Rewriting Shakespeare's Plays for and by the Contemporary Stage 1443882801, 9781443882804

Table of contents :
Table of Contents
Acknowledgements
Introduction: Meaning and Motivations for a Contemporary Appropriation of Shakespeare’s Drama
Part One: The Rewriting Process under Scrutiny and its Stakes
1 Unlearning Tradition: William Shakespeare’s King Lear, Jane Smiley’s and Jocelyn Moorhouse’s A Thousand Acres • Anne-Kathrin Marquardt
2 Rewriting Macbeth: New Witches for a New Audience • Allene Nichols
3 Rewriting through Addition: Contemporary Walks in Shakespeare’s Woods • Dana Monah
Part Two: Global Shakespeares: Adaptation and Performance
4 Fiction and the Possibility of the Ethical: Rewriting Shakespeare and the Intertextuality of Gayatri Spivak • Preti Taneja
5 Shakespeare Mas: Performance and Recontextualisation of Julius Caesar on the Caribbean Carnival Stage • Giselle Rampaul
6 Kops’ Hamlet: To-be-or-not-be a Contemporary Hero? A Critical Reading of The Hamlet of Stepney Green • Estelle Rivier
Part Three: European Shakespeares: Challenging Contemporaneity
7 The Bard does not want to Die (Behind Bars): Rewriting Shakespeare within Volterra Maximum-Security Prison • Mariacristina Cavecchi
8 A Contemporary Appropriation of the Tempest called ‘Caliban’s Castle’ • Margaret Rose
9 Topsy-Turvying The Merchant of Venice: Shylock as Wesker’s Response to the Renaissance Jew • Anne Etienne and Estelle Rivier
General Conclusion
Bibliography
Contributors

Citation preview

Rewriting Shakespeare’s Plays For and By the Contemporary Stage

Rewriting Shakespeare’s Plays For and By the Contemporary Stage Edited by

Michael Dobson and Estelle Rivier-Arnaud

Rewriting Shakespeare’s Plays For and By the Contemporary Stage Edited by Michael Dobson and Estelle Rivier-Arnaud This book first published 2017 Cambridge Scholars Publishing Lady Stephenson Library, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2PA, UK British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Copyright © 2017 by Michael Dobson, Estelle Rivier-Arnaud and contributors All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner. ISBN (10): 1-4438-8280-1 ISBN (13): 978-1-4438-8280-4

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Acknowledgements ................................................................................... vii Introduction ................................................................................................. 1 Meaning and Motivations for a Contemporary Appropriation of Shakespeare’s Drama PART ONE: The Rewriting Process under Scrutiny and its Stakes Chapter One ............................................................................................... 11 Unlearning Tradition: William Shakespeare’s King Lear, Jane Smiley’s and Jocelyn Moorhouse’s A Thousand Acres Anne-Kathrin Marquardt Chapter Two .............................................................................................. 31 Rewriting Macbeth: New Witches for a New Audience Allene Nichols Chapter Three ............................................................................................ 43 Rewriting through Addition: Contemporary Walks in Shakespeare’s Woods Dana Monah PART TWO: Global Shakespeares: Adaptation and Performance Chapter Four .............................................................................................. 59 Fiction and the Possibility of the Ethical: Rewriting Shakespeare and the Intertextuality of Gayatri Spivak Preti Taneja Chapter Five .............................................................................................. 83 Shakespeare Mas: Performance and Recontextualisation of Julius Caesar on the Caribbean Carnival Stage Giselle Rampaul

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Chapter Six ................................................................................................ 95 Kops’ Hamlet: To-be-or-not-be a Contemporary Hero? A Critical Reading of The Hamlet of Stepney Green Estelle Rivier PART THREE: European Shakespeares: Challenging Contemporaneity Chapter Seven.......................................................................................... 119 The Bard does not want to Die (Behind Bars): Rewriting Shakespeare within Volterra Maximum-Security Prison Mariacristina Cavecchi Chapter Eight ........................................................................................... 135 A Contemporary Appropriation of the Tempest called ‘Caliban’s Castle’ Margaret Rose Chapter Nine............................................................................................ 143 Topsy-Turvying The Merchant of Venice: Shylock as Wesker’s Response to the Renaissance Jew Anne Etienne and Estelle Rivier General Conclusion ................................................................................. 161 Bibliography ............................................................................................ 167 Contributors ............................................................................................. 181

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The editors wish to thank all the persons who have worked for the fulfilment of the present volume, in particular the reading committee formed by Tim Crouch (actor, writer, and director), Isabelle SchwartzGastine (Université de Caen Normandie), Jeffrey Hopes (Université d’Orléans), Christine Kiehl (Université Lyon 2) and Robert Shaughnessy (University of Kent). We are very grateful to the contributors to this collection who have been patient enough for their papers to be edited and published. Finally we address a special thanks to our families who are always behind to support us and be confident in the success of our projects.

INTRODUCTION

Despite its quasi-systematic use, rewriting is still treated as a pejorative term, as if it merely meant the act of copying another text imperfectly. Indeed, what is rewriting if not choosing a model which is recomposed as a new text, i.e. building a plot from what was already shaped as a former work? For example the characters’ names and the set of the action might remain alike while some other considerations are adapted. Likewise, the language, the chronology, the intended message might change together with the title. Those alterations are however not insignificant insofar as they induce substantial, if not major, transformations in the new work which will eventually turn out a distorted because partial view of the so-called “model”. The term rewriting is associated with or replaced by others that are more or less derogatory: repetition, reproduction, replay, plagiarism, pastiche or parody, summary or gloze. Translating a work is also considered as being part of the rewriting process. Playwrights like Heiner Müller did not conceal the fact that, through their translations of Shakespeare’s drama, they were voicing the political and social concerns of their own country and times. In Müller’s translation of Macbeth and its portrayal of peasants revolting against their tyrant, the playwright’s opponents in the politically-divided 1970s Germany, perceived encouragement for the East German’s resistance against oppression, Marxism and the violence of despots. Thus despite being a rewritten work, Müller’s translation of Shakespeare’s Macbeth was definitely meant to embody its (second) author’s personal opinion about more contemporary times. Translation does not prevent the final composition from being an inventive adaptation and the result of a revisited reading of the Shakespearean source. Sometimes, the notion of rewriting is used to describe only part of the process when, for instance, the contemporary work has retained mere details of the source such as the theme, one or two scenes, a description, the names of characters or the overall structure. The reproduction is then only partial. In his Littérature dépliée, Jean-Christophe Bailly pointed that in essence the act of writing is always a new beginning, a reconstruction,

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Introduction

whereas the rewritten work may be seen as a “remake” or a “variation”, a “new phenomenon embedded in an apparent […] shift1.” Indeed, rewriting is conditioned by meaning: if playing with words was not an infinite literary stake, if meaning was not constantly a source of reformulation, analysis and investigation, writing would not be an endless cycle. More significantly, in drama, the notion of rewriting is clearly linked to the rehearsal process. Rehearsing means repeating: actors learn their parts by heart before stepping foot on stage and being confronted with the other parts. Yet, even then, repeating the same words and actions paradoxically implies that things will never be exactly similar. Random circumstances always disrupt intentions and their tangibility. This is also one of the reasons why performances, either set in a permanent venue, or on tour, never sound nor look exactly the same and arouse contrasting critiques each time. On this aspect, Caryl Churchill’s A Number (which is not a play based on Shakespeare) is a good semantic illustration2. In this play, Salter, a man in his sixties, who abandoned his son to the welfare services when he was young and had an identical one genetically engineered later, discovers that he has eventually had three sons: the natural one and two clones. As the play unfolds, he meets them in turn, and is led to realize that despite their similar genes, they are all very different. The same could be said regarding a play, its various productions and its offspring: although they are based on the same material, they never look nor sound the same. Likewise, Jean-Christophe Bailly relevantly takes the metaphor of a ball of wool to speak of literature and of its main tool, language: “each word is a thread we draw but to put it back again immediately3.” Just like in sewing where tears need to be sown up, writing or rehearsing needs revisions. Still, in drama, rehearsing, i.e. re-telling the script again and again, is an unending task because rehearsing —just like “repeating” (répéter) in French— implies giving the text an infallible power. At the same time, it asserts the oblique nature of the dramatic composition. Indeed as it is rooted in a text meant to be performed, the dramatic voice 1

« [N]ouveauté enchâssée dans un glissement, fût-il léger, d’apparence. » JeanChristophe Bailly in « Reprise, répétition, réécriture, La littérature dépliée, JeanPaul Engélibert, Yen-Maï Tran-Gervat (ed.), Rennes : PUR, 2008, p. 14. (My translation.) 2 The play’s title is significantly translated as ‘copies’ in French. 3 (« Chaque mot comme un fil qu’on tire mais pour qu’aussitôt [on] y retourne »). Op. cit., p. 14.

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becomes the constant object of actors’ investigation. No ending nor limitation obstruct its progress in time and places. Paradoxically enough, as Bailly remarks, rehearsing and rewriting aim at reaching a kind of perfection and formal ending but conversely the text never ends. Indeed, repeating, imitating and rewriting it open the field of possible interpretations, unclose and disclose it infinitely4. Rewriting thus characterizes the endless work of telling (whether on paper or on stage) and of unwinding meaning. It is one of the reasons why when we read a text, we often think of another, the echo of which resonates through the pages. In drama, we could compare such a vocal reverberation to a chorus whose song can be heard in the wings while other characters are speaking on stage. Some scholars often use the word “spectre” to describe the entanglement of voices and the reminiscence of the former author’s stylistic identity in a new literary work5. Still, the notion of rewriting embraces other literary concepts that need to be further developed. Gérard Genette has thoroughly explained the intertextual relationship that most literary texts have engaged in. In his book Palimpsests6, he focuses on the textual transcendence (also called transtextuality) which is “everything that links the text, either manifestly or secretly, to other texts7.” He also mentions five categories of transtextual relationships that we can recall here as they will help the reader to understand the connections that Shakespeare’s plays and their rewritings nurture. Genette nominates the five categories as such: 1/ Intertextuality which can be explicit (e.g. a quotation) or less canonical (e.g. plagiarism and allusion); 2/ Paratextuality which encompasses the title, the subtitle, the inter-titles, the preface, the foreword, the post-face, among other elements; 3/ Metatextuality is a text commenting on another which may be neither quoted nor named; 4/ Hypertextuality implies a union between two texts: the first (A) is the hypotext, the second (B) is the 4

Bailly uses here the barbarism « infinir » : « la répétition infinit le texte, ouvre le texte à l’infinition du sens […] », op. cit., p. 17. 5 See for instance the works of Pierre Kapitaniak in France and of Vanasay Khamphommala who wrote his PHD on Shakespeare’s spectre in Barker’s works: Spectres de Shakespeare dans l’oeuvre de Howard Barker, sous la direction d’Élisabeth Angel-Perez, 26 novembre 2010, Université Paris IV-Sorbonne. Recently published with a preface by Howard Barker. Paris : Presses Universitaires de Paris-Sorbonne. Mondes anglophones (coll.), 2015. 6 Gérard, Genette. Palimpsestes, La littérature au second degré, Paris : Éditions du Seuil, coll. Points, 1982. 7 « tout ce qui met [le texte] en relation, manifeste ou secrète, avec d’autres textes. » Gérard, Genette, op. cit., p.7.

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Introduction

hypertext. ‘B’ results from ‘A’ although the latter may not be mentioned. ‘B’ is a kind of metamorphosed ‘A’ and could not exist without it; last but not least, 5/ Architextuality indicates a silent relationship between the text and its taxonomic origin (e.g. Poetry; Essay; Novel, etc.). Genette later mainly focuses on the hypertextual category (n°4) which defines the very act of writing ‘on top of’ another text or just because the ‘A’ text is a source of inspiration for the ‘B’ one. Originally, the ‘palimpsest’ was a manuscript on which two or more successive texts were written, each one being erased to make space for a new one. This technique now describes the rewriting process, which implies using a model to be recomposed in a different way, with numerous alterations. In the large field of drama, Shakespeare has inspired many palimpsests that express themselves under various forms: Arnold Wesker’s Shylock for instance, reformulates Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice. Set in a Venetian ghetto in 1563 (the eve of Shakespeare’s birth), Wesker’s 1976 play however manages to highlight the post-Holocaust impact of The Merchant of Venice. As Chantal Meyer-Plantureux shows in her book Les Enfants de Shylock8 (Shylock’s Children), Shakespeare’s Merchant has inspired many other works among which are Charles Marowitz’s adaptation published in The Marowitz Shakespeare, and even some operatic variations (Gabriel Fauré’s Shylock (1889); Reynaldo Hahn’s Merchant (1935) for example.) The list of Shakespearian-inspired works is long and whilst far from aiming to offer an exhaustive account below, we may at least try to mention some of the major works that have been published on the world scene. It is worth noting that some Shakespeare plays are rewritten for the modern stage more often than others, especially the tragedies. King Lear for instance, quite apart from its Enlightenment variation by Nahum Tate, is the source for Edward Bond’s Lear (1971), Howard Barker’s Seven Lears (1989), Michel Deutsch’s John Lear (1997), Rodrigo Garcia’s Rey Lear (2001), and Olivier Cadiot and Ludovic Lagarde’s Lear is in town (2013). Romeo and Juliet led Jean Anouilh to write a Roméo et Jeannette in 1946; likewise Eugène Durif adapted the play in a contemporary context in La Petite histoire (1998). Carmelo Bene also determined to adapt the play in his own Romeo and Juliette based on Shakespeare (1976). As already mentioned, Bene also rewrote two Macbeths: Macbeth (1983) and Macbeth, horror suite (1996). Such plays inspired many other 8 Chantal Meyer-Plantureux, Les Enfants de Shylock ou l'antisémitisme sur scène, Paris : Editions complexes, coll. Le théâtre en question, 2005.

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playwrights, among whom, Eugène Ionesco for his Macbett (1972) and Heiner Müller, Macbeth based on Shakespeare (1971). The Tragedy of Richard III inspired Bene’s Richard III (1977) which was later extended by Deleuze’s Superpositions. It also gave birth to Normand Chaurette’s Les Reines (1991), and Dan Jemmett’s stage-adaptation, Trois Richard (Three Richards, 2012). And yet the play that has engendered the most new interpretations is undeniably Hamlet. Whether on paper or on stage, and whether in dramatic or novelistic forms, the meaning and the structure of these plays are constantly being revisited to express new ideas, as we shall see in Chapter 4. This brief and largely Francophone-centred account willingly omits other ‘palimpsests’ based on Shakespeare’s canon9. Because of their manifold natures and forms (operas, stage and cinema productions, essays, novels and songs for instance), it would be an anthology in itself to try to encompass them all. In the ensuing chapters, the authors focus on the multiple ways by which Shakespeare’s works are revised. Thus in Part One, “The Rewriting Process under Scrutiny and its Stakes”, AnneKathrin Marquardt first proposes to explore the distance separating King Lear (1606), Jane Smiley’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel A Thousand Acres (1991) and the eponymous film adaptation of that novel by director Jocelyn Moorhouse (1997). Her paper examines how Smiley’s reading of the play “positions itself in the interpretive tradition”, explores the relationship between two texts and the way in which the latter can translate into film. In the second paper, Allene Nichols challenges academic conventions as she revisits the stakes of Macbeth in the light of her own literary composition called Second Witch. She explains how myth-based plays can be identified as either ‘reflectionist’ or “interventionist” (Babbage: 53), the first providing an accurate representation of the contemporary world, the second seeking to interrogate our modes of perception. For her case study she chose the interventionist mode, i.e. “keeping the setting in early Scotland, but interweaving an imaginary history of women warriors with mystical powers who are defeated by the Scots into the fabric of the story”. The play is aimed at a high-school audience. In a to-and-fro conversation between texts and centuries, she interrogates notions of gender and their ideological implications. 9

For example Botho Stauss’s Rape, Aimé Césaire’s Tempest or Bond’s Bingo without mentioning rewritings dating back from previous centuries: George Sand’s As You like It or Le Lorrain’s Love’s Labour’s Lost.

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Introduction

In the third chapter, Dana Monah focuses on four non-Anglophone rewritings of Richard III to underscore how rewriters attempt to deepen the mysteries in the source text rather than providing answers to them. The aim of their ‘supplements’ is to alter the meaning of the preceding text to shed a new light on it. “To use Umberto Eco’s metaphor or reading as a pleasure walk in the woods, we could say that the secondary writer stops to admire a beautiful image [(…). His/her] aim is [then] to tell it in a different manner,” she writes. In the second part, “Global Shakespeares: Adaptation and Performance”, Preti Taneja uses We That Are Young, which forms the creative production in her practise-based Creative Writing PhD, to investigate the implications of the rewriting process in a postcolonial context in reaction to King Lear’s topical question : ‘Who is it it that can tell me who I am?’ (1.4.211). We That Are Young charts the fortunes of five young people as they navigate the terrors of an ancient and postmodern Indian society undergoing seismic change. Preti Taneja argues that the appropriation of Shakespeare by postcolonial fiction serves as a way of criticizing its own hybrid identity while providing a vision of a new, if precarious infrastructure. This in turn can ‘figure forth an equality that takes disgrace in its stride’ (Gayatri Spivak). As a possible continuation or answer to the issue raised in this chapter, Giselle Rampaul explores what is made of Shakespeare on the Caribbean carnival stage. Every year, in Carriacou (a Caribbean island off the coast of Grenada), a group of men wearing costumes and reciting passages from Julius Caesar demonstrate their strength and mental poise in a carnival. While detailing the implications of such a ritual, the paper addresses various questions: What does it mean to perform Shakespeare? How does the Carnival cultural stage of Shakespeare Mas complicate ideas about the contemporary stage? To what extent does recontextualisation transform Shakespeare? To conclude this part, Estelle Rivier’s account of Bernard Kops’ Hamlet of Stepney Green leads us back into British territory but to tell the story of a Jewish family in the manner of kitchen sink drama. The play stages a confrontation and comparison between bathetically modern Hamlets senior and junior. East Enders Sam Levy and his son David are undeniably, odd revisions of Shakespeare’s ghost and eponymous hero. What does it mean to write Hamlet in a post-Holocaust context? Why is Kops’ version curiously not a tragedy? How is the notion of performance involved in his writing? Why should this often forgotten play be regarded as a masterpiece?

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Finally, in part three, “European Shakespeares: Challenging Contemporaneity”, Mariacristina Cavecchi focuses on the work of the theatrical laboratory of the prison of Volterra (formerly a Medici fortress), launched in August 1988 and managed by Armando Punzo. She analyses the way Shakespeare (more particularly his Hamlet, Macbeth and Romeo and Juliet) has been appropriated by the convicts (in performances involving choreography, music, physicality) and shows how the experiment has become the seed of a cultural revolution which has burst both geographical and metaphorical bars. Still in Italy, Margaret Rose centres her chapter on Caliban’s Castle, a play published by The London Review in 2010 and turned into a shortstory illustrated by Emily Chappell in 2011, which brings Prospero, Miranda and Caliban to Milan’s Forzesco castle in 2009, exactly four hundred years after Shakespeare’s Tempest. Margaret Rose relates the backstory and explains why Shakespeare’s play is, according to her, so deeply relevant to the environmental issues in our contemporary world. Finally in chapter six, Anne Etienne and Estelle Rivier offer a direct comparison between Arnold Wesker’s Shylock and Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice. They discuss the distance between the two plays, thereby questioning the notion of (re-)writing from common or personal experience. The discrepancies between these Merchants signal a contemporary urgency which may be apprehended both as ideological corrective and as humanistic cure. The authors of this paper study how Wesker negotiated the modern identity of his play by moulding a modern language while settling his characters, in a characteristically tongue-incheek gesture, in the 1563 Ghetto, and implicity positing a virtual dichotomy between the corrupt Venice and the hopeful Belmont.

PART ONE THE REWRITING PROCESS AND ITS STAKES

CHAPTER ONE UNLEARNING TRADITION: WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE’S KING LEAR, JANE SMILEY’S AND JOCELYN MOORHOUSE’S A THOUSAND ACRES ANNE-KATHRIN MARQUARDT

Gérard Genette famously described rewritings as palimpsests1, new texts that can let older ones shine through in-between the lines. But this is only potentially true, since readers will not automatically be aware of both texts simultaneously. The relationship between the texts can be, as Philippe Lejeune2 once put it, palimpsestuous or, to push the pun even further, incestuous – where the second text can ultimately cover up the first, masking the difference between them. Linda Hutcheon has also explored this tension between fusion and distinction. But, according to her, the notion of difference is crucial to understand rewritings: Seen from the perspective of its process of reception, adaptation is a form of intertextuality: we experience adaptations (as adaptations) as palimpsests through our memory of other works that resonate through repetition with variation.3

It is, therefore, the tension between ‘repetition’ and ‘variation’ that this paper is interested in, trying to measure the relative distance – if any – that separates William Shakespeare’s King Lear (1606), Jane Smiley’s Pulitzer

1 Gérard Genette. Palimpsestes. Paris: Seuil, 1992. It was translated into English under the same title. 2 Lejeune uses the word in passing and without further explanations; Hutcheon uses it in English several times. Philippe Lejeune. Moi Aussi. Paris: Seuil, 1986: 115. 3 Linda Hutcheon. A Theory of Adaptation. New York: Routledge, 2006: 8. Hutcheon’s emphasis.

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Prize-winning novel A Thousand Acres (1991) and the eponymous film adaptation of that novel by director Jocelyn Moorhouse (1997).4 If a rewriting positions itself vis-à-vis the first text by opening a gap between the two works, then it is in this gap that the possibility of critical distance is located – but is this possibility always realised? Smiley’s rewriting is centred on incest in a very literal sense, as Lear’s equivalent in the novel abuses his daughters, one of whom becomes the first-person narrator of the tale. In A Thousand Acres, Shakespeare’s play thus becomes associated with a much wider patriarchal tradition. Telling her story is a struggle for the narrator, not least because it entails calling into question other narratives she had heard about her father – in the process, she has to distance herself from King Lear as well. As this paper hopes to show, Smiley represents rewriting as a contest between two narratives, where the newer attempts to wrestle free of its palimpsestuous relationship with the older. We shall examine how Smiley’s reading of the play positions itself in the interpretive tradition, and what her choice of a rather hesitant narrator means for the rewriting process. We shall also explore whether a relationship between two texts can translate into film. When one compares the plot and characters of King Lear to those of Smiley’s A Thousand Acres, it becomes obvious that, in many respects, Smiley has remained quite close to the first text. Although set in 1970s Iowa, the plot of her novel remains recognisably that of the play: a family conflict between an authoritative father (Lear / Larry Cook) and his three daughters, to whom he wishes to bequeath his farm. The two older sisters (Goneril / Ginny, who is also the narrator, and Regan / Rose) accept but will be accused of taking advantage of their father’s generosity. The youngest (Cordelia / Caroline) is first rejected by Larry for refusing the gift, but will later fight alongside her father to take back the farm. A lawsuit follows, tearing the family apart. The subplot of the play is also represented, since Gloucester / Harold Clark, a neighbour of the family, has a falling out with his two sons, Jess and Loren / Edmund and Edgar. Other parallels exist at the level of imagery: as status symbols of the patriarch’s power, the thousand acres of the novel correspond to the hundred knights of King Lear. 4

Line numbers, page numbers and DVD time indexes in this paper refer to the following works: William Shakespeare. King Lear. Ed. R. A. Foakes. London: Arden Shakespeare Third Series, 1997. Jane Smiley. A Thousand Acres. London: Harper Perennial, 2008. A Thousand Acres. Dir. Jocelyn Moorhouse. Perf. Jessica Lange and Michelle Pfeiffer. Touchstone, 1997.

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But the diegesis of the play is also reworked in important ways, as the subplot is contracted and the Lear / Larry storyline is given pride of place. At the heart of the novel lies a terrible secret, that of the incest between Larry and his two elder daughters, Ginny and Rose. As memories of the trauma are slowly brought back to the surface by the narrator, Ginny, the two sisters are undoubtedly portrayed as victims. Moreover, the sisters are no longer implicated in what was the most terrible crime of Shakespeare’s play: the blinding of Gloucester at Regan’s hands (3.7) is transformed into the half-accident of Harold’s blinding, instigated solely by Rose’s husband (p. 231 ff.; p. 301). If, in the first scene of King Lear, Goneril and Regan could be accused of flattery and deceitful rhetoric (1.1.55-82), their short replies to Larry’s love test in the novel seem much more innocent (p. 19). Conversely, Larry’s guilt is emphasised. Kent becomes the very inconspicuous character Ken LaSalle, while the Fool disappears, leaving the patriarch without a moral compass. Choleric and inflexible, he treats all things and persons as his possessions, including his young daughters’ bodies. Smiley’s rewriting is thus based, in great part, on an inversion where guilt is assigned to a different set of characters. But inversion with respect to what, precisely? At least since the 1970s, feminist criticism of the play has emphasised Lear’s own responsibility in the tragedy. To quote only one example, Cristina León Alfar5 argues that Goneril and Regan merely imitate the patriarchal and violent power structures they grew up in to gain a measure of freedom and control for themselves. Interpretations that are more sympathetic to the sisters can also be found in the theatre, for instance when Judi Dench played Regan with a stutter, making her seem less articulate and powerful.6 When we speak of inversion, therefore, it is inversion with respect to a certain traditional interpretation of the play, in which Lear is portrayed as the innocent victim of scheming daughters. Their ingratitude for his gift of the kingdom and the blinding of Gloucester justify the following assessment by A. C. Bradley at the beginning of the twentieth century: Goneril is ‘the most hideous human being (if she is one) that Shakespeare ever drew’ and ‘what we desire for [Lear] during the 5 Cristina León Alfar. ‘King Lear‫ތ‬s “Immoral” Daughters and the Politics of Kingship.’ Exemplaria: A Journal of Theory in Medieval and Renaissance Studies 8.2 (1996): 375-400. 6 Philippa Kelly. ‘See What Breeds about Her Heart: King Lear, Feminism, and Performance.’ Renaissance Drama 33 (2004): 137-157. This Royal Shakespeare Company performance of 1976 was directed by Trevor Nunn; Donald Sinden played Lear.

