “look just like them” – an experience one of Sears’s character describes in the play (1997, 79). By allowing its spectators to observe each other confronting this experience, Harlem Duet disturbs the notion of a universal “Canadian spectator” whose perspective is uncomplicated by either race or gender, and exposes the assumed whiteness of both the Canadian spectator and Canadian theatre (Fischlin and Fortier 2000, 285). In this regard, then – contrary to the critics’ suggestions that the play’s essential value resides in its text – the theatrical medium was critical to Harlem Duet’s intervention in “how Shakespeare means” at Stratford. Simultaneously, black spectators, as confirmed by the observations of Smith, Myrie, and others, were able to see others like them, creating

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a meaningful sense of inclusion, and a cause for celebration. At the same time, they were visible to the non-black spectators, who were in turn visible to them; and the consciousness of every spectator of the play’s subject matter and the production’s cultural significance (a consciousness heightened by all the paratexts mentioned above) made all spectators aware, in some cases for the first time, of “performing” their own skin colour, whether proudly, like Myrie, or sheepishly, like Gary Smith. This unusual temporary community was at once divided by visible differences, but also united, since they all shared the roles of spectators at a play and, more importantly, participants in an event that had been publicized to all those present as “historic.” All those present at a performance of Harlem Duet – or even those simply strolling around Stratford on the day of a performance25 – were witnesses to a public performance, whereby Stratford (and through it, Shakespeare) was publicly claimed by a community that had previously avoided or been excluded from it. Conclusions Harlem Duet’s reception at Stratford complicates both Knowles’s theory of “how Shakespeare means at Stratford” and conventional accounts of how plays work, in general. Stratford’s institutional policies, corporate hierarchies, and working conditions did evidently hinder the creative process, and may have contributed to negative assessments of play’s directing and design; and the universalist discourse promulgated in Stratford’s publicity and marketing material, and habitually adopted by theatre critics, did at times threaten to claim the play for an allegedly “universal” perspective that actually represented the decidedly not universal perspective of (mostly) “pale-faced” male theatre critics. Nevertheless, the reception of Harlem Duet also testifies to its capacity to transform “how Shakespeare means,” partly because of its capacity for transforming its audience into a performance of its own – a capacity exploited and amplified by both Sears and the Festival, in public discourse. This discourse successfully focused the attention of the public (including both playgoers and the much larger group who only read or heard about the play) on Stratford’s poor record of representing Canada’s (and North America’s)26 ethnic diversity, both on its stages and in its audience. It also drew significant numbers of black spectators to Stratford, some for the first time; and even if those spectators didn’t stay to see Sophia Walker play the Madwoman in Duchess of Malfi, as

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Stratford might have hoped, their mere presence in the audience of Harlem Duet contributed to its performance efficacy. Thus, although the factors Knowles identifies are clearly at work, they are not as depressingly all-powerful as they sometimes appear to be in his analysis. Harlem Duet’s reception also exemplifies both the extent to which Shakespeare adaptation is a continuous, reciprocal, and intermedial process. Sears’s dramatic adaptation (which itself responds to and continues the work of previous adaptors) means differently to solitary readers than it did to the critics who framed it as a cultural event, or to the different groups of spectators who watched the play, or watched each other watching the play through the frame of the play’s marketing and publicity discourse; and the critics’ accounts of all these forms of reception, in turn, influenced – and continue to influence – a much broader audience, even in paratexts like this one. In addition, even though public discourse surrounding Harlem Duet often focuses on Shakespeare, it does not subordinate the adaptation to the source. As Julie Sanders argues, even if adaptations “cannot help but reinscribe the canon … they do so in new, and newly critical ways” (2005, 105), and the Stratford production of Harlem Duet – including these public discourses – encouraged readers and spectators to reassess what and how Shakespeare means, and how the Festival serves its communities. Thus even if Harlem Duet reconstitutes the authority of the canon, the canon thereby becomes “something different from what it was” (Fischlin and Fortier 2000, 6). Thanks in part to the marketing and journalistic media that framed it as a major cultural event, Stratford’s Harlem Duet worked productively towards Sears’s vision of a world in which black spectators can always find a play that appeals to them, and white spectators realize that not everyone can take this privilege for granted. NOTES 1 Other writers have already offered perceptive analyses of Sears’s text and its fascinating intertextualities, Shakespearean and otherwise. See, for example, Dickinson 2002, Kidnie 2001, Knowles 2004a, and Leslie Sanders 2000. 2 As Linda Hutcheon demonstrates, “adaptation” is both a product and a process, and moreover as a process of both production and reception (2006, 7–9, 15–21).

“Playing the Race Bard”: Harlem Duet 313 3 Othello, (Desde)Mona, and Billie are all linked to Shakespearean antecedents: “Billie” comes from Sybil (a name Billie herself hates), from Othello’s description of the infamous handkerchief: “A sibyl … In her prophetic fury sewed the work” (3.4.72–4). 4 Although the dialogue implies that He and She live in a condition of slavery in Harlem in the 1860s, New York gradually abolished slavery between 1785 and 1841. 5 As of 2012, Harlem Duet is available as a stand-alone play-text and in at least three anthologies: Testifyin’: Contemporary African Canadian Drama (Sears 2000), Adaptations of Shakespeare (Fischlin and Fortier 2000), and The Shakespeare’s Mine: Adapting Shakespeare in Anglophone Canada (Knowles 2009), which takes its title from a line in Harlem Duet. On the initial reception of Harlem Duet, and its connections to Goodnight Desdemona, see McKinnon 2010, 138–41. 6 I searched 30,000 words of responses to Harlem Duet, and “adaptation” was not one of them. In response to my query at a conference in 2006, even Linda Hutcheon, whose definition of adaptation is notably broad, claimed that Harlem Duet was really a new play, not an adaptation. For an extensive account of the language and cultural bases of fidelity discourse, see Stam 2005, 3–7. 7 Christopher Winsor calls Harlem Duet a “substantial achievement” (1997); Jim Lingerfelt and Roger Kershaw described it (redundantly) as “bold and daring … the essence of courageous theatre” (1997); and the Star’s Vit Wagner referred to the play as “an impressive achievement, an ambitious and accomplished work with scope and the vision to realize it,” in a review titled “Theatre As It Should Be” (1997b). 8 References to Shakespeare in the play itself use “Shakespeare” to signify the white culture whose validation Othello craves, at Billie’s expense. In a scene where Othello comes to Billie’s apartment to clean out his possessions, there is a brief reference to a contested Shakespeare anthology. Billie tells Othello, “The Shakespeare is mine. But you can have it” (Sears 1997, 52). The 1920s incarnations of Billie and Othello also discuss Shakespeare, because their break-up is precipitated by Othello’s fascination with a white director (Desdemona) who offers him a chance to break out of the minstrel circuit and perform Shakespearean roles, specifically Pericles (99– 100). As Kidnie points out, Harlem Duet, with its second-act story about the reconciliation between Billie and her estranged father and its broad concern with the lingering effects of African diaspora, is perhaps more directly engaged with Pericles than with Othello – but few contemporary

314  James McKinnon spectators are familiar with Pericles and responses focus almost exclusively on the Othello connection (Kidnie 2001, 41). 9 “nOTES” was included in the program of the 1997 and 2006 productions, and prefaces the print edition. 10 For examples, see Smulders 2000, Wagner 1997a, Smith 2006, and Morrow 2006. 11 See Knowles 2004b, 108, for example. 12 The playwrights represented in the 2012 season, for example, are all of European descent. See http://www.stratfordfestival.ca/. 13 Stratford officially reclaimed the word “Shakespeare” in 2007, but as Morrow’s use of the adjective “Shakespearean” suggests, its deletion in the 1970s was never really absorbed by the collective consciousness of its audience. 14 As Sears told me shortly before she began rehearsals, the conditions had to be right before she would agree to do the show at Stratford: almost a decade after Harlem Duet’s first production, now an established artist fresh from the success of Adventures of a Black Girl in Search of God, Sears no longer felt the need to work under less than ideal conditions, and perhaps she recognized that Stratford’s programmers needed her more than she needed them. 15 At the time of writing, the image is still circulating on the internet, where it constitutes part of the production’s intermedial afterlife. See http:// www.blackcanada.com/gallery.htm. 16 Surprisingly, neither Elliott nor any of the play’s respondents have ever commented on how Sears ironizes Othello’s infamous paranoia about Desdemona’s suspected infidelity by showing Othello cheating on his wife. 17 The Studio shows in the 2006 season included The Blond, the Brunette, and the Vengeful Redhead, Fanny Kemble, and The Liar. Obviously, designating the smallest theatre as a space for risky or challenging fare can be seen as a strategy for containing or mitigating the so-called risk. 18 I was present at the first day of rehearsal, and thus privy to this comment of Monette’s, because Sears had invited me to participate in the production by offering a “scholar’s perspective” on the play to the company. 19 As an example of the difficulties Sears faced in dealing with Stratford’s bureaucracy – albeit one of little consequence to the production – it took her several phone calls and emails and over two weeks of negotiation to persuade the Festival (at her insistence, not mine) to give me a program credit. Ultimately, they refused to use the word “dramaturge” in the program for institutional reasons. At one point, Sears asked me to provide a

“Playing the Race Bard”: Harlem Duet 315 list of three possible titles to help her win this battle; in the end, I ended up being credited as “Academic Research by …” 20 At the 2006 Stratford Festival, black actors could star in black plays, but were otherwise relegated to minor roles. In The Duchess of Malfi, the Harlem Duet cast played such juicy roles as “understudy,” “Malateste,” “Doctor,” and “Madwoman,” which arguably undermines Stratford’s project of improving record of ethnic and racial representation. In 2012, there were no black playwrights, but black actors played leading roles in Electra and Cymbeline. 21 For Knowles’s assessment of the influence of theatrical training, tradition, and labour practices on the creation of meaning in the theatre, see 2004b, 24–36 and 53–62. 22 I was scheduled to attend the next full company day the week after the first rehearsal, but this was postponed and ultimately never happened. 23 “There has been some grumbling,” Taylor grumbles, “that the GovernorGeneral’s literary awards are increasingly recognizing cultural diversity before excellence, and recent drama winners give credence to the complaint. Last year, the jurors … picked Djanet Sears’s Harlem Duet, an ambitious but severely flawed reinvention of the Othello story. In 1997, Winnipeg Metis Ian Ross won the prize for fareWel, a work which, to judge from its current Toronto premiere, is a very minor comic drama” (1999). Taylor (who had been the only critic to snub Harlem Duet when it premiered in 1997) writes as though excellence was a criterion in and of itself, without explaining what the criteria for “excellence” are (or whether, if “cultural diversity” isn’t one of them, homogeneity is). 24 In a different version of this anecdote, appearing in the preface to The Adventures of a Black Girl in Search of God, Sears sets the encounter at a public post-performance talkback: “My response was kind, but immediate. All Black plays are human plays! What part of the Black experience is not part of the human experience? Most likely to the discomfort of the woman who spoke, I elaborated further.” The version recounted in the Stratford program is comparatively neutral, and does not suggest that asking questions at a talkback will put spectators at risk of a public browbeating from the playwright. 25 Stratford made some effort to ensure that Harlem Duet would be seen by the black community, by arranging a number of outreach events and subsidized bus trips from Toronto. As a result, the constitution (and liveliness) of the audience varied considerably from one performance to another. 26 Roughly a third of Stratford’s revenue comes from direct sales to the United States (see Knowles 2004b, 107).

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WORKS CITED Al-Solaylee, Kamal. 2006a. “Baring the Burden of Race.” Rev. of Harlem Duet. Globe and Mail, 3 July: R3. – 2006b. “Stratford Finally Changes Its Tune.” Globe and Mail, 16 June: R21. Bolter, Jay David, and Richard Grusin. 1999. Remediation: Understanding New Media. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Canadian Adaptations of Shakespeare Project. http://www.canadianshakespeares.ca. Accessed 7 December 2009. Chapman, Geoff. 1997. “A Brittle Exploration of Race and Gender.” Rev. of Harlem Duet. Toronto Star, 2 November: C6. Chapple, Freda, and Chiel Kattenbelt. 2006. “Key Issues in Intermediality in Theatre and Performance.” In Intermediality in Theatre and Performance, ed. Freda Chapple and Chiel Kattenbelt, 11–25. Amsterdam: Rodopi. Coulbourn, John. 2006. “Harlem Duet a Powerful Piece.” Rev. of Harlem Duet. Toronto Sun, 4 July. http://jam.canoe.ca/Theatre/Reviews/H/Harlem_ Duet/2006/07/04/1666778.html. Accessed 7 April 2008. Cushman, Robert. 2006. “Playing the Race Bard.” Rev. of Harlem Duet. National Post, 10 July: AL4. Dickinson, Peter. 2002. “Duets, Duologues and Black Diasporic Theatre: Djanet Sears, William Shakespeare and Others.” Modern Drama 45.2: 188–208. Elliott, Leanne. 2006. “Harlem Duet is Powerful, Passsionate.” Rev. of Harlem Duet. Kitchener-Waterloo Record 4 July: B3. Fischlin, Daniel, and Mark Fortier. 2000. Adaptations of Shakespeare: A Critical Anthology of Plays from the Seventeenth Century to the Present. London: Routledge. Genette, Gérard. 1997 [1982]. Palimpsests: Literature in the Second Degree. Trans. Channa Newman and Claude Doubinski. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. “Harlem Duet Program.” 1997. Canadian Stage Company and Nightwood Theatre [Toronto, ON]. 27 October–29 November. http://www.canadianshakespeares.ca/multimedia/pdf/harlem_bill.pdf. Accessed 7 December 2009. “Harlem Duet Program.” 2006. Stratford Shakespeare Festival. Hoile, Christopher. N.d. “A Landmark Production at Stratford.” Undated rev. of Harlem Duet. Stage Door. http://www.stage-door.com/ Theatre/2006/Entries/2006/9/11_Harlem_Duet.html. Accessed 1 April 2014. Hutcheon, Linda. 2006. A Theory of Adaptation. London: Routledge.

“Playing the Race Bard”: Harlem Duet 317 Kaplan, Jon. 1997. “Rivetting [sic] Alison Sealy-Smith Bursts Bard’s Bubble.” Now Magazine, 24 April. http://www.nowtoronto.com/archive/view_­ issue.cfm?vol=16&num=34&year=1997. Accessed 1 April 2014. – 2006. “A Riveting Duet.” Rev. of Harlem Duet. 31 August. http://www .nowtoronto.com/stage/story.cfm?content=155192. Accessed 1 April 2014. Kidnie, Margaret Jane. 2001. “‘There’s Magic in the Web of It’: Seeing beyond Tragedy in Harlem Duet.” Journal of Commonwealth Literature 36.2: 29–44. Knowles, Richard. 2004a. “Othello in Three Times.” In Shakespeare and Canada: Essays on Production, Translation, and Adaptation. Brussels and New York: P.I.E.-Peter Lang. – 2004b. Reading the Material Theatre. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Knowles, Richard, ed. 2009. The Shakespeare’s Mine: Adapting Shakespeare in Anglophone Canada. Toronto: Playwrights Canada Press. Lingerfelt, Jim, and Roger Kershaw. 1997. “Harlem’s Two Solitudes.” Rev. of Harlem Duet. Stage Door (April). http://www.stage-door.org/reviews/ harlem.htm. Accessed 7 April 2008. MacDonald, Ann-Marie. 1990. Goodnight Desdemona (Good Morning Juliet). Toronto: Coach House Press. McKinnon, James. 2010. “The Dramaturgy of Appropriation: How Canadian Playwrights Use and Abuse Shakespeare and Chekhov.” PhD diss. University of Toronto. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Morrow, Martin. 2006. “Harlem Shuffle: Djanet Sears Challenges Stratford’s Status Quo.” cbc.ca. 23 June. http://www.cbc.ca/arts/theatre/harlem.html. Accessed 7 April 2008. Myrie, Evelyn. 2006. “Stratford Play Breaks New Multicultural Ground.” Hamilton Spectator, 17 July: A15. Nemetz, Andrea. 2000. “Talking about Sex, Race, Love.” Chronicle-Herald [Halifax], 7 April: B3. Sanders, Julie. 2005. Adaptation and Appropriation. London: Routledge. Sanders, Leslie. 2000. “Othello Deconstructed: Djanet Sears’s Harlem Duet.” In Testifyin’: Contemporary African Canadian Drama, ed. Djanet Sears, 1:557–9. Toronto: Playwrights Canada Press. Sears, Djanet. 1997. Harlem Duet. Winnipeg: Scirocco Drama. – 2004. Interview with Matt Buntin. Canadian Adaptations of Shakespeare Project. March. http://www.canadianshakespeares.ca/i_dsears.cfm. Accessed 7 December 2009. Sears, Djanet, ed. 2000. Testifyin’: Contemporary African Canadian Drama. Vol. 1. Toronto: Playwrights Canada Press. – 2004. The Adventures of a Black Girl in Search of God. Toronto: Playwrights Canada Press.

318  James McKinnon Sears, Djanet, and Alison Sealy-Smith. 1998. “The Nike Method.” Interview with Ric Knowles. Canadian Theatre Review 97 (Winter): 24–30. Shakespeare, William. 1997. Othello. Ed. E.A.J. Honigmann. Walton-onThames: Thomas Nelson. Smith, Gary. 2006. “Stratford’s Harlem Duet Deserves to Be Seen.” Rev. of Harlem Duet. Hamilton Spectator, 26 August: D18. Smulders, Marilyn. 2000. “Modern Prequel to Othello: What If Tragic Hero Had Been Married Before?” Daily News [Halifax], 7 April: 35. Stam, Robert. 2005. “Introduction: The Theory and Practice of Adaptation.” In Literature and Film: A Guide to the Theory and Practice of Film Adaptation, eds. Robert Stam and Alessandra Raengo, 1–52. Oxford: Blackwell. “Studio Theatre.” “http://www.stratfordfestival.ca” www.stratfordfestival.ca. http://www.stratfordfestival.ca/about/theatre.aspx?id=1868. Accessed 1 June 2014. Taylor, Kate. 1997. “Harlem Duet: Characters Lost in Political Lessons.” Rev. of Harlem Duet. Globe and Mail, 28 April: C3. – 1999. “Prize Fare Proves Thin.” Rev. of fareWel. Globe and Mail, 15 January: C11. Wagner, Vit. 1997a. “A New Take on Gender and Race.” Toronto Star, 30 October: 1. – 1997b. “Theatre As It Should Be.” Rev. of Harlem Duet. Toronto Star, 27 April: B3. Winsor, Christopher. 1997. “Doin’ the Harlem Shuffle.” Rev. of Harlem Duet. Eye Weekly [Toronto], 13 November.

PART FOUR “Give No Limits to My Tongue … I Am Privileged to Speak”: The Limits of Adaptation?

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Patchwork Shakespeare: Community Events at the American Shakespeare Tercentenary (1916) M o ni k a Smi al kows ka

This chapter explores the ways in which the American celebrations of the three-hundredth anniversary of Shakespeare’s death in 1916 drew on and creatively combined a range of cultural practices across different genres and media.1 The Tercentenary was marked by traditional theatrical productions, such as Henry VIII with Herbert Beerbohm Tree as Cardinal Wolsey, an African American amateur rendition of Othello with Edward Wilbur Wright in the lead role, and the touring performances of several of Shakespeare’s plays by the Ben Greet Woodland Players. There were also forays into the fledgling medium of film: two versions of Romeo and Juliet, Macbeth with Beerbohm Tree, and J.M. Barrie’s Macbeth pastiche, The Real Thing at Last (see Buchanan 2009, 190–216). The majority of commemorative activities in the US, however, were of a more heterogeneous nature: less highbrow than traditional theatre, more communal and participatory than film, and in many cases intermedial and intercultural. This may come as a surprise, considering that the key instigator of the Tercentenary celebrations was the Drama League of America, a ­voluntary organization whose self-proclaimed aims were “to raise the public taste as regards the drama,” “to educate its members to a degree of appreciation which will discriminate among plays,” and “to create and organize a public which should support sound literary and artistic effort on the stage” (Drama League of America 1911, n.p.). Generally, the League promoted fairly traditional, text-based drama, as opposed to popular, mixed genres such as the vaudeville. Its aspiration to educate the public to “discriminate among plays” implies an interest in policing and maintaining boundaries between artistic and popular forms, rather than a wish to promote intercultural or intermedial hy-

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bridization. Nevertheless, for the Shakespeare Tercentenary the League recommended a staggering range of heterogeneous activities: “plays, masques, festivals, pageants, music, dancing, chorus, lectures, sermons, art and craft exhibitions, club programs, library exhibits, study courses, story telling, tableaux, planting of trees, and developing of Shakespeare gardens” (Roberts 1916, 354). The American public received these suggestions with enthusiasm, organizing a plethora of miscellaneous events, spanning and often blending such disparate cultural domains as literary criticism and history (study courses, lectures); drama (plays, pageants, masques); religion (sermons); music (vocal and instrumental, traditional and modern); dance (both professional and social); couture (dressing up); visual arts and antiquarianism (exhibitions); folklorism (reconstructions of popular festivals, games, and customs); horticulture (Shakespeare gardens and tree plantings); and even gastronomy (Shakespeare parties). These activities indicate that the practice – if not the theorization – of intermedial Shakespearean adaptation has a rich history, originating long before the advent of the digital era. Examining this history can enrich our understanding of newer media and more recent adaptations by mapping out the ideologically loaded debates which accompanied earlier intercultural exchanges. Consequently, the discussion that follows investigates possible reasons for the explosion of multimedia adaptations of Shakespeare in 1916, as well as the overall effects and meanings they generated, focusing in particular on the crucial issues concerning the demarcation of the boundaries between popular and high culture. To illustrate how far Tercentenary contributors were prepared to go in their intermedial experiments, it is worth having a look at one of the most bizarre cultural hybrids produced for the occasion – the “Shakespearian circus” organized in New York by the young women of the Vacation Association (Program of the Community Masque Caliban by the Yellow Sands 1916, 10). On 31 March 1916, the New York Times reported: Shakespeare is going to make his début in the sawdust arena. The girls of the Vacation Association, who do their planning and plotting all the year around at 38 West Thirty-ninth Street for their Summer vacations, are going to cast precedent out of the window and astonish future historians by putting Shakespeare where, with all his versatility, he has never been before – in the circus. (“Shakespeare in a Circus” 1916, 9)

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While the article emphasizes the organizers’ daring innovation in taking Shakespeare “where … he has never been before,” it also points to the serious, scholarly dimension of the enterprise: “All of the volumes of Shakespeare are off the shelves and most of the girls are ears deep in classics in every room of the house. Popular novels, which used to be at a premium, are now piled high on the shelves” (“Shakespeare in a Circus” 1916, 9). It appears that, via a most unlikely route, the young women participating in the project have achieved cultural elevation. By getting involved in an undeniably lowbrow activity, a circus, they progressed from consuming popular culture – novels – to contemplating respectable “classics” – Shakespeare’s work. A report of the actual event, however, reveals that the affair was not a straightforward progress from the lowbrow to the highbrow, but rather an eclectic mixture of cultural forms and media, closer to a popular variety show than to a classic literary or dramatic event. The New York Times article of 6 May 1916 entitled “Elephant Scares Shakespeare Girls” made much of the participants dressed up as fairies having “the fright of their lives” over the possibility that Chin-Chin, a baby elephant borrowed for the occasion from the Hippodrome, might bite their bare toes (fortunately, he turned out to be more interested in cookies). Having covered this incident in detail, the report went on to describe the rest of the program: After the circus proper, in which there were many professional turns with the dances of the vacation girls, the audience wandered out into the village street of Stratford-on-Avon, at the rear of the hall, where Shakespeare himself – Jack Hazard [sic] from “Very Good Eddie,” sold his own works. Al Jolson had a music shop and pretty girls sold good things to eat and drink at other shops in the village street. Later the hall was cleared and the circus became a ball. (“Elephant Scares Shakespeare Girls” 1916, 11)

This description reveals a fantastic mixture of historical periods, media, genres, and cultural practices. In Stratford-on-Avon, Shakespeare himself (impersonated by John E. Hazzard, who a few months earlier was involved, as actor and lyricist, in the production of the Broadway musical Very Good Eddie) rubs shoulders with the popular musician and entertainer Al Jolson. Both Shakespeare and Jolson are involved not in their respective arts, but in retail, selling their works, and are surrounded by busy catering operations. All this, combined with the facts that

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the fairies who got so terrified by the elephant in the “circus proper” had been positioned “at the feet of ‘good Queen Bess,’” and that the famous movie actress Mary Pickford was only prevented by illness from being “one of the professional stars of the evening,” completes the picture of indiscriminate cultural eclecticism and hybridity, in which disparate forms merge and morph into one another (“Elephant Scares Shakespeare Girls” 1916, 11). Fittingly, the evening ends with another transformation: the circus (which by then has become a fair) now becomes a ball. Shakespeare Tercentenary and the Community Theatre It would be easy to dismiss the “Shakespearian circus” as a unique product of one group’s quirky imagination. However, despite this peculiar episode being perhaps an extreme case, countless Tercentenary tributes across the US displayed similar characteristics of generic, media, and cultural fusion. In fact, the Tercentenary’s most widely publicized and popular live event, the centrepiece of New York’s and the nation’s celebrations, shared a number of features with the Vacation Association’s contribution. That event was Percy MacKaye’s Caliban by the Yellow Sands, repeatedly performed at the New York City College Stadium (also known as Lewisohn Stadium) in front of thousands of spectators between 24 May and 5 June 1916. Dubbed a “Community Masque” by its author (MacKaye 1916, xix), Caliban was a colossal production, enlisting the participation of about thirty professional ­actors and over fifteen hundred amateurs drawn from a cross-section of New York’s populace. The masque’s plot consisted of the brutish Caliban undergoing a civilizing process at the hands of Prospero, Ariel, and Miranda. Their educational methods were the arts of the theatre: they produced for him three long Interludes and an Epilogue, representing the development of dramatic art from its ancient origins in ritual and folk play to modern times. Interspersed with those were ten “Inner Scenes,” enacting short excerpts from several of Shakespeare’s plays (MacKaye 1916, xxxi–xxxii). The exchanges ­between Prospero, Ariel, Miranda, and Caliban, as well as the Inner Scenes, were fairly straightforwardly dramatic, as they consisted of dialogue, speeches, and action. By contrast, the Interludes and Epilogue resembled the Shakespearean circus in their multimedia character. They involved carefully choreographed dances, group movements, processions, choral singing accompanied by orchestral music, elements

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of tableau and pantomime, and displays of athleticism (see figures 9.1 and 9.2), as well as representations of Germanic Shrovetide customs, a chivalric tournament, an Italian festa, and an Elizabethan May Day festival. Even animal participation was envisaged, as the New York Times reported on 9 April 1916: The committee in charge of the Shakespeare Tercentenary Festival must find a tame elephant and bear within the next few weeks or change Percy MacKaye’s Community Masque, to be presented in the City College Stadium as the crowning event of the festival next month. The masque calls for these animals, and it was thought they could be obtained at the Bronx Zoo, but Director Hornaday dashed these hopes the other day when he wrote saying there were no such animals, at least at his park (“Wanted – An Elephant” 1916, X7).

This mixture of cultural practices situates Caliban closer to Shakespeare’s theatre, which was not far removed from bear-baiting, fencing, and jigmaking, than to later, more decorous theatrical developments. Overall, “the crowning event” of the Shakespeare Tercentenary was a heterogeneous affair, combining an astounding range of disparate media and genres, rather than a formally uniform, highbrow artistic product. The same can be said of numerous Tercentenary tributes across the US, such as the pageant and masque staged in Atlanta (Carroll 1916); a five-day program of events prepared by University of Texas, which included “pageants, esthetic dancing, revels, fairs, lectures, plays and pageants again” (“To Commemorate Shakespeare” 1916, 5); an “al fresco Shakespearean festival” organized by the Dallas Shakespeare Club (Periwinkle 1916, 13); “Tableaux and scenes” staged by the Professional Women’s League in New York (Program of the Community Masque Caliban by the Yellow Sands 1916, 11); and “Elizabethan Fair and Pageant” offered by Barnard College (Program of the Community Masque Caliban by the Yellow Sands 1916, 11), to mention just a few examples (see also Smialkowska 2010a, par. 7–8). One reason for the Shakespeare Tercentenary celebrations having been so eclectic may be found in the fact that they coincided with an unprecedented increase of interest in the role of leisure, and drama in particular, in American society. This interest manifested itself both in practical ways, through the activities of such organizations as the Drama League of America and the American Pageant Association, and in more theoretical debates, conducted via public talks, articles, and

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9.1 (above) and 9.2 (opposite).  Caliban’s community participants display their gymnastic prowess in rehearsal. The masque’s text does not mention these feats of acrobatics, but it does stipulate that the members of the Chorus in the Greek interlude dance “with vigorous, rhythmic cadence of their athletic bodies” (MacKaye 1916, 169). Photos courtesy of Dartmouth College Library.

full-length books devoted to the topic. The Drama League of America, a voluntary organization established in 1910, brought together in a loose federation many existing dramatic clubs and societies across the US and spurred the development of new ones (Blair 1994, 148–60). While rejecting the role of censor, the League took on the responsibilities of educator and arbiter of taste: “realizing that censoring will only help advertise a bad play, not check it, the league acted upon the opposite principle, constructively to create a worthy stage – to support all that is sound and valuable in dramatic art, merely shunning and avoiding the meretricious and unworthy plays” (Drama League of America 1911, n.p.). Thus, the League sought to shape American drama by fostering discerning audiences through such activities as promoting study

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courses and cheap editions of plays, as well as publishing bulletins that advertised forthcoming productions of what was deemed to be “worthy” drama. Simultaneously, more theoretical discussions on the role of the theatre were being conducted in the press, educational institutions, and other public forums. In the US the most active theoretician of the subject was none other than the author of Caliban by the Yellow Sands, Percy MacKaye.2 Throughout the early years of the twentieth century, MacKaye tirelessly produced public addresses, articles, and books aiming at improving the American theatre.3 At the heart of the debates that he participated in lay the question of what constitutes the theatre’s social role and function. Together with other progressivist drama activists, MacKaye accorded the theatre the role of a civic institution, vital to society’s education and well-being: “As a national force, it has never been correlated with the other great forces of citizenship, of law, of industry, of statecraft, of patriotism. Nevertheless the theatre, in its proper function, is peculiarly fitted for such association” (MacKaye 1909, 11). Thus, MacKaye viewed the theatre as a perfect instrument for

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promoting social improvement and national cohesion. In this respect, his ideas matched those of other reformers of the Progressive era, who aimed to address problems of social deprivation, alienation, poverty, and lack of education, which were rife among disenfranchised groups in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, particularly among new immigrants arriving in ever-increasing numbers into the US. The theatre, in MacKaye’s opinion, had the potential to raise social awareness, educate, and integrate disparate groups within American society. In order to do so, however, the theatre would have to be reformed until it reached its “highest” form – one that would perfectly combine supreme artistic standards and sound democratic principles: “art is self-government in the highest; and dramatic art in the highest is the formulation of harmonious democracy” (MacKaye 1912, 83). MacKaye juxtaposed this lofty ideal to what he saw as the “depraved” actual conditions of the theatre and other leisure activities in the early ­twentieth-century US, consisting of such “debased forms of art” as those ­offered in “[d]ance halls, penny arcades, moving-picture shows, vaudeville houses, and other commercial theatres” (MacKaye 1912, 66). It was the commercial underpinnings of the existing theatrical system that MacKaye blamed for the contemporary American theatre not ­fulfilling its momentous social duties or its artistic potential. He denounced the profit-driven “theatre as a private business,” which, disregarding moral and aesthetic standards, offered productions “corruptive of good taste, good morals, good art,” and he campaigned to transform this system into “the theatre as it ought to be: a properly qualified public institution” (MacKaye 1912, 125 and 128). He proposed to replace the commercial theatre with what he called “a new expression of democracy, the civic theatre” (MacKaye 1912, 15). A few years after the publication of his volume The Civic Theatre, Louise Burleigh used a slightly different term, “the community theatre” (Burleigh 1917), which MacKaye acknowledged to be “the better name for the idea” (MacKaye 1917, xi). Burleigh defined the community theatre as “a house of play in which events offer to every member of a body politic active participation in a common interest,” and – similarly to MacKaye – associated it with “democratic institutions” (Burleigh 1917, xxxii).4 To grasp the concept more fully, it is worth quoting MacKaye’s elaboration on the key principles of this kind of theatre: The Civic Theatre idea … implies the conscious awakening of a people to self-government in the activities of its leisure. To this end, organization of

Patchwork Shakespeare: The American Tercentenary  329 the arts of the theatre, participation by the people in these arts (not mere spectatorship), a new resulting technique, leadership by means of a permanent staff of artists (not of merchants in art), elimination of private profit by endowment and public support, dedication in service to the whole community: these are chief among its essentials, and these imply a new and nobler scope for the art of the theatre itself. (MacKaye 1912, 15)

The most important factor here is the non-profit and participatory character of the civic theatre. Crucially, both MacKaye and Burleigh emphasized the active role of the people in the production, not simply the consumption, of what MacKaye later called “a drama of and by the people, not merely for the people” (MacKaye 1916, xviii). The degree of autonomy and control that the community theatre activists were in reality prepared to accord to the general public, however, is open to debate. Burleigh seemed to privilege the people wholeheartedly: “A state theatre must not be a theatre which is applied to the community from without or from above; it cannot be the perfected dream of artists; it must spring from the dreams and needs of the everyday person, the need for expression of the whole community” (Burleigh 1917, xxxi). Conversely, MacKaye’s model, for all its emphasis on democracy, ultimately placed the theatre’s leadership in the hands of “a permanent staff of artists.” Similarly, at the First Annual Convention of the Drama League of America, Dr William Norman Guthrie of the University of the South expressed at best a conditional endorsement of the people as the owners of the theatre: The drama must come out of the people. That does not mean that playwrights must pander to the people. People can be led upward as well as downward. We must have some authority, some standard of taste. This is especially necessary in a democracy. Constantly we are getting to the point when we demand that the people who speak to us shall really know something; we want experts. We are getting away from the thought that a child of 6 months should rule the house and that one a year old should dominate the town. (Drama League of America 1911, n.p.)

Guthrie’s and MacKaye’s insistence on the leadership of experts in the ostensibly democratic theatre points to ambiguities within progressivist ideas concerning American drama at the beginning of the twentieth century. The advocates of these ideas declared “the people” to be the origin, producers, and owners of drama, while at the same

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time treating them as underdeveloped children in need of guidance and control. Moreover, the institutional structure MacKaye proposed for civic theatre – a central “Bureau at Washington, in connection with the American Federation of Arts, provided with one well-paid director” (MacKaye 1912, 38), as well as salaried expert artists at local theatres – resembles more closely a state-sponsored professional theatre than a spontaneous “drama of and by the people.” Thus, MacKaye’s “Drama of Democracy” (MacKaye 1912, 97) can be seen as coming uncomfortably close to what Burleigh criticized as “the gift of a paternal despotism” (Burleigh 1917, xxxi). The issue of the control and ownership of the theatre, therefore, created some contradictions and blind spots in the early twentieth-century debates about the future of American drama. Another related problem was that of reconciling the two highest priorities of the community theatre: its participatory nature and its high artistic standards. Could drama produced and managed by the people – largely amateurs – attain the status of highbrow art? Conversely, could highbrow drama appeal to the masses and be truly inclusive? The reports of the Drama League of America indicate that this was an important and unresolved issue. Miss Elizabeth Hunt, speaking at its Second Annual Convention, opened her address with a blunt statement: “The League is spoken of as a ‘high-brow,’ or a ‘kill-joy’” (Drama League of America 1912, 53). Clearly, its activities were associated with the serious, artistic end of the  dramatic spectrum, not necessarily appreciated by everybody. Moreover, at the same Convention, Mr J.E. Williams, an experienced theatrical manager, pointed to the general public’s lack of interest in this type of drama: We have tried them with Shakespeare and Moliere, with Ibsen and Gogol, Goldoni and Shaw, and they would have none of them … In fact the greatest obstacle we had to overcome in getting an audience for “Kindling” [a 1911 play by Charles A. Kenyon] was the impression that it belonged to the “high-brow” class; and we traced this impression to the fact that it was endorsed by the Drama League. (Drama League of America 1912, 21)

Evidently, the League had its work cut out trying to improve the tastes and habits of the contemporary theatre-goers. Public interest and high artistic standards did not seem to go naturally hand in hand. These early twentieth-century debates concerning the nature and function of theatre may be seen as one of the key factors contributing to

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the astonishingly intermedial character of the Shakespeare Tercentenary activities across the US. The organizers of these activities may have been trying to combine high art, of which Shakespeare is often considered to be the epitome, with wide popular appeal and active involvement of large sections of society, many of whose members were, of course, not yet inculcated with the values of the community theatre. It seems that, for the Tercentenary activists, public participation took precedence over adhering to established dramatic conventions. Consequently, pageantry, with its eclectic fusion of drama, music, spectacle, dance, and processional movement, as well as its community-building function, suited the purposes of the progressivist organizers of the Tercentenary better than more traditional theatrical productions. The rest of this chapter will examine the effects of trying to put the tenets of the community theatre into practice, focusing in particular on the extent to which the Shakespeare Tercentenary celebrations embodied the debates concerning theatre’s ownership, aesthetic standards, and social functions. To this end, it is worth having a closer look at the most extensively documented Tercentenary event, Caliban by the Yellow Sands. “A Drama for and by the People”? The Shakespeare Tercentenary and Intercultural Integration In keeping with the tenets of the civic theatre, Caliban and the Shakespeare Tercentenary as a whole were promoted as the instruments of cultural integration, social cohesion, and community building. Many campaigners explicitly commented on the occasion’s potential to help assimilate America’s disparate social and ethnic groups. MacKaye explained that the “function of the Celebration” was “to help unite all classes and all beliefs in a great coöperative movement for civic expression through dramatic art” (MacKaye 1916, xx), while on 4 March 1916 the New York Post announced the Tercentenary plans with the following heading: “Rallying about Shakespeare. Plans to Unite All New York in Tercentenary Celebration.” Similarly, in his address at the Shakespeare Tercentenary Celebration Dinner held on 4 May 1916, the chairman of  the Mayor’s Honorary Committee for the New York Shakespeare Celebration, Otto Kahn, encouraged New Yorkers to “seek and emphasize … that which unites us instead of searching out and accentuating and indeed exaggerating that which separates us” (Kahn 1916, 6) and optimistically declared that the city’s Tercentenary drive “stands upon a broad and deep popular base; it enlists and has significance for

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Avenue A no less than for Fifth Avenue” (27). Beyond New York, in a Dallas Morning News article of 3 April 1916, Pauline Periwinkle pointed to the Tercentenary’s “nationalizing significance” for America, a country that, because of its immigrant population, “stands in need of a common impulse that will operate as a blending medium” (Periwinkle 1916, 13). In some respects, Caliban fulfilled this promise of intercultural integration by combining disparate, “highbrow” and “lowbrow” media and genres, performers from diverse walks of life, and elements of theatrical traditions of different cultures: Egyptian, Greek, Roman, Germanic, French, Italian, and English (though not Native or African American, Chinese, or Japanese). In practice, however, not all of these forms were treated equally. The Interludes, in which most of the community performers appeared, took place on the stadium floor and consisted chiefly of dances, choruses, pantomime, tableaux, processions, and other spectacular and aural, rather than purely verbal, media (see figure 9.3). Meanwhile, the Inner Scenes, played by professional actors and containing dialogue from Shakespeare’s plays, were situated on the “Inner Stage,” which was raised above the ground level, and only revealed from behind “the Cloudy Curtains” when the Inner Scenes were being acted (MacKaye 1916, xxix–xxx). Thus, the very structure of the masque embodied some of the ambiguities at the heart of the concept of the community theatre and the Shakespeare Tercentenary. “High” drama, epitomized by Shakespeare’s plays, was literally and symbolically elevated above popular customs and rituals enacted on the lower level. Moreover, even though the community theatre was supposed to originate from and be created by the people, Caliban’s key components – text, music, directing, lighting, stage and costume design – were produced by experts: Percy MacKaye, Arthur Farwell, Joseph Urban, Robert Edmond Jones, and Richard Ordynski. Similarly, the assignment of the key speaking parts to professional actors privileged the established, traditional theatre, rather than its populist counterpart. The community performers, while undoubtedly crucial to the action and effect of the masque, were not allowed much voice or original creative input. Interestingly, this mistrust of the amateur was mirrored within the fiction of the entertainment. According to Prospero, Caliban was to be civilized and liberated through mastering the arts of the theatre: “Master it [mine art] and go free” (MacKaye 1916, 83). Yet whenever Caliban attempted to take active control over dramatic creation by seizing Prospero’s staff, scroll, and cloak, he ended up wreaking havoc,

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9.3. Pantomime scene of Hercules and the Sphinx from Caliban. Note the use of masks and stylized, dancelike movements. Photo courtesy of Dartmouth College Library.

debasing art, or relapsing into his brutish ways. At the end of the masque, he was presented crouching at Shakespeare’s feet and calling him “Master” (MacKaye 1916, 145) in a humble acknowledgment of the superiority of the expert artist and established art forms. While Caliban’s action and form thus reveal ambiguous attitudes towards integrating “high” and “popular” media and genres, the circumstances of the masque’s production complicate the picture even further. In January 1916, the event’s organizers revealed their plans to hold it in New York’s Central Park. Little did they expect the furore that would erupt over this choice of location. The press responded with vehement protests against the plan, representing it as an “invasion” of the public park (“Park Invasion Not Agreed to Yet” 1916, 1) and issuing an emotive call to arms: “RISE TO REPEL INVADERS” (“Park Law Prohibits MacKaye Pay Show” 1916, 1). The latter article quoted Assemblyman Mark Goldberg, who objected to “grant[ing] permission to the

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favored few to invade a playground established so long ago for the people” and “steal[ing] from the people their vested rights in their parks and playgrounds” (“Park Law Prohibits MacKaye Pay Show” 1916, 1). Contradicting the populist tenets preached by the community theatre activists, Goldberg juxtaposed “the people,” who owned the park, to the Shakespeare Tercentenary organizers, whom he represented as the elite, “favored few.” Otto Kahn tried to reassure the protestors: “The celebration is to be done entirely in the interest of the community and to foster the community spirit. It is entirely for the purpose of giving the people an opportunity to manifest the community spirit” (quoted in “Park Invasion Not Agreed to Yet” 1916, 1). The opponents, however, would not be persuaded, and within a few days the Committee backed down and withdrew the application to use Central Park, eventually settling instead for the City College Stadium, the use of which was offered to them by the wealthy businessman Adolph Lewisohn. What this heated debate demonstrates is the competing ideas of who “the people” actually are, and who is entitled to represent their interests. While the Tercentenary organizers were no doubt sincere in their belief that they were acting for the people’s good, others were suspicious of their class affiliations and intentions. Part of the problem lay in the association of Shakespeare with “highbrow” art and correspondingly high circles of society, prevalent by the early twentieth century (Levine 1988, 72–81; Murphy 2008, 162–97). Another issue was more immediately practical: the protectors of Central Park objected most strenuously to its hosting a fee-paying event. As the New York Times reported on 14 January 1916, they argued that “[t]o charge admission to any part of Central Park would arouse violent public hostility,” and that “The use of the park for an individual private enterprise cannot be permitted under any consideration” (“No ­ Masque in the Park” 1916, 8). Of course, this accusation of advancing private business ends went directly against the aims of the community theatre, as formulated by MacKaye. The Tercentenary activists tried to counter it by stating: “The Shakespeare Celebration is not a small body of individuals organized as a private enterprise; it is an organization which already represents some hundreds of civic and educational groups, societies, clubs, and leagues, embracing hundreds of thousands of citizens in their membership” ( “Heed Cry against Masque in the Park” 1916, 1). Nevertheless, the fact remains that the Tercentenary Committee did plan to charge for at least some

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of the Caliban tickets to defray the costs of production, making itself vulnerable to those who questioned its civic commitment and altruistic intentions.5 This doubt as to the Tercentenary’s social affiliations, together with the ambivalent position Caliban accorded to popular media and genres, points to the ambiguous and dynamic character of the occasion as an intercultural affair, as it was caught up in negotiating the relative status of different art forms and social groups. “No End of Mediums Hopelessly Confused”: The Shakespeare Tercentenary, Intermedia, and Artistic Standards While some sceptics expressed doubts regarding the Tercentenary’s populism, others criticized it for not attaining the other self-professed goal of the Drama League of America: high artistic standards. One of the most uncomplimentary commentators, quoted in the Philadelphia Inquirer of 13 February 1916, went so far as to declare: “If Shakespeare could rise in his grave and witness some of the events scheduled in his honor this year … it is reasonably certain that he would go back to his shroud and consider himself fortunate to be among the departed” (“Sisters Shine on Two Stages” 1916, 11). Another critic pointed to the genre of pageantry, which was widely adopted for the Tercentenary celebrations, as the chief culprit: “With the passing of June we have the practical end of the epidemic of ‘Shakespearean Pageants’ which have devastated the country this year. They have not been very successful.” The author proceeded to outline the reasons for this lack of success: … the affairs have, as a rule, been incongruous; their purpose principally being to exploit some ambitious minor poet, some social ambition, rather than to honor the inspired poet. The idea has been to ride Shakespeare on the way to the social limelight. … This has prevented the requisite atmosphere; violated any artistic beauty; killed, rather than heightened, theatrical illusion, and lost the spirit so requisite to excite imagination by giving evidence of a genuine craving for something fine and sincere. … Most of the “pageants” have been rather weird, half-baked affairs and have sadly fallen by the wayside. Some of them, too, have been highly creditable. But I cannot recall one that has been wholly successful, or created any satisfying or artistic emotional stimulus.