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Chapter One

brief remainder of his days is […] peace and happiness by Cordelia’s fireside’.7 More recently in 2009 Sophie Alatorre wrote that ‘the cruelty of the play is exemplified by the behaviour of Goneril and Regan who ruthlessly take advantage of the credulousness of others’.8 It is this traditional interpretation of the play which Smiley sought to call into question in her rewriting, producing what Alan Sinfield might call a ‘dissident reading’9 of the play. As Smiley puts it: ‘I’d always felt the way Lear was presented to me was wrong. Without being able to articulate why, I thought Goneril and Regan got the short end of the stick’.10 The question of the relative distance from novel to film, or even from play to film, is more complex, however.11 Jocelyn Moorhouse’s adaptation remains close to Smiley’s novel, as it depicts the choleric father, the incest, the trauma relived and overcome by the elder sisters. But, as is perhaps normal when transforming a 350-page-novel into a film, the story is compressed even further, leaving little room for the Gloucester / Harold subplot. The film concentrates on Ginny and Rose, which is explained by the fact that Jessica Lange (Ginny) and Michelle Pfeiffer (Rose) had bought the adaptation rights and initiated the project, ensuring that they could pick their roles and focus the film on them.12 The marketing strategy, including the slogan ‘Best friends. Bitter rivals. Sisters’, and the 7

Quoted in: David Brauner. ‘“Speak Again”: The Politics of Rewriting in A Thousand Acres.’ The Modern Language Review 96.3 (2001): 654. 8 Sophie Alatorre. ‘“O Ruined Piece of Nature”: King Lear, Tragedy of Subversion?’ ‘And ThatҲs True Too’: New Essays on King Lear. Ed. Sophie Alatorre, Pierre Iselin and François Laroque. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2009: 78. To quote only one other recent example of this point of view: Naomi Conn Liebler. ‘Pelican Daughters: The Violence of Filial Ingratitude in King Lear.’ Shakespeare Jahrbuch 143 (2007): 36-51. 9 The expression comes from the title of his book: Alan Sinfield. Faultlines: Cultural Materialism and the Politics of Dissident Reading. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992. 10 James A. Schiff. ‘Contemporary Retellings: A Thousand Acres as the Latest Lear.’ Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction 39.4 (1998): 367-381. 11 To many critics, the Lear reference is obvious even in the film. To give only a few examples: Gioia Diliberto. ‘King Lear‫ތ‬s World, Reborn on a Farm in the Heartland.’ The New York Times, 8 December 1996: 22. Yvonne Griggs. ‘“All our lives we‫ތ‬d looked out for each other the way that motherless children tend to do”: King Lear as Melodrama.’ Literature Film Quarterly 35.2 (2007): 101-107. Janet Maslin. ‘King Lear (Just Call Him Larry) in Iowa.’ The New York Times, 19 September 1997. 12 On the history of the film project, see: Gioia Diliberto. ‘King Lear‫ތ‬s World, Reborn on a Farm in the Heartland.’ The New York Times, 8 December 1996: 22.

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poster showing the two Hollywood stars close up, further emphasised the central role of the two women. If anything, the opposition between guilty father and innocent daughters is even stronger than in the novel. Larry is often filmed in low-angle shots making him an authoritative and threatening presence. This is the case when he tells the story of the farm to Ginny (00:04:10-30), when he watches his family play baseball (00:19:2550), when he insults his daughters during the storm (00:41:30-00:43:30), when Ginny remembers the incest (01:03:40). Conversely, the daughters appear more innocent, as Ginny’s attempt at poisoning Rose, which the novel depicts at length, is left out in the film. The blinding of Gloucester / Harold disappears entirely. According to Yvonne Griggs, these choices clearly place the film in the genre of the melodrama, as it concentrates on female characters and domestic life, and uses soothing music. Most strikingly, the conclusion of the film is far more optimistic than that of the novel. The novel ends on Ginny’s remark that ‘I can’t say that I forgive my father, but now I can imagine what he probably never chose to remember – the goad of an unthinkable urge’, an urge symbolised by ‘the gleaming obsidian shard I safeguard above all the others’ (p. 370-1). This is of course a reference to the memory of incest slowly rediscovered by the narrator as the novel moves forward, and which she chooses to hold on to. In the film, by contrast, the last frames show Ginny leaving the farm behind as her voiceover focuses on Rose’s children: ‘As each year goes by I see them grow and in them I see something new, something my sister and I never had. I see hope’ (01:36:20-40). The opposition between safeguarded dark memories of the past on the one hand, and optimism about the future on the other, could hardly be clearer. According to Griggs, the film thus repeats the typical story of the melodrama: a woman in conflict with patriarchal values ultimately succeeds in escaping from that world. Beyond the question of genre, this Hollywood production is clearly a mainstream film. Smiley’s text is set against the backdrop of an economic and social crisis in 1970s rural America.13 The political tensions of the period are also present, since, in the novel, Jess escapes from conscription for the Vietnam War by fleeing to Canada. Even if it is not a prominent 13 For a very interesting discussion of the historical background of the novel, especially of rural America in the 1970s, see: John Mack Faragher. ‘The Historical Imagination of A Thousand Acres.’ Novel History. Historians and Novelists Confront America’s Past (and each other). Ed. Mark C. Carnes. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2001: 146-159.

16

Chapter One

theme, the societal conflicts of the time are depicted in the text. In the film, however, the reference to the war disappears, perhaps to avoid controversy; the world the characters inhabit could not be described as being in crisis. Caution is also exercised when the incest itself is revealed. In the novel, two separate scenes serve to corroborate each other: Ginny remembers as she makes her bed (p. 228 ff.) and when she hears her father address Caroline in an inappropriate tone (p. 271 ff.). The film shows both moments, but the memory comes back only on the second occasion – making the bed is perfectly unproblematic. One possible explanation for this choice is that showing the memory of the incest in the place where it had happened would have been too shocking.14 The film thus appears as both more and less extreme than the novel, less extreme because the actual violence is attenuated, more so because the moral divide is much clearer. In this last sense at least, the film can be said to participate in the inversion of values vis-à-vis the traditional interpretation of King Lear that could be seen in the novel. For some critics such as Philippa Kelly, however, its credibility is called into question by these exaggerated moral oppositions: By participating in contemporary dialogues about recovered memory, it may be that the film A Thousand Acres skews its perspective so far toward its women that it has no room for sympathy toward masculinity at all (not only is Daddy irredeemable, but he remains largely unsupported by the thinly fleshed husbands).15

One way rewritings build distance with respect to their first texts is thus by concentrating the diegesis on a few salient aspects, displacing emphasis, and, ultimately, shifting the moral fulcrum of the work. One implication is that rewriting does not necessarily consist in inventing something new, it can also entail (re)discovering possibilities of meaning that may be contained in the first text, but are undervalued by criticism or in performance. Smiley thus justifies her ‘adding’ the incest motif in her novel by pointing out that it is already contained within the play: 14

This strategy seems not to have been successful in the USA. The film was rated ‘R’ (forbidden for under-seventeen-year-olds without adult supervision) by the Motion Picture Association of America because of ‘some strong sexual language’. The French authorities were less cautious, since the Commission de Classification des Œuvres Cinématographiques allowed general audiences to see the film (‘tous publics’), released in France in 1998 under the title Secrets. 15 Philippa Kelly. ‘See What Breeds about Her Heart: King Lear, Feminism, and Performance.’ Renaissance Drama 33 (2004): 149.

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But given [Lear’s] passionate reaction to everything they do, there’s some sense that his feelings about his daughters are inappropriately vindictive. And why should a father’s feelings be inappropriately vindictive? Because they were inappropriately passionate to start with. […] Now you have to ask yourself, why would a man of normal sexual feeling view a woman’s sexual area as a source of sin, if he didn’t feel terrible guilt about what he’d been doing?16

Smiley bases her analysis on concrete elements of the play, such as the numerous insults Lear directs at his daughters, reading them as signs of exaggerated passion. For instance, Ginny’s sterility in the novel might have been inspired by the threat that Shakespeare wrote for his Lear, ‘dry up in her the organs of increase’ (1.4.271), while Rose’s breast cancer might come from the play’s ‘see what breeds about her heart’ (3.6.73-4). It should be noted that Smiley is not the only one to have seen incestuous tendencies at work in Lear. Lynda E. Boose reads the first scene of the play about Cordelia’s betrothal to France as a failed wedding ceremony which reveals that the father does not, in fact, want to give away the bride to another man. Boose concludes that ‘the implied relationship is unnatural because it allows the father to deflect his original incestuous passions into Oedipal ones, thus effecting a newly incestuous proximity to the daughter’.17 Thus, as Linda Hutcheon remarks: What is involved in adapting can be a process of appropriation, of taking possession of another’s story and filtering it, in a sense, through one’s own sensibility, interests and talents. Therefore, adapters are first interpreters and then creators.18

Smiley herself underlines her role as an interpreter of Shakespeare’s text: ‘In one sense, A Thousand Acres is my academic paper on King Lear, while in another sense, it is my production of the play’.19 Of course, 16

Eithne Farry. ‘Smiley‫ތ‬s Lear.’ A Thousand Acres. London: Harper Perennial, 2008: 10. 17 Lynda E. Boose. ‘The Father and the Bride in Shakespeare.’ PMLA 97.3 (1982): 334. The problem of desire for maternal affection as sublimation of an incestuous desire was later developed in: Coppélia Kahn. ‘The Absent Mother in King Lear.’ Rewriting the Renaissance: The Discourse of Sexual Difference in Early Modern Europe. Ed. Margaret W. Ferguson, Maureen Quilligan and Nancy J. Vickers. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986: 33-49. 18 Linda Hutcheon. A Theory of Adaptation. New York: Routledge, 2006: 18. 19 Jane Smiley. ‘Shakespeare in Iceland.’ Transforming Shakespeare: Contemporary WomenҲs Re-Visions in Literature and Performance. Ed. Marianne Novy. New York: St. Martin‫ތ‬s Press, 1999: 159.

18

Chapter One

adapters as interpreters are free to read the first text in a new light, laying stress on aspects hitherto ignored or undervalued. Perhaps paradoxically, in Smiley’s novel, this is done thanks to a hesitant narrator who has difficulty finding her voice. Ginny is literally silenced by her father – not even by explicitly imposed rules, but by habit and internalised obligation. There is no dialogue when Larry speaks: I said, ‘Daddy, did you go all the way to Des Moines?’ ‘What if I did?’ Now the glare was for me. It shone into me like a hot beam of sunlight. I couldn’t think of anything to say. What if he did? What if he did? (p. 103)

The parallelism between the direct speech of the father (‘What if I did?’) and the free indirect speech of the daughter (‘What if he did?’) shows that, even at the most elemental linguistic level, Ginny is trapped by her father’s words, unable to find her own, condemned to repeating his. This happens time and again in the novel, for instance when she tries to confront her father about Rose’s memories of incest. She cannot say anything but ‘Daddy’ and concludes that ‘My voice vanished’ (p. 216). Only Larry masters language: It was easy, sitting there and looking at him, to see it his way. […] When he talked, he had this effect on me. Of course it was silly to talk about ‘my point of view’. When my father asserted his point of view, mine vanished. Not even I could remember it. (p. 176)

Various ‘points of view’ are presented, with the narrator remaining incapable of deciding which is valid. But, little by little, she imagines a confrontation between the perspectives of others – stand-ins for an audience used to the traditional interpretation of the play – and her own ideas – representing the departure from that traditional reading which the rewriting seeks to create. The metaphor used to stage this confrontation is that of the trial, but even here, Ginny is not sure she can convince the jury in this imaginary scene with her youngest sister, Caroline, who is a lawyer in the novel. It is ‘as if her criticisms were simultaneously unjust and just, and the sequence of events that I remembered perfectly was only a theory, a case made in my own defense that a jury might or might not believe’ (p. 118). This relativism stems from a profound mistrust in the power of storytelling. Ginny justly remarks: ‘The fact is that the same sequence of days can arrange themselves into a number of different stories’ (p. 155). She keeps imagining alternative versions, both of other stories and of her own,

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envisioning a different past or future. The diversity of these alternatives creates a fragmented timeline, which relativises all stories. Picking up Larry from the hospital after he had an accident, Ginny imagines a serene future where she would be in charge: ‘It created a whole orderly future within me, a vista of manageable days clicking past, myself in the foreground, large and purposeful’ (p. 148). Her dead mother’s past is also a source of inspiration: ‘The clothes in the closet […] intoxicated us with a sense of possibility, not for us, but for our mother, lost possibilities to be sure, but somehow still present’ (p. 224). After Ginny learns something new about her mother from a neighbour, she imagines a future where she would investigate her mother’s past (p. 93-4). Ginny’s numerous miscarriages and the children she will never have also function as symbols of a different future. About trying to become pregnant once more she says: ‘I felt larger and more various than I had in years, full of unknowns, and also of untapped possibilities’ (p. 26). This is symbolised by the family’s Monopoly games: ‘I wonder if there is anyone who isn’t perked up by the sight of a Monopoly board, all the colors, all the bits and pieces, all the possibilities’ (p. 76). There are so many alternatives that the linearity of time is almost called into question, and with it the possibility of writing a ‘chronological’ story that can reliably be called the truth. A case in point is a newspaper article about a young girl who was killed by her boyfriend, despite her family’s best efforts to prevent the tragedy. Ginny the narrator concludes: ‘I keep rewriting it in my head’ (p. 75). This sentence is perhaps key to understanding the narratorial strategy: this is a novel that keeps rewriting itself. But since this novel incorporates an earlier text, in the process it also rewrites that text. The narrator’s difficulties in writing her own story may thus be read as one version of the struggle opposing an earlier and a later text. The novel’s temporal and narrative relativism may at first seem to undermine any attempt at constructing any story. But the other side of that coin is that all teleology is rejected, so that outcomes are never presented as inevitable. Implicitly, it is perhaps also the tragic mechanism of King Lear, which had led unswervingly to the destruction of all protagonists including the daughters, that is broken by Ginny. Little by little, the novel seems to discover the freedom that lies in alternatives and possibilities, finally wrestling free from the first text it successfully rewrites in the end. At a later stage, the narrator thus succeeds in questioning the point of view of those characters who embody the traditional interpretation of King

20

Chapter One

Lear. The truths of her childhood that had seemed set in stone are – tellingly – compared to a play: The harvest drama commenced then, with the usual crises and heroics. […] Of course we had the ritual recall of earlier harvests that made me wonder what we would say years hence if this harvest were punctuated by Rose dropping dead at the supper table one night. […] The harvest was a drama that caught me up, no doubt about it, something that moved me below the level of knowledge […]. I saw that I could give in to the theatrical surge and be delivered in a matter of weeks to a reconciliation with my life. It was tempting. It was tempting. (p. 317)

Theatre functions as a double-edged metaphor here, referring both to a certain vision of the pastoral American dream, but also, of course, to the first text the novel is rewriting. It appears as a script that is already written: one simply has to play one’s part to fit in, once more, with the ensemble cast. Theatre becomes an allegory of the temptation of adjusting to a predetermined societal role, imposed by subtle and insidious pressures and obligations. The metaphor also taps into the common association of theatre with illusion and appearance, suggesting that this role is at odds with the narrator’s real identity. This disconnection is of course a sign that the narrator has already developed a sense of her identity which is distinct from the social role she had once played. As a whole, it can be seen as a critique of the tragedy the novel is based on, condemning its traditional interpretation as restrictive and illusory role play. In the end, the narrator’s ability to disentangle herself from narratives once believed to be authoritative, to envision new possibilities, and hence to rewrite her own story, is an essential tool for the rewriting of Lear. Caroline Cakebread underlines the parallelism between Ginny, who builds her story against her father’s, and Smiley, who builds her story against Shakespeare’s: Look at A Thousand Acres as the product of Smiley’s struggle to map out her relationship to Shakespeare. In working to gain a foothold in her own past – to recover memory from silence – Smiley’s protagonist Ginny reflects Smiley’s own confrontation with an author whose presence at the hub of the Western literary canon represents a powerful and often overwhelming legacy.20

20

Caroline Cakebread. ‘Remembering King Lear in Jane Smiley‫ތ‬s A Thousand Acres.’ Shakespeare and Appropriation. Ed. Christy Desmet and Robert Sawyer. London: Routledge, 1999: 87.

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Smiley is in fact fully aware of the overlap between her project as an author and Ginny’s project as a narrator, so that these traditionally separate notions converge: As the lawyer for Goneril and Regan, I proposed a different narrative of their motives and actions that cast doubts on the case Mr. Shakespeare was making for his client, King Lear. I made Goneril my star witness, and she told her story with care.21

One remembers, of course, that the trial metaphor is used by Ginny herself within the diegesis. Smiley’s novel thus appears as a Bildungsroman, which not only follows the progress of Ginny the character towards self-knowledge, but also the progress of Ginny the narrator towards the ability to tell her own story against her father’s, and against Shakespeare’s. Several elements in the novel help to explain why rewriting, i.e. imposing one’s own version of a story as the truth, can be conceived of as a struggle. The narrator is hesitant at first because a number of obstacles prevent the shaping of a new story. The first of these is Ginny’s fragmented perception of her own body, caused by memories of abuse which never amount to more than ‘fragments of sound and smell and presence’ (p. 280). Ginny’s perception of her own body is equally distorted, as she explains to Jess: Shame is a distinct feeling. I couldn’t look at my hands around the coffee cup or hear my own laments without feeling appalled, wanting desperately to fall silent, grow smaller. More than that, I was uncomfortably conscious of my whole body, from the awkward way that the shafts of my hair were thrusting out of my scalp to my feet, which felt dirty as well as cold. Everywhere, I seemed to feel my skin from the inside, as if it now stood away from my flesh, separated by a millimetre of mortified space. (p. 195)22

21

Jane Smiley. ‘Shakespeare in Iceland.’ Transforming Shakespeare: Contemporary WomenҲs Re-Visions in Literature and Performance. Ed. Marianne Novy. New York: St. Martin‫ތ‬s Press, 1999: 172. 22 Numerous other passages allude to this lost sense of dignity, for instance when Ginny fetches eggs for her father’s breakfast: ‘The whole way I was conscious of my body – graceless and hurrying, unfit, panting, ridiculous in its very femininity. It seemed like my father could just look out of his big front window and see me naked, chest heaving, breasts, thighs, and buttocks jiggling, dignity irretrievable.’

22

Chapter One

Just like her memories of incest, Ginny’s perception of her body is fragmented (hair, feet, skin), and that in turn is linked to the narrator’s desire to ‘fall silent’. Finding one’s voice thus becomes linked with the act of redeveloping a sense of one’s own body. When Ginny finally remembers the incest, her reaction is instinctive: I screamed in a way that I had never screamed before, full out, throatwrenching, unafraid-of-making-a-fuss-and-drawing-attention-to-myself sorts of screams that I made myself concentrate on, becoming all mouth, all tongue, all vibration. (p. 229)

Inarticulate though it may be, the scream enables the narrator to reconnect with bodily sensations, and it becomes a first step towards reaffirming her voice. At the end of the novel, this evolution is complete: My inheritance is with me, sitting in my chair. Lodged in my every cell, along with the DNA, are molecules of topsoil and atrazine and paraquat and anhydrous ammonia and diesel fuel and plant dust, and also molecules of memory: the bracing summer chill of floating on my back in Mel’s pond, staring at the sky; the exotic redolence of the dresses in my mother’s closet; the sharp odor of wet tomato vines; the stripes of pain my father’s belt laid across my skin; the deep chill of waiting for the school bus in the blue of a winter’s dawn. All of it is present now, here; each particle weighs some fraction of the hundred and thirty-six pounds that attaches me to the earth, perhaps as much as the print weighs in other sorts of histories. (p. 369)

At the end, some memories of bodily sensations can thus be recovered. That the weight of Ginny’s body is compared to print in histories again points to the connection between redeveloping a sense of her body, finding her voice, and her ability to tell a story that is different from what she had inherited. The exact nature of that inherited story is also explored in the novel, and represents one more obstacle in the narrator’s struggle to write her own narrative. The traditional interpretation of Shakespeare’s King Lear is incorporated into the novel, so that its validity can be questioned by an increasingly self-assured narrator. It is present as the opinions of Larry, Caroline and various neighbours, who take sides for the father against his daughters. Caroline accuses her elder sisters of being selfish, acquisitive,

(p. 114-115) She compares herself to a woman with three legs (p. 262); she realises her father has deprived her of the memory of her own body (chapter 35).

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and loveless towards their father.23 Ken LaSalle seems to agree: ‘I don’t think you’ve treated your dad right, to be honest’ (p. 240). So do, apparently, most of the other neighbours (chapter 34). According to James A. Schiff, the neighbours are stand-ins for the spectators and readers of King Lear who are used to the traditional interpretation of the play, an interpretation which the novel forces them to reconsider: The community can interpret Larry’s decline, in tandem with the financial rise of his daughters, in only one way: the daughters are evil, and the father has been unjustly punished and maltreated. That is, of course, how many of us read Lear. Smiley’s brilliance here is that she has recreated not only the characters and scenes of Lear but also the audience. In essence she has given the audience or readers of Lear a role in her novel; they, or we, play the part of the community, the chorus if you will. Thus, Smiley implicates her reader. Those of us who have in the past sympathized with the patriarch Lear and viewed Goneril and Regan as malicious are not at all unlike those characters in Zebulon County who feel compassion for Larry and bitterness for his daughters Ginny and Rose.24

But King Lear is in fact not the only narrative the novel struggles against. Ginny’s silence may also be explained by the fact that all the novel’s women are silenced by the narratives of men, especially the American story about the conquest of the land. The very title A Thousand Acres emphasises this aspect, as it alludes not only to land, but to land measured and conquered, put to use for and by humans. This is one of the narratives Ginny gradually leaves behind, rewriting it by putting her version of it centre stage. The result is that, to some extent, the traditional reading of Shakespeare’s play and the narrative of the American dream are put on the same plane, and both are condemned as two versions of patriarchy which female voices need to work against. The young Ginny perfectly remembers the stories of her male relatives, telling her about the conquest of the farm and imbuing that story with moral values, so that ownership of the farm becomes a value in and of itself: Every story, when we were children, revealed a lesson – ‘work hard’ (the pioneers had no machines to dig their drainage lines or plant their crops), or ‘respect your elders’ […]. The story of how my father and his father 23

Two phone calls show Caroline’s suspicions (p. 97-8; p. 115-117). Later on, it is Caroline who files a lawsuit against her sisters because her father was outside during a storm (p. 244-245). During Ginny’s and Caroline’s last encounter, there are again accusations (chapter 45). 24 James A. Schiff. ‘Contemporary Retellings: A Thousand Acres as the Latest Lear.’ Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction 39.4 (1998): 367-381.

24

Chapter One came to possess a thousand contiguous acres taught us all these lessons, and though we didn’t hear it often, we remembered it perfectly. […] Our ownership spread slowly over the landscape, but it spread as inevitably as ink along the threads of a linen napkin, as inevitably and, we were led to know, as ineradicably. It was a satisfying story. (p. 132)

The comparison between ‘ownership’ and ‘ink’ explicitly highlights the fact that the inevitability of ownership depends on teleological storytelling. Where Ginny long remains incapable of building a narrative of her own, the men are perfectly able to compile a story that validates their actions, and which imposes itself on young Ginny as an obvious truth. That this is a men’s narrative designed to justify a specifically patriarchal lifestyle is underlined by Gloucester / Harold: ‘One person don’t break a farm up that lots of people have sweated and starved to put together.’ Harold was beginning to heave with anger. ‘If you’d have been sons, you’d understand that. Women don’t understand that.’ (p. 204)

In this men’s world, women’s only recourse seems to be silence. Jess’s mother never writes to him during his exile in Canada as a draft evader, and Jess wonders: ‘What ideal did she sacrifice me to? Patriotism? Keeping up appearances in the neighborhood? Peace with Harold?’ (p. 55). Ginny’s grandmother Edith Davis had the reputation of being a quiet woman, but she will never find out exactly why: ‘that detail went unrevealed by the stories’ (p. 133). Mary Paniccia Carden describes the grandmother as ‘Edith, the silent woman over whose body the homosocial bonds that ensure continuity of male ownership were cemented’.25 Indeed there seems to be little difference between ownership of land and ownership of women. Ginny’s grandfather John Cook could marry Edith Davis because he had worked with her parents: ‘It was pretty clear that John had gained, through dint of sweat equity, a share in the Davis farm, and when Edith turned sixteen, John, thirty-three by then, married her’ (p. 15). This is the only explanation Ginny can think of for her personality: I used to wonder what she thought of him, if her reputed silence wasn’t due to temperament at all, but due to fear. She was surrounded by men she had known all her life, by the great plate of land they cherished. She didn’t drive a car. Possibly she had no money of her own. (p. 132-3) 25

Mary Paniccia Carden. ‘Remembering / Engendering the Heartland: Sexed Language, Embodied Space, and America‫ތ‬s Foundational Fictions in Jane Smiley’s A Thousand Acres.’ Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies 18.2 (1997): 190.

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The patriarchal narrative of American conquest, which leaves the women silent, is also linked to a powerful motif in the novel, that of pollution. At the literal level, years of agricultural exploitation by men have left the soil and the drinking water filled with poisons, which affect only the women specifically in their femininity, as several characters including Rose contract breast cancer and Ginny is unable to bear children. At a more metaphorical level, the pollution of the water is connected to the memories of her past that Ginny must rediscover and reassess. She describes a drainage well as ‘the black well of time’ (p. 47). Rose warns her about their father: ‘I know that [Larry’s] face is a black ocean and there’s always always always the temptation to drown in that ocean, to just give yourself up and sink’ (p. 216). As Ginny realises that her childhood was not as happy as she thought, she understands that the water she had associated with purity was in fact the cause of disease in the community. At the end of her evolution towards self-knowledge, the narrator describes the water as a ‘lightless mysterious underground chemical sea’ (p. 370). Smiley thus uses a hesitant narrator as the key instrument of her rewriting. We see Ginny wrestle with fragmented memories, a distorted perception of her own body that causes her to lose her voice, the opinions of those who believe that the traditional reading of Lear and the equally patriarchal narrative of American conquest are valid and legitimate. As a result, the process of rewriting is imagined as a confrontation between two texts, in which domination of the new text over the old is not a given. In keeping with etymology, authorship emerges as a function of authority, the power needed to impose one version of a narrative over another. But does this strategy, which is mainly based on the tension between strength and weakness of the narratorial voice, translate into film? Moorhouse’s film adaptation uses voice-overs to imitate Ginny’s narratorial perspective. But, contrary to what happens in the novel, she seems well able to tell her story from the start. She never envisions different versions of the story, and never hesitates as to which is the correct one. The permanent juxtaposition of past, present and future, the temporal fragmentation of the novel, disappears. The narrator does not need to find which story she is to tell, as that story is already a given and unravels in a linear manner under the eyes of the spectator. This may also explain why the neighbours’ opinions, seen as projections of the traditional reading of Lear within the novel, are much less prominent. In this respect at least, it does not seem that the authority of Ginny’s voice needs to be built against that of others.

26

Chapter One

Other aspects of the film, however, still help to represent Ginny’s story as a struggle. For instance, the film presents us with a fragmented vision of the father, mirroring Ginny’s fragmented memories of incest. The first time Larry appears on screen (00:02:00), only a dark outline can be seen against a rising sun. At first his feet are shown, the image of the man as a whole appears only slowly, and he is still seen from behind. Much later (01:03:40), when Ginny remembers the incest, Larry is again shown as a mere black outline with the light behind him. This way of filming him was certainly inspired by the novel, where Ginny’s inability to speak before her father is connected to her inability to get a fully formed picture of him: Perhaps there is a distance that is the optimum distance for seeing one’s father, farther than across the supper table or across the room, somewhere in the middle distance: he is dwarfed by trees or the sweep of a hill, but his features are still visible, his body language still distinct. Well, that is a distance I never found. He was never dwarfed by the landscape – the fields, the buildings, the white pine windbreak were as much my father as if he had grown them and shed them like a husk. (p. 20)

Whether or not Moorhouse’s film includes the masculine narrative of American conquest that had been present in the novel is discussed controversially in the critical literature. The importance of land ownership is shown visually. The farm can be seen in the background of many shots with huge depth of field, stretching as far as the horizon. The very long shots and camera movements that reveal this vast manmade landscape are to be found long after the expository scenes, since they are often used for transitions. For the spectators it is impossible to determine what belongs to Larry’s farm, and they are left to suppose that it stretches as far as the eye can see. The result of conquest is thus shown through visual means, but the process of conquest itself is glossed over more discreetly. The only major exception is when Larry appears onscreen for the first time (00:04:10-30) and explains the story of the farm to Ginny for what seems like the umpteenth time. Other elements that illuminate the context of the plot, such as references to the Vietnam War, disappear. The theme of pollution, very prominent in the novel as a symbol of the corrupting influence of men on women and landscape, does not seem to have been included in the film. The farm is often filmed as an idealised and stereotypical space, where immaculately white buildings stand out in front of perfectly kept fields and a sky that is always blue. The corruption of family bonds, or of wider American history, does not seem to be reflected in the corruption of the environment. According to John Ottenhoff, the political aspect of the novel disappears completely: ‘the

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powerful theme of poisoned land remains undeveloped, a shadow of the politically engaged rural consciousness evident in Jane Smiley’s book’.26 But many critics disagree, claiming that the film manages to find visual metaphors of pollution. Gail Finney27 cites many images contrasting purity and filth, for instance the opposition between the white washing the women constantly hang out to dry and the drainage wells, full of poisoned water. Positive images, such as one of the rare additions with respect to the novel, a scene in which the family happily play baseball, only exist to reinforce this contrast. James R. Keller highlights the importance of maize as a visual metaphor that is almost absent in the novel. Produced by artificial means, it is a symbol of the hidden poisons in the soil, mirroring the hidden family secrets. The plants are taller than humans, forming a vegetal wall that imprisons the characters in the patriarchal system of the farm. The farmland even becomes an alienating space. The opening sequence takes its cue from the first sentence of the novel (‘At sixty miles per hour, you could pass our farm in a minute, on County Road 686’, p. 3) and shows the farm as seen through the windows of a car (00:00:30-45 and again 00:01:30-45; the first of these sequences marks the beginning of Ginny’s voice-over). The camera also sees the farm through the rear window of a car driving away when Caroline leaves after the division of the farm (00:18:00), and later when Ginny leaves her husband (01:24:15). As the farm slowly moves further into the background, it appears as the centre of the characters’ lives, the point of reference with respect to which their movements are measured. But one of the last frames of the film inverts the perspective through the rear windows of cars. The camera is in the farmhouse, now abandoned, as it sees cars driving away through an open window (01:36:15). The gaze of the camera is eerily disembodied,

26 Quoted in: Sharon O‫ތ‬Dair. ‘Horror or realism? Filming ‘toxic discourse’ in Jane Smiley‫ތ‬s A Thousand Acres.’ Textual Practice 19.2 (2005): 270. 27 Gail Finney. ‘The Tectonics of Trauma: Father-Daughter Incest in Film.’ Unfitting Stories: Narrative Approaches to Disease, Disability, and Trauma. Ed. Connie Canam, Angela Henderson, Carla Paterson and Valerie Raoul. Waterloo, ON: Wilfred Laurier University Press, 2007: 94. Finney concludes that this way of conveying the ‘ironic contrast between surface order and tranquillity and underlying corruption and greed’ is ‘unavailable to verbal narrative’ (Ibid., p. 94). On this point, I disagree with her, since I believe Smiley’s novel is full of such imagery, especially the motif of polluted underground water.

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Chapter One

since there is no one left in the house.28 The effect is to endow this empty shell with a soul. As the farm watches its former owners leave, it might be said to be the main character of the film. Thus, despite the open farmland so often shown, the film manages to create a claustrophobic environment and a sense of entrapment. But I would argue that this applies mainly to the psychology of the female characters of the film and functions as an obstacle to their personal emancipation. The film certainly shows that this emancipation is difficult, but it omits several important aspects of the wider critical perspective that could be found in the novel. In Smiley’s text, the cultural authority of Shakespeare becomes equated with the cultural authority of the narrative of American conquest, and both are called into question by a narrator who genuinely struggles to impose her version of these narratives. In the film, this struggle is transferred to a different arena. It has little to do with storytelling strategies, since the aim is not to criticise the authority accrued by an earlier story. Instead, it has to do with psychological and social issues, in a melodrama that focuses entirely on two individuals and their personal struggle against norms which are not presented as the hardened sediment accumulated by older narratives. Sharon O’Dair thus concedes that Moorhouse’s film is feminist in the sense that it concentrates on the difficulties encountered by women, but the focus on the domestic also eliminates any attempt at rewriting authoritative stories: ‘A Thousand Acres is mainstreamed in larger part by its feminism’.29 In Smiley’s novel, the process of rewriting may thus be seen as a struggle between a potential narrative contained in the first text and a tradition of criticism and interpretation which chooses to ignore that potential narrative. As Alan Sinfield puts it, ‘All stories comprise within

28

This shot is in fact reminiscent of the codes of the horror genre, even if the reference is perhaps involuntary. An unidentified person watches innocent people, so that there is primary identification (the camera reproduces the point of view of a character, which is thus shared by the audience), but not secondary identification (the camera sees a character from the outside so that the audience can identify with him / her as if with a mirror image). Normally, the use of both perspectives in succession enables the spectators to recognise the character whose point of view is presented in subjective camera. In this scene, however, there is only primary identification, so that spectators cannot know through whose eyes they are seeing. 29 Sharon O‫ތ‬Dair. ‘Horror or realism? Filming ‘toxic discourse’ in Jane Smiley‫ތ‬s A Thousand Acres.’ Textual Practice 19.2 (2005): 271.

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themselves the ghosts of the alternative stories they are trying to repress’.30 Seen in this light, one possible role for the rewriter is to bring these ghosts back to life.

30

Alan Sinfield. Faultlines: Cultural Materialism and the Politics of Dissident Reading. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992: 21.

CHAPTER TWO REWRITING MACBETH: NEW WITCHES FOR A NEW AUDIENCE ALLENE NICHOLS

When I was twelve years old, I decided to draft my two sisters and put on a nativity play in our garage. Thinking that the story could use an update to make it more exciting, I made a number of revisions. My parents, seeing us rehearsing a religiously themed play, invited our pastor to see it. The night was magical as far as my sisters and I were concerned. From behind curtains made of bed sheets hanging from suspended ropes, we produced bicycles that were camels in our minds, a baby Jesus that was also my sister’s baby doll, and a purely imaginary group of animals created in stilted dialogue (‘Listen, Dear. The cattle are lowing’). The night was a disaster as far as the adults were concerned, ending with us being sent to bed and the pastor yelling at my parents, who apologised repeatedly and profusely for what seemed like hours. To this day, my sisters and I debate what part of the play most offended the minister. Was it that the two wise men were led to baby Jesus not by a star or an angel but by a cat in the desert with a red hat and Sandy Claws? Was it that Mary, exhausted and thirsty from giving birth, asked Joseph to run to the store and pick up some Coca-Cola? Regardless, I had discovered both the joy and the subversive possibilities of reinterpreting old stories. This is why, years later, I decided to rewrite Shakespeare’s Macbeth from the perspective of the second witch. Because plays like Macbeth have rich characters and complex plots, they are particularly apt at carrying political and social messages. For instance, a film version of Macbeth, which was filmed in Thailand and used footage of Thai political protests was banned there because, according to the censors, it ‘has content that causes divisiveness among the

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people of the nation.’1 In addition to using recent footage, the film also used the color red, which was the color the protestors against the government used (BBC News). By visually referring to protests in Thailand in the context of the story of Macbeth, the film makes a powerful statement about the current regime. Reframing Macbeth, even in minor ways, reveals different aspects of the play. For instance, the BBC animated version, free from the constraints of using flesh and blood actors, emphasises the bizarreness and evilness of the witches by contorting and dissolving their figures, making them more phantasmagoric and less human (BBC Animated Tales).2 At one point, Lady Macbeth is transformed into a witch-like creature as she speaks. Such visuals reveal the psychological aspects of the narrative by exteriorizing the characters’ interior qualities. The result is that literal monsters appear on the screen, which lend themselves to a focus on elements of horror in Macbeth. Shakespeare provides rich motivation for his major characters, demonstrating, for instance, that Lady Macbeth has a strong desire to rule and resents the ways in which being a woman prevents her from achieving her goal. In contrast, the three witches are unmotivated, making them particularly tempting to someone wanting to transform Macbeth into a new work. The logic seems to be that the witches enjoy doing evil things because they are witches. In writing the three characters, Shakespeare was responding to popular superstitions about witches and addressing the beliefs of his benefactor, James I (Kinney 74). However, today’s audience has vastly different influences. They are less likely to believe that characters do bad things simply because they are evil. Furthermore, twentieth century witches from Glinda the Good Witch in the Wizard of Oz to the main character in Gregory Maguire’s Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West have demonstrated that witches can act out of any number of motivations. The motivation for the second witch in my story is that as teenagers, she (Maeve) and the future Lady Macbeth (Rose) are in love and plan to continue their relationship after Rose marries Macbeth. Rose’s mother, however, seeing Maeve as a threat to her ambitions to rule through her daughter, convinces Maeve that Rose has murdered Maeve’s daughter and 1

BBC News, “Thailand fiml censor bans ‘divise’ Macbeth film.” 4 April 2012. BBC Animated Tales – Macbeth. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jGONKToDAvU

2

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wants Maeve dead as well. Maeve flees the castle and spends years plotting her revenge against Rose. That revenge culminates in the events of the last act of Macbeth, but Lady Macbeth is the focus of the witches’ vengeance. Macbeth is merely the instrument of her destruction. In re-focusing the story of Macbeth on the minor character of the second witch, I was following a long tradition of transforming Shakespeare’s work. Such transformations often make use of the idea that every narrative contains many narratives hidden inside it. Everyone on stage has a different story, and only some characters’ stories are privileged. Those stories determine which events are considered important and what actions are shown.

Transformation Theory Once I had decided to write a play centering on the second witch in Macbeth, I began researching other transformations of Shakespeare’s texts. I quickly discovered that when discussing works that transform original texts, the terminology itself is contested. Is a transformation a radical sort of adaptation or is it something new? Should such works be called adaptations, transformations, offshoots (see Cohn’s title)3, or something else entirely? In the introduction to their book Beyond Adaptation: Essays on Radical Transformations of Original Works, Phyllis Frus and Christy Williams argue that a transformation is based on an old story or stories, but it is different enough that it functions independently of the original.4 In their opinion, it is not necessary for the reader to know the original text of the transformation, but such knowledge enriches one’s understanding of the new text. They go on to list a number of ways in which writers, filmmakers and others transform texts. One way writers and filmmakers can transform a work, Frus and Williams suggest, is to ‘rework material in a significant way, such as telling a story from a different perspective to engage themes and issues left out by the previous version’. (Frus & Williams: 4) One notable Shakespearean transformation that uses both a different perspective and different themes is Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead. Daniel Fischlin notes many transformations of Shakespeare’s work, such as Philip Osment’s This Island’s Mine, The Women’s Theatre Group 3

Ruby Cohn, Modern Shakespeare Offshoots. Princeton, N.J: Princeton University Press, 1976. 4 P. Frus, C. Williams, eds. North Carolina: Mcfarland & Company, Inc., 2010.

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and Elaine Feinstein’s Lear’s Daughters, and Paula Vogel’s Desdemona have an overt political or social agenda5; however, Stoppard did not set out to express or influence an ideology. In an interview with Jon Bradshaw, he states that “The play had no substance beyond its own terms, beyond its apparent situation. It was about two courtiers in a Danish castle. Two nonentities surrounded by intrigue, given very little information and much of that false" (Fischlin: 95). Nevertheless, the play reflects the cultural moment in which it was written. Appearing at roughly the same time as Debord’s Society of the Spectacle, a critique of the postmodern condition, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern reflects the same sense of individuals trapped in the metanarratives of their culture. Jean-Francois Lyotard describes metanarratives as stories about ourselves and our culture that so saturate our daily lives, coming from media, literature, family, etc., that most people accept them without realizing it and without questioning their legitimacy (Lyotard: 17). Thus, even though the events going on at court have little meaning to Rosencrantz and Guildenstern and are not coherent, as they are from Hamlet’s point of view, they continue to play their roles. A second way to transform a text is to use a ‘familiar plot but vary the setting, situation, and/or characters’ or to address contemporary social and cultural issues by updating the story (Frus & Williams: 4). In the movie Romeo + Juliet, Baz Luhrmann maintains the plot, and even the language, of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, but links the movie to contemporary concerns by changing the setting to the United States in the late twentieth century. Most significantly, guns replace swords, perhaps giving the late twentieth century audience the same visceral sense of danger that Shakespeare’s audience would have derived from bladed weapons. Likewise, the musical West Side Story is a broad transformation of Romeo and Juliet. By moving the setting to New York City in the mid twentieth century and making Juliet and her family Puerto Rican and Romeo and his gang white, the author addresses contemporary issues of race. While today’s audiences may not appreciate the kind of clan divisiveness that drive the characters in Shakespeare’s play, they are more likely to understand, and respond to, gang violence and interracial romance because these issues are part of the relatively recent cultural history of the United States.

5

Daniel Fischlin and Mark Fortier, Adaptations of Shakespeare: A Critical Anthology of Plays from the Seventeenth Century to the Present, London: Routledge, 2000.

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Retelling an old story from a different perspective is not new. Shakespeare himself did it. Macbeth reflects knowledge of Raphael Holinshed's Chronicles of England, Scotland and Ireland (Kinney: 28), the Gesta Romanorum (27), and perhaps other sources as well. Writers have been transforming Shakespeare’s Macbeth ever since. Fischlin writes that: Shakespearean adaptation [in the mode of changing major elements] is not about faithful adherence to the narrative or performative conventions of traditional Shakespeare, but about the degree to which the playwright can transform that material and reshape conventions in such a way as to expose the orthodoxies that support the tradition. When successful, such a reshaping puts the enormous cultural power of Shakespeare to work in a way that undermines the way in which that power conventionally operates (p.17).

While Stoppard may not have intended Rosencrantz and Guildenstern to comment on anything beyond the immediate environment of the plays, it is a good illustration of how an author reshapes a narrative to expose and undermine how power and convention operate. The royal family, which has the power, may view their lives in a coherent manner, but Rosencrantz and Guildenstern experience life as fragmented, without a stable meaning because of their powerlessness. One of the reasons that transformations like Rosencrantz and Guildenstern appeal to playwrights and audiences is that they are based on myth. Roland Barthes describes myth as “second-order semiological system” in which the original sign, or “signification,” is covered up but not obliterated by a new context and is therefore ripe for appropriation (Barthes: 114/117). In other words, by their very nature, myths both relate to the original culture and are masked from it to the point that they can be moved into other contexts. Thus, old stories, including fairy tales, folk tales, religious texts, plays, and songs whose origins are obscured function as myths. Plays and movies that rework Shakespeare’s plays can be considered myth-based because they function as myth in several ways. First, as in the case of the three witches in Macbeth and the fairies in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Shakespeare’s work draws on old stories that were popular at the time he was writing. Second, Babbage describes myths as stories that may exist in non-historical time, may use ‘divine figures, heroes, or animals’ and that may move between the supernatural and the historic (Babbage: 11). Many of Shakespeare’s plays meet one or more of these criteria. For instance, Macbeth moves between the supernatural reality of the witches and the historic time of Macbeth’s rule. In all of these contexts, myths are stories that continue to reverberate with new

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meanings. Whether Shakespeare’s stories and characters retain their meaning because they are archetypal (Jung) or because they contain ideologies that are still current (Barthes), readers and audiences continue to value and enjoy them. In Re-visioning Myth: Modern and Contemporary Drama by Women, Frances Babbage addresses Michael Patterson’s idea that myth-based plays can be identified as either reflectionist, which tries to ‘provide an accurate representation of the contemporary world that exposes its tensions and oppressions’ or interventionist, which are ‘fragmented and open-ended texts that seeks not just to analyse and challenge the world “as it is” but to interrogate our modes of perception’ (Babbage: 53). Rosencrantz and Guildenstern is an example of an interventionist text. While the reflectionist mode means finding mythical characters and situations that correlate with the contemporary world, the interventionist mode gives playwrights more options in terms of moving between the past and present and allowing for fragmentation and montage. Romeo + Juliet is an extreme example of the reflectionist mode of revision. The result of merely moving the story to a new time and of maintaining the original language is that the audience is continually jolted out of the story by dissonant elements, such as referring to guns as swords. The interventionist mode is a more frequent strategy for transforming Shakespeare’s plays. Writing that ‘crucially, the myths invite a different mode of thought, “irrational” violence and the gratification of illegitimate longings promise access to ways of knowing outside the framework of Enlightenment structures,’ Babbage argues that ‘the overturning of order that the myths imply hints at the political possibilities in dramatic revision’ (p. 99). West Side Story is an interventionist play that expresses illegitimate longings in the form of desire for someone of a different race, rather than the desire for someone from a different clan, as in the original. The relationship between Maria and Tony suggests the possibility of overcoming violence based on racial and cultural differences even though Tony is ultimately destroyed by such violence. Based on what I learned about transformations of Shakespeare’s work, I decided to use the interventionist mode, keeping the setting in early Scotland, but interweaving an imaginary history of women warriors with mystical powers who are defeated by the Scots into the fabric of the story. By focusing on the romantic relationship between two women, I also addressed contemporary issues of female homosexuality and its relationship to the power dynamics of a patriarchal culture.

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Narratives within narratives I first considered transforming Macbeth during a school year when I found myself teaching the play simultaneously to four classes of students in junior high and high school while helping them prepare a performance of a scene from the play for a competition. My students had a variety of learning differences and their comprehension level ranged from what might be expected of a second grader to that of a college graduate. As a result, I employed a variety of teaching strategies and resources, including movie versions of Macbeth, the animated version, a prose adaptation for struggling readers, No Fear Shakespeare, and the actual text. Each version of the story stressed a particular aspect of the original work and, in doing so, distorted or lost others. At roughly the same time, I was reading Wicked (1995) by Gregory Maguire. In Wicked, Maguire finds a new narrative within the Wizard of Oz by making the Wicked Witch of the West the main character. Rather than being merely evil, as she is in The Wizard of Oz, this wicked witch, named Elphaba, is motivated by a variety of social, political, and personal factors. According to Alissa Burger, ‘Elphaba is revealed in Maguire’s work as a flawed and fascinating woman, adding texture and a sinister undertone to Oz that had previously remained peripheral’.6 She adds: Maguire transforms the familiar story by naming previously unnamed characters, turning previously marginalised figures into dynamic subjects, adding new people and creatures to a familiar story, and complicating the world of Oz through further narrative development and an addition of a sociocultural context overlooked in earlier versions (124).

In Wicked, I found a great example of how to transform old stories and myths by looking at them from a different character’s perspective. Elphaba behaves according to her own sense of morality, such as when she refuses to assassinate a woman who is involved in a repressive government because she is surrounded by innocent schoolgirls. Nevertheless, Elphaba adopts the name “Wicked Witch of the West.” For her, evil is a fashion and a subject position rather than a moral stance. She puts it on like she puts on the black dress and pointed hat of the religious order that took her in. Later, she again attempts to assassinate the same woman and fails 6

Alissa Burger, ‘Wicked and Wonderful Witches: Narrative and Gender Negotiations from The Wizard of Oz to Wicked’ in F. Phyllis and C. Williams, Beyond Adaptation: Essays on Radical Transformations of Original Works. North Carolina: Mcfarland & Company, Inc. 2010, p. 124.

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because she waits too long, trying to decide whether to act, and the woman dies of natural causes. Nevertheless, she tells an old schoolmate that she killed her, and the discussion turns to the idea of evil. A character remarks that evil is “a presence, not an absence…. Evil’s an incarnated character, an incubus or a succubus. It’s an other It’s not us.” “Not even me?” said the Witch, playing the part more vigorously than she expected. “A self-confessed murderer?” “Oh go on with you, “said the artist, “we all of us show ourselves in our best light. That’s just normal vanity” (179).

By arguing that evil is a non-normative subject position taken by someone who defines herself against the majority culture, Maguire suggests that morality itself is ambiguous and good and evil largely depend on where one stands in relation to the metanarratives of the culture. I asked myself how Lady Macbeth and the witches constructed their own subject positions in relation to the metanarratives of the Scottish people and of their own people. Lady Macbeth’s people were murdered and enslaved by the Scots. The witches are Scots who are outcasts and react against the culture that cast them out. Anger, I decided, was a powerful force that, when acted upon, can have unintended consequences. Having taken the step to put one of the witches at the center of the story, I decided to make Lady Macbeth their target. In Macbeth, her resolve allows Macbeth to carry through with the early murders. She is the one who insists that Macbeth pull himself together and deal with the deeds. In Act 1, Scene 5, she begs “spirits / That tend on mortal thoughts” to “unsex me here / And fill me from the crown to the toe top-full / of direst cruelty!”, which suggests a high level of frustration with her feminine role. She believes that she can only perform her part in the murders that will make Macbeth king if her gender is stripped from her. I wanted to create a story to explain how she came to feel that way. It seemed to me Lady Macbeth’s past would have somehow brought her to the point where she hates being female and is willing to reject the roles associated with it in favor of wielding the power of a ruler.