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Similarly to the objectors to the use of Central Park, this criticism questions the Tercentenary organizers’ motives. While the author directly accuses the individuals involved of hubris and self-­ advancement, one can also interpret “some social ambition” in a wider sense, as the overall social purpose of the community theatre – the improvement of the American public through active participation in drama. The article seems to suggest that such an overtly social purpose is at odds with “artistic beauty.” Interestingly, the author also claims that the Tercentenary pageants “failed to attract wide attention” outside of educational institutions, “did not awaken any general or community interest,” and were not a commercial success. The article thus implies that populist aims and “high” artistic ambitions cannot be reconciled, and that trying to do so results in drama that is neither artistically sound nor marketable.6 The other target of the article’s criticism is the “incongruous” nature of the Tercentenary tributes. The author clearly did not appreciate their intermedial character, describing them as “weird” and “half-baked.” This suggests that, to this reviewer, the chief criterion of aesthetic value was unity, and that mixing genres and media led to the “violat[ion of] … artistic beauty.” The critic quoted above singled out MacKaye’s masque as one of the “most pretentious” of the Tercentenary tributes, denouncing his “imitation of Shakespeare” as “simply pathetic.”7 Similarly, Lawrence Reimer, dramatic critic of the New York Sun, was vocal in his criticism of the show: Admirers of the stage and, above all, of Shakespeare, must have felt a bitter regret at the amount of money expended on the so-called masque at the College of the City of New York … There is no end of mediums hopelessly confused in the production of this spectacle. As a gigantic show, Caliban of the Yellow Sands [sic] may be notable. As a contribution to the art of the theater, it is not important. Even in its most superficial features it is disappointing. (Quoted in Davies 1916, n.p.)

Again, the brunt of the criticism was the show’s “hopelessly confused” combination of media. Reimer went on to ask rhetorically: “Is it possible to suggest that in honor of Shakespeare … there might have been arranged in place of this massive conglomerate of unassimilated arts a performance of one of Shakespeare’s plays?” (quoted in Davies 1916, n.p.). Both critics’ use of words such as “incongruous,” “confused,” and “unassimilated” condemns the Tercentenary’s attempts at combining

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genres and media, and Reimer explicitly privileges traditional drama over intermedial experiments. One of Reimer’s objections was the “negligible” effect of the spoken dialogue in Caliban (quoted in Davies 1916, n.p.). This was in fact a repeated criticism even among those commentators who, overall, were positive about the masque. Thus, in the Evening Mail on 25 May 1916, Burns Mantle praised the show for “Arousing Community Spirit,” declaring: “Here, in the spirit of it, is probably the finest thing New York has ever done, made possible by the enthused co-operation of its citizens. Here are 1,500 actors at least who are hereafter certain to have more respect for their city as a community of common interests.” While acknowledging the community-building value of the enterprise, he was less impressed with its dramatic standards: Judging “Caliban” as a work of art, we should say that so long as it holds to pageantry and pictorial pantomime, to its wonderful interludes and the more simple methods of illustrating a simple symbolism, it is a complete success. But whenever it calls upon the spoken drama … it fails, for there is little drama in it, and that little is more amusing than impressive. (Mantle 1916, n.p.)

Therefore, according to some critics, Caliban succeeded in its social aims, but failed to become proper drama. Instead, as an art form it was relegated to “more simple methods” – those of spectacular, participatory, and popular media, such as “pageantry and pictorial pantomime.” The repeated use of the word “simple” indicates that Mantle sees these media as less complex and less advanced than the medium of the spoken drama. Again, in the eyes of contemporary commentators, the two key aims of the Drama League of America – the active involvement of large sections of the community and high dramatic standards – proved difficult to reconcile. The Shakespeare Tercentenary: Tradition or Innovation? Another reason why the Shakespeare Tercentenary may have been seen as confused and incongruous was its mixture of new and old dramatic forms and traditions. Two of the artists involved in the production of Caliban, Joseph Urban and Robert Edmond Jones, represented innovative, modernist theatrical developments, following the experiments of  Edward Gordon Craig and Adolphe Appia. Their designs for the

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masque were bold and non-naturalistic, including the representation of Sycorax as a “Super-puppet” (MacKaye 1916, xxxi); masks for some of the characters (see figures 9.3 and 9.4); extensive symbolic use of light and darkness (achieved through a powerful electric lighting system), colour, movement, and shape. Gary Taylor associates these modernist, non-naturalistic staging methods with the need of the theatre at the turn of the century to compete with the rapidly developing medium of cinematography. Since the theatre could not hope to reproduce rapid changes of scenery with the film’s photographic accuracy, it shifted towards consciously artificial, schematic representation, aiming at creating poetic mood rather than “scenic verisimilitude.” This was accompanied by a move towards poetic speech rather than everyday, realist dialogue (Taylor 1990, 274–6). Interestingly, Caliban utilized both innovative scenography and poetry (not only in the scenes taken ­directly from Shakespeare, but also in MacKaye’s original dialogue, written predominantly in iambic pentameter). Overall, the spectacular stage effects elicited praise, with one newspaper commenting that “it is largely upon its spectacular merits that ‘Caliban’ must rest its case” (“‘Caliban’ Huge and Impressive” 1916, n.p.). Meanwhile, as mentioned above, the masque’s spoken dialogue came under criticism, not least because it could not be heard clearly in the large outdoor space. As Mantle sarcastically commented, To strain the ear to hear what it is Lorenzo is saying to Jessica, to expect the familiar verse and to hear coming ever so faintly across the yellow sands some such Shakespearean message as: “Blah, blah-r-r-r-moonlightsleeps-blah, Here, blahblah-the-sounds-blah-sic, Jessica.” is to have one’s ascending interest in the proceedings rudely interrupted. Better, we should say, the pictures alone unmarred by hoarse speech (Mantle 1916, n.p.).

Clearly, poetic drama does not really work in a huge outdoor arena with no amplification systems. Mantle’s criticism focuses on a practical aspect of the performance, not its overall concept, which seems to have been consistent with the cutting-edge dramatic developments of the time in its stylized staging and poetic language. Another critic, Simeon Strunsky, presented a more

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9.4.  The masked figure representing War in Caliban. Photo courtesy of Dartmouth College Library.

thoroughgoing condemnation of the modernist methods Caliban employed. Strunsky wrote his article in the form of an ironic dialogue between Caliban and the Printer’s Devil, which he entitled “CALIBAN and the Yellow Press: An Interlude” (Strunsky 1916, 3). In the opening exchanges, the Printer’s Devil enquires about Community Drama, which Caliban claims to “like … first rate, though it gets rather chilly towards ten o’clock.” Yet when the Printer’s Devil probes him on what exactly he liked about the show, cracks start to appear, as Caliban responds: “Nearly everything. The lights, the music, the dancing, the costumes. The only trouble is finding out what it’s all about.” He seems to find the intermedial components of the show perfectly pleasing, but the overall meaning of the affair eludes him. The Printer’s Devil has the answer to the problem: “Get an electric pocket torch and a copy of the official programme. Unless you prefer to take the afternoon off and read Mr. MacKaye’s text.” His interlocutor, clearly familiar with the ideas of the community theatre, demurs:

340  Monika Smialkowska It seems a pity, after a lot of people have gone to the trouble of creating a new art form with lights and costumes and dance and pantomime and music, to have to bone up on the meaning of it all in a paper covered book or an official programme.

Nevertheless, he is soon forced to admit that he only understood the meaning of the masque’s symbolic lights and dances after the newspapers and the program explained it to him. The Printer’s Devil sums up tersely: So you see that the Community Drama, which we may define as the drama which you can’t hear, includes one essential art which is never mentioned. In addition to the arts of dance, lights, music, costume, and pantomime, there is the art of the Printed Programme. This may be the official programme or it may take the form of preliminary interviews and press-­ notices, the stuff that is technically known as dope. (Strunsky 1916, 3)

Unexpectedly, MacKaye’s “drama of and by the people” emerges here as quite an esoteric, literary form, which has to be explained to the masses through the printed word, particularly the press – the mass medium they understand. This was borne out in the actual production of Caliban, which was accompanied by an extensive printed program and preceded by a wide newspaper campaign, as well as the publication of the full text of the masque, which included MacKaye’s explanations of its meaning, together with a remarkable aside: An interesting American phase of the New York production is the problem of carrying its community meaning to the still polyglot population, so that steps have been taken for the immediate translation of the Masque into Italian, German, and Yiddish. (MacKaye 1916, 152)8

Contrary to the hopes of the community theatre’s advocates, the cutting-edge artistic methods employed in Caliban did not automatically guarantee its participants’ comprehension or community integration. Instead, the entertainment came out as quite an arcane affair, for which expert guidance and interpretation were needed (see figure 9.5). What is also striking is how the masque combined innovative techniques with a nostalgic harking back to and reconstruction of an imaginary past. The community Interludes culminated in a representation of the “antic rites of Merry England” (MacKaye 1916, 109), complete with

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9.5.  Sample pages from the printed program of Caliban by the Yellow Sands, explaining the masque’s action, time, setting, and symbolism. Courtesy of Dartmouth College Library.

such paraphernalia as a Maypole, Morris dancers, and a hobby-horse. These popular pastimes brought back Miranda, who had been carried off by Death and his troop of killjoy Puritans. In this way, the masque rejected the traditional foundations of modern America – thrift and seriousness – in favour of an idealized version of a pre-industrial, rural community life.9 Moreover, such reconstructions of the Elizabethan “golden age” were a common feature of Tercentenary activities across the US (see Smialkowska 2012). As we have already seen, the “Shakespearian ­circus” included an impersonation of “good Queen Bess.” She also a­ ppeared in entertainments in Atlanta (Carroll 1916), Wellesley, Massachusetts (Conant 1916), and the University of North Dakota (Bittinger et al. 1916), as well as being a feature of a masque by Alice Riley, published in The Drama for public use during the Tercentenary (Riley 1915). Overall,

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Elizabethan popular customs such as May Day festivals were seen as a particularly apt way of introducing “the folk-spirit … and communityspirit” (Drama League of America [1916], 12). While seemingly incongruous with the modernist dramatic techniques, this nostalgia for a romanticized Elizabethan era in fact responded to some key early twentieth-century American concerns: as David Glassberg argues, it presented “artistic alternatives to the drabness of modern industrialism and the wanton revelry of commercial amusements, while reinforcing social order and the nation’s Anglo-American identity” (Glassberg 1990, 37).10 In this respect, it was not far removed from the political and aesthetic principles of high modernists such as T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound, principles which John Carey argues were deeply elitist, idealizing an imaginary, pre-industrial, pastoral era, while aiming “to exclude these newly educated (or ‘semi-educated’) readers, and so to preserve the intellectual’s seclusion from the ‘mass’” (Carey 1992, vii). Conclusion This brings us full circle to the debates surrounding the nature and function of art, particularly drama, embodied in the American celebrations of the 1916 Shakespeare Tercentenary. What underlay the astonishingly intermedial and intercultural nature of these celebrations were the attempts to create a theatre that would fulfil multiple – and sometimes conflicting – social and artistic aims. This theatre was expected to adhere to the most exacting aesthetic standards while appealing to the masses; to be artistically controlled yet participatory; unified yet heterogeneous; highbrow yet popular; literary yet spectacular; innovative yet traditional. No wonder that it produced unlikely (even extraordinary) hybrid forms in which Shakespeare rubbed shoulders with Al Jolson, and good Queen Bess risked too close an encounter with a baby elephant. In effect, the Shakespeare Tercentenary encapsulates a unique historical moment when a battle was waged for mass audiences and participants in art and leisure forms defined in equal measure by their aesthetic and social functions. In this respect, the Tercentenary presents a microcosm of complicated intermedial and intercultural transactions, in which established and emerging art forms combine and adapt to one another not only as a result of technological innovations but also in response to competing social and ideological imperatives, particularly those concerning the demarcation of high and popular culture. Eventually, the popular following would be

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decisively won by the movies and the theatre would be removed even further into the domain of the minority, highbrow audiences. For a short time, however, community theatre experiments captured the attention of significant numbers of the American populace, resulting in a fascinating, though by no means harmonious, fusion of high and popular cultural forms. NOTES 1 This research is associated with two research projects: “Locating the Hidden Diaspora: The English in North America in Transatlantic Perspective, 1760–1950,” funded by Arts and Humanities Research Council, and “Shakespeare and the Cultures of Commemoration II: Remembering Shakespeare” (FFI2011/24347), funded by the Spanish Plan Nacional de I+D+I (MICINN-ANEP). 2 In Europe, Romain Rolland and Edward Gordon Craig published pioneering work on the subject between 1903 and 1913 (see Prevots 1990, 59–68). 3 Many of his shorter contributions are included in his volumes, MacKaye 1909 and MacKaye 1912. 4 It is worth noting that, while in The Community Theatre Burleigh advocated the integration of new European immigrants into American society, in the 1920s she was active in white supremacist movements in Virginia. This suggests that the politics of the activists of the community theatre were not always unequivocally democratic and inclusive (see Bair 1999). 5 MacKaye initially proposed “charging admission to about 20,000 or 25,000 of the 50,000 persons who are expected to witness the Masque” (“Park Law Prohibits MacKaye Pay Show” 1916, 1). In the actual event, it seems that all seats had to be paid for, even though the cheapest tickets only cost 25¢. The highest prices came to $50 for a six-seat box. 6 This untitled article appears as a newspaper cutting in Scrapbook: Caliban III, in Papers of MacKaye Family, Rauner Library, Dartmouth College, ML-5 (72), n.p. The scrapbook attributes it to Denver Post, 2 July 1916. Courtesy of Dartmouth College Library. 7 Ibid. 8 I have found no evidence that these translations ever materialized. 9 For corresponding movements aiming at “the restoration of the organic society, the return to an imagined collective artisan life of unalienated labour” (101) in early twentieth-century amateur drama in Britain, see Dobson 2011, 92–108.

344  Monika Smialkowska 10 For extensive discussions of the Tercentenary’s involvement in early twentieth-century debates concerning immigration and American national identity, see Cartelli 1999, 63–83; Kahn 2000; and Smialkowska 2010b.

WORKS CITED Bair, Barbara. 1999. “Remapping the White/Black Body: Sexuality, Nationalism, and Biracial Antimiscegenation in 1920s Virginia.” In Sex, Love, Race: Crossing Boundaries in North American History, ed. Martha Elizabeth Hodes, 399–422. New York: New York University Press. Bittinger, Lyle M., et al. 1916. The Book of Shakespeare, The Playmaker, Written in Collaboration by Twenty Students of The University of North Dakota, Under the Direction of Professor Frederick H. Koch of the Department of English, Designed for the Shakespeare Tercentenary Commemoration by The Sock and Buskin Society, for Presentation at The Bankside Theatre on the Campus of The University of North Dakota. Grand Forks: University of North Dakota. Reprinted from The Quarterly Journal of the University of North Dakota 6.4 (July): 309–64. Blair, Karen J. 1994. The Torchbearers: Women and Their Amateur Arts Associations in America, 1890–1930. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press. Buchanan, Judith. 2009. Shakespeare on Silent Film: An Excellent Dumb Discourse. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Burleigh, Louise. 1917. The Community Theatre in Theory and Practice. Boston: Little, Brown, and Company. “‘Caliban’ Huge and Impressive.” 1916. Newspaper cutting in Scrapbook: Caliban II, in Papers of MacKaye Family, Rauner Library, Dartmouth College, ML-5 (71), n.p., attributed in the scrapbook to Tribune, 25 May. Courtesy of Dartmouth College Library. Carey, John. 1992. The Intellectuals and the Masses: Pride and Prejudice among the Literary Intelligentsia, 1880–1939. London: Faber and Faber. Carroll, Armond. 1916. A Pageant and Masque for the Shakespeare Tercentenary. Atlanta: Atlanta Center, Drama League of America. Cartelli, Thomas. 1999. Repositioning Shakespeare: National Formations, Postcolonial Appropriations. London: Routledge. Conant, Isabelle Fiske. 1916. Will o’ the World: A Shakespearean Tercentenary Masque. Wellesley, MA.: Mangus Printing. Davies, Maitland. “Topics in Stageland.” 1916. Newspaper cutting in Scrapbook: Caliban III, in Papers of MacKaye Family, Rauner Library, Dartmouth College, ML-5 (72), n.p., attributed in the scrapbook to Los Angeles Tribune, 4 June. Courtesy of Dartmouth College Library.

Patchwork Shakespeare: The American Tercentenary  345 Dobson, Michael. 2011. Shakespeare and Amateur Performance: A Cultural History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Drama League of America. 1911. Proceedings of the First Annual Convention of the Drama League of America, January 1911. Chicago: Drama League of America. Reprinted from The Evanston Index. Drama League of America. 1912. Report of the Second Annual Convention, Chicago April 22 to 25, 1912. Chicago: Drama League of America. Drama League of America. [1916]. The Shakespeare Tercentenary: Suggestions for School and College Celebrations of the Tercentenary of Shakespeare’s Death in 1916. Ed. Percival Chubb. Washington, DC: National Capital Press. “Elephant Scares Shakespeare Girls.” 1916. New York Times, 6 May, 11. Glassberg, David. 1990. American Historical Pageantry: The Uses of Tradition in the Early Twentieth Century. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. “Heed Cry against Masque in the Park.” 1916. New York Times, 15 January, 1 and 18. Kahn, Coppélia. 2000. “Caliban at the Stadium: Shakespeare and the Making of Americans.” Massachusetts Review 41.2: 256–84. Kahn, Otto. 1916. Art and the People. New York: New York City Shakespeare Tercentenary Celebration Committee. Levine, Lawrence W. 1988. Highbrow/Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. MacKaye, Percy. 1909. The Playhouse and The Play, and Other Addresses Concerning the Theatre and Democracy in America. New York: Macmillan. – 1912. The Civic Theatre: In Relation to the Redemption of Leisure, A Book of Suggestions. New York and London: Mitchell Kennerley. – 1916. Caliban by the Yellow Sands. Garden City and New York: Doubleday, Page and Company. – 1917. “Prefatory Letter.” In Burleigh 1917, ix–xviii. Mantle, Burns. 1916. “‘Caliban by the Yellow Sands’ a Masque of Pictorial Beauty.” Newspaper cutting in Scrapbook: Caliban II, in Papers of MacKaye Family, Rauner Library, Dartmouth College, ML-5 (71), n.p., attributed in the scrapbook to Evening Mail, 25 May. Courtesy of Dartmouth College Library. Murphy, Andrew. 2008. Shakespeare for the People: Working-Class Readers, 1800–1900. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. “No Masque in the Park.” 1916. New York Times, 14 January, 8. “Park Invasion Not Agreed to Yet.” 1916. New York Times, 12 January, 1 and 10. “Park Law Prohibits MacKaye Pay Show.” 1916. New York Times, 13 January, 1 and 9.

346  Monika Smialkowska Periwinkle, Pauline. 1916. “Tercentenary of Death of Shakespeare in April.” Dallas Morning News, 3 April, 13. Prevots, Naima. 1990. American Pageantry: A Movement for Art and Democracy. Ann Arbor and London: UMI Research Press. Program of the Community Masque Caliban by the Yellow Sands, by Percy MacKaye. 1916. New York: Shakespeare Tercentenary Celebration Committee. “Rallying about Shakespeare. Plans to Unite All New York in Tercentenary Celebration.” 1916. Newspaper cutting in Scrapbook: Caliban II, in Papers of MacKaye Family, Rauner Library, Dartmouth College, ML-5 (71), n.p., attributed in the scrapbook to New York Post, 4 March. Courtesy of Dartmouth College Library. Riley, Alice C.D. 1915. The Lover’s Garden: A Flower Masque, Arranged from Shakespeare for the Tercentenary. In The Drama 20 (November): 695–714. Roberts, Mary Fanton. 1916. “Shakespeare – The Man of Wisdom: Our National Celebration in His Honor.” The Craftsman 29.2 (January): 347–63. “Shakespeare in a Circus.” 1916. New York Times, 31 March, 9. “Sisters Shine on Two Stages.” 1916. Philadelphia Inquirer, 13 February, 11. Smialkowska, Monika. 2010a. “‘A Democratic Art at a Democratic Price’: American Celebrations of the Shakespeare Tercentenary, 1916.” Transatlantica 2010.1: n.p. http://transatlantica.revues.org/4787. – 2010b. “Shakespeare and ‘Native Americans’: Forging Identities through the 1916 Shakespeare Tercentenary.” Critical Survey 22.2: 76–90. – 2012. “An Englishman in New York? Celebrating Shakespeare in America, 1916.” In Locating the English Diaspora, 1500–2010, ed. Tanja Bueltmann, David T. Gleeson, and Donald M. MacRaild, 205–21. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press. Strunsky, Simeon. 1916. “Post: Impressions.” New York Evening Post Saturday Magazine, 3 June, 3. Cutting posted in Scrapbook: Caliban III, in Papers of MacKaye Family, Rauner Library, Dartmouth College, ML-5 (72). Courtesy of Dartmouth College Library. Taylor, Gary. 1990. Reinventing Shakespeare: A Cultural History from the Restoration to the Present. London: Hogarth Press. “To Commemorate Shakespeare.” 1916. Dallas Morning News, 2 April, 5. “Wanted – An Elephant.” 1916. New York Times, 9 April, X7.