Adaptations and ideology Marina Warner writes that ‘Myths offer a lens which can be used to see human identity in its social and cultural context’ (Warner: 19). Social conditions inevitably influence transformations, and works that are

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frequently adapted tend to be those that are able to speak to contemporary social conditions and identities. For instance, in uMabatha, Welcome Msomi uses Macbeth’s plot to address issues of Zulu identity by changing the imagery and the language to evoke a tribal context. Much of the action takes place in Mabatha’s kraal, which is an ‘enclosed village of huts’ (Warner: 189). Spears rather than daggers or swords are used for war and murder, and the witches, rather than being associated with an array of European creatures, are associated with venomous snakes through lines like ‘I will spit to the spirits of misfortune / And spread the shadow of my venom / Between the sun and the new day’ (Warner: 170). Daniel Fischlin’s and Mark Fortier’s introduction to uMabatha states that the play is about Shaka, the nineteenth century Zulu chief who rose to power after a prediction by a witch, or Isangoma, that he would do so (Fischlin & Fortier: 164). This correlation, though, is not immediately evident to a Western reader/viewer, suggesting that the play was written expressly for a Zulu audience, or at least an audience that would understand the context. The editors further argue that ‘uMabatha decolonialises Shakespeare as a vanguard for colonial values, exposing the ways in which power and its abuses are not unique to colonial Western culture’ (165). uMabatha, then, is an application of Macbeth’s themes used in a specific cultural context to address a new theme, colonialism, through a Zulu cultural lens. Fischlin states that ‘If Shakespeare can be associated with the explicit techniques of colonization exerted upon cultural difference, he can also be associated with the processes by which those in the West (let us not forget, also the product of powerful colonial forces) internalise the lessons of identity’ (p. 17). Perhaps no identity is as thoroughly internalised as gender identity. Macbeth’s three witches have proven to be a particularly malleable symbol for discourses about how women should behave and what they are capable of. The need to define gender roles was particularly relevant in Shakespeare’s time because of the development of towns and the decline of feudalism. Rather than working with women in the fields and sharing in child care, the Early Modern man was more likely to leave home to engage in trade, leaving his wife to raise the children and maintain the household (Brauner: 24). Thus, the ‘good wife’ reinforced the new social system. The witch was the inversion of the good wife. She was dangerous because she operated outside the social structure. In Macbeth, the witches are untamed by domestic duties and therefore dangerous. In contrast to the witches, Lady Macduff is the ‘good wife’, tending to her home and her children even after her husband flees. Her death on

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Macbeth’s orders highlights her saintliness and purity and further sets the witches apart as impure women. In the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, as women demanded an equal voice in public and that men shared household and childcare duties, the need to define gender roles arose once again. Shakespeare’s witches demonstrate that women will use power for evil purposes. The good witch in The Wizard of Oz, which was published in 1900, would be unthinkable in Shakespeare’s time because Glinda acts outside of the household and has a public voice, but her position and power have not made her evil. On the other hand, Baum’s Wicked Witch of the West is an avenging fury who might well have enjoyed the company of Shakespeare’s witches. While the good witch offers new possibilities for women, she also sets up a relationship in opposition to the wicked witch, thus suggesting qualities that are out of bounds for women. The good witch is pure, beautiful, and white. The wicked witch is corrupt, ugly, and non-white. There are no shades of gray in these representations. Published a century after The Wizard of Oz, Wicked considers gender roles even more radically, questioning the idea of gender that Baum adheres to. ‘Focusing simultaneously on physical and behavioral deviations from an imagined feminine ideal, the transformations presented by Maguire…draw attention to the constructed, normative nature of gender behavior and representations” (Burger: 125). In ‘Macbeth: The Prisoner of Gender,’ Robert Kimbrough’s description of Shakespeare’s expression of gender in his plays most resembles ideas about gender at the end of the twentieth century. He writes ‘through all of Shakespeare there runs the theme that both male and female must be liberated from the restrictions inherent in the concept of two genders’ and, in regard to Macbeth, that ‘the relationship between Lord and Lady Macbeth has been one of mutuality and sharing; yet they…are prevented from attaining and maintaining a full range of human character traits because of cultural attempts to render some exclusively female and some exclusively male’ (Kimbrough: 176). However, another interpretation is that Lady Macbeth tries to exceed her gender role by acting in the public sphere and is therefore deserving of punishment. In this interpretation, Shakespeare reinforces strict gender boundaries. Lady Macbeth is like the witches, behaving out of the bounds of her gender status, and therefore monstrous. I chose to write a play that transformed Macbeth because of the potential for creating discourse about gender roles in twenty-first century Western culture. While many women are able to engage in a vastly larger

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number of public roles than were women in Shakespeare’s time, ideas of femininity and masculinity still define what is and is not acceptable appearance and behavior. I wanted to explore how such limitations can lead women to behave in extreme ways. So in my play, Lady Macbeth’s mother, a capable woman forced to live in her husband’s and daughter’s shadows, craves legitimate power and manipulates her daughter and Maeve to achieve it. Maeve, the Second Witch, manipulates the Third Witch, a young man who has lost his memory, to get the information she needs to destroy Rose. Another consideration for my play that has ideological underpinnings is the question of the development of Christianity in Europe. I envision Lady Macbeth and the witches as representing the last pagans living as the Christians co-opted pagan rituals. Unlike King Arthur, who had the advantage of being male, which is privileged in Christianity, and therefore became the ‘first Christian king’, Lady Macbeth and the witches become ‘the last pagans’. This transition is manifest in Lady Macbeth, whose hand washing could be seen as a sort of inverted stigmata. As I explored her character in poetry prior to starting Second Witch, I wrote of Lady Macbeth that: Her stigmata bled curses and peopled her nights with Judas-bred children. Her candle was too weak a god-light to turn the blood into rivers of penitent beasts. She died as she lived unreconciled to her place as the bearer of her husband’s sins, unwilling, even to the last, to repent.

Conclusion: telling a good story Shakespeare was great at developing plots. I am not. I often start off with a question and then create characters and a situation and hope the plot will develop organically. For Second Witch, I started with the question, ‘for what reasons might the three witches work mischief in Macbeth’s

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life?’ In order to make my story dovetail with Macbeth, it required a strong plot from the beginning. Fortunately, Shakespeare is an excellent teacher. From him, I learned to use mistaken identity, revenge and gender switching as plot elements. It also helped that I knew how the play had to end. Since Second Witch is about the witches seeking revenge against Lady Macbeth, it needed to end with her death. Like Stoppard, I also freely inserted full scenes from Macbeth where my story and Shakespeare’s intersect. I also borrowed from Shakespeare’s formal techniques, like blank verse, monologues, and asides. Second Witch ends shortly after Macduff kills Macbeth offstage and Lady Macbeth drinks Maeve’s poison onstage. As Rose is dying, she recognises the third witch as Maeve’s daughter, who is disguised as a boy and who Rose raised. Maeve realises her mistake and she and Rose reconcile before Rose dies.

CHAPTER THREE REWRITING THROUGH ADDITION: CONTEMPORARY WALKS IN SHAKESPEARE’S WOODS DANA MONAH

Introduction The contemporary adaptor seeking to rework one of Shakespeare’s plays could be compared to an archaeologist taking a walk into a dead city. It is a ghostly city, reduced to ruins. As he advances, he unearths beautiful, glittering objects, miraculously preserved, and tries to infuse them with life and meaning, to imagine how they worked in the old times. These are the great scenes, the key moments of the plays – such as the seduction of Lady Anne or the battle of Bosworth in Richard III – the scenes we rediscover in most reworkings. However, these rescued fragments are fragile, brittle objects, carrying with them the marks of history, the ‘alluvial deposits’ (Mesguich in Carlson 1993: 214) accumulated with time, traces of the uses and misuses they have been subject to. Moreover, when disinterring these objects, the context in which they functioned, the relationships linking them to other objects are lost forever. Thus, the archaeologist would try to imagine this city of the past, starting from the bits and pieces recovered, but also relying on his knowledge of history and on his personal sensitivity. As French director Antoine Vitez stated, ‘the works of the past are broken architectures, sunken galleons, and we bring them back to light by pieces without ever reconstructing them, because anyway their use is lost, but by constructing with the pieces another thing. Dust removal is restoration. Our work, on the contrary, is to show the fissures of time.’1 (Kaiserbruber and Vitez 1976: 9). Faced with the impossibility of restoring the old world exactly as it was, the archaeologist will have to inhabit it anew, transforming it. Thus, he will fill in the gaps, 1

Unless otherwise specified, translations from French are mine.

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the missing fragments with elements of his own invention, without caring for the precision of his restoration. These are the new passages, which have no corresponding passage in the hypotext, the ‘original’ texts created by the contemporary writer. Although only briefly discussing dramatic works, theorists of fiction have offered, over the last decades, valuable insight into this rewriting technique. In his ground-breaking book on the practice of hypertextuality, Gérard Genette identified continuation as one of the modalities of secondary writing, distinguishing between a proleptic continuation (i.e., what will come after) – the most frequent, an analeptic or backward continuation, an elliptic continuation (whose purpose is to fill a median gap) and a paraleptic continuation ‘designed to bridge paralipses, or lateral ellipses’ (Genette 1997: 177). Particular to dramatic rewritings is that they roughly tell the same story as the canonical text, revisiting many of the plot elements contained, so prequels and sequels are scarce. However, while most of the interpolations are attempts at filling median gaps, they are often triggered by a scene having a corresponding scene in the hypotext, acquiring thus the function of proleptic continuation of the respective scene. Partly building upon Genette’s considerations and always situating his research in relation to that of the French theorist, Richard Saint-Gelais (2005, 2011) recently proposed to approach rewritings not as relationships between texts, but between fictional universes, theorizing them as manifestations of a larger phenomenon, which he calls transfictionality. His take is largely informed by the possible-worlds theory, as adapted for the study of fiction by Thomas Pavel (1988), Umberto Eco (1979, 1994), Lubomir Doležel (1998) or Marie-Laure Ryan (1991). This theory claims that literary texts postulate fictional worlds which ‘overflow’ their plot, inviting thus readers to take their pens and immerse themselves into the silences, the gaps or indeterminacies the texts create. Saint-Gelais considers ‘interpolations’ as a subcategory of ‘expansions’, the fictional works which extend the temporal and/or diegetic limits of a previous fiction. He distinguishes expansions from ‘versions’ (the term he uses for rewritings), which aim at telling the same story in a different manner: by revisiting it from a new point of view (‘recentering’), by reinterpreting it (‘reinterpretation’) or by proposing a radically different course of events from the one postulated by the initial work (‘counterfictionals’). However, I propose to consider the dramatic fragments which complete the gaps of a fictional universe as instances of rewriting, because, unlike prequels or sequels, they are part of a work which as a whole reworks another work;

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secondly, just like the scenes which have a corresponding scene in the hypotext, they do construct a critical relationship with elements of the source work. I distinguish between two essential modalities of inhabiting the gaps of the fictional universe of a given text, according to the attitude of the adaptor towards the fragile, ‘incomplete’ world that he discovers: he may either set for himself the (apparently) rather modest purpose of filling in the blanks, of telling what the source-text ‘forgot’ to tell and writing thus ‘ghost chapters’, just as Umberto Eco’s reader (Eco 1994: 268-9). Conversely, he may decide to use the fragments borrowed from the original text as springboards for his own imaginative creation, introducing Shakespeare’s characters into versions of the proto-world which are radically different from the one postulated by the source-text, and thus creating counterfactuals. In this article I will investigate the nature and functions of the ‘pseudoShakespearian’ fragments, whose purpose is to give the playwright a hand, to fill in the gaps of his story. Three kinds of temptations give birth to such strange, intermediary texts, telling a story which is not entirely Shakespeare’s nor really the adaptor’s: telling what Shakespeare ‘forgot’ to tell, by staging the scenes he didn’t write; entering into the wings of his story; and ‘discovering’ striking details, which do not add anything to the plot, but are to be enjoyed just for their beauty. The fictional world of Shakespeare’s Richard III is the one which four non-Anglophone dramatists set out to expand at the end of the 20th century and turn of the 21st. Paradoxically, all these rewritings operate a radical reduction of the fictional world projected by the source-text, focussing on the intimate side of Richard’s story, namely on his relationship with women. While French translator and adaptor Bernard Chartreux’s Cacodémon roi (1983) and Flemish author Peter Verhelst’s Richard III (2004) purge the play of male characters (only retaining those who functioned as extensions of Richard, executing his orders), in Italian actor and director Carmelo Bene’s Riccardo III (1977), the Duke of Gloucester is the only man in a society of women, and the new play turns the political competition into a complicated game of seduction. The protagonist himself fades out in Québécois Normand Chaurette’s Les Reines (1991), who decides to ‘kill’ Richard in order to bring into the spotlight the mysterious queens.

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Writing what Shakespeare forgot to write The gaps, the indeterminacies in the source-text, as well as the absent scenes, all those events which can be inferred from Shakespeare’s story but are never staged, are the mermaid’s song for all rewriters: they raise questions and seem to ask for continuations. What happened after Richard wooed Lady Anne? How did the princes die in the Tower? What did the coronation scene look like? Most often, such interpolations are triggered by facts and events in a previous scene, which the adapter perceives as being incomplete or unclear, as hiding mysteries that are worth elucidating. One shouldn’t however be misled by the nature of these ‘continuations’: the world they propose is of a different quality from the one projected by the source-text. As Lubomir Doležel argues, postmodernist rewriting ‘supplements the canonical world, but with a world of different extensional and intentional structuring’ (Doležel 1988: 213). More often than not, the filling in act will be one of alteration, not of ‘legitimate’ continuation, and it is precisely due to this vocation of unfaithfulness that the continuing fragment can be considered a piece of rewriting. ‘Continuation thus becomes, in the best of cases, the pretext for an oblique rewriting’, points out Genette (1997: 200). Shakespeare’s Richard III is famous for the fact that important events are not shown on stage, but hidden to the spectator or reader, offering thus excellent material to the adaptors who might wish to inhabit the grey areas of its fictional world. The famous ‘wooing scene’ (I.2) is one such instance, as it ends in a rather ambiguous manner: it remains unclear whether Lady Anne has accepted or not to marry the Duke of York, and the reader or spectator does not encounter the young woman again until Act IV Scene 1, when she helps Queen Elisabeth and Queen Margaret to curse Richard, and learns that she must be crowned queen of England. Lady Anne has married the duke of Gloucester, infers Shakespeare’s reader, who can freely muse on what has happened to her since the second scene of the play. Peter Verhelst and Normand Chaurette ‘fill in this gap’ by writing sequences offering some kind of aftermath to Shakespeare’s wooing scene. The Flemish playwright shows Richard and Anne together, during what seems to be their wedding night. His gesture aims at satisfying the reader’s curiosity concerning this episode which was absent from Shakespeare’s tragedy. Yet, what Shakespeare would have written, had he decided to give dramatic expression to this moment, is not even the smallest concern of the rewriter, who has already radically altered the

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meaning of the wooing scene, while preserving the original scenario. His Lady Anne is a powerful, strong-willed woman, who isn’t lured by Richard’s rhetoric, but abandons herself to her husband-to-be in a conscious gesture of self-imposed sacrifice. Verhelst’s ghost chapter is ‘conditioned’ by the way in which he appropriates the seduction scene, and it maintains the previously established difference, thus only superficially filling in the gap in Shakespeare’s fictional universe. It is Richard who speaks in this dramatic sequence, entitled (NIGHT COMPANY) (DREAMS): in a soliloquy – vaguely addressed both to Anne and to the audience - he confesses his quest for purity, and mentions the minute, surgical, destructive gestures which accompanied it. He then recalls the image of a young girl whom he saw singing, her arms raised towards the sky, and his shock at the beauty of her pure voice. Without any transition, Richard mentions the death of the young girl, in what looks like an earthquake or a terrorist attack. The man’s speech of purity and destruction enters into a strange dialogue with the young woman’s extremely sensual body language: she slowly undresses and places the man’s hand around her neck. It is Anne who controls Richard in this sequence, but she does so in a paradoxical, unsettling way, by the very fact of willingly abandoning herself to her husband. Strangely enough, just after pronouncing his last three lines, where he assimilates Anne to the idea of purity to be destroyed, Richard withdraws his hand, frightened, and a triumphant smile blossoms on the lips of the young woman. Verhelst’s continuation raises more questions than it answers: is Richard afraid of physical contact? Could his able rhetoric be just a mask of an unavowed aversion to sexual love? Shakespeare’s script suggests that Richard is excluded from physical love and makes it clear that his protagonist is not sexually interested in Anne, whom he only sees as an instrument of acquiring political power. His modern collaborator speculates on the meanings suggested by the hypotext and capitalizes on the idea that Richard destroys because he cannot love. The interest of this dramatic sequence, which is both a ghost chapter giving dramatic expression to Richard and Anne’s wedding night and a continuation of the seduction scene, comes from the fact that it is not pure invention, that it draws upon meanings which are present in the hypotext, reworking into a new configuration Richard’s rhetoric, the relationship between language and body or the one between victim and seducer/seductress. Another modality of populating the ‘hollow’ areas of the proto-world is having characters revisit a key scene some time after it has taken place: when no longer involved in the events, they may see the familiar episode

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with fresh eyes. The added fragment does not modify the original events, but it alters – in the manner of a radical production – the intentions and feelings of the characters, with the difference that it is not the actual performance that the spectator of the rewriting will be offered, but a narrative account of a familiar scene. This is what Bernard Chartreux does when he shows Richard musing a little too much on his brilliant victory in the encounter with Anne. Chartreux’s wooing scene was very similar to Shakespeare’s, almost a shortened prose translation of the original, in which Anne yielded more readily to the man who killed her husband. However, just after rejoicing in such an easy prey, Richard starts over-interpreting the woman’s attitude: by accepting him she has deceived her dead husband, so time might come when she will just as easily abandon him for yet another man. What if Anne only pretended to fall in love with him in order to secure a husband? Thus, this aging Richard, who is afraid of failure and death, rewrites the motivations of his stage partner and invites Chartreux’s readers/spectators to re-read the seduction scene from a new perspective. If the episode rewritten après-coup appeared in the French adaptor’s script, Canadian Normand Chaurette asks his readers to rely on their previous acquaintance with Shakespeare’s play in order to appreciate the way in which his queens revisit it. His reworking contains a dramatic sequence where Anne Warwick (this rewriting’s counterpart of Lady Anne) tries to persuade Anne Dexter (Richard’s sister, whom her mother has forbidden to speak, suspecting her of an incestuous relation with her brother George) that she dreads becoming the queen of England and cannot suffer the Duke of Gloucester. In order to support her statements, she kindly provides her interlocutor with an account of Richard’s courtship. Anne’s image of Richard is a caricature of the one that Shakespeare’s protagonist created in his opening soliloquy: he is physically disabled, and his speech is just as lame as his body. When told by Chaurette’s character, the (un)seduction scene is multiplied, becoming a regular torment, which Anne endures out of pity: ‘Ce sont ces minutes infernales/ Où je m’efforce de sourire/ Quand Richard m’accoste/ Au vu de tout le monde’ (Chaurette 1991: 15). As a malicious director, the Canadian playwright completely reverses the roles in Shakespeare’s scene: here, it is the woman who dominates the man, whom she marries out of interest – just like her stage partners, Anne Warwick longs to be queen, but she can only fulfil her dream by marrying the right man.

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It is interesting that while appropriating her encounter with Richard to her own political projects, Anne Warwick re-enacts in a way the original scene, as she adopts, towards Anne Dexter, a position which is similar to that of Shakespeare’s Richard in his confrontation with Lady Anne. Just as the Shakespeare’s protagonist (with whom she momentarily identifies, when declaring that she feels just as unwanted as Richard), Anne plays a role in order to manipulate the reactions of a powerless, silenced woman. By making reference to events which it does not stage, this rewriting asks its reader or spectator to rely on his/her foreknowledge of the Shakespearian hypotext in order to fully appreciate Anne Warwick’s manipulations. However, the very fact of placing his audience in an over informed position engenders new doubts and ambiguities: is Chaurette’s protagonist really a caricature of his Shakespearean ancestor, or does Anne ‘embellish’ reality in order to make it serve her politic ambitions? What renders this passage interesting for the discussion of rewriting techniques is the fact that it asks the audience to see Shakespeare’s absent scene as a constituent part of the secondary play: Chaurette’s sequence wouldn’t be the same without Shakespeare’s wooing scene looming in the background.

Offstage business When the ‘hollow’ spaces of a fictional universe are not to be found in the unachieved, elusive nature of a dramatic situation, they might be hidden in the ‘wings’ of the main story. Adaptors sometimes feel the urge to explore the destinies, adventures, secrets of the minor characters, those who rarely make their appearance on the stage of the hypotext. Thus, they locate their rewriting behind the scenes of Shakespeare’s tragedy. Both Genette and Saint-Gelais range such passages (which sometimes extend to the whole length of the secondary work) among continuations, and they both mention Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead (1966) as the canonical manifestation, in dramatic literature, of this rewriting formula. Genette (1997: 177) explains that in ‘paraleptic continuations’ the plot of the source-text emerges into the secondary one in bits and pieces. For Saint-Gelais, who prefers the term ‘parallel continuations’, this technique belongs to transfictional extensions, not to rewritings proper. Yet, the Canadian critic does include a similar device (‘decentering/ recentering’) among versions – referring to the situation when a narrative tells a story from a different perspective, generally from the point of view of another character (Saint-Gelais 2011: 144). He insists on the fact that unlike a ‘parallel expansion’, ‘decentering’ is characterized by strong interferences between the primary fiction and the secondary one,

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by a shared diegetic space. Nevertheless, the Canadian theorist points out the relationship between the plots of Hamlet and Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead when he imagines them as two plays simultaneously enacted on two adjacent stages, the actors of the latter holding temporary roles in the former, which causes them to briefly pass on the other side. As I will argue in this section, the relationship between the plot of Richard III and that of its rewritings is always a strong one in the four reworkings, which allows us to consider such sequences instances of rewriting rather than continuations. When used in a dramatic text, this rewriting formula creates an unsettling, theatrical feeling, a double bind: the contemporary reader or spectator is invited to enter into the wings of the story proposed by the source-text, to gaze at what secondary characters did while waiting for their turn to enter the main stage, and he/she has restricted access to what was formerly openly offered to view. The ‘main’ story, the one the audience is supposed to be familiar with, will henceforth emerge in the reworking as a far-away, distant music, as fits and starts from a remote world. Thus, when uncovering (or rather pretending to uncover) a shadowy or blank area of the fictional universe postulated by the primary work, such fragments dissociate and connect two distinct worlds: the secondary world (the ‘backstage’) explored by the derived text and the primary one, ‘the main stage’, which belongs to the source-text, to Shakespeare’s Richard III. To a certain extent, all these rewritings stem from a fascination with what lies beyond Richard’s impressive personality, with the intimate side of the history play. Yet, out of the four appropriations only Normand Chaurette’s Les Reines - and to a lower degree Peter Verhelst’s Richard III - truly explore the world of the female characters. According to Shawn Huffman, ‘Chaurette [...] was constantly haunted by the female characters in Shakespeare’s play, characters seemingly just beyond the reach of the audience, existing behind the veil of male ambition’ (Huffman 2004: 66). As Genette and Saint-Gelais justly remarked about Stoppard’s play, there is not much action going on these back stages: in spite of their neverending agitation, Chaurette’s queens spend their time talking about past glory and present unhappiness, while they wait for the men to write History. Similarly, Verhelst’s ladies confide in the spectator as they expose their most intimate feelings. Here, all that is to happen has already been written, everything is known in advance, and the women, highly dependent on their husbands, fathers, brothers and sons (but also on

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Shakespeare’s script) cannot do anything in order to change the way the world goes. The main role of the female characters, both in Chaurette’s reworking and in Verhelst’s, is to be spectators to the male history, a history which they tell and interpret anew, from their extremely personal perspectives. One of the most salient features of this dramatic technique is that it often replaces the coherent, linear story of the hypotext with a series of highly subjective stories, which partly reflect upon the main one. As Florence March rightly observes, ‘Verhelst’s dramaturgy focuses on interiority and intimacy through monologues, creating a tension between national History and individual stories. The number of male characters has been drastically reduced, and the female characters’ points of view are foregrounded as the Flemish dramatist focuses on the margins of Shakespeare’s play, making them the centre of his own’ (March 2010). Indeed, in both Chaurette and Verhelst, the queens take pleasure in exposing their intimacy to the audience, they descant on their sufferings and expose their dreams, exhume facts and events which happened a long time before and which shed new light on the events in the hypotext. In both plays the ‘communication’ with the areas of the fictional universe to which the audience no longer has access is assured by dramatic instances that keep the audience informed on what is happening “on the other side” of the stage. In Verhelst’s rewriting, this role is played by a voice-over which, according to Florence March (2012: 97) provides the reader/spectator with the necessary information in order to follow the story and links together the otherwise disparate stories. It does so through the means of short announcements, most of them having a purely informative function, on what is happening on the other stage – much like a football commentator in a live radio streaming: ‘LOYAL [Verhelst’s counterpart and conflation of the killers in Richard III] ENTERS CLARENCE’S CELL’. When informed that ‘CLARENCE, EDWARD’S BROTHER, IS BROUGHT TO THE TOUR’, the readers or spectators familiar with Shakespeare’s tragedy are placed in a privileged position: upon this brief announcement, they will ‘fill in’ with the way in which it was staged in Shakespeare’s tragedy, observing what Mary-Laure Ryan (1991: 51) calls ‘the principle of minimal departure’, with the difference that Shakespeare’s fictional universe - not the actual world - will be taken as a frame of reference. As postulated by Ryan, the readers/spectators will only make the adjustments asked for by the derived text. At other times, the

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voice will abandon its detached position, guiding the contemporary audience through the Shakespearean maze, giving explanations or announcing how the action will evolve, becoming thus a mediator between the offstage world and that of the hypotext. Even when it abandons a strictly informative, narrative role, assuming that of a commentator and a critic, the disembodied voice in Verhelst’s Richard III remains reliable, drawing attention to the discrepancy between the protagonist’s statements and his actions, just like the Chorus in Greek tragedy. In Chaurette’s reworking the narrative voice is diffracted, multiplied, as each of the six women in the Tower peeps through the curtain hole offering access to the world of the kings, and informs her stage partners and the audience in the house on what she saw there, or rather on what she chose to see. Thus, the narratives contradict one another and end by telling different stories about the same event: King Edward dies in Queen Margaret’s account and resurrects in that of Queen Elisabeth, while Richard’s order to assassinate George acquires both a highly improbable character (‘commenter/ Le bien fondé d’une résolution de Richard/ Visant à supprimer George’) and is perfectly scheduled and imminent (‘Richard n’a convoqué les assassins/ Que pour le milieu de la nuit’) (Chaurette 1991: 22). The queens are no innocent observers; their destiny depends on the deeds of those unseen men, which explains why they constantly strive to rewrite what they see, in order to make it correspond to their own interests. Possible worlds are constantly actualized in one account, only to be discarded in the next one, providing the audience of Chaurette’s play with an extremely blurred picture of what is happening beyond the curtain. When faced with this dramatic formula, the reader/spectator is constantly asked to compare, as in a palimpsest, what he remembers from the hypotext with the information provided by the rewriting. Once again, the rewriting proper, as a work of art, seems to be located in an inbetween-ness, to result from the partial and intermittent superimpositions of the hypotext and the hypertext. Both Verhelst’s and Chaurette’s rewritings construct their full meanings with the help of Shakespeare’s absent fictional universe. The dramatic formula discussed in these cases is certainly informed by the seduction of the theatre wings, of the secret world behind the theatre curtain. And since both on a material and on a metaphoric level the specific of the wings is to accommodate a double activity – watching what is happening on stage and organising plots – rewriting through parallel continuation bears the mark of the symbolic place which inspires it. Thus, one of the pleasures of this technique is

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seeing how the events postulated by the source play are reflected in the deforming mirror of the rewriting.