Upcycling Shakespeare: Crafting Cultural Capital S u jata I yen g a r

“Shakespeare” offers a liminal, intermedial space between branded, profit-generating, mass-market industry and independent, financially threatened, idiosyncratic cultural production. On the one hand, Shakespeare represents a multimillion-dollar business, concentrated in particular sites of cultural capital on both sides of the Atlantic such as Stratford-on-Avon, the London Globe, the Royal Shakespeare Company, and the Shakespeare Festivals of Stratford, Ontario, and Ashland, Oregon, and in college and school classrooms.1 On the other, there is no one “authentic” Shakespeare text, as Stephen Orgel (2002) and others have argued, no definitive “script” for the plays or poems, which are in any case off-copyright and freely available in multiple versions on- and off-line. Shakespeare’s life and biography remain comparatively mysterious, hence the proliferation of Shakespearean lives and the persistence of the anti-Stratfordian or anti-Shakespeare movement (the stubborn belief that despite the overwhelming documentary and material evidence, the glover’s son from Stratford-on-Avon called William Shakespeare could not have written the plays attributed to him). Adaptations of all kinds flourish, in multiple media and genres – film, dance, opera, chamber music, novel, television drama, and so on. So rich is Shakespeare as a source of cultural production that at least one scholarly journal is devoted predominantly to the analysis of performances of Shakespearean plays on stage and on film (Shakespeare Bulletin), one concentrates solely upon appropriations of Shakespeare (Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation), and the other major critical venues d ­ evote special issues or sections to Shakespeare in performance at least once a year (Shakespeare Quarterly, Shakespeare Survey, Shakespeare Newsletter). In

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counterpoint, Shakespeare studies has for the past fifty years at least devoted itself to removing Shakespeare from the heart of the study of early modern society and returning him to his place in the wide field of early modern cultural production – among other playwrights, such as Thomas Middleton or John Fletcher or Christopher Marlowe; among booksellers, publishers, and printers, such as Nathaniel Butter or Thomas Thorpe or Valentine Simmes; among scribes and actors, such as Ralph Crane or Will Kempe – and in seeing the plays as collaborative creations. It is ironic, then, that both high and low cultural adaptations of “Shakespeare” might appear to reauthorize the playwright by using Shakespearean texts and stories as the starting points for new works.2 But I want to argue for the opposite – that the ambiguity within the Shakespeare brand (the fact that it’s not really a “brand” at all) does not restrict the meanings of “Shakespeare” but instead allows Shakespeare to function as a creative space for artisans and artists (among whom, I will suggest, we can include critics and scholars). In Ourspace, Christine Harold (2007) argues that postmodern pranks, “hoaxes,” and appropriations of iconic brands and advertisements (such as those featured in the alternative magazine Adbusters) ultimately support rather than demolish the profiteering enterprises they parody. She suggests, however, that a solution to the increasing corporate domination of creative enterprises might be to bypass established cultural products and brands altogether, and instead to use to the utmost newer technologies and fora such as Creative Commons to produce an art that is more independent from entrenched business interests (Harold 2007).3 In what follows, I identify what I am calling a “Shakescrafting” movement and suggest, first, that the intermedial status of the brand “Shakespeare” enables both academic knowledge workers and artisans or crafters to create original work or products that they market themselves directly to consumers, so that “Shakespeare” serves simultaneously as iconic and established destination and publicly available, common land.4 Second, I investigate Shakescrafts derived from Shakespearean text (i.e., inspired by Shakespeare stories or quoting Shakespearean words or fabricated from printed Shakespeare editions). I should add at the outset that I am not interested in uncovering the motives, knowledges, or social standing of Shakespearean crafters, although such an endeavour would be worthwhile. Rather, I am interested in Shakespeare as author-function in bound, printed books in an era of changing media literacies: an intermediated Shakespeare. I am here using Christina Ljungberg’s helpful and pithy of summary of intermediality as “what

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happens when various sign systems interact” (2010, 84) in order to explore the limits of what Linda Hutcheon, and Siobhan O’Flynn, in her epilogue to the second edition of Hutcheon’s A Theory of Adaptation, understand as adaptation: “a transcoding process that encompasses recreations, remakes, remediations, revisions, parodies, reinventions, reinterpretations, expansions, and extensions” (O’Flynn 2012, 181). Obsolete or remaindered Shakespeare editions, I conclude, like the cultural artefact of “Shakespeare” itself, serve as both adaptation and appropriation, as both commerce and critique. On the one hand these codices exist as waste matter ready to be rescued from a recycling bin by a canny crypto-capitalist crafter, and on the other, in the world of fine arts and “altered books,” they survive as high-cultural, high-concept emblems of the gradual process through which the reading of long-form texts, particularly in the form of bound and ordered bundles of paper sheets, is becoming a residual activity, a marker of archaic, high, or elite culture. Crafting, Culture, and Capital Richard Sennett’s The Craftsman (2009) (which itself appropriates a line from Shakespeare’s Coriolanus, “I am my own maker,” for its epigraph) includes the writing of code as “craft,” along with brick making, building, and any other job undertaken with a spirit of doing it well “for its own sake,” learning how to complete a process or a made object thoroughly and perfectly. He rereads the grand ideals of the Enlightenment as triumphs of artisanal knowledge. Working with and against thinkers as diverse as Kant, Wittgenstein, Diderot, Arendt, and Engels, Sennett argues that it is through this crafted making – objects, texts, code – ­especially with the hand, that thinking can take place. Competence and engagement characterize these thoughtful processes, which are far from antique; Sennett extends modern craftsmanship to computer programmers, physicians, parents, and, ultimately, to all citizens in a democracy. He defines this universal and ethical craftwork through the craftsman’s ability to take instruction, to work in a team, to enter a flow state, and to allow the authority of the flesh rather than the rule of law or of print. Craft here is democratic: everyone has the power to be a good craftsman. In a narrower but still useful volume, Glen Adamson (2007) distinguishes between craft and art by attributing to craft the following qualities: supplementarity, sensuality, skill, the pastoral, and the amateur.

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Craft is supplementary in a Derridean sense, argues Adamson, because one needs craft or skill with material objects (including with one’s body, in performance) to make art, but art rejects the material world (an argument he develops from Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory and its notion of immanence or the intrinsic meaning or value of the art-object). Craft functions as a supplement to Art or to the artwork in that the materiality of the object (its thingness) draws attention to the process of its making as well as the product that ensues. The crafted work is sensual in the features that deploy specific qualities of the material used (the kind of wood used for a Stradivarius violin; the “grain” of the paper in an eightfold “origami” handmade book). The crafted work demonstrates (through the combination of its supplementarity and its sensuality or use of materials) skills that are very specific to its manufacture (the twisting of wire, the cleaving of wood, the mixing of pigments). Craft evokes the pastoral through an imagined world of unalienated labour (where the worker owns the means of production and the process of manufacture or recycling or upcycling) and through nostalgia or belatedness. Finally, observes Adamson, the crafting process is performed by an amateur, not a professional, engaged in it for love rather than for money (even if the end result of that loving process is an object that can be sold for gain). The qualities of craft identified by Sennett (2009) and by Adamson (2007) – an engagement with the world even as one turns away from it, an emphasis on materials, a pride in the process of fabrication, a nostalgia for an imagined, idealized past in which one worked for love rather than for money, and a delight in a completed object or system – characterize the “online craft fair and art show,” the for-profit but professedly “green” or sustainable market Etsy.com. New York Times journalist and author Rob Walker first identified the growing financial and social clout of the crafting movement after the social networking revolution in “Handmade 2.0.” Etsy.com allows crafters to set up online storefronts and “to sell work that they have made” (Walker 2007). Online storefronts created the reduction or removal of overheads, an instant, constant, wide and global audience, and the ability for artists and crafters to market their work anonymously, thus removing many of the barriers (financial and psychological) preventing such sellers from previously entering the marketplace. In 2007, when Walker first discussed the phenomenon, “more than 70,000 [sellers] – about 90 percent of whom were women – were using Etsy to peddle their jewelry, art, toys, clothes, dishware, stationery, zines and a variety of objects from the mundane

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to the highly idiosyncratic.” Etsy advocates “Craftivism” and localism (organizing crafting classes in real time and real space as well as online; urging members to support the “Handmade Pledge” against the exploitation of factory workers and against unethical mass production) even as it exploits the latest business news and markets (training members to develop their own websites and to become financially literate). Walker found that Etsy crafters are mostly women in their mid-thirties. Many of them have been laid off from more traditional forms of employment, or have chosen to integrate artistic endeavour into their daily, working lives rather than relegate their crafting to the status of a “hobby” or a pastime. They therefore note that “‘If [they] can’t have a job where [they] make enough money … then this movement isn’t sustainable’” (anonymous, quoted in Walker 2007). The site continues to thrive, even with the downturn in the global economy. In June 2010, Etsy shifted $22.1 million worth of items, “a 71% increase from 2009’s total” and a 54% increase in the number of objects sold (Etsy.com 2010). The qualities of nostalgia and the pastoral associate crafting with Heidegger’s ecological world-view in “The Thing.” A long-standing tradition from Husserl and Heidegger to Bill Brown and Matt Crawford focuses upon objects, items, things, materia, in literature and in the world. Husserl (1965) had suggested that subjects (human beings) constitute objects as a group of ideas or functions. Heidegger argued that, while an “object” exists only in regard to the subject who uses it, an “object” becomes a “thing” when it stops being purely functional (when it stops working, or when we become aware of its status as a “made” object) (1975, 167).5 In his example, a jug is not only a “container” for water or for air or any other fluid but in its “thingness” represents a “gathering” or accretion of the acts of containing, of holding, of pouring out libations and thus of uniting “earth and sky,” “divinities and mortals,” the most elemental gifts of the earth (169–70). Linguistically, he argues, “thing” (Ding) means “gathering,” the experiential gathering or collection of the meaning of the object (in this case, the jug) and its action in a single “space-time.” And yet, paradoxically, “Only what conjoins itself out of world becomes a thing”: the thing (in order to be a thing) participates (“conjoins”) in a fundamental unity of history, experience, topography, and so on, and yet when it manifests its quiddity, its thing-i-tude, it separates itself “out of world” by drawing itself to our attention (182). Bill Brown deploys the “object/thing dialectic” in his manifesto for “Thing Theory” in order to comment upon the culture of things” rather

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than “the nature of things,” especially their “belatedness” and historicity. “[T]he thing seems to name the object just as it is even as it names something else” (Brown 2001, 5). Brown’s 1998 analysis of Claes Oldenburg’s massive sculptures of objects (in particular, the typewriter eraser in the Sculpture Garden of the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC) identifies artistic production and labour history (the history of office work and typewriting, the obsolescence of tools, the reconfiguring of that historical tool as an artwork in order to draw attention to its now-antiquated functionality and to changing media for both communication and art) as the “thingness” of a thing, and “thing theory” as the “joking” term to describe an attempt to understand how material and especially made objects alter human beings. In literature, objects become “things” by virtue of the attention paid to them within the text: “Literature might … serve as a mode of rehabilitative reification – a resignifying of the fixations and fixities of thing-ification that will grant us access to what remains obscure (or obscured) in the routines through which we (fail to) experience the material object world” (Brown 1998, 937). Literature in this model turns objects into things not for capitalist or Marxist “reification” (the separation of use-value from exchange-value and of both consumer and maker from owning the means of production, the rendering invisible of labour) but to illuminate qualities of design, history, social significance, and function that we might miss when using the object in the real world. We might want to add that literature in this model “things” things by reminding us that such objects both transmit meaning and extend the senses of the body through space in time: in other words, these objects themselves are interpellated as media, “extensions of the self,” in McLuhan’s well-known phrase. We could further suggest that thinged objects in literature display all four of Jens Schröter’s types of intermediality: synthetic, formal or transmedial, transformational, and ontological. Schröter does not discuss thing theory or objects in literature, but his fourfold system is immediately helpful in this context, and parallels the discussions of Hutcheon and others about adaptation as well as Lars Elleström’s own fourfold system to define and characterize the four “modalities” of media, namely that media are “material, sensorial, spatiotemporal and semiotic” (Hutcheon, A Theory of Adaptation, 2006 and 2013; Elleström 2010, 11). (1) Thinged things display a “synthetic intermediality” (in which objects move from being “life media” to “art media” through their very representation in art [Schröter 2012, 18–19]), and we shuttle between their two aspects just as, as Hutcheon suggests

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of adaptation, we “oscillate” mentally between source text and adapted text (Hutcheon 2013; 121, 172; Desmet and Iyengar 2009, 245–8). (2) Literature presents such objects to the reader or viewer through transmedial, formal approaches that are only, Schröter suggests, comprehensible in retrospect, when we consider the literary history of an art form, formal approaches such as “fictionality, rhythmicity, compositional strategies … [or] seriality” (Schröter 2012, 22). (3) Quiddity or thingness in literature enacts a “transformational intermediality,” in which one medium represents another in order not only to theorize or critique one medium through another but also to estrange us from the quotidian (an instance where Schröter’s taxonomy most clearly parallels Brown’s) (4). Finally, Schröter deploys Saussurean linguistics in order to argue that we define media through what they are not in order to create new subdivisions and subtypes of media. “Shakespeare in performance” meant Shakespeare on stage until the advent of cinema; “Shakespeare on screen” meant Shakespeare on cinema until the advent of television; “Shakespeare on the small screen” meant Shakespeare on television until the appearance of mobile media; and “Mobile Shakespeare” will soon need to be subdivided further once wearable computing and geolocative technologies become ubiquitous. Similarly, objects in literature are thingly because of the information we don’t have about the rest of their imagined world or the qualities of the thinged objects that we don’t see. Shakesthings But if literature can re-thing things through what Brown calls “rehabilitative reification,” what happens when crafters thing literature, both the raw information or story or fabula and the mediated matter that disseminates it, most often the paper of printed books? Schröter in fact (following Seymour Chatman) singles out “fabula” as one of the “transmedial” or formal characteristics that can alert us to an intermedial object (Chatman, quoted in Schröter 2012, 22), and Shakespeare as brand or anti-brand is medium: it transmits literature, distilled. Its dual status as supreme signifier of Western culture and ubiquitous global sourcematerial to be exploited by popular culture allows it to provide the intellectual or artistic content for anti-branded or personal marketing, especially in contexts where craft self-consciously markets itself as anti-branded, handmade, and personally liberating to both artists and consumers. What we find in Shakespeare-themed crafts (Shakescrafts)

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bears out Adamson, Brown, and Sennett through an emphasis on nostalgia, and vintage technologies and techniques (belatedness, sensuality, the antique and rural past, and the amateur); on “natural” or recycled or sustainable processes (the pastoral, the sensual, the supplementary), and on an idealized historical femininity (both in the adopted personae of sellers and in the Shakescrafts they sell). Crafters market Shakespearenamed or -themed products (makeup, shoes, jewellery, baby clothes, hand-dyed yarn, overprinted decorative pages from old Shakespeare editions, “papercraft,” screen-prints, photographs, hand-painted fabric, wedding invitations, self-published and -produced young adult literature, candles, “gewgaws and regalia,” and so on) as handmade or crafted or local, both on small crafting sites and catalogues and on large social networking sites such as Facebook. Shakescrafted jewellery might be named after and intended to evoke characters from Shakespeare’s plays and Shakespeare’s own life, such as idolceremony’s “Dark Lady” earrings, “Charcoal glass and black pearl accented with silver” (in which the colour and rarity of the materials mimic the mystery associated with the personages of the sonnets).6 Screen-printed fabrics or scarves include the nostalgic garments on sale as found objects from Ophelia’s Attic, and hand-dyed yarn is sold in colours, patterns, and textures thought to characterize persons from the plays, such as creaturecomforts’s silk roving hand-dyed “black and green [to] represent the malice and envy of Shakespeare’s Iago, the colors separated by stretches of natural color” (“Iago”). When Shakespeare criticism (Shakescrit) overlaps with (or is framed by) Shakescraft in many of the descriptions and backstories given to items associated with Shakespearean characters, we can more confidently call them intermedial adaptations, intermedial in formal terms. Idolceremony and creaturecomforts demonstrate a familiarity with Shakespeare’s works and even with critical debates surrounding them, making their work clearly “adaptation” in Hutcheon’s and O’Flynn’s sense; O’Flynn argues that we should consider fan-generated content, existing across multiple platforms with a coherent narrative, as “transmedia” adaptation, because it presupposes a consistent imaginary universe (O’Flynn 2013, 206). Other crafters, I will later suggest, seem to have little or no knowledge or interest in the words from which their works derive, and these crafters take over or appropriate “Shakespeare” as a signifier of literacy, nostalgia, and romance, rather than adapting Shakespeare’s words as part of a fantasized and coherent Shakespeareworld. “The Dark Lady” earrings can be so named only by someone

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familiar with biographical interpretations of Shakespeare’s sonnets that identify a “fair youth,” a “Dark Lady,” and a “rival poet” as characters within a sequence of poems that tell a story. The hand-dyed yarns of self-described “Shakespeare fanatic” creaturecomforts provide an outlet for character studies of the people of the plays, indeed, for an entire theory of character (this would be the kind of “formal or transmedial intermediality” that Schröter observes we can only note retroactively). The “Iago,” “Desdemona,” and “Othello” yarns are dyed in deliberately complementary colours, as if choosing yarn is like casting a play, and as if plays are woven out of interiority or character just as clothing is knitted from yarn (creaturecomforts). Desdemona’s is “rosy pink and spring green” because of her “innocence and naïveté,” while Othello’s yarn is hand-dyed in “black and burgundy, dark colors to represent the troubled Moor” (creaturecomforts “Desdemona”; creature­ comforts “Othello”). The Animated Shakespeare used a similar palette for the flickering cels of its own Othello, as do Michael Foreman’s watercolour illustrations for Leon Garfield’s young adult Shakespeare adaptations, Tales from Shakespeare. Celia, “the lesser known heroine of As You Like It … [t]he more frivolous of the two young women” gets “green, gold and rosy pink … brighter, fun colors” (creaturecomforts “Celia”). Character here literally embodies the play, to such an extent that a line called “star-crossed” that is inspired by Shakespeare’s tragic lovers (in particular, by Othello and Desdemona) includes strands of “black … and burgundy” but also a “natural” strand, as if to present an alternative future for the imaginary lovers in which skin colour (in the case of Othello) or vendetta (in the case of Romeo and Juliet) does not disable the lovers’ future (creaturecomforts “Othello”; creaturecomforts “Desdemona”). The descriptions of yarn also provide capsule summaries of the plays’ characters and action, so that a purchaser can feel that she is acquiring a cultural product as well as a handcrafted one and a seller can feel that she is combining instruction and art in a Horatian or Sidneian demonstration of the art of poetry. Particular Shakespearean names or characters demonstrate the ambiguity of the Shakespeare brand and its raw material aptly. Seller names, store names and product names of Shakescrafted products that use the name of Hamlet’s tragic heroine Ophelia, for example, either exploit the so-called Ophelia Complex – the triad of feminine beauty, sudden death, and water – or resist traditional Shakespeare branding by figuring Ophelia in opposition to conventional or ladylike behaviour and affect.7 Both sets of Ophelias deliberately evoke a nostalgia associated

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with natural objects, found objects, recycled objects, and the pastoral world, such as gracestudiosart’s “Ophelia necklace,” the design of which incorporates copper “violets,” chalk pastel, and a miniature, handmade book. These gentle or genteel Ophelias often redefine the notion of purity to transcend the sexual virginity discussed at length in Shakespeare’s play and instead to evoke unadulterated, natural ingredients and a transparent manufacturing process for cosmetics and clothing. Featherheartflower tags “Ophelia’s Orange blossom lotion” as “paraben free” and “natural,” while Ophelia’s Apothecary (present both on the online social network Facebook and on Etsy) prides itself on freedom from parabens and sulphates, and on its hand-blended ­cosmetics. Many of the Ophelia-named sellers advertise their cosmetics as “cruelty-free” or “vegan,” along with an assertion of their “green” or sustainable credentials; the “headdresses” in OpheliazGarden are “handmade from cruelty-free, professionally sterilized feathers.” These Shakecrafts imply that the Ophelia complex can be redemptive, as if by dying in the river Ophelia returned to the natural world and became an immutable part of it, returning to the pastoral world of craft rather than the artificial (in its Renaissance sense) world of the court, or to the world of Heidegger’s things that contain and evoke the elemental, ecological gifts of the earth. This redemptive movement differs from what Jay Bolter and David Grusin (2000) have termed “remediation,” because sellers alter, adapt, and remedy events from Shakespeare’s plays through creative and ­simultaneously curative appropriations of the story or words.8 We might prefer to call this redemptive crafting a therapeutic intermediation, since crafters transform the plays not just into other media than print or live performance, but into discrete, consumable commodities that lack the physical affordances we might seek in a remediation, while they simultaneously retain the background and associations of Shakespeare’s play. Ophelia herself, in a nod both to Lisa Klein’s popular young adult novel of the same name and to Mary Pipher’s bestselling social science volume about teenage girlhood, Reviving Ophelia, is remediated both in shop names such as OpheliazGarden and in the repeated emphasis of crafters upon the “natural” and “recycled” or “upcycled” objects they sell.9 Crafted Ophelia-stores are multimodal, multi-platform intermedial appropriations of “Shakespeare’s Hamlet,” however, rather than adaptations of Hamlet. What I mean by this is that the text (or any of the printed texts, for that matter) of Hamlet is nowhere to be found

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in  OpheliazGarden’s sterilized feathers or Ophelia’s Apothecary’s cruelty-­free cosmetics. The online shop Ophelia’s Treasures might or might not refer back to the text itself; it announces that it is a “­mother/ daughter team” making bead-and-wire jewellery and “papercraft,” simultaneously reconstructing an imagined maternal relationship for Shakespeare’s motherless Ophelia, remedying Ophelia’s relationship with Gertrude, who had hoped to be her mother-in-law, and intermediating the imagined, textual “Treasures” given from Hamlet to Ophelia in the play and then returned to him by Ophelia in the “Nunnery” scene into beautiful objects made by Ophelia herself – and by her revived mother. Text turns into transmedial (bead-and-wire) treasure, but whether or not these intermedial objects are also adaptations here depends upon the knowledge and self-consciousness of the purchaser. Jewelled Shakesthings engage in a kind of “synthetic intermediality” (Schröter 2012, 20): they register as intermedial only when we pause to consider the Shakespearean back-story, but as we do so, we create a new kind of medium or art form. Remediating, Demediating, and Intermediating Shakespeare: Paper-, Type-, and Book-craft Perhaps it would be more accurate to identify what is done to Shakespeare as “upcycling” rather than as remediation. In “upcycling,” a term coined by William McDonough and Michael Braungart, sources that would otherwise be of little worth are crafted into items of greater financial or environmental value rather than “downcycled” into things that are worth less than the original objects, as in traditional recycling. For McDonough and Braungart, upcycling is no less than the complete rethinking and redesign of all the made objects in the world. Even an object as seemingly benign and recyclable as a book must be redesigned, since both conventional paper and recycled paper leach chlorine into the air we breathe; the plasticized covers of paperbacks remain stubbornly in landfill for decades. McDonough and Braungart’s book, therefore, “is not a tree,” but instead “a technical nutrient … plastic resin and inorganic filler … a product that can be broken down and circulated infinitely in industrial cycles, made and remade as ‘paper’ or other products” (2002, 5). Upcycled Shakespeare is often demediated rather than remediated, to borrow Garrett Stewart’s coinage (2011) the crafter transfers printed texts from one medium to another but in and through the process

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renders the matter within the book illegible, or at least unreadable as text (though it is still, as Stewart demonstrates, available for analysis as culture-object). Such demediations, Stewart adds, may reify the book as a thing at several levels, for example by building a library (a repository for books, which are themselves repositories for words) out of bound volumes previously censored or prohibited (thus re-enacting the process by which the words in the books were rendered illegible). This at-once cheeky and reverential appropriation of the book as a thing that stores words (which are, arguably, themselves repositories for the thingness or quiddity of their referents) is particularly evident in  crafters’ networks through the Shakespeare-themed paper-crafts, which range from jewellery, home decoration, and handmade notepaper to personalized greeting cards. Consider bookity’s votive holder “made using a real page from Romeo and Juliet, taken from a vintage compendium of Shakespeare. The paper is pale gold from age and gives out a gentle golden glow as the candle burns.” The description of the “Romeo and Juliet tealight” begins with the well-known lines from Romeo and Juliet, “soft, what light from yonder window breaks?/It is the East, and Juliet is the sun.” The text on the candle-holder is demediated, rendered unreadable as play-text by its being glued to a glass container and also by the backlighting from the lit candle that makes the printing on the opposite side of the page overlie the first. The Shakespearean quotation is relevant only because it refers to a light-source, and the product is a light-source, too, archaic in both content (a candle) and form (it is made from a cheap nineteenth-century edition of Shakespeare). The print pages used show act and scenes 2.4 and 2.5, not 2.2, the so-called balcony scene in which the famous lines appear. The yellowing of cheap, acidic, wood-pulp paper becomes the “pale gold [of] age,” a semantic and commercial appropriation (yellow to gold, trash to treasure). Any old edition of any old literary author that described any old or natural kind of light-source might serve the same function: Shakespeare as author is fully demediated even as the author-function remains culturally legible. We can take this Shakesthing through Schröter’s four kinds of intermediality. It’s synthetic, because it literally glues a print medium to a “life medium,” the glass tea-light. It’s formal or transmedial, because it takes on the deep structure of the play in associating love with illumination; cleverly, it is, as Schröter requires, “media-specific enough in order to still be able to point in its new media context to the medium from which it was borrowed, or from which it originates” (2012, 24–5), alluding to the

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10.1  Romeo and Juliet votive holder. Bookity.etsy.com

historical material artefact of the candle and to the metaphorical world of the play. It’s transformational, because it presents and comments upon the medium of the printed book through the medium of the candle, formerly used to light readers but now only used for ambience: books, and Shakespeare, like candles, are archaic. And finally, it’s ontologically intermedial, reproducing the balcony scene through not reproducing the balcony scene. Or take PaperAffection’s “Shakespeare hair flower bobby pin.” The seller tells us that the pages used for the flower’s petals were “upcycled from the Folger Library edition of King Lear – which was destined for the recycling bin” and describes the colourful contrast between the “browning petals of this old tome” and “crisp white paper” (PaperAffection). The Folger Library editions are relatively new, from a series developed in the early aughties, and certainly not “tomes,” being bound in lightweight paper covers and running to 200–300 pages. What the crafter sells here is the aura of antiquity or rarity or exclusivity surrounding “Shakespeare.” The aptly named ddeforest offers a  kind of mise-en-abime of paper-cycling, selling “bundles” of pages (also from an old edition of Romeo and Juliet) expressly intended for

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further papercraft. Papercrafters emphasize the obsolescence of paper media and rapidly outdating communications technologies such as the postal system. 42things develops bookmarks made from “vintage” stamps and “a discarded poetry book” containing lines from Antony and Cleopatra (it is unclear whether the book was an edition of the play or an anthology of well-known extracts from Shakespeare). Crafters freely appropriate Shakespearean tags or quotations in different print media. Often these are clearly appropriations, not adaptations in my sense; that is to say that although they often use words from Shakespeare, the words themselves in Shakespearean context are often irrelevant or even at cross-purposes to what is being communicated, namely literacy, nostalgia, and beauty. Hoolala comments on a Shakespeare brooch printed with “A Plague on all your houses” that “this might not be the original quote Shakespeare wrote but I am sure you understand [the] meaning,” and EverythingELB markets a glass pendant with text from the comic Pyramus and Thisbe interlude in Midsummer Night’s Dream as straightforwardly romantic, with no sense of the source’s parody. Bouncingballcreation takes appropriation a step further in a Taming of the Shrew pencil set in which pages from the play have been handwrapped around pencils that, the seller carefully notes, have been “sharpened” ready for use. Instead of the pencil being used to annotate the play, the play is being used to annotate the pencil. In its invention of a post- or meta-Shakespearean world and characters, and its free intermediation of Shakespeare’s words, Shakescraft overlaps with “Steampunk” and other “alternative history” movements that seek to integrate modern or postmodern or postcapitalist technologies (internet store-fronts; virtual worlds; Kindles and Cloudcentred computing) with crafted containers, clothing, and cosmetics, another tenet of upcycling (in which “biological nutrients” and “technical nutrients” are to be kept apart from each other but both serve vital functions in the human world) (McDonough and Braungart 2002, 92– 117). Some crafters also use “upcycling” to refer to the revaluation of vintage clothing or antiquated technology and processes. Such crafters upcycle Shakespeare in order both to evoke what it offers as text and performance and to rediscover the pre-industrial processes and crafts of the imagined Shakespearean world. Some upcycled items only partially demediate Shakespearean texts, such as the overprintings of single pages taken from nineteenth-­ century editions of Shakespeare by the Steampunk artist SteamBathFactory. SteamBathFactory parodies the language of present-day

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antiquarian booksellers and early modern cabinets of curiosities: “Introducing a rare curiosity. One vintage anatomical heart printed on one 1877 antique page from Will Shakespeare’s Hamlet” (SteamBath­Factory n.d.). History and craft have “thinged” the printed page as well as the matter upon it, or rather, the matter or information transmitted has changed its meaning: Shakespeare is both “antique” and “vintage,” and is here given a printed heart transplant for a “second life” as art rather than literature, “very chichi” both materially and intellectually. It is theoretically possible to read the lines from Hamlet underneath the overprinted heart, but there is no suggestion in the description that the image of the heart is particularly relevant to the extract from Hamlet in a metacritical or intertextual way. Not only Shakespeare but also the technologies of printing and the medium of the book itself now participate in craft. It would be hard to call this artefact an adaptation of Shakespeare, because it does not tell a coherent story across multiple platforms, as O’Flynn suggests that fan-generated transmedial adaptations do. Rather, it appropriates Shakespeare in the service of adapting or transmediating book- and print- craft. Perhaps we could say, remembering Schröter’s comment that we are driven to describe “ontological intermediation” through metaphors taken from other media, that it resonates at the frequency of Shakespeare. YourKeepsakeCo offers multiple remediations or rather intermediations of the Shakespearean sonnet, suggesting as a present for newlyweds a glossy black-and-white photographic print of a typewriter with the sonnet or other poem of one’s choice typed on a sheet of paper loaded into the machine, as if a human being had just typed it on the machine, even down to the bar that covers up a line of the poem. Tagged “vintage” and “personalized,” the description omits to mention that the sonnet is placed on the sheet in the typewriter through Photoshop or another photo editing program, rather than manually typed on the vintage machine and then photographed by the artist. We can take such an image through Schröter’s four categories of intermediality once more. At first glance, the computer-enhanced photograph of the typewriter produces a synthetic intermediality, a new art-object that extends the “life medium” of the wedding gift (across space and time, so that the lovers have existed as a couple for four hundred years) and the “art medium” of the wedding photograph (which is itself an extension of a life medium in its capacity as a supplement to human memory). The typewriter photograph shares and draws attention to the formal or transmedial intermediality of the verse line as a unit of composition in

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both poetry and manual typing, since the paper bail demediates the sonnet by covering up the text behind it; it additionally draws attention to the obsolescence of typewriting as medium. The image is trans­ formationally intermedial, as it estranges us from the archaic media it represents (not only the typewriter but also the silver nitrate, blackand-white photograph) by drawing attention to the limitations or constraints of such media. It is, finally, ontologically intermedial, since in order to define it one has to exclude the various media categories that it paradoxically represents (it is not composed by hand, nor typewritten, nor developed with a photographic emulsion, and so on). A Marxian analysis might further suggest that what makes an object into a Heideggerian or Brownian “thing,” especially on Etsy and other online crafting fora, is the labour that went into it and the circumstances surrounding that labour. Objects that are self-described as “handmade” draw attention to their thingness by directly turning a transaction into a handing-over, as it were. The labour of the crafter is visible through the thing’s uniqueness and imperfections and through the visibility of her personal history through the shop “profile” or the seller’s “bio” or biography. Idolceremony’s biography neatly combines economic, emotional, and intellectual attributes: “I seek out inexpensive metals and glass in interesting patterns and vibrant colors in order to provide starving philosophers like myself something joyful and shiny at an affordable price. Check the sale category for older pieces that have been marked down!” (Idolceremony, “Shop Policies” n.d.). “Inexpensive metals and glass” are the materials of skill; “something joyful and shiny” is the escape to pastoral by the amateur. “Interesting patterns and vibrant colors” allude to the sensuality of the crafted work, while the phrase “starving philosopher” points out an inadvertent supplementarity of the crafted work, the seller’s secret hope for a “joyful and shiny” escape from the world of work. Adamson (2007) further suggests that craft provides the “frame” for Art: similarly, Shakescraft frames “Shakespeare” and the practice of literary criticism as analogous to artistic production in its insecurity, creativity – and, for its practitioners – necessity. Conclusion: Reading as Craft and Books as High Art What are we to make of the ubiquity of Shakescrafts and, among this category itself, the significance of paper- and book-craft? Shakespeare himself, as ubiquitous brand, bearer of high and low culture, printed

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and bound in multiple mass-market editions as well as collected in rare quartos, folios, and small-press printings, offers at once cultural capital, an inexhaustible vein of language for artists to mine, and a form or medium that is deceptively accessible, making Shakespearean books a compelling category for book artists (Peter Greenaway’s evocative film Prospero’s Books has inspired particularly rich artistic responses to The Tempest).10 Shakespearean books by artists comprise artist’s books, or unique art-books made entirely by artists, such as Sue Doggett’s The Tempest (1995); livres d’artiste, or illustrated editions by particular artists, such as John Gould’s What a Piece of Work Is Man: The Shakespeare Suite (1980); letter-press or small-press limited editions of Shakespearean texts, such as Jen Bervin’s Nets (2004), which is also an altered book; and altered books, or printed and bound codices turned in various ways into sculpted or printed artworks, such as Philip Smith’s The Tempest (1980). The category of altered books, which turns printed and bound codices into the raw material for new works of art and literature, is currently undergoing its own Renaissance, perhaps in response to the changing status of a bound and printed codex in a world of electronic media and virtual paper. Altered Books as a form begins, arguably, with the palimpsests of ancient civilizations, extends through Shakespearean “Grangerized” Victorian volumes that were to be “extra-illustrated” with the clippings of a diligent reader, and culminates in the sculptural works of present-day book artists.11 Such books include Tom Phillips’s A Humument, which scores through words, overpaints portions of pages, and cuts out sections of an obscure nineteenth-century novel, W.H. Mallock’s A Human Document; the carven sculptures of Brian Dettmer; or Georgia Russell’s organic, coralline and labyrinthine structures (2011).12 And in an era of electronic textuality, even the very reading of a printed book – and certainly the exercise of literary criticism – takes on the status of high craft, while printed books themselves, even those that are mass-produced commodities, may accrue through artistic alterations and the forces of history what Walter Benjamin famously called “aura,” the unique and precious glow of rarity, and become Art. Margot Ecke’s The Tragedy of Ophelia (2009) guides a reader through a traditional or “monumental” text such as Hamlet in order to combine the historically rich literary tradition of printed books with the deeply personal and tactile experience of a present-day reader who holds a physical codex. The volume began as a sewn, bound, printed, massmarket edition of Hamlet from the 1940s before Ecke unbound it and

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encased each page in red Ingres paper from which she had cut windows that revealed only the heroine’s lines. Ecke then rebound the volume finely (now three times as thick as it was originally, since each page was enveloped in red). For Ecke, in the scenes in which Ophelia appears, her exposed lines against the red insistently demand our attention. Ecke chose red for Ophelia’s encased pages both in honour of the book’s original red, gold, and black binding and for its passion, “the living, the breathing, the here, the now” (Ecke 2011). She suggests that the experience of reading Ophelia’s lines in isolation like this forces us to consider Ophelia’s language carefully, “as though you were an actor in a play” (in an unwitting echo of early modern theatrical practice, in which each actor received his own part on a roll, rather than a copy of the complete play), and helps us develop a “one-to-one” or more personal relationship with the character (2011). Both the artist’s concentration upon Ophelia’s/Shakespeare’s words and her consistent, multi-platform or multimodal imagining of Ophelia’s voice and narrative render The Tragedy of Ophelia an adaptation of Shakespeare’s texts, rather than solely an appropriation of Shakespeare as a signifier of literacy and nostalgia. This adaptation is by definition intermedial, in all its senses. It synthesizes a new art medium, that of the altered book (sculpture and printed book, or even sculpture, book, and performance), in order to exploit the dual status of printed books as life media and art media. It deploys the formal constraints of Shakespearean verse drama and the print conventions of speech prefixes and lineation in order to isolate Ophelia’s speeches, so it is formally or transmedially intermedial. It refers knowingly to the practice, phased out in the twentieth century, of hand-binding books, and unknowingly to the early modern medium of the actor’s roll, so it is transformationally intermedial, changing how we feel about these earlier media. And it is ontologically intermedial, making Ophelia herself into a medium through “purposeful and institutionally caused blockades, incisions, and mechanisms of exclusion” (Schröter 2012, 30), in this case by literally excluding words that are not attributed by the play to Ophelia in order to alert a reader or viewer to the historical or institutional suppression of women’s and girls’ voices. Book artist Buzz Spector (1996) identifies book arts as unusually democratic, even erotic, in the sense that books are familiar objects that, unlike other forms of art, we can and do take to bed with us.13 Altered books are intermedial (print/sculpture/paint) and intercultural (bridging fine arts and familiar craft, the unique and the mass-produced). They imply the potential for what Benjamin called immanence – an ontological

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10.2  Margot Ecke’s The Tragedy of Ophelia (2009)

essence of art – that comes into being through individual encounters with texts and art, even in mass-produced commodities. Shakespearean altered books intermediate the archaic past of Shakespeare’s words, the recent past of printed and bound codices, the immediate present of the reader’s experience of words on a page, and the unborn future readers who will respond to Shakespeare’s words through intermedia that we cannot yet fully imagine but can only glimpse, like Ecke’s Ophelia, through cut-paper windows. NOTES 1 I thank the members of the 2010 International Shakespeare Conference seminar, “Shakespeare the Brand,” especially Pascale Aebischer, Susan Bennett, Kate Rumbold, and Julie Sanders, and my colleagues in the University of Georgia discussion group “Books as Things” in fall 2010,

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e­ specially Jed Rasula, Richard Menke, Miriam Jacobson, Ben Hudson, and Nick Crawford. My greatest gratitude, however, extends to Christine Harold, who first recommended that I combine my interest in Shakespearethemed crafts with “Thing Theory.”   Kate Rumbold (2010) offers some background on the financial underpinnings of various Shakespearean institutions in the UK in her analysis of these venues’ deployment of “new media.” See also Bennett 2008. 2 There is a rich secondary literature contextualizing Shakespeare among his contemporaries. On Shakespeare as one among many dramatists, see, for example, Gary Taylor's recent edition of the Collected Works of Thomas Middleton; Suzanne Gossett’s recent Middleton in Context (2011); on early modern publishing culture as a collaborative process, see Petersen 2010; on early modern dramatic practice as collaboration, see Stern and Palfrey 2007; on Shakespeare as co-author, see Vickers 2002. 3 The classic guide to brand resistance is Klein 2002, recently reissued and revised. 4 I am borrowing the spatial metaphor from the Creative Commons ­movement, “a set of copyright licenses and tools that create a balance inside the traditional “all rights reserved” setting that copyright law creates” (http://creativecommons.org/about). Julie Sanders compares Shakespeare’s sonnets to “an open-source initiative” (Sanders 2011). 5 I am indebted for this summary to Jed Rasula’s comments on Heidegger’s ecological perspective. 6 Etsy distinguishes among seller names, store names, and product names through live web-links; I will put the names of products in inverted commas, but leave stores and sellers without. 7 The Ophelia complex was so named by Gaston Bachelard. The essays in Peterson and Williams 2012 historicize both elite and popular appropriations of the character. See esp. Seth Lerer, “I’ve Got a Feeling about Ophelia,” which traces nineteenth- and twentieth-century associations of the name with gentility, delicacy, and vulnerability (Peterson and Williams 2012, 11–28), and Sujata Iyengar and Christy Desmet, “Rebooting Ophelia,” which offers a snapshot of Shakespeare’s character in “Web 2.0” (user-generated consumer content, often incorporating social networks; Peterson and Williams 2012, 59–78). 8 See Bolter and Grusin (2000) for remediation as the formal translation or recalcitrant persistence of the affordances of one medium into those of a new one, but Levinson 1998, esp. 113–15, for the “therapeutic” overtones that Boulter and Grusin cite but repudiate.

Upcycling Shakespeare: Crafting Cultural Capital  367 9 The resistant Ophelia likewise remediates Shakespeare, and has already appeared in Shakespeare criticism; Theodora Jankowski (2000) has argued that women’s virginity could function as a “queer” sexuality in early modern culture, as the denial of male control, and Kaara Peterson (1998) has read Ophelia’s floral grave not as the deflowering or loss of virginity taken for granted by popular interpretations such as Kenneth Branagh’s film of Hamlet but as an “enflowering” or willed resistance to patriarchy. Etsy Ophelias are not necessarily “queer virgins,” but they are queerly and gothically sexual. The Brighton- and online-based shop Ophelia Fancy, winner of the Swatch Alternative Designer Award in 2006, sells bespoke, vintage, burlesque underwear in a third-wave assertion of overt and performed sexuality. 10 I thank Susan Rosenbaum for suggesting to me Greenaway’s influence on Shakespearean book artists. 11 For a stimulating discussion of Altered Books as an art form, see Stewart (2011), esp. chapter 5, although Stewart misidentifies Tom Phillips’s Victorian source text as A Human Monument; it should be A Human Document. The error perhaps testifies to Stewart’s own argument about the difficulty of reading the words of such “demediated” books. On “Grangerized” Shakespeare books from the nineteenth century, see Blake and Sillars 2010. 12 Phillips has been working steadily on A Humument since 1966, and writes in 2008, “I have so far extracted from it over one thousand texts, and have yet to find a situation, statement or thought which its words cannot be adapted to cover.” 13 I thank Margot Ecke for this reference and for her pithy summary of Spector’s work.

WORKS CITED 42things. N.d. “2 Upcycled Book Page and Vintage Stamp Bookmarks.” Etsy. com. http://www.etsy.com/listing/52680988/2-upcycled-book-page-andvintage-stamp. Accessed 28 January 2012. Adamson, Glen. 2007. Thinking Through Craft. New York: Berg. Bennett, Susan. 2008. “Universal Experience – The City as Tourist Stage.” In The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare Studies, ed. Tracy C. Davis, 76–90. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bervin, Jen. 2004. Nets. Brooklyn: Ugly Duckling Presse. Blake, Erin C., and Stuart Sillars, eds. 2010. Extending the Book: The Art of Extra-Illustration. Washington, DC: Folger Shakespeare Library.

368  Sujata Iyengar Bolter, Jay David. “Social Media and the Future of Political Narrative.” In Herzogenrath 2012, 248–64. Bolter, Jay David, and David Grusin. 2000. Remediation: Understanding New Media. Boston: MIT Press. Bookity. N.d. “Romeo and Juliet Tealight Holder.” Etsy.com. http://www .etsy.com/listing/56285015/romeo-and-juliet-tealight-holder. Accessed 6 September 2010. Bouncingballcreation. N.d. “The Taming of the Shrew Pencil Set.” Etsy.com. http://www.etsy.com/transaction/52160570. Accessed 28 January 2012. Brown, Bill. 1998. “How to Do Things with Things (A Toy Story).” Critical Inquiry 24.4: 935–64. – 2001. “Thing Theory. ” Critical Inquiry 28.1: 1–22. – 2012. “The Big Think: Interview.” Vlog. http://bigthink.com/videos/ big-think-interview-with-bill-brown. Accessed 6 January 2012. Bruhn, Jørgen. “Heteromediality.” In Elleström, 225–36. Crawford, Matt. 2009. Shop Craft as Soul Craft: An Inquiry into the Value of Work [published in the UK as The Case for Working with Your Hands]. New York: Penguin. Creaturecomforts. N.d. “Handpainted Merino Wool Yarn – Celia – Pink, Green, Rose, Gold.” Etsy.com. http://www.etsy.com/listing/47691923/ handpainted-merino-wool-yarn-celia-pink. Accessed 28 January 2012. – N.d. “Desdemona – Handdyed Polwarth Roving 4.4 oz.” Etsy.com. http:// www.etsy.com/transaction/43130299. Accessed 28 January 2012. – N.d. “Handdyed Mixed BFL/Silk Roving – Iago – Black, Green, Natural.” Etsy.com. http://www.etsy.com/listing/80662579/handdyed-mixed-­ bflsilk-roving-iago-black?ga_search_query=iago. Accessed 28 January 2012. – N.d. “Othello – Handpainted Merino Roving 3.7 oz.” Etsy.com. http:// www.etsy.com/transaction/41412170. Accessed 28 January 2012. Ddeforest. N.d. “Vintage Romeo and Juliet Play Bundle.” Etsy.com. http:// www.etsy.com/listing/56877805/vintage-romeo-and-juliet-shakespeare. Accessed 28 January 2012. Desmet, Christy. 1999. “Introduction.” Shakespeare and Appropriation. London: Routledge. Desmet, Christy, and Sujata Iyengar. 2009. “Appropriation and the Design of an Online Shakespeare Journal.” In Shakespeare in Asia, Hollywood and Cyberspace, ed. Charles Ross and Alexander Huang, 239–51. West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press. Dettmer, Brian. N.d. “Brian Dettmer.” http://briandettmer.com/. Accessed 26 January 2012.