Pleasure walks The interpolations discussed so far were triggered, more or less, by the source-text, either as an unfinished or ambiguous event asked for a clarifying continuation, or as the adaptor felt tempted to enter the backstage in order to explore what lay beyond the main course of events. However, quite often contemporary rewritings prefer to visit regions of the fictional universe that the source-text did not announce (but that do not contradict its narrative logic), to muse on details and minor events. Umberto Eco would describe such passages as moments when the writer invites his reader to linger in the narrative woods: In a wood, you go for a walk. If you’re not forced to leave it in a hurry to get away from the wolf or the ogre, it is lovely to linger, to watch the beams of sunlight play among the trees and fleck the glades, to examine the moss, the mushrooms, the plants in the undergrowth. Lingering doesn’t mean wasting time: frequently one stops to ponder before making a decision. But [...] one can wander in a wood without going anywhere in particular and [...] at times it’s fun to get lost just for the hell of it. (Eco 1994: 50)

More than ‘ordinary’ writers and readers, rewriters have no wolf to run away from: their readers are supposed to be familiar with the forest, so they could gladly join them in pleasure walks, and even ‘get lost just for the hell of it’, as what interests here is not to finish the journey, but to revisit its most interesting parts. Unlike the passages which aim, even if only superficially, at filling in gaps in the protoworld, those which I will explore in the following section seem to be disconnected from the plot, and are to be taken, at least at first glance, as pieces of cake to be enjoyed for themselves. They could be considered instances of what the art historian Daniel Arasse (1996:11) calls ‘the detail’ (‘dettaglio’), which is not just a small part of a figure or of an ensemble (the detail ‘particolare’), but a privileged moment in the picture, a moment one chooses to single out. There are excerpts, in some of these contemporary appropriations of Richard III, which arrest the gaze of the reader by their extraordinary emotional quality, setting them apart from the rest of the play. Such are, for instance, the passages where Bernard Chartreux or Carmelo Bene stop telling the story inherited from

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Shakespeare, and focus on the Duchess and her son(s), captured in an instance of strange tenderness and beauty. In a scene which follows that of Clarence’s death, Bernard Chartreux shows the Duchess rocking her dead son, as if to help him fall asleep. Yet, instead of a lullaby, she delivers a variation on the speech that her Shakespearian counterpart delivered in Act IV Scene 4, where she was cursing her womb for giving birth to a monster. Due to its repetitive structure, framed by the anaphora of the phrase ‘it is my womb’, this speech becomes a sort of lullaby, addressed both to dead Clarence and to Richard, who sits by the side of his mother, and enters into a sort of dialogue with her, as he recites a strange genealogy of the house of York. The Duchess then curses ‘Ricky’, her ‘monster child’, but her curse impresses by its unsettling mixture of violence and tenderness, and by the superimposition, in a grotesque image, of childhood and death. Likewise, in Carmelo Bene’s rewriting, the mother sings a lullaby to agonizing Edward, a lullaby consisting of some excerpts from two poems by T. S. Eliot, Gerontion and Ash Wednesday. The speech is doubly dislocated, both from the speaker (the stage directions ask the actress to exaggerate the pain in a grotesque manner) and from the addressee: in a way, the Duchess speaks here in the name of her son, as the poetic persona, in both poems, is an old man tired of life, pondering over death, faith, afterlife, hopelessness and disillusionment. This moment, when the Shakespearian character speaks with the words of Eliot in the name of her dying son, sets it apart from the norm of Bene’s rewriting (where characters only use paraphrases of Shakespeare’s words): it is as if the Duchess were double-voiced, carrying with her the ghost of speakers to come, of other old men pondering over the meaning of life and death. If Chartreux’s and Chaurette’s sequences uncover details that Shakespeare’s tragedy ignored, and slow down the pace of the plot, providing time to reflect upon the events, in Peter Verhelst’s rewriting similar moments seem to suspend the diegesis altogether, acquiring a postdramatic flavour. Richard’s story is framed and interrupted by a long soliloquy in which the Duchess of York tells the audience – whom she addresses directly, as if it were a stage partner - the story of Richard’s birth and the very mixed feelings -- of repulsion, culpability and paradoxical love -- that unite her to this strange child. As a privileged witness of this very intimate confession, the spectator is positioned in an intermediary space, halfway between reality and fiction, at the same time

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immersed in a relationship with a fictional character and asked to reflect upon the fiction. It is perhaps not a coincidence that three of the four rewritings discussed in this article focus on the most intimate and painful aspect of Richard’s story, that the Elizabethan playwright didn’t develop in his tragedy: the protagonist’s relationship with his mother, depicted in disturbing images of violence and tenderness, of dying kings and princes, whom their mothers rock to sleep with lullabies which have acquired a 20th century flavour. Thus, the hypertrophy of the family sphere, in its most intimate aspects, becomes a lens through which the political is approached, and it seems to condense one of the contemporary takes on Shakespeare’s work. These fragments are to be read as miniatures, as details ‘dettaglio’, encompassing the mood of a reworking.

Conclusion The gap filling or ghost chapters constitute a rather paradoxical rewriting technique: they are ‘new’ texts, produced by rewriters (as different from the fragments which result from the alteration of an already existing scene), whose purpose is to tell an old story, or rather to supplement it with forgotten events, to enrich it with new details, taking care not to disturb its narrative logic. Thus, by inserting new events into a relatively stable scenario, adaptors relocate Shakespeare’s text into a perpetual unfinished state, which can be compared to that of medieval literature or myths. While preserving a few invariants (the key scenes), Richard’s story is a highly malleable one, contend the rewriters, a story that they feel free to modify, to alter according to their interests, a story which can always be told otherwise. As different from the counterfactuals, these passages aim at enlarging the fictional world of a given text; therefore, they are usually ‘called for’, triggered by the blank spaces in the primary text. However, whether they take the form of a continuation of an unfinished episode, of a parallel fiction shedding light on the destinies of secondary characters or of a minor detail that Shakespeare’s story does not call for, but that it can accommodate (one can always write a scene describing what Lady Macbeth had for breakfast), the paradox and beauty of these additions comes from their delusive quality. As Saint-Gelais contends, ‘transfictional texts never fill in anything: of course, they can add quantity of elements, but they never exhaust the original incomplentenesses, over and above the fact that they create new ones’ (2011: 58). Transfictional

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fragments that fill in the gaps of a story seem to be distorting mirrors, creating new understandings of the initial text. Thus, they become powerful instruments of rewriting through addition, showing that the borderline between a text and its commentary is extremely delicate. One of the most interesting features of these pseudo-Shakespearean texts is their palimpsest quality: quite often, they are haunted by events, meanings and facts in the source-text, they rely on the absent hypotext in order to construct their meanings, asking the reader to permanently bear in mind Shakespeare’s Richard III. Constantly, the reader or spectator encounters images which are similar yet different from images in the source-text, confirming Julie Sanders’s statement that ‘part of the pleasure of the of the rewriting experience lies in the tension between the familiar and the new, and the recognition both of similarity and difference, between ourselves and between texts’ (2006: 14). Yet, the force of these intermediary texts lies precisely in the imprecision of the contemporary reader or spectator’s memory, who is not a Shakespearian scholar, but an ‘ordinary’ reader, and whose Richard III is a blurred mixture of a teenage compulsory reading and Olivier’s film adaptation. He or she might remember that a certain aspect of Shakespeare’s play was different from the derived play, but is not very certain of his recollections, and feels tempted to reread Shakespeare’s text. Nonetheless, especially when watching a production of the derived play, there is no time for such things, so the doubt persists, creating a hybrid, intermediary, elusive Richard III, which is not entirely that of Bene, Chartreux, Chaurette or Verhelst, nor Shakespeare’s.

PART TWO GLOBAL SHAKESPEARES: ADAPTATION AND PERFORMANCE

CHAPTER FOUR FICTION AND THE POSSIBILITY OF THE ETHICAL: REWRITING SHAKESPEARE AND THE INTERTEXTUALITY OF GAYATRI SPIVAK PRETI TANEJA

Gayatri Spivak’s moving, persuasive essay, Ethics and Politics in Tagore, Coetzee, and certain scenes of Teaching takes as its starting point some passages from Emmanuel Lévinas and Immanuel Kant to argue for a kind of reading that motivates an ethics of equality. The quotation from Lévinas offered by Spivak is as follows: The suspicions engendered by psychoanalysis, sociology and politics weigh on human identity such that we never know to whom we are speaking and what we are dealing with when we build our ideas on the basis of human fact […] but we do not need this knowledge in the relationship in which the other is the one next to me.1

According to Lévinas we do not need to know the ‘facts’ as per the various sciences, in order to feel and act on empathy for the ‘other’. Spivak identifies the gap between the ethical and epistemological in the same breath as she talks of Kant’s ‘discontinuity between the ethical and the political.’2 She notes Kant’s thinking that the ‘ethical communality of being cannot form the basis of a state.’3 She goes on to write, and this is my starting point also, that these discontinuities, particularly ‘between the ethical and the epistemological fields are tamed in the nestling of logic and 1

‘Ethics and Politics in Tagore, Coetzee, and certain scenes of Teaching’, Gayatri Chakravarty Spivak, Diacritics, Volume 32, Number 3-4, Fall-Winter 2002, pp. 17-31. 2 Ibid., p. 17. 3 Ibid.

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rhetoric in fiction.’4 Fiction, which ‘offers us an experience of the discontinuities that take place “in real life”’ allows ‘an indeterminate sharing between writer and reader, where […] reading is to taste the impossible status of being figured as an object in the web of another.’5 To understand, for a moment that the ‘other’ is the ‘one next to me’. For Lévinas, that realisation of proximity both constitutes the self and calls that self into question. It brings with it responsibility, as Kent R. Lehnhof sets out: I cannot freely pursue my own interests in the face of the other, for the nudity and neediness I see in the face of the other lays claim to all that I would consume, control or possess in such a pursuit. […] For Lévinas, the essence of responsibility is service.6

On these terms and through that Spivakian moment of recognition, a link to the political, and a future, more ethical state might be forged. I would go further to argue that it is not only a recognition of the other as constituting and challenging the self which inspires this, but a recognition of the other in the self – to put in terms that Rabindranath Tagore would certainly recognise – ‘tat tvam asi’7 – that thou art. It is via consideration of the concepts and use of the word ‘nothing’ in William Shakespeare’s King Lear, poetry by Tagore and the novel Disgrace by J.M Coetzee (1999) that Spivak illuminates how intertextual reading (her usage of the term is after the Latin word texere – to weave) ‘is sacred.’8 She argues that such reading can give rise to the ethical impulse that might motivate what Sangeeta Ray has called ‘soul making’, a seemingly ‘(im)possible task in a world dominated by discourses of nationalism, globalization, development, and equality.’ 9 Though Spivak’s methodology in her ‘extremely elliptical’ essay is ‘complex and often 4

Ibid., p. 18. Spivak acknowledges her debt to Derrida’s article ‘White Mythology’, subtitled, ‘Metaphor in the Text of Philosophy.’, Ethics, p. 18. 5 Ibid. 6 Kent R. Lehnhof, ‘Relation and Responsibility, A Lévinasian Reading of King Lear,’ Modern Philology, Vo.111, No.3 (February 2014), pp. 485-509. p. 488. 7 The statement is at the heart of the Hindu relationship with the absolute. I use it here away from the religious context to say something about the recognition of ‘sameness’ between people, alongside the inescapable and ethical difference the ‘other’ also represents on Lévinasian terms. 8 Spivak, Ethics, p. 18. 9 Sangeeta Ray, Gayatri Chakravarty Spivak: In Other Words (Chichester: John Wiley, 2009), p. 50.

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fraught,’10 according to Ray, it serves to underline how difficult is the task of intertextual reading and writing towards bridging the gaps Spivak sets out. Though Ray does not believe that either Tagore’s poem Apoman (1910) 11 or Coetzee’s Disgrace are direct examples of intertextual writing in the sense that they are not ‘deliberate rewritings of canonical texts,’12 Spivak recognises that ‘㻵㼚㼟㼛㼒㼍㼞㻌㼍㼟㻌㻰㼕㼟㼓㼞㼍㼏㼑㻌㼕㼟㻌㼍㻌㼒㼍㼠㼔㼑㼞㻙㼐㼍㼡㼓㼔㼠㼑㼞㻌㼟㼠㼛㼞㼥㻌㼠㼔㼑㻌 㼕㼚㼠㼑㼞㼠㼑㼤㼠㼡㼍㼘㼕㼠㼥㻌 㼔㼑㼞㼑㻌 㼕㼟㻌 㼣㼕㼠㼔㻌 㻸㼑㼍㼞㻚䇻㻌 Disgrace can certainly be considered an appropriation of King Lear particularly in light of Thomas Cartelli’s reminder that, ‘as in the case of the term “postcolonial,” the term “appropriation” has come to signify some form of subversive or oppositional intervention in an established discourse.’13 Taking this as my starting point, I want to consider from a postcolonial perspective some of the motivations and aesthetics of writing fiction that is appropriative and intertextual, and which uses its hybridity to critique contemporary inequalities of gender, race and socio-economic conditions. Perhaps, like the some of the works I focus on here, it also deploys a language learned via the same globalising influences that have contributed to forming those inequalities over time. Spivak requires readers to restore ‘reference in order that intertextuality may function.’14 I weave her essay through my own thinking in this chapter to begin with a consideration of some of the ethical questions raised by Shakespeare in King Lear and the aesthetics by which they are achieved. This lays the ground for a poetics of intertextuality which I bring to an investigation of how three contemporary writers, Edward Bond, Jane Smiley and Coetzee use King Lear as a starting point in the creation of writing that works on its readers far beyond the boundaries of the printed text, the bought (e-) book. I also consider the importance of focalisation: how writing the figure of ‘I’ as object is essential to creating a literature that might fit Spivak’s definition of being ‘in the service of the emergence of the ethical’15; a literature that attempts to ‘figure forth an equality that

10

Ibid. Otherwise known as ‘Poem no. 108’ in Tagore’s Gitanjali. 12 Ibid. 13 Thomas Cartelli, Repositioning Shakespeare: National Formations, Postcolonial Appropriations, (London: Routledge, 1999), p. 18. 14 Spivak, Ethics, p. 19. 15 Spivak, Ethics, p. 27. 11

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takes disgrace in its stride.’16 Such an equality is no fairy-tale ending. Rather it is one that struggles into being, and, as in King Lear, Disgrace, Smiley’s A Thousand Acres (1991), or Bond’s Lear (1971) often leaves the reader feeling uncomfortable, exhausted and provoked. In encompassing disgrace one cannot gloss over these visceral realities (viscerealities?), but must find a way to move forward with full recognition and claiming of them, igniting the sense of responsibility so important to Spivak of reading and responding to fiction as both event and task. Is this self-evidently a good thing? I believe so, even though the word ‘believe’ in such a context might seem counter to the idea of working fiction into epistemological discourse. Nevertheless to investigate this proposition I conclude with a return to Spivak’s exposition of Tagore’s poem Apoman and draw on my experience of practice-based research for an intertextual appropriation of King Lear set in India (a novel), to argue that such work can give rise to a criticism that might motivate a reading which in turn ignites an ethics of equality. This work itself is not the subject of this chapter. Instead an example from my practice-based research gathered in the first half of 2012 (the date is important – it prefigures the rape and death of Jyoti Singh Pandey; it catches the capital city when the wave of the global recession still seemed distant from India’s shores, and was two years before Narendra Modi was elected Prime Minister,) is instructive for my argument here. It also advocates for this kind of research as methodology in furthering the ethical value of humanities scholarship and its relevance in the world today.

King Lear and the ethics of discontinuity Spivak’s discontinuity between the ethical and the political is revealed via Lear’s ‘violent dislocation (my emphasis) from the social framework and ideology which defined him as king.’17 This makes possible a perspective that challenges the rightness of any particular system: the feudal or the mercantile, the customary or the individualistic, the ‘legitimate’ or the bastard. ‘The text,’ according to Ryan: […] Ultimately urges us to reject both the waxing and waning world views it explores in favour of a perspective whose purchase on our imagination 16

Ibid., p. 30. ‘King Lear and the Subversive Imagination’, Kiernan Ryan, King Lear, ed. by Kiernan Ryan (London: Palgrave, 1993), pp. 73-83 (p. 78). 17

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and moral sense is far more powerful: a perspective committed to equality, mutuality and cooperation rather than division, domination and exploitation.18

This goes beyond the idea of the heroic but flawed individual identified by many critics as the heart of the play. ‘To adopt this line,’ Ryan emphasises, ‘means blocking out the entire point of King Lear, which subjects an all-powerful patriarchal monarch to a traumatic experience whose consequences throw into question kingship as such, and the unequal distribution of power and wealth on which it is predicated.’19 To Ryan the play aligns itself with the ‘mad, the blind, the beggared, the speechless, the powerless, the worthless; with all those who ‘With best meaning/ have incurr’d the worst,’ 20 through their heroic failure to be ‘as the time is.’ (5.3.31). Ryan’s focus is on Lear’s dislocation and by extension Gloucester’s. Yet it is important to include Goneril, Regan and Edmund – they too are products of their social world, dislocated from it in several important ways. I include Edmund in the category of ‘worthless’ for it is this social perception he is fighting against when he asks, ‘Why brand they us/ With base? With baseness, bastardy? Base, base?’ (1.2.9-10). By the same argument Goneril and Regan are ‘worthless’: being childless women they merely function for Lear during the love test of Act 1.1 as the conduit for land and wealth to pass between men.21 They are also ‘speechless’ for their speech is dictated to them by power: they begin the play obedient and therefore ‘powerless.’ Following the break up of the family and the kingdom, Goneril and to a lesser extent Regan are cast from dutiful daughters into positions of patriarchal power, Cordelia falls from favourite into shamed unfavouredness. Edmund propels himself towards a legitimacy that he cannot achieve without acting on the violent fear it might still be taken from him should the old guard survive. Taken together, these examples reveal Shakespeare’s tragedy to be not one of masculinity (Lear), female spitefulness (Goneril/Regan) or individual sacrificial heroic action (Kent/ 18

Ibid. Ibid. 20 King Lear, 5.3.4 by William Shakespeare, ed. by RA Foakes, (London: Arden, Third Series, 1997). All further references are to this edition and shall be noted in the text as (A.S.L). 21 I note how the question of Lear’s favour is not speculated on by Gloucester and Kent in Act 1.1.1-4 in terms of which daughter Lear prefers, but which son-in-law. 19

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Cordelia), but a tragedy of the social world, one which asks a question as central to a postmodern age as in any age since the play was written. So Lear’s heartfelt plea, ‘Who is it that can tell me who I am?’ (1.4.211), can be taken not as an example of an individual in thrall to the vaguaries of his own mental health,22 but as a cris de coer (plural) for a society on the brink of a fragmentation that comes to pass before the play’s end. In asking this collective question the play dislocates its readers and audience from complacency: it compels us to dislocate ourselves from the world we blindly (it seems for the most part,) live in; to ‘see it feelingly’ (4.6.145); to strive beyond being ‘as the time is’ (5.3.31). King Lear’s ethics are the ethics of dislocation, and in its fictionalisation of inequalities – the rift between nature and man, between what is considered ‘legitimate’ in terms of speech, gender, birth and wealth – it brings to bear a critique that cannot be content to flatter any of those systems the play rails against. For Spivak the key ethical dislocation in King Lear begins with Cordelia’s ‘nothing’. It ‘derails everything – the meter as well as the moment’23 – as she notes: C: Nothing my Lord. [six syllables of silence] L: Nothing? [eight syllables of silence] C: Nothing. [eight syllables of silence] L: Nothing will come of nothing. Speak again. (1.1.83-88).

This noticing underlines an interdependent poetics of speech and silence through which Shakespeare offers a representation of the interdependency of self and other. When Cordelia disrupts the social world with her insistence on using its boundaries to avoid playing the prescribed game, she shows that world (and particularly her sisters) how they might be. She also warns them of the consequences of such behaviour (syllables of silence – actual special nothing – death). In form and content society self critiques and self perpetuates here; the ethics of how each sister behaves (for survival or for the breakage of bonds) can only be understood in response to the structures that contain her. The cumulative effect is of women struggling against what social rules condemn them to be – whether

22 I find recent arguments for Lear’s dementia, based on the idea expressed by Regan that ‘he hath ever but slenderly known himself’ rather reductive of the wider implications the play presents us with. A full discussion of this is beyond the scope of this essay. 23 Lehnhof, Relation and Responsibility, p. 488.

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that is perfectly good or monstrous (all three sisters can be perceived by Lear and his court/ the reader/ audience as either in Act 1). It is through identification with the other, and the realisation of the other in the self that the play moves us towards a deeper understanding of how to ‘be’ in the world. This is articulated through character of Edgar who dislocates himself from his family (rather than simply challenge the claims of his less favoured, bastard half-brother in front of their father) and from the social world into alterity. As Poor Tom, he comes to recognise social hypocrisy and his own ability to dissemble, to investigate the blurred lines between madness and civilisation. Lear identifies with Edgar/Poor Tom, and this leads to an identification of the other within himself. Shakespeare does not offer this to his audience lightly. Before any sense, however ambivalent, of peace can be reached, shame must be recognised and endured. Shame, as Ewan Fernie points out24 in Shakespeare takes on much greater power when considered not just as an individual’s interior feeling but instead as a force for the ethical life. How we conduct ourselves, within what boundaries and for what reasons is at stake here – Cordelia’s ‘Nothing, my lord.’ (1.1.87) dislocates a latent sense of shame from Lear as individual and brings this sense to bear on everyone who colludes in the conditions that give rise to the love test Lear makes his daughters undergo. When Cordelia speaks a prophecy as a parting shot to her sisters before she goes to France: ‘Time shall unfold what plighted cunning hides/ Who covert faults at last with shame derides.’ (1.1/282), the ethical project she suggests is the discovery of selfknowledge. Throughout Act 1.1, therefore Cordelia draws attention to how our own blind following of social mores contributes to and sustains, for example, gender and socio-economic inequality in the world. She argues for a different mode of being, despite the personal risks. Lear almost learns this; arguably, Goneril, Regan and Edmund almost do too – as do the enigmatic Edgar, the blinded Gloucester all cast into situations of ‘nothingness’ in which they are faced with themselves. It is left to the Fool, the character who exists within and without of the play and is aligned in the text with Cordelia, to pick up her warning and articulate the disgrace that arises when systems of power fail in their selfcritique. The speech that expresses this in its aesthetics and in its content is 24

See for example, Ewan Fernie, Shame in Shakespeare (London: Routledge, 2002).

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the prophecy in Act 3, which lays bare the hypocrisy of the social world and looks forward to a future when shame has lost its stinging currency and the disgrace it reveals has been equalized: When priests are more in word than matter, When brewers mar their malt with water, When nobles are their tailor’s tutors, No heretics burned but wenches suitors; When every case in law is right No squire in debt, nor no poor knight; When slanders do not live in tongues, Nor cutpurses come not to throngs, When usurers till their gold i’the field, And bawds and whores do churches build, Then shall the realm of Albion Come to great confusion: Then comes the time who lives to see’t That going shall be used with feet. This prophecy Merlin shall make, for I live before his time. (3.2.8195)

Via a depiction of equal shame and a move towards equality the speech looks forward to a time when a prophecy will be made that will imagine a new world into being. ‘Great confusion’ will be necessary for this to occur. Spivak catches the freewheeling perspective of the Fool’s words when she reads Tagore’s Apoman. She understands that the poem makes a ‘mysterious prediction, looking toward the historical future: ‘Apoman hote hobe tahader shobar shoman’ – ‘my unfortunate country, you will have to be equal in disgrace to each and everyone of those whom you have disgraced millennially.’25 This phrase speaks to the first half of the Fool’s speech above; but her translation suggests there is more – for something better to occur, disgrace will have to be balanced with disgrace. For Spivak, Tagore’s words act as ‘a warning to postcolonial ambitions,’26 one that is crucial for the coming into being of nations, for states in transitions of power, the ramifications of which will be felt for generations. Like the Fool’s speech, the warning takes a position that examines its own dilemma, and, like Shakespeare, Tagore understood that the disgrace of ‘man’s inhumanity to man’27 is a dynamic that binds both master and

25

Spivak, ‘Ethics’, p. 19. Ibid., p. 18. 27 Robert Burns, Man was made to mourn: a Dirge, (1784). 26

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slave.28 But the use of a future anterior tense in the Fool’s prophecy and in Tagore imagines a realisation of shame and points towards a true recognition of the other. It hints that almost despite ourselves, there is a utopia that we strive towards knowingly or unknowingly, an equal society that is waiting (within us) to be realised.