Upcycling Shakespeare: Crafting Cultural Capital  369 Doggett, Sue. 1995. The Tempest: A Sketchbook from the Play by William Shakespeare. London. Elleström, Lars. 2010a. “The Modalities of Media: A Model for Understanding Intermedial Relations.” In Elleström 2010b, 11–48. Elleström, Lars, ed. 2010b. Media Borders, Multimodality and Intermediality. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Ecke, Margot. 2009. The Tragedy of Ophelia. Winterville, GA: Blue Tarp Press. – 2011. In discussion with the author. Athens, Georgia, 21 December. Etsy.com. 2010. “Etsy Statistics: June 2010 Weather Report.” Etsy.com. 2010. http://www.etsy.com/blog/en/2010/etsy-statistics-june-2010-weatherreport/. Accessed 18 July 2010. EverythingELB. N.d. [Image only]. Etsy.com. http://img0.etsystatic.com/ il_fullxfull.170725397.jpg. Accessed 28 January 2012. Featherheartflower. N.d. “Ophelia’s Orange Blossom Lotion.” Etsy.com. http://www.etsy.com/transaction/24240169. Accessed 28 January 2012. Gossett, Suzanne, ed. 2011. Thomas Middleton in Context. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Gould, John. 1980. What a Piece of Work Is Man: The Shakespeare Suite. Toronto: The Gallery. Gracestudiosart. N.d. “Ophelia Necklace.” Etsy.com. http://www.etsy.com/ listing/78768078/ophelia-necklace-sale. Accessed 28 January 2012. Harold, Christine. 2007. Ourspace: Resisting the Corporate Control of Culture. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Heidegger, Martin. 1975. “The Thing.” In Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. Albert Hofstadter, 162–85. New York: Harper. Herzogenrath, Bernd, ed. 2012. Travels in Intermedia[lity]: Reblurring the Boundaries. Hanover, NH: Dartmouth College Press. Hoolala. N.d. “A Plague on All Your Houses Shakespearean Pin Brooch.” Etsy. com. http://www.etsy.com/listing/15141602/a-plague-on-all-your-houses. Accessed 28 January 2012. Husserl, Edmund. 1965. Phenomenology and the Crisis of Philosophy. Trans. and intro. Quentin Lauer. New York: Harper. Hutcheon, Linda. 2012 [2006]. A Theory of Adaptation. 2nd ed. London: Routledge. Idolceremony. N.d. “The Dark Lady.” Etsy.com. http://www.etsy.com/ transaction/32646010. Accessed 28 January 2012. – N.d. “Shop Policies.” Etsy.com. http://www.etsy.com/shop/idolceremony/policy. Accessed 28 January 2012. Jankowski, Theodora. 2000. Pure Resistance: Queer Virginity in Early Modern English Drama. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.

370  Sujata Iyengar Klein, Naomi. 2002. No Logo: No Space, No Choice, No Jobs. London: Picador. Levinson, Paul. 1998. The Soft Edge: A Natural History and Future of the Information Revolution. London: Routledge. Ljungberg, Christina. “Intermedial Strategies in Multimedia Art.” In Elleström 2010b, 81–95. McDonough, William, and Michael Braungart. 2002. Cradle to Cradle: Changing the Way We Make Things. New York: North Point Press, 2002. O’Flynn, Siobhan. 2013. “Epilogue.” In A Theory of Adaptation, by Linda Hutcheon, 2nd ed. Routledge: London. Ophelia’s Apothecary. N.d. “Shop Home.” Etsy.com. http://www.etsy.com/ shop/opheliasapothecary. Accessed 28 January 2012. Ophelia’s Attic. N.d. “Exhumed Fashions.” http://www.ophelias-attic.com/ oneofakindclothing/exhumed.html. Accessed 28 January 2012. OpheliasTreasures. N.d. “About.” Etsy.com. http://www.etsy.com/people/ OpheliasTreasures. Accessed 28 January 2012. OpheliazGarden. N.d. “Description.” Etsy.com. http://www.etsy.com/shop/ OpheliazGarden?ref=ss_profile. Accessed 28 January 2012. Orgel, Stephen. 2002. The Authentic Shakespeare and Other Problems of the Early Modern Stage. London: Routledge. PaperAffection. N.d. “Shakespeare Hair Flower Bobby Pin.” Etsy.com. http:// www.etsy.com/transaction/13667821. Accessed 28 January 2012. Petersen, Lene. 2010. Shakespeare’s Errant Texts. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Peterson, Kaara. 1998. “Framing Ophelia: Representation and the Pictorial Tradition.” Mosaic: A Journal for the Interdisciplinary Study of Literature 31.3 (September): 1–24. Peterson, Kaara, and Deanne Williams, eds. 2012. The Afterlife of Ophelia. London: Palgrave. Phillips, Tom. 2008. “Introduction.” http://humument.com/intro.html. Accessed 26 January 2012. Rumbold, Kate. 2010. “From ‘Access’ to ‘Creativity’: Shakespeare Institutions, New Media, and the Language of Cultural Value.” Shakespeare Quarterly, Special Issue, “Shakespeare and New Media,” “Open Review,” http:// mediacommons.futureofthebook.org/mcpress/ShakespeareQuarterly_ NewMedia/rumbold-from-access-to-creativity/. Accessed 25 September 2010. Russell, Georgia. 2011. “Georgia Russell – First and Last Things.” http:// www.englandgallery.com/artist_work.php?mainId=32&groupId=none&_ p=8&_gnum=8&media=Constructions%20%26%20mixed%20media. Accessed 26 January 2012.

Upcycling Shakespeare: Crafting Cultural Capital  371 Sanders, Julie. 2011. “The Sonnets as an Open-source Initiative.” Shakespeare Survey 64: 121–32. Schröter, Jens. 2012. “Four Models of Intermediality.” In Herzogenrath 2012, 15–36. Sennett, Richard. 2009. The Craftsman. New Haven: Yale University Press. Smith, Philip. 1980. The Tempest. N.p. Spector, Buzz. 1996. The Bookmaker’s Desire. New York: Distributed Art Publishers. SteamBathFactory. N.d. “Anatomical Heart – 1866 Antique Page – Hamlet Prince of Denmark.” Etsy.com. http://www.etsy.com/transaction/31080941. Accessed 28 January 2012. Stern, Tiffany, and Simon Palfrey. 2007. Shakespeare in Parts. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Stewart, Garrett. 2011. Bookwork: Medium to Object to Concept to Art. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Taylor, Gary, and John Lavagnino, eds. 2010. The Collected Works of Thomas Middleton. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010. Vickers, Brian. 2002. Shakespeare as Co-author. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Walker, Rob. 2007. “Handmade 2.0.” New York Times, 16 December. http:// www.nytimes.com/2007/12/16/magazine/16Crafts-t.html. Accessed 22 June 2010. YourKeepsakeCo. N.d. [Image only]. Etsy.com. http://ny-image2.etsy.com/ il_fullxfull.170978882.jpg. Accessed 16 January 2012.

Beyond Adaptation M a rk For tier

This essay is somewhat strangely situated at the conclusion of a collection focused on new media and intermedia inasmuch as I argue for a more or less unlimited field in which the ways of adaptation always operate, no matter the change in circumstances. There is nothing new or capable of unmitigated newness within this generalized regime. New media and intermedia are just the latest turns within this field. That being said, adaptation in general always manifests itself in the particulars of time and place. Not all finches, even within the Galapagos Islands, have developed long pointy beaks, but those that have developed them have done so in particular circumstances ruled by general principles of adaptation. The epiphenomena of new media and intermedia, therefore, are guided by the same principles as Darwin’s finches, although their specifics arise in a particular situation. Intermedia, as a place of hybridity and crossbreeding, where old work is transcribed in new ways, would appear to be an especially promising place for adaptation to unfold, although promising sites do not always live up to their promise. Nor are more traditional sites necessarily less rich as fields of adaptation. Towards the end of this essay I will examine one instance of Shakespeare in new media – the graphic series Kill Shakespeare – to explore the development of the “new,” with promises kept and not kept, within the general and unchanging laws of cultural development. 1 My reflections have their source in what Shakespeare might have called a misprision – an accident of misinterpretation happy or disastrous as

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the case may be. The object of this misprision was the phrase “Beyond Shakespeare Adaptation.” Within a few seconds of encountering this phrase I came to what I take to be its intended meaning – adaptations of other writers, Marlowe, Webster, whomever. But for a moment or two I had read it differently – what can be done with Shakespeare (or whomever) that was not adaptation, that was beyond adaptation. Even after I understood that I had been mistaken, this earlier understanding stayed with me – now an intentional misprision – because it raised for me a number of issues and questions that had been preoccupying me. All of these issues and questions unfold from the basic question, “What is there, if anything, beyond adaptation?” 2 Let me begin with a set of issues and problems that arise from a critical debate that has been going on for some time, and that my work – and my work with Daniel Fischlin – has been part of, concerning the relative prudence of a more narrow or a more expansive definition of adaptation. Many, if not most, scholars of reworkings of Shakespeare have adopted a more or less limited sense of adaptation.1 Some treat adaptation as a process across media: novel into film for example.2 On another tack, adaptation, narrowly defined, is a different thing from pastiche, parody, travesty, sequel, and so forth.3 Adaptation is one genre of reworking among many, defined variously as adding to the source, standing in for the source, with this set of features or that set of features. In this analysis all of these other genres would be beyond adaptation, beyond the confines and scope of adaptation as a highly particularized genre. This is an important debate, but I am going to give it short shrift here. From my perspective this activity of making distinctions has a bit too much of the bureaucrat and the bean counter about it. What interests me is what these genres have in common as part of a larger activity that I call, for lack of a better word, adaptation. From my perspective, therefore, these various genres are not beyond adaptation but are rather part of adaptation in a more expansive sense. 3 Another issue arises for some theorists of cultural adaptation at this point, which is where does adaptation in this larger sense stop, since

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stop it must. If adaptation is a general activity of cultural reworking, then editing, translation – however faithful in intent – scholarly interpretation, theatrical production, in effect anything you can do with Shakespeare would be adaptation of Shakespeare. Nothing you can do with Shakespeare would be beyond adaptation. Some critics are uncomfortable with this, but discomfort with something doesn’t mean it is incorrect. I myself have never been able to find a compelling reason not to understand adaptation, at least in one of its meanings, in this unlimited sense. 4 One way of explaining my understanding of adaptation is to borrow an insight from Jacques Derrida. Derrida’s work in one of its aspects elucidates a structure that holds for various historically subordinated notions, most prominently, perhaps, writing. Writing, which is traditionally taken as secondary to language and speech, has an affinity with archewriting, the basic possibility of inscription and proliferation necessary for there to be language and speech at all.4 Writing in the narrow sense could be, for example, the text you are reading. Archewriting, on a deeper level, is the very possibility of expression. This Derridean structure works for many other seemingly secondary terms. In law it elucidates equity – which is not only particular exceptions to preceding law but on a deeper level the infinity of circumstances that constitute the very possibility of law. Returning for a moment to the notion of misprision, misunderstanding would appear to be a momentary lapse in the process of communication; but as Caryl Emerson observes in his preface to Bakhtin’s Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, if we ever really understood each other, there would be no further need to communicate (Emerson 1984, xxxii): misprision is the necessary and primal ground of whatever understanding we can effect. And this structure is also true of adaptation, which is not only particular works of secondary creation but the very possibility of cultural activity going forward. In the realm of culture, therefore, one might postulate that there is nothing beyond adaptation. Derrida famously declared that there is nothing outside the text. Just as apt might be these lines from a recent song by Bob Dylan and Robert Hunter: “Beyond here lies nothin’, nothin’ that we can call our own.”

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5 I am not going to say much at the moment about the obviously drastic and unsettling effect that primal archewriting, equity, misprision, or adaptation has on speech, law, understanding, or cultural creation. Suffice it to say that everything is changed, with origin and constancy adrift and always at risk on a sea of primal variation. 6 Adaptation has been a fraught word in cultural studies inasmuch as it has currency in natural science as well as in cultural activity and understanding. The flight from essentialism, natural and otherwise, has in the past meant for some, myself included, a suspicion of cultural contamination by scientific naturalism. But that has been changing for some time now. As far back as 1980 Deleuze and Guattari wrote of a “neoevolutionism” that is not strictly either natural or cultural (1987, 239). Somewhat more recently, the feminist philosopher of becoming Elizabeth Grosz has explored Darwinian understanding as explaining “both biological and cultural emergence” (2004, 9).5 Adaptation so generalized and writ large is even more inclusive and inescapable than cultural adaptation as discussed above. To cite once again Dylan and Hunter: “Beyond here lies nothin’, nothin’ but the moon and stars.” And maybe not even the moon and stars. 7 Is there nothing, then, beyond adaptation? Is this the conclusion to which an expansive understanding must lead? When I contemplate possibilities, I can imagine three types of phenomena that might be considered to some extent outside of adaptation. The first would be that which is completely new. Second would be that which doesn’t change. Cockroaches, we are told, have been as they are for millions of years and might stay that way no matter what for millions more. The final group would be the completely annihilated, that which has entered into oblivion (the extinct, the forgotten, the lost) – the dodo bird, the dinosaurs, the lost plays of Shakespeare. Human and global experience shows that oblivion is a highly conceivable phenomenon, although we now surmise that dinosaurs are all around us in the form of birds and I

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recently saw a lost Shakespeare play, Cardenio, at the RSC in Stratford. Oblivion isn’t always everything it’s cracked up to be.6 8 Scholars have noted a recent presentist turn in Shakespeare studies, eschewing the detachment of historicism to treat Shakespeare as once again very much our contemporary. Certainly the study of adaptation has always had a strong presentist streak – few, I suspect, would be interested in adapting Shakespeare if his work were taken to be entirely dead and anachronistic. One recent presentist trend in Shakespeare studies, one with a long historical pedigree, is to treat Shakespeare as a thinker or philosopher, and as a fellow traveller as one puzzles though ideas in the present. Examples of this trend are Colin McGinn’s Shakespeare’s Philosophy (2006), A.D. Nuttall’s Shakespeare the Thinker (2007), David Bevington’s Shakespeare’s Ideas (2008), and most recently Julia Lupton’s Thinking with Shakespeare (2011). In the spirit of these works I would like next to think with Shakespeare about newness, constancy, and oblivion. 9 In a short essay such as this it is at most possible to give only a very rudimentary and provisional account of how one might think with Shakespeare and where that thinking might lead. One of many possible techniques would be to follow particular keywords through Shakespeare’s works. Let’s start with the word “new,” which regularly appears under a cloud of suspicion.7 There are relatively rare positive evocations of newness – in Measure for Measure the giver of mercy becomes “Like man new made” (2.2.77) and near the joyful conclusion of The Winter’s Tale “Every wink of an eye some new grace [is] born” (5.2.110–11). Much more often, however, the love of novelty and newfangledness is presented as a social and cultural problem, a misguided and damaging social trend: New customs, Though they be never so ridiculous (Nay, let ’em be unmanly), yet are follow’d. (Henry VIII 1.3.2–4)

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This is especially true of the young, whose apprehensive senses All but new things disdain; whose judgments are Mere fathers of their garments; whose constancies Expire before their fashions. (All’s Well That Ends Well 1.2.60–3)

Moreover, there is doubt as to whether real newness does or can exist – as in Ecclesiastes, What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun.

Shakespeare expresses this hypothesis almost exactly in the Sonnets: “there be nothing new, but that which is/Hath been before” (Sonnet 59.1–2). This scepticism about the new is expressed most famously in Prospero’s response (wistful, understanding, dismissive) to Miranda’s exclamation “O brave new world/That has such people in’t!”: “’Tis new to thee” (Tempest 5.1.183–5). More complexly resonant is Antony’s response to Cleopatra’s claim that she can measure love: “Then must thou needs find out new heaven, new earth” (Antony and Cleopatra 1.1.17–18). Measuring love is as impossible as finding a new heaven and new earth. Moreover, such a new heaven and earth, unlike that promised in Christian eschatology, would be a perverse place where the limitlessness of love is bounded. Here profound newness is both impossible and undesirable. This double rejection of newness is also expressed in Troilus and Cressida: “all with one consent praise new-born gawds,/Though they are made and moulded of things past” (3.3.176– 7): the love of the new is a mistaken and tasteless idolatry. Often in Shakespeare the word “new” implies a renewal of something past rather than something completely novel: “I sigh the lack of many a thing I sought,/And with old woes new wail my dear time’s waste” (Sonnet 30.3–4). Here we get a coming together of the new and the old, which is also at work in the reference in King John to “an ancient tale new told” (4.2.18). It is not surprising therefore that Shakespeare expresses a limited view of human creation, in opposition to divine “prime creation” (Richard III 4.3.19). Thus Prospero expresses the stages

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of a diminishing account when he says that his treacherous brother “new created/The creatures that were mine, I say, or chang’d ’em,/Or else new form’d ’em” (Tempest 1.2.81–3): he moves from creation to alteration and adaptation. Finally, for now, we might note the use of the word “original” by Titania in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, when she says to Oberon of the environmental disasters of the day, “We are their parents and original” (2.1.117). Here original implies they are the source of something else, but not that they lack a source themselves, something like the sense it has in Darwin’s view of the origin of species and the descent of man – a series of causes rather than a pure beginning.8 10 Shakespeare’s work shows a different but equally fraught understanding of constancy. The strongest assertion and praise of constancy is in Sonnet 116: “love is not love/Which alters when it alteration finds” (2–3): love does not adapt to changing circumstances (not adapting to changing circumstances, in an evolutionary context, unless you’re a cockroach, is a recipe for extinction). Love’s not Time’s fool, though rosy lips and cheeks Within his bending sickle’s compass come, Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks, But bears it out even to the edge of doom. (9–12)

Similarly, in Sonnet 14, the speaker says of his lover, from thine eyes my knowledge I derive, And, constant stars, in them I read such art As truth and beauty shall together thrive. (9–11)

The view of procreation in the Sonnets as male cloning is another bulwark of constancy against time: As far as thou shalt wane, so fast thou grow’st, In one of thine, from that which thou departest, And that fresh blood which youngly thou bestow’st Thou mayst call thine, when thou from youth convertest. (11.1–4)

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Yet, in the highly troubled amatory context of the sonnets, these moments come across as a cri de coeur and a desperate act of faith in the face of ubiquitous inconstancy. Inconstancy is a more common referent in Shakespeare’s work than constancy is – inconstant wind, sea, moon, fortune, women, and especially men: O heaven, were man But constant, he were perfect; that one error Fills him with faults, makes him run through all th’ sins: Inconstancy falls off ere it begins; (Two Gentlemen of Verona 5.4.110–13)

Sigh no more, ladies, sigh no more, Men were deceivers ever, One foot in sea, and one on shore, To one thing constant never. (Much Ado about Nothing 2.3.62–5)

Caesar’s “I am constant as the northern star” (Julius Caesar 3.1.60) is, I dare say, less than entirely convincing, and when Titania in A Midsummer Night’s Dream says of the lovers’ accounts, all their minds transfigur’d so together, More witnesseth than fancy’s images And grows to something of great constancy; But howsoever, strange and admirable … (5.1.24–7)

the constancy they bear witness to is of misprision and sudden transformation. Like indeterminacy and openness in evolution, Fortune, Fluellen tells Pistol, is painted blind, with a muffler afore his eyes, to signify to you that Fortune is blind; and she is painted also with a wheel, to signify to you, which is the moral of it, that she is turning, and inconstant, and mutability, and variation. (Henry V 3.6.30–5)

What we get in Shakespeare’s work is more often a longing for absent or impossible constancy than a celebration of its presence.

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11 The doubt and suspicion that feature in Shakespeare’s work concerning newness and constancy are sorely absent when the issue is oblivion. Here there is surety. There is for each of us the inevitable personal oblivion: Last scene of all, That ends this strange eventful history, Is second childishness, and mere oblivion, Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans every thing. (As You Like It 2.7.163–6).

There is the oblivion that has faced great civilizations of the past, When water-drops have worn the stones of Troy, And blind oblivion swallow’d cities up, And mighty states characterless are grated To dusty nothing. (Troilus and Cressida 3.2.186–9)

Finally there is the “general doom” (Rape of Lucrece 975) to come: The cloud-capp’d tow’rs, the gorgeous palaces, The solemn temples, the great globe itself, Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve, And like this insubstantial pageant faded, Leave not a rack behind. (Tempest 4.1.151–6).