Shakespeare, Tagore and intertextual writing: the focalisation of disgrace From Tagore’s warning Spivak moves into her discussion of J.M Coetzee’s Disgrace as an intertextual work which warns against neocolonial impulses on the part of the new state: against patriarchal, nationalistic imperatives that mimic worst of the coloniser’s practices. The ‘great confusion’ of the Fool’s speech called into being by Lucy, who at the end of Coetzee’s novel evokes Cordelia with her use of the word ‘nothing’ as a potential beginning: But perhaps that is a good point to start from again. . . . To start at ground level. With nothing. Not with nothing but. With nothing. No cards, no weapons, no property, no rights, no dignity. (D, p.205) 29

Lucy has been raped. Despite this, and being “‘perhaps” a lesbian, decides to carry the child of this attack to term. She agrees to “marry” Petrus, the black man who works on her land and is establishing his family there. Petrus has sheltered one of the rapists, though he is not one of them as such. Spivak understands Cordelia’s ‘nothing’ as different from Lucy’s, writing: It is not the withholding of speech protesting the casting of love in the value form and giving it the wrong value. It is rather the casting aside of the affective value system attached to reproductive heteronormativity as it is accepted as the currency to measure human dignity.30

Whether it is different or not is moot, however. Both serve to break away from social and society’s bonds, and it can be agreed that Cordelia’s

28

In fact, he hints, following Hegel, the master somewhat more than the slave. J.M Coetzee, Disgrace, (London: Vintage, 1999), p.205. All further references are to this edition and will be marked in the text as D.p.) 30 Spivak, ‘Ethics’, p. 21. 29

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‘nothing’ acts to generate Lucy’s – and the intertextuality is a chain reaction towards a vision of a new more equal world order. If it is difficult to understand Lucy’s decision (in as much as Cordelia’s ‘nothing’ is throws up complex dilemmas,) it is perhaps because Lucy is focalised intensely through her father, David Lurie’s point of view. Coetzee utilises a tone of self-reflexivity through the novel, which begins with the lines: ‘For a man of his age, fifty-two, divorced, he has, to his mind, solved the problem of sex rather well,’ (D., p.3). The reader immediately understands that this novel will be about the unravelling of Lurie’s assumptions; that sex will be his undoing and his teacher; that his disgraceful self-congratulation disgraces others, and will only disgrace him. Is this in any way concurrent with Shakespeare’s focalisation in King Lear? How can a world seen primarily through disgraceful eyes provide the spark that will ignite an ethical impulse in its reader? For as David Lurie’s, Lear’s eyes are disgrace-full when they rest on ‘others’ (his daughters) and in how they seem to us: the play’s persuasive emphasis on understanding Lear’s ego, his deeply felt struggle, his coming to terms with the other in himself, ensures that. Using this technique the author’s text reveals the limitations of power via the dislocations I have described above. The writing makes us question: are Goneril and Regan monstrous? Is Cordelia perfectly good? Is Coetzee’s Lucy crazily defiant, Bev Shaw desperate or ugly, Melanie no more than a young seductress? The question is – ‘Who is it that can tell me who I am?’ The dislocation between the focalisation of disgrace through Lear’s and Lurie’s eyes suggests that the answer is the author, who concentrates in this way to probe the discontinuity between safe understandings of what these stories are about – someone else in some other time – to make them about us, in our time. While the focalisation might seem to want to makes us collude with both Lear and Lurie, it is the ‘great confusion’ Cordelia and Lucy articulate and embody that make us admit and challenge that collusion simultaneously. Spivak calls this ‘counterfocalization’31; it is the beginning of feeling shame, the admittance of disgrace, the identification with the other; the beginning of the ethical moment for the reader that demands to be felt (how can it not?) beyond the paper covers of a book; the journal article published within the academy, to halt, even for a

31

Spivak. ‘Ethics’, p. 24.

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moment the organisation.

re-perpetration of

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political

Jane Smiley’s A Thousand Acres32 reverses the gaze completely to reclaim the powerlessness of Goneril and Regan I describe above. Smiley’s narrator is Virginia (Ginny), a self professed (rhyming) ‘ninny’ (ATA, p.343) who has not been able to ‘see better’ (1.1.159) while the personal, state-level and by extension, national and global patriarchal greed that dictates farming practices has poisoned the ground water of the land she lives on. This poison afflicts the female population with the shaming, devaluing diseases of breast cancer and infertility. Ginny has to come to terms with her own metaphorical blindness, which allowed her and her sister Rose (Regan) to be sexually abused by their father Larry (Lear). This blindness and obedience also kept both sisters in domestic servitude to their social world beginning with their father and their husbands until the crisis point of Caroline’s (Cordelia) disobedience precipitates the end of the world Ginny grew up in. In contrast to Lurie, written by Coetzee in the close third-person and relentlessly in the present tense, Ginny’s self reflexive focalisation is first person and in the past tense: she tells an unstable remembered narrative of her younger self. Nevertheless the power of Smiley’s decision can be summed up in this quotation from Adrienne Rich: Revision, the act of looking back, of seeing with fresh eyes, or entering an old text from a new critical direction, is for women […] an act of survival. Until we can understand the assumptions in which we are drenched, we cannot know ourselves.33

Smiley operates on King Lear and its standard (masculine heroic) readings with this understanding. Her perspective is an ethical one, not least because her writing was motivated by ‘feminism, environmentalism and a vaguely Marxist materialism’34, but also because her task for Ginny is not only to know herself, it is to fully know the ‘other’ – in this case her 32

Jane Smiley, A Thousand Acres, (London: Harper Perennial, 2008) All further references to this edition, noted in the text as (ATA, p.) 33 Adrienne Rich, ‘When we dead awaken: writing as re-vision,’ in College English, No.34, Vol. 1, Women, Writing and Teaching, (October, 1972), pp. 18-30 (p. 18). 34 Jane Smiley, quoted in Marianne Novy, ‘Shakespeare in Iceland’ in Transforming Shakespeare: Contemporary Women’s Re-Visions in Literature and Performance ed. by Marianne Novy, (Basingstoke: Macmillan Press, 1999) p. 146.

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abuser, and recognise that other in herself. She comes to this knowledge in her attempt to kill her sister Rose/ Regan by preparing a canning jar full of poisoned meat – an attempt that fails by chance. This desire to kill she calls her ‘gleaming obsidian shard’ (ATA, p. 371) – realising as she does so that it is inherited from her father. She materialises Cordelia’s ‘nothing’ here – and her voice takes on the Fool’s strange prophetic perspective as she realises the ability that the object of the canning jar represents and confers: Of remembering what you can’t imagine. […] but now I can imagine what he probably never chose to remember – the goad of an unthinkable urge, pricking him, pressing him, wrapping him in an impenetrable fog of self that must have seemed, when he wandered around the house late at night after working and drinking, like the very darkness. (ATA, p. 372)

From a dislocated present we cannot comprehend, she recalls a past that we have lived through via her memories. She projects a future in which her hard won knowledge must be safeguarded ‘above all others’. (ATA, p. 372). Are readers to understand that narrator-Ginny is revengeful, bitter and still locked in that same darkness? By the end of the novel, the feudal organisation of the farmland has dissolved into a mercantile capitalism so complete it even has an ironically self-referential name: ‘The Heartland Corporation’ (ATA p. 368). Ginny, like Lucy remains a point of resistance however: she has, from nothing, built a new family of herself and her two nieces; and a life in which she chooses not to collude, as she did before, blindly in the hierarchies of paternalistic capitalism. Like Lucy in Disgrace, Ginny makes visible the so-called ‘rational kernel of the institution of marriage – rape, social security, property, human continuity.’35 In a patriarchal world that continues around her, her ‘family’ is all women; her ‘children’ are not born of her own womb. Three women end the novel as three sisters began it – only this time the figure at their centre is awake, alive: able to see with a full understanding of the disgrace she has lived and is living in, the potential for violence she has been shaped by and in thrall to. So must the knowledge be safeguarded. In as much as A Thousand Acres is a ‘Great American novel’ it can be considered to be a postcolonial critique in two ways – first as above in its evocation of Shakespeare as the ‘centre’ of the Western patriarchal literary canon – highlighting a failure of epistemology to admit women and others; 35

Spivak, ‘Ethics’, p. 23.

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and second in its intertextual use of Meridel Le Sueur’s The Ancient People and the Newly Come. Quoted as epigraph, Le Sueur’s text provides the focalising on what is to come by invoking a past of the same, as Sinead McDermott suggests: This reference, along with further textual references to the pioneers and to the destruction of the prairies, means that the narrative also functions obliquely as a critique of the histories of settlement and of the removal of peoples on which the United States was formed.36

In its writing, A Thousand Acres builds its gendered, postcolonial critique to offer a tentative vision of a different future; one that belongs for its implementation in the hands of the reader holding the book. But can such texts, objects of financial transaction in themselves, and within which women’s bodies are the land – the sites of conflict and resistance – translate to actual political change? Spivak understands Tagore’s warning refrain, (‘my unfortunate country, you will have to be equal in disgrace to each and everyone of those whom you have disgraced millennially’) to be a failure of democracy; in which equality is a separate but related category to freedom. Equality and disgrace in this understanding belongs to the disenfranchised poor: those who are kept from accessing power by endemic and historic discrimination; for women of course this is intersectional on grounds of race and gender (for Tagore and in India, caste would also be an issue). As a white South African woman, the land-owning daughter of a University Professor, Lucy does not fit the category of powerlessness in terms of race – but in terms of her gender, she does. For Lucy – timing matters also – this is a country on the cusp of regime change; as in King Lear, an old order is giving way to a new that has been shaped by it for good and bad. Meanwhile Ginny, in her context as Iowan farming daughter and wife embodies both woman and slave. The contradiction between their disenfranchisement and the women’s factual economic and relative social status – their access to money, to land within the framework of power which also binds them, reminds us that the power to become autonomous also resides in such bodies: that the most difficult of conditions can actually generate choices outside what would be expected as an appropriate happy ending. 36

Sinead McDermott, ‘Memory, Nostalgia, Gender in A Thousand Acres’ Signs, Vol. 28, No.1, Gender and Cultural Memory (Autumn, 2002) pp. 389-407, (p. 394).

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The English playwright Edward Bond makes this point sharply – for him Shakespeare’s hinted at new world does not go far enough. In his Lear, hope and despair are signified by a uniting/dividing wall – a direct comment on the terrible division of Germany by the Berlin Wall; the metaphorical severing of the globe effected by the Iron Curtain, both of which events were lived experience for Bond. An evacuee child of the working class, a soldier turned writer, his play seems to evidence absurdity but has a powerful social message at its heart. The play’s ending, in which Lear dies attempting to destroy the wall he insisted be built, is meant to be a ‘positive gesture to those who are learning to live.’37 Bond’s work is designed to shame the audience into action by highlighting the absurdity of ‘power’ as per the Fool; in its highly stylised approach it builds on an epic vision that asks more from its audience than clapping and going home to bed. The author is the Fool here.

Fiction as task: Bhaktin Since Bond wrote Lear, since Smiley, since Coetzee’s Disgrace, changes towards political equality and more ethical cultural attitudes pertaining to the economic and sexual equality (as just two examples) of others have been slow in coming in the UK, where I write from; and in India, the locus of my research. The shame of this deep-set inequality, the disgrace of it in India is vividly realised by Spivak when she writes in the second part of her essay about the failure of democracy in terms of the ‘class apartheid’38 evident in the Indian education system: If the largest sector of the electorate misses out on early education, democracy cannot function, for then it allows the worst of the upper sectors to flourish. Democracy sinks to that level; we are all equal in disgrace.39

Of course Spivak is right to draw attention to the ‘inconvenient effort’ of recognising this in literature we buy or borrow, from which we have an expectation of being changed emotionally, but perhaps not in terms of ethics. Smiley certainly recognised this also in her choosing of Ginny over the arguably more loathsome Rose as narrator, and making her an 37

Edward Bond, quoted in Thomas Cartelli, ‘Shakespeare in Pain: Edward Bond’s Lear and the Ghosts of History’, in Shakespeare Survey 55: King Lear and its Afterlife, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), p. 161. 38 Spivak, ‘Ethics’, p.25. 39 Ibid.

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‘appealing witness...cautious, ambivalent, straightforward’40 in order not to alienate her readership completely. Notwithstanding this, conditions in the world predicate that the attempt must continue to be made by fiction writers. Before I illustrate this with an example from my own practice-based research, I want to take up two further interwoven threads picked from the idea of the ‘dialogic’ nature of fiction, expressed by Mikhail Bakhtin.41 For Bakhtin the novel marks a vital stage in the history of consciousness because in its form, ‘it manifests the self’s discovery of the other.’42 It is ‘de-normatising’43 via its ability to render a dominant language, (focalized perhaps through a close, single point of view,) as just one among many. ‘In the world of the dialogic novel, there is no overriding authorial voice, and hence no central claim to truth since each word is inflected by the countervoice of its addressee.’44 This has two impacts – the first is that the novel becomes an interrogation into the web of the social, and secondly it becomes a critique of the writer’s place within society as authoritative – as ‘the subject supposed to know.’45 Doubt enters in – and into this dislocation comes the opportunity for writing and for realizing disgrace. Taken this way, according to Coetzee: I would say that what you call the literary life, or any other way of life that provides a means for interrogation of our existence – in the case of the writer of fantasy, symbolization, storytelling – seems to me a good life. Good in the sense of being ethically responsible.46

As Carrol Clarkson notes, Coetzee raises Bakhtin’s investigation into the dialogic nature of novels to a level upon which the choices on aesthetics and intertextuality made by a writer are necessarily ethical ones. ‘If the emphasis in Bakhtin is on linguistic and novelistic strategies,’ she writes, ‘Coetzee reintroduces a question of authorial consciousness in terms that raise ‘dialogism’ to a question of ethics […] and in terms that 40

Novy, p.172. Mikhail Bakhtin, The Diaologic Imagination, four essays, ed. by Michael Holquist, (USA: University of Texas Press, 1981). 42 Michael Holquist, Bakhtin and his world, (London: Routledge, 1990). 43 Bakhtin, p. 425. 44 Carrol Clarkson, ‘Coetzee’s Criticism’ in Tim Mehigan, ed. A Companion to the Works of J.M Coetzee, (New York: Camden House, 2011), p. 228. 45 Ibid., p.226. 46 “An Exclusive Interview with J.M Coetzee,” quoted in Mehigan (ed.) Companion, p. 226. 41

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demand a consideration of the relation of the writer to his writing.’47 Intertextuality is fundamental to this: Coetzee’s novels and critical works are each deeply so, and not only with Shakespeare: they ‘are full of other people’s words.’48 He writes, ‘In the process of responding to the writers one intuitively chooses to respond to, one makes oneself into the person whom in the most intractable, but also perhaps the most deeply ethical sense one wants to be.’49 Appropriative fiction is motivated by the same sense of the ethical for the writer: the need to interrogate the other in the self – only then the possibility of the emergence of the ethical in the critically-aware reader can arise. The first thread leads to the second – that fiction which is intertextual, or appropriated is an attempt in itself to express and embody disgrace; it acts as a resistance to the idea of the fatalistically repetitive history it seems to inscribe. Coetzee understands this when he writes: (Let me add, entirely parenthetically, that I, as a person am overwhelmed, that my thinking is thrown into confusion and helplessness, by the fact of human suffering in the world, and not only human suffering. These fictional constructions of mine are paltry, ludicrous defences against that being overwhelmed, and to me, transparently so.)50

Lived research undertaken in India proves to illustrate the idea and what follows is necessarily anecdotal. However, I hope it serves to make the shift towards recognising that a practice-based approach has validity in the ethics of discontinuity I have sought to articulate in this chapter. I here adopt a more journalistic style – fitting where ‘journalist’ evokes a sense of both recording and journeying.

An account of practice-based research In early spring 2012, on a research trip to Delhi, I was commissioned by a national Indian news magazine to cover a case in which an 11 yearold girl from an economically deprived background had died on Christmas Eve 2011, apparently of untreated vomiting and dehydration, in a well 47

Clarkson, in Mehigan, (ed.) Companion, p. 228. Ibid. 49 J.M Coetzee, ‘Homage,’ The Threepenny Review, (Spring 1993). 50 J.M Coetzee, Doubling the Point, Essays and Interviews (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1992) p. 248. 48

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known orphanage in the old part of the city. Arya Anathalaya has been owned and run by the same widely known and respected family for over 100 years. Children in the orphanage reportedly got to wear decent clothes, ate good food and had a clean environment in which to live. But allegations of abuse were rife, going back as far as 2009. The 11 year-old girl’s postmortem report said that her body revealed ‘repeated vaginal and anal sexual abuse.’ I went to see Pooja, the girl’s mother. She lived on the outskirts of the city more than 40km from the centre, in a group of slum tower blocks where many who had lived inside New Delhi were moved to ‘clean up’ for the 2010 commonwealth games.51 Here were children whose game was to kill flies with their broken flip-flops, who wandered around among piles of garbage, naked from the waist down while the local drunk serenaded the sunset. Pooja was a sweeper in the lower-middleclass tower blocks, further back in towards the city centre. She had four children, and could not look after them while she worked – hence the recourse to the orphanage, a place where she thought her daughters would be safe. “She was the smartest in the family,” Pooja said. “She used to love the smaller children and play with them, or she would sit and read a book.”52 “We still have the letters she wrote us, they are the writings of a much older girl,” said her grandmother. Both women remember that the little girl didn’t like living in the orphanage and repeatedly asked to come home. “I didn’t listen, I thought children are just like that,” Pooja said. I spent time interviewing social workers who expressed both outrage that there had been scant legal or media coverage of the tragedy and surprise that I was even investigating it. Their feeling was that the nexus of power around the orphanage funded largely by donations from the city’s well off families acted to silence any criticisms. During my research I heard stories of child trafficking, kidnapping and abuse; of NGOs set up as fronts to facilitate such crimes, of others working to protect children in the face of local resistance. I learned about an overstretched and underaccountable system staffed by those with little training, and which had no background-check procedure for previous abuses against children. At the 51

For more, see ‘Slum dispute over commonwealth games’ by John Sudworth, BBC News Online, 21 October, 2006, http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/south_asia/5325034.stm [accessed 10 August 2014]. 52 Interview with the author, New Delhi, March 2012.

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heart of the problem however, was an attitude that, according to many activists is typical of philanthropy among the well off classes; that children in care should be grateful to receive a hot meal, clean clothes, a space to sleep, because it is more than they would get on the streets or in their makeshift homes. Donors didn’t seem to notice. ‘People give for themselves, to remember a dead relative, or mark an occasion,’ said one child protection officer told me. ‘They don’t look beyond their own need to feel good. But would you want your own child to live in such conditions?’53 I recall Tagore’s words and repeat Spivak’s translation again: ‘Oh my unfortunate country, you will have to be equal in disgrace to each and every one of those you have disgraced millennially.’ I took the social worker’s question away with me, wrote up my findings and filed the piece with photographs of the slum, of Pooja the girl’s mother, her picture of her children and the protests organised in central New Delhi’s Jantar Mantar. It was never published – the orphanage remains open and only in 2014 was finally brought under the accountability of India’s Juvenile Justice Act.54 Meanwhile, the conditions in which millions of women and girls live in India remains one of subjugation and silencing. Wendy Doniger describes ‘others’ in India as ‘people who, from the standpoint of most high-caste Hindu males, are alternative […] of other religions or cultures, or castes, […] or gender (women.)’55 Following a lawsuit that charged the book with denigrating Hinduism, the book was recalled from sale in India and stores of it ordered to be pulped.56 I mention the controversy in the context of what appropriating Shakespeare as a warning to postcolonial ambitions might be up against – a strong nationalistic mentality itself built partly on an Imperialist model of hierarchical power. Debates about socio-economic and gender equality acted to criticise the promotion of the ‘India Shining’ image, which was 53

Interview with the author, New Delhi, March 2012. ‘Arya Anathalya to come under India’s Juvenile Justice Act’, Akanksha Jain, Hindu, 10 March 2014, http://www.thehindu.com/news/cities/Delhi/aryaanathalaya-to-come-under-juvenile-justice-act/article5769393.ece [accessed 18 December 2015-12-18]. 55 Wendy Doniger, The Hindus, an alternative history, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), p.1. 56 For more on this see for example, ‘Wendy Doniger’s book is a tribute to Hinduism’s complexity, not an insult’ Vijay Prasad, Guardian, 12 February, 2014, http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/feb/12/wendy-doniger-bookhinduism-penguin-hindus [accessed 10 August 2014]. 54

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promulgated nationally and internationally by the right-wing incumbent election campaign in 2004. Though this campaign was widely critiqued, my experience in the capital city, New Delhi showed that it connected with an attitude of chauvinistic and individualistic nationalism among the middle class, whether from well off families or from the growing section whose opportunities for wealth creation stemmed from economic liberalisation in the 1990s and has little care for the lives of the less privileged except as newspaper fodder.

Conclusion: fiction and the possibility of the ethical The rewriting of Shakespeare’s works because of their significance in the coloniser’s arsenal might seem to belong more to the practice of the first generations of Indian writers in English, who reference them as part of an ‘Empire writes back’57 teleology. But Cartelli notes that literary works produced after 1947 take as their subject matter not only the depredations of colonialism […] but also the succeeding deprivations of indigenous power elites.’ 58 He states that, ‘this is not only predictable but inevitable,’59 because the ‘postcolonial’ cannot only be demarcated chronologically. However as I have argued here, it is not enough to simply put Shakespeare to work as a critique without acknowledging what that critique, and the potential of intertextual fiction might ask of writers and readers going forward. More interesting is a concentration on the play’s language, themes and poetics as intertextual modes to critique the shaping of group identity. Further, to explore the workings of shame and the disgrace made evident in post-independence inequality that arise from hybridity – in this case a mixing of Western and various Indian cultures, literatures, languages – towards a possible future that acknowledges and embraces that both/and nature in a way that challenges perceptions of fixed identity and social roles. 57

As well as being a phrase coined by Salman Rushdie in his 1982 newspaper article, ‘The Empire Writes Back with a Vengeance’ the phrase also forms the title of a much referenced book of postcolonial literary criticism, The Empire Writes Back, by Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths and Helen Tiffin, (London: Routledge, 2002). For an example of my point, see Rohinton Mistry, Such a Long Journey (London: Faber and Faber, 1991) or Family Matters (London: Faber and Faber, 2002). 58 Cartelli, National Formations, p. 5. 59 Ibid.

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This is what Spivak names ‘fiction as task’. It goes beyond an acknowledgement of what Cartelli rather ungenerously calls, ‘the failure’ of postcolonial nations ‘to break decisively with the language, institutions, influence and control of the imperial centre.’60 He suggests: Post (-) coloniality is the liminal space between freedom and subjection, independence and dependence, that is demarcated in the dash between prefix and noun. It is within this space that a continuing engagement with colonialism takes place as the postcolony attempts to negotiate a sense of national and cultural self definition that may, as it were postdate the colonial connection and situate it in a past from which the former colony has now presumably emerged.61 (Emphasis Cartelli’s own).

I want to ask – is this really the only way in which intertextual (appropriative) fiction can work? If we understand the ethical standpoint the Fool offers we can take a reading of the play as imagining a possible future. We can understand the play’s characters to be striving towards that, even though they might fail. They leave the task to us. In doing perhaps the possibility of going beyond railing against the colonised past and offering the vision of a ‘decolonised’ future Cartelli and others condemn us to: one which risks falling into the category of sameness. In other words, is ‘national and cultural self-definition’ (with its implications of a state endorsed identity) all there is as alternative? Does the nation state rule the roost here – necessarily patriarchal, enthral to global capitalism, undeniably still defined against, not with its internal and external others? Can reading Shakespeare’s play as existentialist or as highlighting the absurdity of the human condition (as per Jan Kott), or as endorsing the ‘critically established heroic individualist, and paternalist bias of Shakespearean drama,’62 be considered any more than a cultural product, only momentarily cathartic for the individual? Can readers be satisfied with this, given the uneasy ambivalence with which Edgar (as per the Folio text) who usurps the Fool at Lear’s side to become the most enigmatic character in the play, ends King Lear? As he says, The weight of this sad time we must obey Speak what we feel, not what we ought to say The oldest hath borne most; we that are young Shall never see so much nor live so long.’ (5.3.321-5)

60

Ibid. Ibid. 62 Cartelli, p. 2. 61

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These words are a warning to ‘postcolonial ambitions’63 because they take their cue from Cordelia; and from the idea that one can learn to ‘see it feelingly’ (4.6.145) they follow the Fool’s sentiment expressed in the speech above; to envision a felt sense of a possible, more equal future. They also undermine and warn against the dangerous desire to claim power that is achieved or ‘thrust upon’64 us in the process of decolonisation. Considered this way the intertextual appropriation of Shakespeare becomes an ethical endeavour, prompted by the desire to advocate towards a potential society imagined into being in the play itself. Having experienced the reality and silencing of life for India’s most disenfranchised, might fiction provide a more persuasive forum for speech? Of course writers must consider the ethics of representation. Coetzee writes from a position so close to, but not actually one that is David Lurie’s. He does not write from Petrus’. Smiley sits rather closer to Ginny, she speaks in the first person, however her retrospective gaze does not represent others, and unashamedly works to come to terms with her own culpability in her gendered history. It seems that relatively, the absolutely kingly socio-economic reality of writers in contrast to those who have little or no access to basic human rights demands that the attempt to fictionalise be made. Appropriation of Shakespeare, as I have shown is one ethical means to this – the aesthetics of King Lear do not directly represent socio-economic ‘others’ (i.e., the play does not speak via them). Instead through Edgar, spilt and struggling between his identity as his father’s son, as Lear’s Godson, and his embraced persona as Poor Tom, (a persona he is singularly reluctant to shed) it shows us what it means to understand that the other is, in Lévinas’ phrase ‘the one next to me.’ Alive to this, appropriating King Lear as a contemporary Indian novel offers a way of thinking about gender and socio-economic issues in conversation with other appropriations and intertextual works; one that displaces, dislocates and ultimately provokes the response Spivak identifies as the potential of intertextuality. Such a project depends on the ability to read in a certain way, but before this, for a certain kind of teaching to be made available which is the real point of Spivak’s Ethics essay. Those she advocates for are deeply prohibited by structural

63

Spivak, ‘Ethics’. William Shakespeare, Twelfth Night, (2.5.133), ed. by Keir Elam (London: Bloomsbury Arden Third Edition, 2009). 64

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discrimination from accessing such pedagogy on any more than an ad hoc basis. However, arguably it is middle class consumers of culture – readers and theatergoers – for whom a dislodging and dislocating from the relative safety of individualism are most important. As I have shown, the ways in which King Lear asks writers and readers to work to recognize the other, and in ourselves, means that we are not exempt from carrying such work into our dealings with others in our own lives. For postcolonial writers, therefore, the question need not be one of ‘writing back,’ or of articulating an identity that foregrounds and assert its nationalist or indigenous credentials. The task of such writing is not to displace or match the Shakespearean text with words by Tagore or equally canonical Indian writings.65 Instead, appropriating King Lear into a contemporary Indian novel not only makes clear the ways in which the play was used as a shaping influence on the speech of others. It also explores how that speech has become mixed over time with various influences: the accents of global capitalism expressed through international entertainment media, the attempt to maintain a nationalism via promotion of one particular language above others, the divisions of class and caste that predicate which languages are spoken and learned at various levels of society. In doing so it expresses a hybridity that engages and critiques various centres, not just one – to see feelingly towards a possible future free of such pre-ordained alternatives. Cartelli notes, ‘a decommissioned Shakespeare, freed from his service to Imperial interests and from the service of such countertextual applications such service inspires could, presumably be remobilised to address ancillary concerns about social or sexual redefinition.’66 I somewhat agree; even if the presence of Shakespeare’s plays in any postcolonial text will always signify Imperial interests to some extent – as they should. Instead, a Shakespeare decommissioned from any kind of nationalistic interests (in as much as the play itself critiques the idea of ‘nation’ and ‘kingship’ – a discussion beyond my remit here), is free to speak in its many voices to the ‘otherness’ of the human condition. Understanding the ethical position contained within the play is therefore to use it as separate from and as signifier of its colonial and 65 66

See for example the film Life Goes On dir. Sangeetha Datta, (2011). Cartelli, p. 169.

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postcolonial history. In doing so, to express a hybrid identity of both self and other. In this way do writers make work that dislocates itself into the realm of the every day struggle – and this brings me to the end of Spivak’s essay also. Such writing and such reading might in turn produce an actual Cordelia (in my sense of the character,) or a Lucy or a Ginny who can make attempts towards a more ethical future, free of inequalities being perpetrated across time, across generations, gender, class and caste – before the ‘promised end,’ (5.3.279) whatever that may be – is reached.

CHAPTER FIVE SHAKESPEARE MAS: PERFORMANCE AND RECONTEXTUALISATION OF JULIUS CAESAR ON THE CARIBBEAN CARNIVAL STAGE GISELLE RAMPAUL

How many ages hence Shall this our lofty scene be acted over In states unborn and accents yet unknown. Julius Caesar 3.1.121-23

Every year, at Carnival time in Carriacou, a group of people, traditionally men, don special costumes, recite passages from Julius Caesar and beat each other with whips in a verbal and physical duel. This demonstration of intellect, mental poise and physical strength takes place at the crossroads of villages, and culminates in a final battle in the market square of the main town of Hillsborough. This is the essence of Shakespeare Mas, a little-known ritual practice that only occurs in this tiny Caribbean island off the coast of Grenada. Terrence Hawkes has drawn attention to the ways in which meaning in Shakespeare is produced by the historical or cultural context in which a play is performed or revisioned. He argues that ‘Shakespeare doesn’t mean: we mean by Shakespeare.’ This chapter examines what Carriacouans mean by Shakespeare in their Carnival ritual performance of Shakespeare Mas. An analysis of the history, the content as well as the delivery of the Shakespearean speeches in this festival reveals a unique appropriation of Shakespeare that calls into question what it means to perform Shakespeare, and examines the extent to which recontextualisation of Julius Caesar on this Carnival cultural stage transforms Shakespeare. In the past decade and a half, there has been some academic interest in Carriacou’s Shakespeare Mas. In the nineties, Joan F. McMurray and Joan

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M. Fayer of the University of Puerto Rico made several trips to Carriacou, observing and conducting interviews about the festival. This resulted in two academic essays: “The Carriacou Mas’ as Syncretic Artifact” by both authors, published in The Journal of American Folklore (1999), that contextualises the festival in relation to other African Caribbean Carnival traditions of verbal duelling; and “The Carriacou Shakespeare Mas’: Linguistic Creativity in a Creole Community” by Joan M. Fayer, appearing in Contact Englishes of the Eastern Caribbean (2003), that focuses on the linguistic prowess of the Mas men. Antonio Benitez-Rojo has also written about the Carriacou festival in The Repeating Island (1996). Craig Dionne’s book chapter, “Commonplace Literacy and the Colonial Scene: The Case of Carriacou's Shakespeare Mas”, published in Native Shakespeares: Indigenous Appropriations on a Global Stage (2008), discusses the ways in which the out-of-context passages quoted by the players can be read in relation to commonplace literacy and educational techniques not only in the Caribbean, but also in England. And Rob Leyshon has published a short fictional account of the festival, “Shakespeare Mas’” in Caribbean Dispatches: Beyond the Tourist Dream (2006). Despite these publications, still very few people are aware of the festival. It is advertised in travel guide books on Grenada and Carriacou as a tourist activity, but this is often accompanied by a short description only. This chapter on Shakespeare Mas contributes to contemporary discussions about global Shakespeares by examining the cultural currents between Britain and the Caribbean that intersect and manifest on the Carnival stage.

‘This our lofty scene’: A description of Shakespeare Mas Only seven and a half miles long and three and a half miles wide, Carriacou is the largest of the Grenadine islands in the Lesser Antilles that lie in the southern region of the Caribbean archipelago. Named after the Amerindian word, Kayryouacou, meaning ‘land of reefs’, the island was first colonised by the French in the seventeenth century, but went back and forth between the French and the British from 1650 to 1762. Finally, Carriacou, captured by the British in the Seven Years War, was ceded with Grenada by the Treaty of Paris in 1763. It remained a British colony until 1974 when Grenada and its other dependency, Petite Martinique, gained independence. In the mid seventeenth century, Africans were brought to the islands as slaves to work on the plantations. Today, French, British and African influences are apparent in Carriacouan cultural festivities, including Shakespeare Mas.

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On Carnival Tuesday morning, each participant dresses in the traditional costume of Shakespeare Mas. The main part of this motley coloured costume is a handmade loose-fitting long-sleeved shirt (sometimes white, sometimes with ‘bright floral print’) with elasticated cuffs or ‘fastened at the wrist’, with strips of different coloured cloth cut on one side in a deep zig-zag to make a triangular pattern onto which tiny bells (referred to as shakers or wooloh) are sometimes sewn. These bands of cloth (referred to as damouco) are then sewn onto the shirt in overlays. A black heart, made of cloth (or more expensive material such as velvet in the past) and adorned with small round mirrors (often referred to simply as glass), lace and other decorative touches such as tinsel or ribbons, is sewn onto the centre of the shirt. Under the shirt, the players wear a white cotton petticoat, sometimes embroidered, trimmed with lace or eyelet threaded with ribbon. If worn, their trousers are tucked into their boots or socks; otherwise, long socks are worn with gym shoes or boots. On their heads, tied under the chin or at the back of the neck, is a padded and protective headpiece, a cotta or kata ‘made from cloth or grass’, to which the crown is attached. The kata supports the crown and allows it to sit high on the head. The crown, which really resembles a cape, is made of two yards of colourful floral patterned cloth stuck with cassava starch onto cement bags and extends down the back to protect the wearer from inevitable blows. The screen mask, tied round the back of the head and edged with a strip of cloth, conceals the identity of the wearer while allowing him to see quite easily. Often the features of a face are painted on the mask which is usually white or pink. The final item is the whip, made of thick, pliable electrical wire wrapped with electrical tape or sticky tape and cloth. According to Vibert Douglas, a veteran who started playing in 1961, the whip was cut from a tamarind tree in his time. This was followed by the bull pistle, referred to as the bull, a whip made from the skin of a bull’s penis that was stretched and dried, and that is notorious in the Caribbean for delivering particularly painful lashes. Cosnel McIntosh, one of the curators of the Historical Museum of Carriacou and another veteran who started playing in the 1950s, argues that the instrument of punishment was not originally a whip; it was a big stick that was pliable enough to ensure a blow did not miss, but it was, in fact, symbolic of a sword and was a remnant of British mummer’s plays that were enacted throughout the Caribbean during the colonial era. Shakespeare Mas is, in fact, a competition--a duel of words (and blows). In each participating village, a First King, a Second King, a Peacemaker and a Backer are chosen according to their eloquence and ability to recite speeches from Shakespeare, mainly Julius Caesar. These

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titles were sometimes bestowed before the festival during rehearsals but, most times, during the festival itself, and imitated the ‘hierarchical structure [...] in the British courts or military’. All the titles were bestowed by the Backer, an older and experienced player, based on the ability to speak well, to deliver their well-memorised speeches appropriately and to use and dodge the whip skilfully. ‘The Backers were the big strong men who walked at the front directing the masmen and keeping the crowd at a distance. They were also present on evenings together with other spectators assessing the practice sessions.’ The Backer’s support was of paramount importance. The Peacemaker is the player who knows the most speeches and ‘the “unwritten” rules of performance’ and who would intervene in a combat if it became too violent. He would break up the fight and diffuse the situation by quoting appropriately from his repertoire. The other untitled masqueraders who made up the village group are simply referred to as Pierrots, the generic name for this masquerade. A crowd of spectators gathers in a ring in the space provided at the crossroads in the village. The players enter the space to the ringing of a bell, breaking through the crowd – sometimes leaping and violently whacking their crowns to show their might and seriousness of purpose-and the challenge begins. Most players, nowadays, recite passages from Julius Caesar, which has always been popular; but there was a wider range of speeches from other plays and other sources in the past. While one player quotes a passage, he lunges towards his opponent, brandishing his whip, gesticulating and stomping to the rhythm of the speech. It is a display of braggadocio; the object is to ‘give your opponent a hurtful speech--that is where the excitement in the thing is’. The second player listens and confirms his accuracy throughout the speech by shouting ‘Brave!’, sometimes also whacking his own crown with his whip. The audience, sometimes familiar with the speeches through experiencing the festival over the years, cheer on the players, shouting ‘Brave, boy!’ or ‘Speech!’. Some are even able to confirm the speaker’s accuracy or point out flaws in the recitation. If the quoting player makes any errors-forgetting, misquoting or poorly delivering lines--the listening player might say, ‘Break for your crown!’ or ‘Cover!’, warning that he is about to strike a blow. The offending player is then whipped over the back which sometimes results in a skirmish. Depending on the gravity of the offence, the relationship between the players and their levels of inebriation, the altercation can become quite violent. For those few minutes, the players lose themselves in the scrimmage to the crowd's cheers of ‘Bull! Bull!’; but, very quickly, the Peacemaker parts them and they share a friendly embrace when the situation has been diffused.

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‘Accents yet unknown’: What Carriacouans mean by Shakespeare Colonial education and the making of the Mas Shakespeare Mas actually evolved from an older festival called ‘Old English History and Shakespeare Mas’ in which Pierrots would recite historical speeches and passages from The Royal Readers that were disseminated throughout the colonies after emancipation. The procedure of the Old English History and Shakespeare Mas ritual which involved one village group of players invading another, engaging in a battle of words and whips, with one group being declared the victor and inheriting the defeated village’s supporters as it moved on to another village, can be seen as a metaphor for the conquering and colonisation of countries featured in the preferred passages. The passages, that easily took the form of challenge and reply and that thematically dealt with military might and power and the vanquishing of weaker opponents, reflect this movement of the villages from both the north and south sides of the island who would ultimately clash in a battle between two sizeable groups (the Heroes and the Bandroys respectively) in Hillsborough. It was not till later—perhaps in the second half of the twentieth century—that Julius Caesar became the popular source of passages for the festival. But how did Carriacouans become familiar with these passages in the first place? After emancipation in 1834, the British took a great interest in ‘civilising’ the colonised people of the West Indies through formal education. Carl C. Campbell writes: ‘The main impulse to develop such a programme came from England, from the swell of British philanthropy, Protestant missionary zeal, and from a conscience-aroused British government. Between 1835 and 1845 an annual subsidy of £30,000, reduced gradually after 1841, was made available to build schoolhouses and to pay teachers’ salaries in the British Caribbean.’ Helen Tiffin regards The Royal Readers that circulated in the colonies as ‘[o]ne of the most influential teaching texts throughout the Caribbean’ because ‘their role in education generally and in literary education in particular, was an especially potent one.’ This series of Readers--each aimed at a different educational level--was responsible for cultivating British values and literary tastes in the colonised peoples. Accordingly, they were littered with poems by canonical writers, and historical passages about British and European battles and victories.

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The Royal Readers also contributed to the establishment of Shakespeare as a literary icon and might have paved the way for the specialised Shakespeare Mas that came later. As early as The Royal Reader 3, there was a story introducing Shakespeare through the reading passage, ‘The Prince and the Judge’, that tells the story of Prince Hal’s misadventures in Henry IV. Royal Reader 5 included a section on ‘Choice Quotations’ from various canonical poets including Tennyson, Byron, Milton, Burns, Scott. Of the thirty-three quotations included, Shakespeare was cited the most times with twelve references. The fact that so many choice quotations came from one writer contributed to the construction of Shakespeare as literary genius. Moreover, William Shakespeare is listed in the following lesson entitled, ‘Lives of Great Men.’ The Royal Reader 6, the final book in the series, featured ‘The Speech of Henry V at The Siege of Harfleur’; ‘The Seven Ages of Man’ (‘All the world’s a stage’ speech from As You Like It); and an abridged version of King John. Both the Harfleur and the As You Like It speeches have been identified as other Shakespeare passages previously popular (and sometimes still used) in the Mas. It is possible that The Royal Reader was the source of these. Fayer and McMurray also argue that ‘[t]wo different editions in the series contained condensed versions of [...] Julius Caesar with a selection of passages in the original language, vocabulary lists, topics for discussion, and sample questions.’ As Dionne points out, colonial education took the form of ‘commonplace literacy’ that involved the decontextualisation of reading passages that contributed to the tendency to regard The Royal Readers as the ‘original’ source for Shakespeare. It is unclear why Julius Caesar, in particular, became so popular; but one player reports that he was required to read the play for his GCE (General Certificate of Education) Examinations in the early 1970s. As Fayer and McMurray contend, ‘if the play was studied and selections memorized by schoolchildren, it would have logically found its way into the speech mas’.’ Indeed, the educational curriculum in the colonies remained heavily dominated by British texts, especially Shakespeare, from early on and into the twenty-first century. The Royal Readers eventually fell into disuse in the colonies as they were subsequently replaced by other readers, but Shakespeare remained (and still remains) a component of the CXC (Caribbean Examinations Council) syllabus, established in 1972 as a local replacement for that of the GCE. Fayer suggests that the iambic pentameter of Shakespeare’s speeches may have aided players in memorizing long speeches. Indeed, some masqueraders have had little formal education but they can recite several long passages which they might have learnt by listening to other Mas men. Commenting on

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Trinidadian Pierrots (who seem to be direct descendants of the Carriacou Pierrots) who were popular in the nineteenth century, Errol Hill writes: ‘Since the Pierrots were familiar with literary masterpieces which they quoted freely in confronting an adversary, we are safe in assuming that these masqueraders were presented by educated members of the population.’ Hill assumes that knowledge of the ‘masterpieces’ went hand in hand with education. Shakespeare Mas, however, shows that the situation can be more complex than that. Shakespeare might be a metonym for learning in Carriacou (as it continues to be in the rest of the Caribbean) and masqueraders revel in their ability to engage in these linguistically sophisticated verbal exchanges, but the ability to quote Shakespeare in Carriacou is not necessarily tied to literacy or highly levels of academic education. It has become, rather, part of an inherited cultural practice that is Carriacouan, not British, in nature. As mentioned earlier, the availability of the text of Julius Caesar might have contributed to the survival and specialisation of the festival. In fact, in his description of the festival, Vibert Douglas refers to it as ‘William Julius Caesar Shakespeare Mas’. Fayer suggests that ‘the political uncertainties, cycles, and philosophies developed by Shakespeare in Julius Caesar have relevant parallels in Carriacou’s history and therefore contribute to the use of this text for the mas’.’ Another reason for its popularity, suggested by Fayer and McMurray, is ‘because the historical date of the play is close to the birth of Christ’ making it ‘appropriate for the pre-Lenten carnival celebration.’ One might also wonder at the proximity of the Ides of March to the Lenten period. Douglas suggests some similarity between Judas’s betrayal of Christ and Brutus’s of Caesar as a possible reason for the popularity of the play in this Carnival celebration. And, according to Benitez-Rojo, the content of the play ‘is more carnivalesque, in the sacrificial sense of the word, than those of other tragedies by Shakespeare.’ He argues that the whip lashes ‘correspond to the dagger-thrusts of Brutus & Co. directed at the falling Caesar.’ Shakespeare Mas thus ‘provides the rhetorical space in which to kill Caesar, the old ruler, the white master, the colonial power, colonial education, Shakespeare’. The mas, therefore, becomes a means of resistance and self-assertion of the Carriacouan people, of the descendants of slaves. All these attempts to answer the question ‘Why Julius Caesar?’ reflect the ways in which Carriacouans have made Shakespeare their own and possibly interpreted the play according to their own historical and cultural context.

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Performance and recontextualisation on the Carnival cultural stage The recitation of the speeches in Shakespeare Mas reflects an appropriation of the play unlike any other anywhere else in the world. Bill Ashcroft et al.’s definition of appropriation as ‘the process by which the language is taken and made to “bear the burden” of one’s own cultural experience’ is relevant to the transformation of Julius Caesar in the Carriacouan context. The speeches, in fact, do take on the ritualistic dimension associated with Carnival activities; take place within a participating community; and occur in the public sphere. As Hannah Scolnicov argues, ‘The problem of the transference of plays from culture to culture is seen not just as a question of translating the text, but of conveying its meaning and adapting it to its new cultural environment so as to create new meanings.’ More than that, the speeches of Shakespeare Mas are decontextualized and recontextualised and have little, if anything at all, to do with modern concepts of theatrical performance that involve story, acting and stage. Discussing performance, Erika Fischer-Lichte writes: For a performance to occur, it is necessary that actors and spectators assemble for a particular time span at a particular place and do something together. . . . Thus, the performance is not to be regarded as a representation or expression of something which already exists elsewhere – like the text of a play – but as something which is brought forth by the actions, perceptions, responses of both actors and spectators alike. The performance calls for a social community, since it is rooted in one, and, on the other hand, since in its course it brings forth a social community that unites actors and spectators.

Although it is thus natural to consider Shakespeare Mas recitations of Julius Caesar speeches performances, they are hardly consistent with ideas of performing Shakespeare. In Shakespeare Mas, the ‘Western paradigm of the proscenium and the so-called “dramatic text”’ are redefined. Issues associated with performing Shakespeare such as ‘natural acting’ and ‘performance normalization’ (themselves problematic) are, therefore, completely irrelevant. So, too, is the ‘crisis of recognition’ invoked in arguments about adaptation. According to Henri Schoenmakers, ‘A performance becomes a “sign” for something, though what that “something” is or could be is difficult to indicate in general terms.’ What is needed, then, are ‘new interpretative methodologies’ for examining how Shakespeare appears in o/Other places.

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Defining the West Indian as a man-of-words, Roger Abrahams draws attention to the penchant and proclivity for language in Caribbean folk culture. Quoting Shakespeare, held up as the ultimate literary genius and epitome of British cultural superiority, especially characterised the Pierrots in this way. The more Shakespearean passages a Pierrot knew and could flawlessly quote, the greater his intellect was taken to be. Indeed, quoting Shakespeare could move one up the hierarchy to becoming the King of the village even if only in the temporary Carnival world. However, Sophia S. Morgan argues that ‘rituals and literary narratives are reflexive: through them a society cuts off a piece of itself for inspection’ and that the ritual, ‘even when critical or subversive, mirrors structures and processes allegedly existing in the society’. Morgan calls this process ‘exo-reflexivity.’ Harish Trivedi also argues that it is ‘necessary to see literature, especially when implicated in cross-cultural transactions, not merely as literature but also as part of a larger reality and, particularly . . . , as part of colonial politics.’ Indeed, although some aspects of the Pierrot masquerade were originally parodic of the colonial masters’ dress and tastes, this does not diminish their conservatism in issues of language, literary tastes and academic education. Their enactment of colonisation in the conquering of villages, their insistence on accurate and exact repetitions of British canonical texts, and the violent punishment meted out for non-conformity to and lack of knowledge of these texts betray a political orthodoxy at the heart of this ritual of resistance—a reflection of Homi Bhabha’s concept of mimicry as ‘the sign of a double articulation’. At the same time, an examination of what Morgan calls the ‘endo- or self-reflexivity’ (which refers to what is reflected in the content or the telling of a narrative) of the Shakespeare Mas ritual shows the ways in which Carriacouans have transformed traditional or expected meaning in Shakespearean texts to produce a mode of expression that is distinctly Carriacouan and that has meaning only in their particular context. Although the point of the Pierrot masquerade was to show how English he was, the delivery of speeches actually characterizes the speakers, not in terms of their Englishness, but in terms of their Carriacouan identity. In fact, Bill Ashcroft writes: ‘The success with which post-colonial societies have transformed the English language, through literature and other cultural production, is one of the most striking outcomes of the three centuries of British colonial adventurism. But the extent of that transformation is rarely sufficiently acknowledged because it disturbs the stereotypical binary relationship between colonizers and colonized.’ Morgan’s endo-reflexivity is useful when considered in conjunction with Henry Louis Gates’s concept of signification, a trope usually associated

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with Afro-American modes of expression but equally applicable to Caribbean speech styles. An analysis of the content and the telling of the speeches identifies them as a type of signification, and reflects the ways in which Shakespeare Mas disrupt simple binary readings of cross-cultural appropriation and colonial ‘influence’. Moreover, the idea of ‘universality’, often touted as a defining characteristic of Shakespeare, is challenged and complicated. Gates explains that signification is ‘a trope that subsumes all other tropes’; it is often associated with pastiche ‘and, most crucially, it turns on repetition of formal structures, and their difference.’ Abrahams defines it as the ‘technique of indirect argument or persuasion’ or the ‘language of implication’. To signify is ‘to imply, goad, beg, boast, by indirect verbal or gestural means.’ The speeches in Shakespeare Mas, in fact, have little, if anything, to do with the plot of Julius Caesar. When Pierrots are reciting Brutus’s or Mark Antony’s funeral speeches (the most popular ones used), they are not attempting to portray these characters. Because they are accompanied by specific gestures such as pointing one’s whip, footstomping, shouting, advancing on the opponent, and indeed masquerading as a Pierrot, the speeches take on a particular function. They become rhetorical challenges. The content or locutionary act and the telling or illocutionary act of the speeches contradict each other if the speeches are taken simply to be parts of Julius Caesar. However, in this context, the telling actually transforms the content into a rhetorical speech act associated with eliciting a particular reaction or perlocutionary effect, and not with a performance piece or an excerpt from a Shakespearean play. The ‘formal structures’ of the speeches are strictly adhered to, but the particular appropriation of Shakespeare in this context is founded on ‘difference’ in meaning and delivery--consistent with Gates’s definition of pastiche. In signifying Shakespeare, Shakespeare ceases to mean Shakespeare; Julius Caesar ceases to mean Julius Caesar. The masqueraders are not simply quoting Shakespeare; they are meaning something different by ‘Shakespeare’. And this meaning is a Carriacouan meaning only. McMurray and Fayer have, in fact, pointed out that the exchanges of speeches do not necessarily follow the chronology or the plot of the play although it is often argued that Julius Caesar is chosen for its argumentative exchanges. This is corroborated by the many informants who argue that masqueraders, especially nowadays, do not understand the content and the context of the speeches they quote. No doubt, these masqueraders are enamoured with the sound of the poetry and are impressed by the reputation of Shakespeare, but most of them have not

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read the entire play and do not know the story. Moreover, as McMurry and Fayer further point out, sometimes speeches could comprise the lines of multiple characters without any consideration of how this affects meaning. Dionne’s description of commonplace literacy (in which passages, appearing completely out of context, were presented to schoolchildren in reading books) helps to explain the reason for the content and appearance of these speeches. According to Benitez-Rojo, ‘The performance seems to be more related to the rhythm and the intonation that the play’s lines take within the local dialect than to any dramatic representation per se of Julius Caesar. Perhaps, as happens with the griot, it is precisely the rhythm (its mnemonic potential) that serves as a basis for the players’ remembering Shakespeare’s lines.’ An examination of an older local speech performed by a veteran player, Millar David, demonstrates the function of the Shakespeare speeches in the Shakespeare Mas: What’s thou standing most brave, bold and becoming honourable king of Bandroy? I could not detect what man you are. […] Do you know I am master of Hero today, Owner of Hillsborough, Captain of Brighton, Majority of Freeport, Superintendent of Social Union, And also the warrior king of Bandroy Who decide to rule and govern the day? […] Step back ten feet distance from my shadow! Relate yourself to me

Before the

Therefore I shalt know what man you are. Otherwise worms shall be your petticoat!