Oblivion comes to each in time. Grosz draws from Darwin the essential temporality of natural and cultural systems: “The evolution of life and the evolution of language are possible only through the irreversible temporality of genealogy” (Grosz 2004, 32). Time the destroyer figures strongly in the Sonnets and even in The Winter’s Tale: while the passage of the years is there locally a force for healing and good, Time declares that he shall take “the freshest things now reigning, and make stale/The glistering of this present” (4.1.13–14). Thus in Sonnet 122 an initial assertion of constancy beyond time is reduced to the short time before senility or death:

Beyond Adaptation  381 Thy gift, thy tables, are within my brain Full character’d with lasting memory, Which shall above that idle rank remain Beyond all date, even to eternity; Or at the least, so long as brain and heart Have faculty by nature to subsist, Till each to raz’d oblivion yield his part Of thee, thy record never can be miss’d. (1–8)

12 To summarize, then, in the style of a CliffsNotes for pessimists and nihilists, in Shakespeare’s work there is a dismissal of the new, a mainly futile longing for constancy, a fear of change, and an expectation of oblivion. There is, in effect, nothing beyond adaptation except the everpresent but complex possibilities of oblivion. On one level, such a vision speaks to the anxiety, even terror, of a quasi-Lacanian captated self – a psycho-structure to which few, if any, of us are immune.9 At the funeral of the Canadian social democratic politician Jack Layton, one of the inspirational messages suggested was “Have a dream longer than a life,” but for us (dis)possessive individualists, even if such a dream can be mustered, it ends nowhere happy. Après moi, le déluge. The possibility exists, I suppose, to think this deluge otherwise, but that will be hard slogging. Rather than dwell solely on this pessimistic individualism, however, I would like to pull various threads of my exploration together by saying a few things about the recent Canadian graphic novel series Kill Shakespeare (McCreery, Del Col, and Belanger 2010, 2011) and how  it might play in these reflections. Kill Shakespeare imagines a Shakespearean world where an attempt is made to wrest power from the god Shakespeare and which pits Hamlet, Juliet, Othello, and Falstaff, among others, against Richard III, Lady Macbeth, Iago, and their forces. A few reflections: generically, Kill Shakespeare might be called an intermedial mashup – piling characters from a number of plays into one new work – although there is less new about this than one might imagine: when I was a child, at bedtime, to my delight, my father (not much of an expert in intermedia) used to bring characters from different fairy tales together.10 The authors of Kill Shakespeare claim

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inspiration from such things as The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. As an aside, I won’t speculate as to which scholars of adaptation would or would not call Kill Shakespeare an adaptation or would insist that mashups are a specific and different genre: in the big picture, Kill Shakespeare exists in the realm of adaptation. The mashup, however, is an interesting adaptive and evolutionary idea, the cultural version of recombinant genetic engineering. However, if one were to follow the keywords and ideas in Shakespeare discussed above – newness, ­constancy, and oblivion – through Kill Shakespeare, one would have relatively little to reflect on. In their place one would find words and notions such as struggle, survival, freedom, prophecy, and fate, smeared with a large dollop of mutilation and torture. The result is a work that is, underneath the gore, much less dark at its heart, in its genes. Shakespeare’s bitter rapeseed has been modified into more palatable canola. Second, Kill Shakespeare, like all adaptation, points to the essential inconstancy of cultural development. In this light Kill Shakespeare continues an English Canadian tradition (I’m thinking of Ann-Marie MacDonald’s Goodnight Desdemona [Good Morning Juliet]) of calling Juliet’s constancy to Romeo into question and finding her a more suitable partner (in this case, Hamlet). Also, as in MacDonald’s play, this repartnering of Juliet is related to a change in genre: MacDonald turns tragedy to comedy and romance; here Shakespeare’s tragedies are redone as melodrama and romance. Third, what is noteworthy about this work, or any other adaptation, is not its novelty. No matter how cutting-edge and recent the medium, newness is not its calling card. Newness is a misleading epiphenomenon of adaptation, which unsettles simple distinctions between old and new. The new always has its source in the old. Adaptation is not innovation but renovation. In Kill Shakespeare, Shakespeare’s heroes are given a chance at a do over; they are given a second chance at life – having somehow survived the tragic events attached to their names – a chance at renewal and redemption. Shakespeare’s world itself is presented as a bit of a fixer-upper whose beauty is in need of renewal. Shakespeare himself finds redemption. Whatever the éclat, adaptations in new media, like all cultural work, do not involve newness or innovation as much as they do renovation and do not kill the past so much as carry it on. Fourth, Kill Shakespeare is a somewhat muddled engagement with who or what Shakespeare is: god, man, character, ideal, texts, a world.

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11.1  Kill Shakespeare © Kill Shakespeare Entertainment, images by Andy Belanger

384  Mark Fortier

The Shakespeare who might be killed is an individual who has created a world but exists within it as a privileged entity, though one similar to those he has created. But this is not the same Shakespeare that the authors of Kill Shakespeare have in mind when they ask, like many before them, “How do we get kids interested in Shakespeare?” Nor is Shakespeare the man, the author, the character in a fiction, the same as the world he has created, or as what Graham Holderness has delimited – Shakespeare as “what is here, now, always, being made of him” (1998, xvi). This Shakespeare is not an unchanging individual but rather something collective and inconstant. This leads to some preliminary thoughts on Shakespeare and oblivion, on killing Shakespeare. Without giving anything away, killing Shakespeare the man turns out to be easier said than done; killing Shakespeare writ large is a different undertaking altogether. This Shakespeare cannot be killed while invoking Shakespeare. Invoking Shakespeare gives Shakespeare renewed life. In this way, Kill Shakespeare, like “Beyond Adaptation,” is a completely ironic title, one that points to, even effects, the opposite of what it says. At the end of the work Shakespeare the author-god-man asks to be forgotten in the future when his words are brought to mind. This is done by reciting Sonnet 71, which in the psychodrama of Shakespeare’s sonnet sequence is an ironic call to be forgotten: forgetting is not voluntary and the call to forget is a reminder. On the surface the Shakespeare of the graphic series seems much less conflicted about his own oblivion than is the Shakespeare we derived above. But this redeemed Shakespeare (if not his creators) is being naïve or disingenuous. There may come oblivion for Shakespeare, but it can only come unnoted and unnoticed, not by any evocation of his death or his forgetting. Kill Shakespeare could have been called, with just as much irony and futility, Forget Shakespeare. As long as we speak of or through Shakespeare, his oblivion has not come and we are not beyond adaptation. NOTES 1 See, for instance, Hutcheon 2006 and Kidnie 2008. 2 See, for instance, Adaptation: The Journal of Literature on Screen Studies. 3 See, for instance, Schoch 2002. Strenuous categorization and separation also dictate the approach of Ruby Cohn’s groundbreaking Modern Shakespeare Offshoots 1976. 4 See, inter alia, Derrida 1976.

Beyond Adaptation  385 5 “According to Darwinian precepts, culture is not different in kind from nature … Nature and culture can no longer be seen as dichotomous or oppositional terms, when nature is understood as the very field on which the cultural elaborates and develops itself” (Grosz 2005, 30–1). 6 We require a differential taxonomy of what might be called oblivion, which comes in different forms and affects its subject or object in different ways. Oblivion can affect a species, a society, an individual. Oblivion in one sense is a synonym for extinction, yet its root suggests not only extinction but being forgotten. Thus oblivion can obliterate life and afterlife – the living person and the person remembered. Oblivion as a concept can give a kind of presence to the subject or object of the concept, in as much as it memorializes it; but conceiving of dinosaurs does not make them any less, in a real sense, extinct. Shakespeare’s sonnets distinguish among the oblivion of an individual who dies without children, oblivion of an individual unloved, and the rescue from oblivion of an individual memorialized in verse. The umbrella term “Shakespeare” covers a range of entities that can be subjected to oblivion in a variety of interconnected but somewhat distinct ways. The Shakespeare that lives on, in our world or in the world of Kill Shakespeare, is distinct from the body buried in a Stratford church and cannot be killed in the same way. In culture there is no complete oblivion without forgetting. That which has suffered complete oblivion leaves no trace. 7 All references to Shakespeare’s works are to The Riverside Shakespeare. 8 See Grosz 2004, 20–32. 9 See Lacan 1977. 10 I am somewhat sceptical of the outlook taken by Sinnreich, that the present moment (as opposed to other historical moments) is “a moment of profound change, a moment when the old definitions no longer apply, and when the new definitions have yet to be written” (2010, 3), and that his field of interdisciplinary study – “critical information studies” – is “something new” (5). Old definitions can be surprisingly useful, and interdisciplinarity is, by definition, at least as much about bringing things that already exist together as it is about novelty. I am more sympathetic to the view expressed in the modest 1981 section of Dick Higgins’s “Intermedia”: “Intermediality has always been a possibility since the most ancient of times” (2001, 52).

WORKS CITED Adaptation: The Journal of Literature on Screen Studies. Oxford Journals. www.adaptation.oxfordjournals.org.

386  Mark Fortier Bevington, David. 2008. Shakespeare’s Ideas: More Things in Heaven and Earth. Chichester: Wiley Blackwell. Cohn, Ruby. 1976. Modern Shakespeare Offshoots. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Deleuze, Gilles, and Felix Guattari. 1987. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Derrida, Jacques. 1976. Of Grammatology. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Dylan, Bob, and Robert Hunter. 2009. “Beyond Here Lies Nothin’.” Bob Dylan. Together through Life. Columbia Records. Emerson, Caryl. 1984. “Editor’s Preface.” In Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, by Mikhail Bakhtin. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Grosz, Elizabeth. 2004. The Nick of Time: Politics, Evolution and the Untimely. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. – 2005. Time Travels: Feminism, Nature, Power. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Higgins, Dick. 2001. “Intermedia.” Leonardo 34.1: 49–54. Holderness, Graham. 1988. The Shakespeare Myth. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Hutcheon, Linda. 2006. A Theory of Adaptation. New York: Routledge. Kidnie, M.J. 2008. Shakespeare and the Problem of Adaptation. Abingdon, Oxon.: Routledge. Lacan, Jacques. 1977. “The Mirror Stage as Formative of the Function of the I.” In Ecrits, 1–7. New York: W.W. Norton & Company. Lupton, Julia Reinhart. 2011. Thinking with Shakespeare: Essays on Politics and Life. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. MacDonald, Ann-Marie. 1990. Goodnight Desdemona (Good Morning Juliet). Toronto: Coach House. McCreery, Conor, Anthony Del Col, and Andy Belanger. 2010, 2011. Kill Shakespeare. Vols. 1 and 2. San Diego: IDW. McGinn, Colin. 2006. Shakespeare’s Philosophy: Discovering the Meaning behind the Plays. New York: Harper Perennial. Nuttall, A.D. 2007. Shakespeare the Thinker. New Haven: Yale University Press. Schoch, Richard W. 2002. Not Shakespeare: Bardolatry and Burlesque in the Nineteenth Century. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Shakespeare, William. 1974. The Riverside Shakespeare. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company. Sinnreich, Adam. 2010. Mashed Up: Music, Technology, and the Rise of Configurable Culture. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press.

Contributors

Jennifer L. Ailles is a Renaissance, gender scholar, and adaptation ­specialist at Columbia College Chicago. She writes and teaches on Shakespeare, gender and queer studies, alchemy and witchcraft, monarchy, fairy tales, adaptations, digital access, and ecocriticism. She has taught at a number of institutions including Rollins College, the ­University of Rochester, and Full Sail University. She also had the privilege of being the first Project Manager of the Canadian Adaptations of Shakespeare Project at the University of Guelph. She has written a book-length study on the cultural history of Queen Mab and is co-­ author of Key Concepts in Writing and Rhetoric (2014). Her current book project focuses on the symbolic and material relationships between jewelled and decorative items such as illuminated treasure books, jewellery, monarchical regalia, insignia, and sacred magical objects, their human interlocutors, and the subsequent literature and drama they created in medieval and Renaissance England. Andrew Bretz is a post-doctoral researcher with the Canadian Adaptations of Shakespeare Project at the University of Guelph. He teaches at both Wilfrid Laurier University and the University of Guelph, where he was recently awarded the sole CSA Teaching Excellence award for 2013. His dissertation was on the topic of the representation of the rapist on the early modern stage and presently he is researching the Sanders Portrait of Shakespeare. He has been previously published in Notes and Queries and Modern Philology. He is also preparing the introduction to Midsummer Night’s Dream for the Shakespeare Made in Canada series from Oxford University Press (Canada).

388 Contributors

Christy Desmet is Josiah Meigs Distinguished Teaching Professor at the University of Georgia and (with Sujata Iyengar) co-founder and ­co-general editor of Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation. She is the author of Reading Shakespeare’s Characters: Rhetoric, Ethics, and Identity (1992) and editor or co-editor of several books on Shakespearean appropriation: Shakespeare and Appropriation (with Robert Sawyer, 1999); Harold Bloom’s Shakespeare (with Robert Sawyer, 2001), Shakespearean Gothic (with Anne Williams, 2009); and Helen Faucit (2011). She has recently published essays on Shakespeare and Media, including “Paying Attention in Shakespeare Parody: From Tom Stoppard to YouTube” (Shakespeare Survey 2008); “Appropriation and the Design of an Online Shakespeare Journal” (with Sujata Iyengar, in Shakespeare in Hollywood, Asia, and Cyberspace, ed. Alexa Huang and Charles S. Ross [2009]); and “Rebooting Ophelia: Social Media and the Rhetorics of Appropriation” (with Sujata Iyengar, in The Afterlife of Ophelia, ed. Kaara L. Peterson and Deanne Williams [2012]). Kim Fedderson is the Founding Dean of Lakehead University’s Orillia Campus. Immediately prior to his returning to Lakehead University, where he had held a variety of positions including Professor of English, Chair of the Department of English (1997–2001) and Dean of the Faculty of Social Sciences and Humanities (2001–6), he was Vice-­ President, Aca­demic and Student Services at Confederation College. He holds an Hon­ours BA and MA from the University of Toronto and a PhD from York University. He has taught at York University, Seneca College, Yunnan University in China, and Gifu University for Languages and Education in Japan. He has published extensively on rhetorical theory and post-secondary pedagogy, and continues his work on Shakespear­ ean adaptation with his long-­ standing collaborator, Dr J.M. Richardson. University Research Chair and Professor Daniel Fischlin is co-editor with Mark Fortier of Adaptations of Shakespeare: A Critical Anthology of Plays from the 17th Century to the Present (2000) and is the founder and director of the Canadian Adaptations of Shakespeare Project (CASP), the largest, most complete online resource in the world for the study of Shakespeare’s relation to a set of national theatrical practices. In 2007 Fischlin curated the Shakespeare Made in Canada Exhibit at the Macdonald Stewart Gallery in Guelph, which housed over six thousand square feet of resources that documented the relationship ­between Canadian

Contributors 389

culture and Shakespeare. Dr Fischlin serves as the General Series Editor for Oxford University Press’s re-edition of the Shakespeare plays (Shakespeare Made in Canada) from a specifically Canadian point of view, featuring prominent Canadian scholars, ­ authors, and theatre practitioners. Mark Fortier is a Professor of English and Theatre Studies at the University of Guelph. Among his publications are Adaptations of Shakespeare (with Daniel Fischlin), Theory/Theatre: An Introduction, The Culture of Equity in Early Modern England, and forthcoming, The Culture of Equity in Restoration and Eighteenth-Century Britain and America. Sujata Iyengar, Professor of English at the University of Georgia, is the author of Shades of Difference (2004) and Shakespeare’s Medical Language (2011), and the editor of Disability, Health, and Happiness in the Shakespearean Body (forthcoming 2014). Her articles have appeared in the scholarly journals Shakespeare Survey (2014), ELH (2002), and MaRDiE (2007), and in many edited collections, including the widely referenced Color-Blind Shakespeare (2006) and Sensible Flesh (Penn Press, 2003), the award-winning The History of British Women’s Writing, volume 2 (2010), and the exhibition catalogue Voices of Tolerance in an Age of Persecution (2004). Her essay for OuterSpeares draws upon research from her current book project, “Shakespeare and the Art of the Book.” This monograph argues that through nineteenth-century printing techno­ logy (wood-pulp paper, stereotyping, lithography), twentieth-century innovations (full-­colour printing, polymer plates), and electronic publishing, Shakespeare inspires book arts as a proxy for the crafted, the handmade, and the artisanal. Professor Iyengar’s forthcoming work on intermedia Shakespeares includes her essay “Othello on Screen” for the Oxford Handbook to Shakespearean Tragedy, edited by Michael Neill and David Schalkwyk, and one on intermedia Ophelias for the collection Rethinking Feminism, edited by Ania Loomba and Melissa Sanchez. With Christy Desmet, Professor Iyengar co-founded and co-edits Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation, a peer-reviewed, scholarly, online, multimedia publication that won the CELJ’s “Best New Journal” award in 2007. Tom Magill is an ex-prisoner who transformed his life through arts education while in prison for violence. While incarcerated he met his enemy – and his enemy became his teacher. On release he earned a BA (Hons) in

390 Contributors

Drama and Theatre Studies at the University of Birmingham and an MA in Cultural Studies at the University of Leeds. He is an award-winning filmmaker, drama facilitator, actor, writer, director, and producer. He specializes in utilizing Augusto Boal’s “Theatre of the Oppressed” methodology and the works of William Shakespeare in transforming community and prison settings. After training with Michael Bogdanov, he became his  and Augusto Boal’s personal ­representatives in Northern Ireland. In 1999 he co-founded the Educational Shakespeare Company (ESC) to develop drama and film with prisoners and ex-prisoners. ESC is an award-­winning arts education charity, empowering marginalized people to find their voice and tell their stories through film. In 2007 he  ­directed Mickey B, an award-winning feature film adaptation of Shakespeare’s Macbeth, cast with prisoners from Maghaberry maximum-security prison. Mickey B won the 2008 Roger Graef Award for Outstanding Achievement in Film at the Arthur Koestler Awards. For his work in criminal justice he received the 2011 Justice in the Community Award (from the Northern Ireland Department of Justice). He has presented his film work in Britain, Canada, Denmark, France, Germany, Holland, Ireland, Israel, Nigeria, South Korea, and the United States. James McKinnon is a theatre scholar, director, and educator. His research interests include dramaturgy, devising and theatre pedagogy, and dramatic adaptation, particularly contemporary Canadian appropriations of  Chekhov and Shakespeare. Since completing his PhD (Toronto) in 2010, he has been a lecturer at Victoria University of Wellington, and is currently the director of its Theatre Programme. Don Moore teaches critical theory, literary theory, film, and media studies. His recent work focuses on post-9/11 global cinema and cinematic depictions of “terrorism,” with particular emphasis on how they are implicated with contemporary shifts in discourses of ethics, politics, human rights, and globalization. Don has authored over a dozen articles and book chapters on the topics of contemporary critical theory, cultural studies, post-9/11 ethical rhetoric, globalization, and film. He is the co-editor of “Beyond Ground Zero: 9/11 and the Futures of Critical Thought,” a collection of essays published as the summer 2008 double issue of the Review of Education, Pedagogy and Cultural Studies. He is currently working on a book about post-9/11 global cinema, called Terrorizing Cinema: Learning from Post-9/11 Global Film.

Contributors 391

J. Michael Richardson is a professor in the English Department at Lakehead University, Thunder Bay campus, with a specialization in early modern literature. His work in this area includes the book Astrological Symbolism in Spenser’s “The Shepheardes Calender.” He and Dr Kim Fedderson have been collaborating since the mid-1990s on the study of pop cultural adaptations and appropriations of Shakespeare in film, television, and graphic novels. Their work has appeared in journals such as College Literature and in collections such as Apocalyptic Shakespeare and Macbeth: New Critical Essays. Working with Dr J.D. Rabb, Dr Richardson has also published on the works of Joss Whedon, most notably the book The Existential Joss Whedon and the forthcoming Joss Whedon as Shakespearean Moralist. Jessica Riley is a PhD candidate at the School of English and Theatre Studies, University of Guelph. Her research interests include developmental dramaturgy, theatre history and historiography, Canadian theatre, and early modern English drama. A former editorial assistant for Theatre Journal, her work has been published in Canadian Theatre Review and in the New Essays on Canadian Theatre collection, Latina/o Canadian Theatre and Performance. Jessica’s current research involves the archival analysis of past play development processes, focusing on scripts developed by influential Canadian dramaturge Urjo Kareda at Toronto’s Tarragon Theatre. She is also editing Kareda’s collected letters, a project for which she received the 2013 Heather McCallum Award from the Canadian Association for Theatre Research. Monika Smialkowska is Senior Lecturer in English at Northumbria University. Her research interests fall into two categories: the early modern genre of court masque, and post-Renaissance adaptations and appropriations of early modern authors and genres. She has published articles in journals such as Shakespeare, Critical Survey, and English Literary Renaissance. Currently, she is working towards a monograph exploring the ways in which the three-hundredth anniversary of Shakespeare’s death in 1916 was celebrated around the world.

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Index

access: to apps, 75, 89–90; to culture, 232–3, 297; issues of, 91–2, 175; and language, 236, 253n6; and literacy, 91–2, 103–4n30; to radio, 230, 232; to Shakespeare, 171, 194–5, 240; to Stratford, 297, 315n25; to technology, 89–90, 91–2, 96, 233 adaptation: beyond, 373–82, 384, 385n6; cultural, 373–5; intermedial, effectiveness of, 10; intermedial, politics of, 29; limits to, 27; social uses of, 174–5, 177–9; sound and, 8; television, 19, 37, 61–2, 64, 66, 71n9, 104–5n37, 195n1, 347, 353; theory, 7–8, 196n3, 312n2, 349, 352–3, 373; as translation, 211–12; wild, 34 Adelaide Road (app), 82, 97 Akala, 281–3, 284n1 All’s Well That Ends Well, 377; radio adaptation of, 245 Android, 78–9, 100-1n4, 101n5 Antony and Cleopatra, 274, 283, 285n10, 377; and Shakescrafting, 360 Apple, 78–9, 86, 100–1n4, 101n5, 102n17, 103–4n30 applications. See apps appropriation, 6, 9, 46, 53, 56–7, 99,

168, 178, 243, 252, 260, 272, 276, 290, 295, 347–9, 354–61, 364, 366n7; and YouTube, 62–6, 69–70 apps, 34, 36, 285n8; accessibility of, 75, 89–90; and audience, 81; educational, 82–7, 89, 102n18, 103nn21–2; native vs web, 78; popularity of, 79, 100–1n4; promotion of, 81 archive: cultural, 122, 128; as incomplete, 244; media, 116, 124; Shakespearean, 94, 98, 274; YouTube as, 35, 55, 61, 66, 68–70 arts: and community-building, 152, 183–4; and social change, 152, 156, 193; transformative power of, 220 As You Like It, 82, 241–2, 270, 355, 380 audience, 205, 207, 209–13, 215–17, 220–1, 226–7; as curator, 56; global, 15–17, 30–1, 154, 157, 169, 267, 279, 350; and media, 4, 10–13, 258; as participatory, 15, 31, 82, 93–4, 97–8, 308–9; perception of, 212; and Prison Shakespeare, 161–2, 164, 166–9, 179–81, 192, 197n6, 198n9; of radio, 231–3, 235–52, 253n3; traditional boundaries of, 36–7, 76–7, 80, 100; YouTube, 53–4, 56

394 Index ballads, 188, 266–7 “Banquo” (app), 97–9 Bardbox, 69–70 Battle of Wills (2008), 21 Beatles, The, 56–8, 60–2, 71n9 Bin Laden, Osama, 121–2, 131–2, 149n8 Boal, Augusto, 37, 152–3, 156, 158, 174–81, 187, 190–1, 194, 199n14 Bogdanov, Michael, 165, 167, 171, 179–81, 186 boundaries: cultural, 89, 153, 156–7, 161, 171, 190, 263, 321–2; of media, 27–9, 36, 156–7, 277; of performance, 15, 76, 232–3; religious, 11–15; virtual, 18 Branagh, Kenneth, 64, 66, 69, 152, 272, 367n9 Brave New World, 23–6 Broadway, 38, 81, 206, 231, 241–2, 244, 261, 278, 285n9, 323 Burleigh, Louise, 328–30, 343n4 Caliban by the Yellow Sands, 322, 324–7, 331–41; as community theatre, 333–4; as intercultural, 332; program, 339–41; promotion of, 331; success of, 336–9 Canadian Adaptations of Shakespeare Project (CASP), 6, 44n10, 85, 268–74, 284n1, 285n7 censorship, 14, 159, 172, 326 chat rooms: use in performance, 15–17 circus: Shakespearean, 322–4, 341 civic theatre, 328–31 Clear Channel Communications, 261, 284n5 Cloud computing, 28, 32, 36, 75–7, 79, 86, 89–91, 97, 360 Collins, Suzanne, 11–14, 43n4

colonialism, 8, 23–6, 33, 117, 119, 121–4, 127, 139–43, 145, 153–4, 157, 169, 183, 271, 276; neo-, 139–40; post-, 33, 117, 119, 121, 134, 138–41, 183, 226, 271 Columbia Broadcasting System (CBS), 231, 248–52 Comedy of Errors, The, 278 community theatre, 324, 328–37, 340, 342–3, 343n4; aesthetic vs social functions of, 331–2, 342; as participatory, 329; social purpose of, 336–7 copyright, 53, 56, 58, 63–4, 71n5, 71n10, 347, 366n4 Coriolanus, 20, 44n7, 349 craft: as democratic, 349; vs art, 349–50; process vs product, 350; qualities of, 349–50. See also Shakescrafting Crime of Castlereagh, The, 178, 186–7, 191, 199n15, 200nn18–19 cultural capital, 38–40, 62, 95, 154, 206, 262, 297, 347–65 cultural economy, 4–5, 242 culture: access to, 232–3, 297; amateur, 53, 57; high vs low, 21, 64, 206–7, 232–3, 237, 252, 262, 321, 323, 325, 330–5, 343, 348, 363 curation, 99–100; of YouTube Shakespeare, 55–6, 59–63, 68 dance, 5, 8, 267, 278, 280, 322–4, 332, 333, 340–1, 347 De-ba-jeh-mu-jig, 23–5 de la Rocha, Zack, 282–3 demediation, 357–60, 362, 367n11 Drama League of America (DLA), 321–2, 325–6, 329–30, 335, 337, 342

Index 395 ebooks: popularity of, 103–4n30 ecology of knowledges, 170–1 editing: live, 15–16 education: and apps, 79–83; experiential, 177–8; industry, 38; open access, 86–8, 90, 99, 103nn22–3. See also flipped classrooms; pedagogy Educational Shakespeare Company (ESC), 152, 157, 169, 177, 180–2, 200n20 Ellington, Duke, 273–6, 280 Eminem, 257–60, 276, 283, 284n2 English Shakespeare Company, 165, 180 ereaders, 75–83, 89, 103n20. See also iPad; Kindle; Kobo; Nook Etsy, 350–1, 356, 359, 362, 366n6, 367n9 Ex Machina, 8 Facebook, 10, 77, 91, 94, 101n5, 277, 291, 354, 356; use in performance, 16, 97 fidelity criticism, 19, 27, 162, 347; of Harlem Duet, 294, 313n6; in Slings & Arrows, 210–14, 218, 226–7 film: adaptation, 41; as an intermedial form, 5; and self-evaluation, 193–4, 200n20; vs theatre, 4, 152, 164, 181 First Nations: Shakespearean adaptations, 8–9, 23–6 Fischlin, Daniel, 139, 146n2, 237, 373 flipped classrooms, 83–8, 99, 102n15 Fluxus, 27. See also Higgins, Dick Forum Theatre, 179. See also Boal, Augusto Gilligan’s Island: adaptation of Hamlet, 56

Globe Theatre, 206, 266, 271, 275–6, 347 Google, 7, 32, 35, 71n8, 71n10, 78–9, 278 graphic novel, 41, 82–3, 372, 381–4. See also Kill Shakespeare Hamilton, Clayton Meeker, 245–7, 250, 254n8 Hamlet, 15–17, 21, 39, 82, 85, 87, 93, 102n16, 163, 206–7, 233, 278, 381–2; adaptations of, 56–9, 63–7, 69–70, 367n9; radio adaptation of, 244, 248–9; in Shakescrafting, 354–7, 361, 363–5; in Slings & Arrows, 208–10, 214–18, 222–5 “Hamlet is back … and he is not happy” (2008), 58–9, 65 Hamlet Live, 15–17, 20, 31 “Hamlet Mash Up” (2011), 64–5 “Hamlet – the Mashup!!!” (2011), 65 “Hamlet ‘To Be or Not to Be’ Mashup” (2008), 69–70 Harlem Duet, 39; effects of, 310–11; and fidelity criticism, 294, 313n6; importance of, 302–3, 310–11; as original work, 294; publicity of, 290–1, 296–301; and race, 290–3, 296, 298–300, 304, 306, 315n20, 315n23; reception to, 291–6, 301–12, 313n5, 313n7, 315n23; relationship to Shakespeare, 39, 291, 293–6, 299, 308, 313n3, 313n8, 314n16, 315n23; and risk, 304; and role of audience, 308–12; as symbol of diversity, 290–2, 297–9; venue, 303–4 Henry IV, 245, 286, 305 Henry V, 245, 276, 379 Henry VI, 247

396 Index Henry VIII, 321, 376 Higgins, Dick, 27–9, 33, 80, 207, 385n10 hip hop, 38, 260–2, 281–3. See also rap human rights, 123–4, 143–4, 146–8n2, 148n3, 186, 199n17, 200n18 Hunger Games, The, 11–14, 20, 34, 42n2, 43n4 Huxley, Aldous, 23–6 hyperlinking, 60 hypermediation, 120, 132, 146, 301 Image Theatre, 178, 187 IndieGogo, 16 intermediality: of 9/11, 118–20; cultural, 155, 173; defining, 3–4, 27, 63, 76, 153, 258, 348–9, 372; as inherent, 43n6, 45n13; and learning, 83–4; origins of, 28; and paratextuality, 291–3, 309; and play, 258; race and, 141; social utility of, 28; types, 352–3, 358, 361 iBooks, 78, 86 iPad, 79, 81, 86, 89–90, 100–1n4, 285n8 iPhone, 77, 79, 90, 100–1n4, 101n6 iPod, 79, 100–1n4 Iraq, 283; and Shakespearean adaptation, 14–15; war, 121, 133, 139, 144, 149n7, 284n5 Irish Republican Army (IRA), 157, 169, 178, 185–9, 200nn18–19 iTunes, 7, 76, 78–9, 82 iTunes U (app), 83, 86 Jay-Z, 258–60, 283 jazz, 38, 262, 273–4 Julius Caesar, 84–5, 95, 102n16, 195–6n2, 271, 283, 379; radio adaptation of, 249–51

Kill Shakespeare, 41, 82, 372, 381–4, 385n6; as mashup, 381–2 Kindle, 7, 77–8, 101–2n9, 360 King John, 377 King Lear, 9, 82, 93, 95, 102n16, 206, 244; as comedy, 227; as m-novel, 93; radio adaptation of, 244; and Shakescrafting, 359; in Slings & Arrows, 208–9, 218–19, 223, 226–7 Knowles, Ric, 290–4, 296, 299, 301, 303–5, 311–12, 315n21 Kobo, 7 language: access to, 236, 253n6; Shakespearean, 236, 253n6 Last Action Hero (1993), 58, 65, 67 Lepage, Robert, 8–9 literacy, 6, 76–7, 89–92, 99, 103–4n30, 156, 165, 176, 190, 281; digital, 89, 91–6, 175, 178; new, 95–6; Shakespeare’s contributions to, 91, 270–1, 354, 360, 364; texting and, 92–4 liveness, 7, 15–18, 30–1; and aurality, 234. See also Hamlet Live Macbeth, 14, 17–18, 35–6, 206, 280, 285–6n10, 321, 381; apps, 82–3, 85, 87, 93, 95, 97–9, 102n16, 104n32; Indian adaptation of, 279; moral of, 176–7, 280; Orson Welles adaptation, 236–9, 248; radio adaptation of, 236–7, 239; in Slings & Arrows, 208–9, 211–18, 220–2, 227. See also Mickey B (2007) MacKaye, Percy, 324–34, 336, 338–40, 343n3, 343nn5–6 Maghaberry Prison, 152, 159, 172, 176, 189, 199n13 Magill, Tom, 35–7, 152, 195n1, 253n2; relationship to Shakespeare, 163

Index 397 Manga Shakespeare (app), 82, 102n14 mashups, 10, 35–6, 53, 55, 58, 62–7, 69–70; Kill Shakespeare as, 381–2 masque, 266, 322; community, 324–6, 332–41, 343n5 Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs), 76, 86–90, 96, 99, 103nn21–4, 103n26 Matheson, Dawn, 270–1 McKellen, Ian, 206, 211–13, 217 McKennitt, Loreena, 271, 275, 285–6n10 McLuhan, Marshall, 20, 43–4n6, 119, 241, 352 Measure for Measure, 376; radio adaptation of, 245 media: as archive, 116, 124; boundaries of, 27–9, 36, 156–7, 277; as cultural, 7; and meaning-making, 6; melted, 116–17, 146; new vs old, 30, 34–6, 40, 80, 118–19; power of, 12–13, 43n6; spectacle, 118–19, 126–7, 130–1, 141, 146 memory, 97, 136–7, 263, 265 Merchant of Venice, The, 195–6n2, 208, 271 metaphor, 60–2 metonymy, 60–2 Mickey B (2007), 35–7; and Boalian methodology, 177–81; challenges of, 171–4; as collaborative, 153, 158, 164–5, 168, 179, 182, 190–1; development of, 153, 190; influences on, 175–6; and literacy, 165; reception of, 152, 154, 161–2; use of language, 167–9, 192, 198n9; and violence, 157–61, 164–6, 170, 173, 184, 190–4; and women, 165–6. See also Prison Shakespeare

Midsummer Night’s Dream, A, 58, 60, 62, 85, 102n16, 206, 280, 378–9; and Shakescrafting, 360; in Slings & Arrows, 208, 213, 225–6 misprision, 372–5, 379 m-novels, 77, 91–6, 104nn31–2; and commentary, 93–4 Mobile Phones for Literacy (m4Lit), 77, 92–5, 104n33 Monty Python Hamlet, 66–7 morality: post-9/11, 123–4, 126, 146–8n2 Much Ado about Nothing, 195–6n2, 305, 379 Mudlark Production Company, 30–1, 96, 105n39 multiculturalism, 8–9, 34, 199n16; at Stratford Festival, 290–2, 297–9, 315n20 music: as an intermedial form, 5; use in Shakespearean plays, 264–6; as soundtrack, 279. See also ballads; popular music MXit, 94, 104n35 myShakespeare, 77, 91, 97 narration: and authority, 231, 241, 247–52, 252–3n1 National Broadcasting Company (NBC), 231, 244–5, 249, 252 New World Brave, 23–4 9/11 (­September 11, 2001), 34, 36, 284n5; cinema, post-, 116–17, 123–8, 132; as cultural trauma, 119; as inherently cinematic, 131–2, 148n5; as intermedial phenomenon, 118–20; as limit term, 127–8; morality, post-, 123–4, 126, 146–8n2 No Fear Shakespeare (app), 84–5

398 Index Nook, 77–8 Northern Ireland, 35, 37, 152–95, 253n2; conflict in, 185–9, 198n10, 199n15, 200n18 Northern Ireland Prison Service, 152, 172 Olivier, Laurence, 61, 65, 295, 307 Ophelia complex, 355–7, 366n7, 367n9 Otello, 82 Othello, 70–1n2, 102n16, 163, 208, 244, 291; adaptation of, 269, 321, 381; as m-novel, 93; relationship to Harlem Duet, 39, 291, 293–6, 299, 308, 313n3, 313–14n8, 314n16, 315n23; use in crafting, 355 patchwork Shakespeare, 10, 40, 321–43 pedagogy, 37–8, 76, 90, 177, 205–6. See also flipped classrooms performativity, 17–19, 80, 153, 157, 264 popular music: and adaptation, 38; commercialization of, 263; defining, 261–4, 284n5; globalizing Shakespeare through, 275–83; Shakespearean influence on, 267–8; and technology, 263 postmodernism, 9, 118, 125–7, 129, 133, 141–3, 253n4, 360; of theatre, 225 premediation, 118, 120–2 Prison Shakespeare, 153, 168–70, 181, 195–6n2, 196–7n4; effectiveness of, 156 promotion: of theatre, 39, 290–1, 296–301; YouTube, 57, 59 Prospero’s Prison, 157, 181–4, 194

race: politics of, 39, 124; and Harlem Duet, 290–3, 296, 298–300, 304, 306, 315n20, 315n23 racism, 24, 120, 140, 142–3, 169, 195n1, 198–9n11, 226, 237, 274 radio: access to, 230, 232; adaptation, 38; adaptation of theatre, 231, 234– 5; and All’s Well That Ends Well, 245; announcer, 245–8; and audience engagement, 231–3, 235–52, 253n3; as boundary defying, 230; commercialization of, 243–4; and Hamlet, 244, 248–9; and ideology, 230–1; and intimacy, 235; and Julius Caesar, 249–51; and King Lear, 244; as lacking, 234, 242; legitimation of, 230–1; limits of, 240–1; and Macbeth, 236–7, 239; and Measure for Measure, 245; popularity of, 252, 253n3; and role of narration, 235–6, 240, 249–52, 254n8; and Richard III, 246–8, 254n8; and Romeo and Juliet, 231; success of, 230; and “Shakespeare Cycle,” 249–51; and “Streamlined Shakespeare,” 249–51; and the “Summer of Shakespeare,” 231, 244, 249, 251; and The Winter’s Tale, 245 Radio Corporation of America (RCA), 240, 242, 251–2 Radio Guild, 244–9 rap, 38, 258–60, 281–3. See also hip hop Reduced Shakespeare Company, 67 remediation, 8, 127, 140, 205–7, 233, 251, 254n8, 258; defining, 118; intermediality and, 117–20; vs redemption, 349, 356–7, 361, 366n8, 367n9; taxonomy of, 301. See also upcycling

Index 399 Richard III, 61–2, 195–6n2, 233, 377, 381; radio adaptation of, 246–8, 254n8 Richard III (1955), 61–2 Richard III (1995), 206, 211–13 Richard III (2001), 9 Romeo and Juliet, 11–14, 30–1, 42n2, 43n4, 77, 80–2, 85–7, 91, 93–4, 96–7, 102n16, 104n32, 196–7n2, 206, 245, 278–80, 285–6n10, 321, 355, 382; radio adaptation of, 231; in Slings & Arrows, 208, 225; and Shakescrafting, 358–60 Romeo + Juliet (1996), 196–7n4, 206, 279 Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC), 30–1, 69, 77–8, 81–3, 91, 96–7, 102n13, 105n39, 211–12, 347, 376 sampling, 34–5, 267, 278–9; as invention, 65–70 Sanders Portrait of Shakespeare, 21–2 Sands, Bobby, 178, 186–8, 191, 200nn18–19 Schröter, Jens, 352–3, 355, 357–8, 361, 364 Sears, Djanet, 39, 290–315 semiotics, 3, 7, 54, 63, 119, 155, 259, 352 Shakescrafting, 10, 40, 347–65; altered books as, 363–5, 367n11; appropriation vs adaptation, 354, 356–7, 361; as demediation, 358; intermediality of, 358–9; use of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, 360; use of Antony and Cleopatra, 360; use of Hamlet, 354–7, 361, 363–5; use of King Lear, 359; use of Romeo and Juliet, 358–60; use of The Taming of the Shrew, 360; use of The Tempest, 363. See also craft

Shakespeare: access to, 171, 194–5, 240; Canadian scholarship of, 6–7, 21–2; centrality of, 5–6; Chinese adaptation of, 9; circus, 322–4, 341; commercialization of, 223, 323, 347–8; as cultural signifier, 24, 208, 259–60, 292, 297, 353; as decentred, 5–6, 10; economies of, 156, 196–7n4; fidelity to, 210–12, 214, 218, 227; First Nations adaptations of, 8–9, 23–6; as global brand, 7, 22, 27, 30, 40, 206, 219, 260, 269, 348, 353, 355, 363; Iraqi adaptation of, 14–15; language, 236, 253n6; and multiculturalism, 8; scholarship of, 42, 45–6n14; South African adaptations of, 77, 91–6, 104n33, 104n35, 104–5n37; Thai adaptation of, 14, 19–20 Shakespeare in Bits (app), 85–6, 102n18 Shakespeare Must Die (2012), 14, 20 Shakespeare (app), 78; Pro, 78–9 Shakespeare’s Face (2002), 21 Shakespeare in Love (1998), 80, 196n4, 206 Shakespeare Tercentenary, 40, 321– 43; aesthetic vs social functions of, 342–3; artistic vs populist aims of, 336–7; success of, 336; tradition vs innovation, 337–42 Skype, 77 Slings & Arrows, 37–8, 205–27; fidelity to Shakespeare, 210–12, 214, 218, 226–7; and Hamlet, 208–10, 214–18, 224–5; and King Lear, 208–9, 218–19, 223, 226–7; and Macbeth, 208–9, 211–18, 220–2, 227; and A Midsummer Night’s Dream, 208, 213, 225–6; and pedagogy,

400 Index 205–6; and Romeo and Juliet, 208, 225; and The Tempest, 208 Smith, Wadada Leo, 280–1 SMS: novel, 91–6, 105n38 social media, 16, 31, 55, 70–1n2, 97, 153. See also Facebook; Google; Twitter; YouTube social networking, 17, 28, 30–1, 35, 77, 94, 97–8, 102n14, 261, 277, 291, 350, 354, 356, 366n7 sonnets, 80, 88, 93, 206, 271–3, 280, 354–5, 361–2, 366n4, 377–80, 384, 385n6 SoundCloud, 7 soundscapes, 5, 27, 97, 293 South Africa: and Shakespearean adaptation, 77, 91–6, 104n33, 104n35, 104–5n37 spectacle, 16, 22, 32, 125–6, 129, 137; of deception, 138–9; intermedial, 134–5, 138; media, 118–19, 126–7, 130–1, 141, 146; open, 137; theatrical, 132–3, 212–13, 225, 331, 336; of the war on terror, 118–19, 139–40, 146 star-crossed lovers: trope of, 11–14, 42n2, 43n4, 95, 355 Stratford Festival, 37, 39, 81, 205–6, 270–1, 273–4, 290–312, 347, 376; access to, 297, 315n25; bureaucracy of, 304–5, 314n19; and diversity, 290–2, 297–9, 315n20; ideology of, 297; name, 297–8, 314n13; publicity, 290–1, 296–301. See also Harlem Duet Stratford-on-Avon, 194, 323, 347 Such Tweet Sorrow, 30–1, 33, 77, 80, 91, 96–8, 105n39 suicide: narrative of, 11–14, 159, 165, 172, 197n5

tablets, 19, 36, 75–7, 89, 91 Taming of the Shrew, The, 10, 56, 195–6n2, 196–7n4; and Shakescrafting, 360 Tate, Nahum, 226–7 Taymor, Julie, 36, 115–46 television: and 9/11, 132; and adaptation, 19, 37, 61–2, 64, 66, 71n9, 104–5n37, 195n1, 347, 353; as an intermedial form, 5, 35, 252, 254n7, 263, 353. See also Slings & Arrows Tempest, The, 8–9, 23–6, 86, 195–6n2, 271, 363, 377–8, 380; and Shakes­ crafting, 363; use in Slings & Arrows, 208. See also Caliban by the Yellow Sands; Prospero’s Prison; The Tempest (2010) Tempest, The (2010), 36, 115–46, 271; and dehumanization of Caliban, 141–3; and dream, 136–7; freedom in, 138–9; and hyperreality, 125–6, 133; ideological training in, 135–8; and memory, 136–7; and setting, 125, 129; similarities to 9/11, 115–16; terrorism in, 120, 125–6; use of power, 126, 134; and violence, 115, 120, 126, 130–1, 134, 139–40, 143–4; women in, 143–4 Ten Things I Hate about You, 10, 196–7n4 terrorism, 120–1, 125–6, 139, 144, 185; global, 130–2. See also war on terror texting: and literacy, 92–4; mobile Shakespeare as, 76. See also m-novel theatre: adaptation, 41; African American, 39, 236–7, 290–312, 321; commercial, 224–6; democratic principles of, 328–30, 343n4; as

Index 401 i­ nherently intermedial, 43n6, 153– 4; and poetry, 188–9; production, 8, 15–17; significance of, 30, 45n12; and social awareness, 327–8; spectacle, 132–3, 212–13, 225, 331, 336; as transformative, 185. See also civic theatre; community theatre Theatre of the Oppressed, 37, 152–3, 177, 199n14. See also Boal, Augusto thing theory, 350–3, 358, 362, 365–6n1 Timon of Athens, 274 Titus Andronicus, 208 transmediality, 10, 16, 42n1, 352, 355, 357–8, 361–2, 364 trauma, 238, 293; cultural, 119–20, 122, 127 Troilus and Cressida, 245, 377, 380 Twelfth Night, 196–7n4, 257–8, 285–6n10, 305 Twitter, 10, 91, 104n32; use in performance, 16–17, 30–1, 33, 77, 80, 91, 96–8, 105n39 Two Gentlemen of Verona, 271, 379 upcycling, 40, 350, 356–7, 360: as demediation, 358, 360; vs downcycling, 357 Vacation Association, 322–4 video games, 31, 97, 127 virtuality, 7, 17–18, 20 violence, 36–7; in Mickey B, 157–61, 164–6, 170, 173, 184, 190–4; in

The Tempest (2010), 115, 120, 126, 130–1, 134, 139–40, 143–4 Wainwright, Rufus, 271–3 war on terror, 115–45, 146–8n2, 148–9n6; marketing of, 138, 149n7; as spectacle, 118–19, 139–40, 146 Web 2.0, 53–6, 60, 65, 68, 100, 366n7 Welles, Orson, 236–9, 248–9, 251, 252–3n1 West Side Story, 81, 278 Williams, Saul, 282–3 Winter’s Tale, The, 81, 266, 376, 380; radio adaptation of, 245 World Shakespeare Festival, 77, 91, 97 World Trade Center, 115–16, 127, 133 Xbox: use in performance, 31, 97 YouTube, 10, 33–5, 53, 76–7, 82, 91, 97, 99, 252, 277–8; algorithm, 58–62, 71n3, 71n6; and appropriation, 62–6; as archive, 35, 55, 61, 66, 68–70; audience, 53–4; commentary, 53, 61, 70n2; curation of, 55–6, 59–63, 68; filtering, 56–7; and invention, 54, 59–62, 65–8; mashup, 35, 62–5, 67, 69–70; paratext of, 53; use in performance, 16, 31; promotion of, 57, 59 Yoza Cellphone Stories, 77, 91–6, 99 Zhaohua, Lin, 9