This speech is also quite similar to that of a Trinidadian Pierrot quoted by Andrew Carr: ‘I am King of Dahomey, but I also rule over many countries that I have conquered. Do you now visit my dominions to offer your subjugation, or do you come as an enemy to dispute my rule?’ The content of these speeches makes clear the bragging and the challenge involved in the exchanges between opponents. The announcement of the speaker’s identity and achievements, the questioning of the opponent’s identity and intent, and the unveiled threat of death (especially in the former speech) comprise the illocutionary acts of these two speeches. In

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terms of delivery, the speech is shouted to the other player in a particular rising and falling rhythm. Each line rises in intonation at the beginning and falls at the end, and foot-stomps and other gestures keep the rhythm of the delivery. In both these examples, the locutionary act makes the illocutionary act and the perlocutionary effect clear. Because the Shakespeare speeches take the same form regardless of their content, the telling or the signifying is also understood as having a similar function. In Shakespeare Mas, Shakespeare becomes not only a cross-cultural, but also an ‘intercultural idiom’ as the festival ‘yokes divergent cultural materials and identities into pastiche, collage, and bricolage’ and operates in an ‘oppositional [way] to the grand literary and theatrical narratives that would draw national and cultural boundaries around “Shakespeare” and manage “his” meanings.’ Shakespeare is ‘radically . . . disarticulated’ in Denis Salter’s words, but certainly not at the expense of ‘the postcolonial actor’s autonomy’. The particular appropriation of Julius Caesar in Shakespeare Mas challenges our understanding of what it means to perform Shakespeare; and the idea of ‘universality’, often touted as a defining characteristic of Shakespeare, is challenged and complicated through the recontextualisation of the play on Carriacou’s Carnival stage.

CHAPTER SIX KOPS’ HAMLET: TO-BE-OR-NOT-BE A CONTEMPORARY HERO? A CRITICAL READING OF THE HAMLET OF STEPNEY GREEN ESTELLE RIVIER

The Hamlet of Stepney Green (1959) is Kops’ first dramatic piece and, appearing as it did in the era of Osborne and early Pinter, it was immediately identified as a kitchen sink drama appropriate to an angry young man. The title of the play obviously draws a direct connection with Shakespeare’s Hamlet but did Kops really rewrite the latter? In this essay, after briefly summarizing the plot of Kops’ composition, we shall analyse its characteristic features, bearing in mind the Shakespearean model. Who is the hero in Kops’ play, for instance? What are the stylistic specificities of the script? We shall also see to what extent Bernard Kops’ comedy is suffused with Jewish and autobiographical allusions. Finally, in the following study, we hope to highlight the way in which Kops offered a very personal reinvention of Shakespeare’s play, far from clichés and conventions. Organized in three Acts, the plot, set in post-Second World War England, mainly develops the ambiguous relationship between Sam Levy, the dead father and David, his Hamlet-like son. The family is Jewish, which has an impact on the general mood of the play especially when it makes reference to the recent genocide, while traditional songs rather ironically complete the dialogue. The play is not devoid of humour but it manages to intermingle metaphysical reflections on primordial matters (such as death, or the future for a young Jew in Europe) with absurd situations in which the ghost of Sam is able to vanish through a wall of the apartment. The dialogue has little direct connection with that of Hamlet, even though the second Act is clearly identified as deriving closely from

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it: David, who believes his father has been poisoned by his mother, Bessie, is driven by a restless desire for revenge; he is thought mad and ignores the beautiful Hava Segal, his future step-father’s daughter who loves him. This Act is rather dark despite some light entertainment provided by the visit of three successive agents from Jewish memorial companies selling stones. By their physical resemblances and the comedy of repetition they generate, those men called Green, Black and White inevitably recall Hamlet’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern.

Identifying the (anti-) hero In Kops’ play, the pivotal element is Hamlet although, paradoxically, he is not, strictly speaking, the main protagonist. In that word’s original Greek usage, the protagonist is strictly speaking the first actor (‘First combatant’) or leader of the chorus, while the second and third actors were named ‘deuteragonist’ and ‘tritagonist’. In today’s terminology, the protagonist has come to imply hero. Yet, Hamlet is not exactly the hero of most contemporary writings derived from Shakespeare’s play. ‘Hero’ is in any case an ambiguous word: it indeed points to the prevailing importance of the character in a given tale, but it may also carry connotations of honour and virtue, implying (again, as per Greek usage) someone closer to the gods than other mortals. Chris Baldick finds it more suitable to use the word “protagonist” to speak of the hero (or the heroine) of a play: “the leading character may not be morally or otherwise superior,” he notes, and adds: “[w]hen our expectations of heroic qualities are strikingly disappointed, the central character may be known as an anti-hero.” 1 In practice Kops chose to place secondary characters from Shakespeare’s source centre stage, treating the Stepney Green Hamlet of his own play as a ‘side-hero’, that is someone who cannot be ignored but whose concerns seem to vanish behind the concerns of others. However this assertion should be qualified. It is obvious that in the first Act, David Levy/Hamlet is more talked about and observed than really involved in the action or the dialogue. If anything he is at first more conspicuous as a singer than as a talker, the cast list describes him as “a tall and intelligent boy [who] wants

1

C. Baldick, Concise Dictionary of Literary Terms, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008 (new edition), p. 112. He remarks: “The more neutral term ‘protagonist’ is often preferable, to avoid confusion with the usual sense of heroism as admirable courage or nobility […]”, p. 112.

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to be a crooner”2. When he first appears on stage, he is singing. As often in this script, his lyrics are both comical and allegorical, or work as a parable. Here, as well as taking up in comically elaborate fashion Hamlet’s antic claim that Polonius is a fishmonger, they are also proleptic: DAVID [sings]: Silver trout are sleeping in heaps upon the slabs, With mackerel and lobsters and lethargic crabs. The dead are busy sleeping eternity away, They cannot go out shopping on this fair summer’s day. [The Hamlet of Stepney Green, p. 171.]

His song is immediately followed one by his father, and it will be immediately completed by Solly Segal, a friend of the family, who looks after Sam and will in time marry his widow. Although the audience, at this early stage of the play, cannot associate the ‘Silver trout’ to Bessie Levy/Gertrude, the ‘mackerel’ to Solly Segal/Claudius nor the ‘dead’ to Sam/the ghost, there is an irony there pointing to David’s clearsightedness about the prospective interest Solly Segal might have in the party. Throughout this first Act, David remains in the background, which is one reason why he is rebuked: his indolence and lack of empathy condemn him to be dependent on his father’s financial help (although he refutes it) and to ignore what could bring him happiness, i.e. Hava/Ophelia’s love. He is presented as a twenty-two-year-old boy lacking ambition, or at least living in a dream of becoming famous for his voice. He is constantly blamed, either directly or indirectly: MR SEGAL: David, listen to me, and try to be a good boy for a change, your father is dying. (p. 173) BESSIE: Take no notice [of Davey], Mrs Stone ʊ what a life with that boy, no tongue can tell … (p. 184) HAVA: If only he’d let me ʊ I don’t want to push himself ʊ he’s too busy with worrying about his voice. (p. 189)

Only Sam, as a former herring merchant, always excuses and values his son, whom he compares to the most beautiful fish in the sea (‘[…] a lovely red herring like my Davey’, p. 189).

2

Bernard, Kops. The Hamlet of Stepney Green, London: Penguin Books, 1959, p. 164.

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In the next two Acts, the relationship between David and Sam evolves more obviously into a version of that between old and young Hamlets. From Act Two onward, Sam appears as a Ghost who can be identified as such by his son only. It might seem then that they both thereby emerge as the heroes of a present-day tragedy, but a careful reading soon reveals that Kops rather focuses on the irony of an improbable situation more than on the psychology of the characters. For instance, David believes he has a mission: to revenge his father whom he believes to have been poisoned. Here it looks as though The Tragedy of Hamlet is being replayed. Yet, Sam/the Ghost does not have any desire for vengeance, nor does he understand his son’s motivation. Hence the irony lies in Shakespeare’s roles being reversed, and all that will follow is based on the gap between Sam’s goal and his son’s own purpose, more than on David’s inner fight to respect his father’s injunction. The staged relationship between the pair is full of paradoxes and unexpected reactions. The ambiguity surrounding both Sam and David, or rather the ambiguous situation they develop, gradually makes it clear that Kops, intriguingly, is rewriting Hamlet in such a fashion that its hero is no longer a Hamlet-like figure. According to James Giddin, although the Hamlet legend is here satirized and the roles reversed, the Shakespearean main theme is sustained: the ghost (i.e. Sam) is eventually liberated from the burden of saving his family from decrepitude3. The resemblance, however, is only partial, not least because Sam returns as a ghost not to punish his surviving kin but in the hope of enabling them finally to enjoy life. Once his final attempt at opening their eyes is successful, he is ready to die. Kops’ play frustrates the audience’s expectations insofar as the title seems to announce that Hamlet will be central to the plot. Yet, Sam, Old Hamlet, is omnipresent, especially in the first Act where his health is the subject of all attention. Although his death is said to be imminent, the tone remains light, adorned with children’s songs, while the action is banal. In this first Act, we scarcely perceive the link between Shakespeare’s script and Kops’: all the names have changed, the context is coloured by Jewish vocabulary and tradition, and finally the set -- described as being divided into a garden and a living-room -- illustrates the daily life of a lower middle-class family. It is only in the second Act, when the relationship between David and his father (returned as a ghost) is being developed, that 3

J. Giddin, Postwar British Fiction :New Accents and Attitudes, University of California Press, 1962, p. 60.

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the parallel between the two plays becomes more evident, although the tone of The Hamlet of Stepney Green is never alarming nor threatening to the extent that we could believe it has now turned into a tragedy. Even there, Sam’s point of view remains the focus of the author’s attention. He is portrayed as the suffering protagonist, first in his body, then in his mind, because his son has not found his place in society. Kops reverses the roles when Sam claims that he has come back to help David, not to be revenged: DAVID: Why did you come back? SAM: To help you. DAVID [annoyed and surprised]: What do you mean? SAM: I only mean and know one thing : you need me. DAVID: Don’t make me laugh. [He laughs.] SAM : You’re unhappy ʊ that’s why I came; you’re holding on to me. [The Hamlet of Stepney Green, p. 196.]

The rest of the conversation revolves around the notion that Sam/the Ghost has a mission, a mission that is, however, questioned by David, who insists on his own duty: avenging his father’s murder. But Kops suffuses the Act either with humorous touches or with historical references that distance the play from its model: the sequence showing Bessie, Segal, and the Stones sitting around a table to communicate with the dead, for instance, is both moving and cynical. Sam, who anonymously works as the communicant, places the letters and makes the word “HITLER” appear. Immediately, the characters cry and rush away from their seats. If tragedy has taken on a new face in Kops’ play, it is clear that it translates the burden of history differently. While in Shakespeare interrogations on ‘personal’ history, i.e. what comes after death, prevail, here the reminiscence of a ‘people’s’ collective history, i.e. the Holocaust, is still omnipresent in minds. Sam appears as a double agent whose inner nature is struggling to impose his vision in an apocalyptic world. As with Stoppard’s writing in Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, which oscillates between the comedy of the situation and the seriousness of the philosophical debate it hosts, Kops operates a contradictory movement between two levels of reading. The first level invites us to witness an ordinary domestic scene where boredom, lack of ambition and narrow horizons have settled. This satiric observation is neither delightful nor profoundly distressing, as the characters stand as mere caricatures of their tangible models. The second level, however, leaves the realistic scene to bring us into a near fairytale (with fantastic characters and a happy ending), even though the main topic

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of conversation is death and mourning. Both genres ʊsatirical domestic realism and the fairy-taleʊ lead to a dialogue between life and death, raising a crucial question: how can we love rather than be eager for revenge in a post-Holocaust world? This juxtaposition of genres is all the more puzzling as it initiates feelings of pity in the spectator’s heart while (s)he is entertained: laughter is triggered by characters whose current situation looks miserable, haunted as it is by ghastly memories. Kops makes it clear that out of tragedy comedy may flow. He who suffered from a forced exile, poor living conditions and the difficulty of finding his way in a foreign social context does not intend to take any personal revenge, at least not strictly speaking. Choosing Hamlet as the reference-point for his first literary composition is not insignificant however. Even if Kops never acknowledges it explicitly, an oblique reading of his play reveals a parallel between two ghosts, the one of the Shakespearean character (the revengeful father who holds the truth), and the one of History who is also wounded by quarrels and hatred. Kops uses Shakespeare’s Hamlet to display this threatening presence and the scar it has left on a weakened man. What differs in Kops’ play is that man’s weakness is not due to his incapacity to take his revenge, but on the contrary, to his natural propensity for forgiveness. Thus the Kopsian heroic figure takes the opposite view to the Renaissance model and is presented as a new hero, or anti-hero, who is accessible because he proves benevolent and merciful. The ‘non-hero’ or the ‘anti-hero’ is by definition the antithesis of the brave and resourceful kind as is explicitly stressed in Baldick’s Dictionary of Literary Terms: “The anti-hero is the man who is given the vocation of failure. […] [A] type who is incompetent, unlucky, tactless, clumsy, cackhanded, stupid, buffoonish4”. After which, a set of examples is given: Tristram Shandy in Sterne’s eponymous novel, Leopold Bloom in Joyce’s Ulysses, Jimmy Porter in Osborne’s Look Back in Anger among them. As the presence of Jimmy Porter in Baldick’s list suggests, the anti-hero is particularly prominent in modern and post-modern drama, both in the Theatre of the Absurd and in the tragedies (of Müller for example): “[…] the protagonist is an ineffectual failure who succumbs to the pressure of circumstances”, Baldick writes. The anti-hero(ine), who according to Baldick, is the parody of the idealistic form of heroism, is the emblem of “ordinariness and inadequacy” (p. 113). It might be hasty (and certainly inadequate) to go so far as to state that Sam and David in The Hamlet of 4

Op. cit. p. 46.

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Stepney Green are anti-heroes, at least following the definitions above, even though the two characters share puzzling traits with those mentioned. In that sense, they also trigger an interrogation concerning Hamlet, who is himself intensely conscious that he is not a Hercules, and whose failures to fit such a model have been a recurring motif in discussions of the play. For instance, as TyaCamellia Allred notes in his essay, “Hamlet: Anti-Hero”: “True heroes do not take revenge, and surely do not encourage torture or gratuitous suffering”. Yet Hamlet lacks remorse in the arrangement of the deaths of his childhood friends Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, and Allred concludes: “[Hamlet] again has no guilt or acknowledgement of blame: ‘They are not near my conscience. Their defeat/Does by their own insinuation grow’ (5.2.62-63).” 5 Allred’s reading may sound crudely moralistic, especially given that it is applied to a fictitious protagonist whose literary origin is more than four hundred years old and necessarily includes notions of heroism that we no longer adhere to. For instance, the drama of Shakespeare’s time often presupposes the necessity for revenge, which was also considered as a means to survive.6 Furthermore, being an anti-hero does not imply a lack of cleverness, as Hamlet’s behaviour proves elsewhere. His capacity to handle language and cheat the court, who do not manage to detect his fraudulent impersonation of madness, is an example. As a matter of fact, his qualities have led other critics to acknowledge him as a true hero: in his general introduction to the play, G. H. Hibbard notes that “[h]is reason for refraining [from killing the praying Claudius] may be deplorable; but it is in perfect keeping with the paradoxical nature of the tragedy as a whole that his determination to see Claudius damned should have the positive effect of preserving him as a tragic hero.”7 Judging the behaviour of protagonists in modern and post-modern drama as being either that of heroes or anti-heroes is all the more complex when they partly derive from another literary tradition. Our uncertainty about how to evaluate Kops’ characters – are we to measure them against Renaissance notions of heroism, or the values of twentieth-century 5 T. Allred, “Hamlet: Anti-hero”. Delta Winds: A Magazine for Student Essays. Delta College, n.d. Web. 3 November 2013. 6 See on this topic, Lily B. Campbell, Shakespeare’s Tragic Heroes, Barnes and Noble (ed.). More particularly Chapter Twelve Hamlet: A Tragedy of Grief, pp. 109-147. We should also refer to John Kerrigan’s recent work: Revenge Tragedy: Aeschylus to Armageddon, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998. 7 Op. cit., p. 56.

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liberalism? – may be part of this play’s entire point. The ‘hero’ of contemporary drama is relieved of his ancient heroic functions in the noble sense of the word since (s)he does not offer the vision of a model to be imitated and is not able to change the course of history thanks to his/her will or to his/her actions. The new ‘hero’ or ‘anti-hero’ is a free character. In this intellectual uncertainty, our evaluation of Kops’ (anti-) heroes may depend more simply on the degree of emotion, either positive or negative, they may evoke. On the one hand Sam’s benevolence in Acts Two and Three, and the ultimate success of his benign posthumous ambition for his family, would range the old man in the class of true heroes. On the other hand his simplicity, even his banality, tend to downgrade his value, inviting the audience to view him as a modest though virtuous and consequently casual citizen. In the first Act, Sam seems constantly at odds with his environment as though his place in society is not legitimate any longer. He is even one of the first to acknowledge and welcome his impending death, as though he is not finding his place in an insipid life: You can’t run away from death Mr Segal, there’s no escaping it; it catches you in the end; my end is here and now, and now, I’m resigned to it […] Mr Segal, now I realize that I never lived; all my life I’ve been asleep. Been dead! [Act One, p. 169.]

His life has indeed been anti-heroic, in the sense that it was very ordinary: as a pickled-herring seller, he raised two children but scarcely paid attention either to them or to his wife. It is only during his afterlife that he tries to repair his past indifference. His anti-heroism may also result from his slow awakening, and his discreet interference in his son’s future. As a ghost, the success of his plan depends upon a chunkily Wagnerian trick, a love potion which David drinks so that he finally notices Hava and falls in love with her. Sam’s ultimate success depends on comically obvious artifice: his earlier attempts to open his son’s eyes through wise persuasion, all through Acts Two and Three, are entirely unsuccessful. However, these details of the play’s narrative mechanism are less important for their moral tenor than for the way in which they underline Kops’ conscious embrace of an innately anti-heroic genre. From the start it is obvious that we are not reading classical tragedy, but conversely a story that is a deliberate reversal of the genre. Love, not vengeance, is the central theme of Kops’ play, and the plot is constantly directed towards the fulfilment of a happy ending. For example, in the first absurd but

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somehow moving confrontation between Sam/the Ghost and David, his living son, death is presented as being salutary and a source of hope. Far from inspiring pity or even sympathy, the confrontation between father and son (or between death and life) rather provides the text with delightful and humorous undertones: DAVID: It’s going to be just fine, I know – apart from all my other worries, I now have a ghost on my hands – another father would have the decency to die and to stay dead – trust you. SAM: Davey, don’t you see – I live only in your mind and heart. No one else will see me; nobody else will want to. [p. 197.]

If Sam is a ghost, it is because he must redeem his earthly existence as an ordinary and imperfect man. Kops makes it clear, however, that his main protagonist, albeit an anti-hero, is neither ultimately threatened nor threatening, and that his imperfections are not irreversible. On the contrary, the death of a flawed and insignificant citizen can also be viewed as beneficial, and even extra-ordinary, since it can accomplish small miracles in others’ lives. Hamlet’s new identity is disclosed through his confrontation with the other, which means that even if he stands in the background in Kops’ play, he is physically present in the character(s) who stand in the foreground. Sam and David, his son, are both intrinsically channelling parts of Hamlet’s identity, which brings the reader/audience to rethink it through the eyes of others. Such a result may not be the playwright’s major aim insofar as he rather tends to interrogate the play in the light of his own contemporaneity. For Kops, Hamlet is a “referential”8 to be demystified. For this purpose, Kops uses subterfuge: he removes characters, adds new ones and changes the context, and sometimes refers to History or at least to special events taken from the press headlines. But in the end, he has created a new persona (etymologically “a mask”9) who is literally a fictional entity that can be identified by the stage’s signs and by the performance. Sam or David can hardly be confused with real entities, they are not individuals but only embodied figures. In that way, they are comparable to Hamlet, the character par excellence whose nature 8

J-P. Ryngaert & J. Sermon. Le personnage théâtral contemporain: décomposition, recomposition, Paris, Editions théâtrales. 2006. p. 27. 9 OED offers the general nineteenth-century explanation of persona as "related to" Latin personare "to sound through" (i.e. the mask as something spoken through and perhaps amplifying the voice). More generally speaking, a persona is the mask helping people to pretend they are another or to protect themselves.

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ʊalthough dramatically mirroring the essence of life10ʊ is pure creation, illusion, artifice.

The source and its rewriting: Mind the gap! Kops’ tragicomedy or the half-tone image of simplicity. At first glance, the presentation of The Hamlet of Stepney Green bears all the aspects of a conventional play: it is divided into Acts and scenes; the cast is clearly identified as forming a community defined by ordinary family relations; scenes are set in realistic places and the usually ‘unpoetic’ dialogue, instead of tending towards soliloquy or the choric, is shared among the characters (despite the obvious prevalence of a binomial made of Sam and David). The characters correspond to familiar types, and the printed text of the play supplies ordinary, neutrally-expressed and mainly realistic stage directions. On the page, it does not look remotely like Hamlet. Indeed, if Kops does not ignore the fact that his play takes its source from Shakespeare, he conspicuously eschews any trace of a Renaissance literary style. As we have seen previously, the style of the play’s dialogue reflects the modest and unassuming life Sam and his family live. The vocabulary is ordinary, except when adorned with a few more philosophical comments or sudden ironical breakthroughs, as in Act One, when Sam’s unexpected hilarious sincerity and release sound like a proleptic insight into his future mission: Come on, Davey, pull yourself together; liven up, sing. Say all those crazy things I used to chastise you for saying. Spout all the things you read from books and heard from your strange friends. I want to change everything. I want something new to happen. I want to lose all sense of order, so that I’ll be prepared for my new existence if there is one! Everyone where I’m going may be like you; I want my son to vouch for me in the unaccustomed darkness. [p. 179, my emphasis.]

As the play unfolds, the dialogue sounds more absurd, mainly because apart from David, no one knows that Sam is present on stage. It results in comic misunderstandings and nonsensical dialogues:

10

Hamlet: “[…] for any thing so overdone is from the purpose of playing, whose end, both at the first and now, was and is, to hold, as 'twere, the mirror up to nature; to show virtue her own feature, scorn her own image, and the very age and body of the time his form and pressure.” [3.2.1821. My emphasis.]

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DAVID: I wanted you to be proud of me. SAM: There’s still time. DAVID [mood changes]: Now that my dad’s out of the way I suppose you’ll marry my mother. SEGAL: I’m lonely. Don’t think too badly of me. You’re too young to understand loneliness. DAVID: Am I? Yes, ever since you died the house has been full of people. SEGAL [jumps up]: Ever since I died? [Feels his face.] What do you mean? SAM: Poor old boy. Don’t be too hard on him. DAVID: Every time you talk I get the feeling that it’s myself thinking. My other self. SEGAL: That’s a good thing. I could teach you a lot. […] DAVID: I was with you when you died. SEGAL: When I died! Oh, you’re driving me mad. SAM: I’m happy to know I didn’t die alone. Was it difficult seeing me die? DAVID: Yes. SEGAL: What do you mean? Yes? [Act Two, scene two, p. 217.]

Despite the seriousness of the topic, such exchanges encourage the audience to distance themselves from the underlying tragedy occurring in David’s life, as well as from the tragic Shakespearean source that feeds Kops’ writing. Finally, the element that more strikingly breaks the flatness of the play’s petit-bourgeois realism and creates an ironical distance between what is said and what is seen is music. Songs punctuate the majority of the play’s verbal exchanges and are sung either by children or by major characters. They reflect the mood of the scene where they intervene and, when they are not popular nursery rhymes, often sound like proverbs, pieces of advice or inherited truisms about life. “No matter what you do,” Sam sings in Act One, “You’ll end up underground.” As James Giddin remarks, the originality of Kops’ writing lies in this conjunction of two apparent oppositions: the harshness of life and the capacity for the human to observe it with optimism: This play, like the Dream of Peter Mann, is full of songs and chants, and embroiders the fantasy with touches of British musical comedy. Although both plays contain satirical comments on current society (many of the songs, for example, parody little materialistic clichés […]), the fantasy that

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directs attention towards the value, no matter how limited, of life is the centre of the play.11

It is true that these entertaining songs distract the audience from the monotony of the situation occurring on stage. They sometimes sound incongruous when they unite characters who are in opposition elsewhere in the story (as for instance David and Segal), but they also add a melancholy tone to some private scenes (as when David intones the couplet that had been sung by children at the beginning of the play and completes it or when, at the start of Act Two, all the characters, Sam included, join in a chorus to mourn Sam’s death). It creates a leitmotiv that reflects some of the preoccupations of the Jewish community, such as their attempt to rebuild a decent life and prosper or cherish the existence that has been spared from extinction. They also tend to play down morose situations and personal conflicts. In Act Two, scene 2, for instance, Bessie expresses her bitterness regarding her son’s behaviour in a song. Although her reproaches are full of hidden meaning and charged with resentment, they appear less tragic because they are articulated in rhyming couplets: [Second and third couplets] Other mothers see joy from their child, You are thoughtless, hopeless and wild, Didn’t I bring you into this life? Do me a favour – go get a wife. Oy-yoy-yoy-yoy – what have I done To deserve such a terrible son? […] [She slaps him lightly upon the face, and makes a gesture as if she could kill him.] (p. 209)

While often cheerfully and self-parodically presenting clichés about Jewish identity (for instance, the excessively complaining mother), Kops’ songs can also supply brief reminders of Hamlet’s soliloquies, as when the children conclude the first Act singing “Where do we go to when we die?/What are we doing in this dream?” (p. 192). But it is the stylistic difference that registers more than the verbal echoes, an effect of comic discrepancy rather than poetic resemblance. Interestingly, in 1958 Kops’ play was produced as a musical in Broadway, directed by Joe O’Brien. It was given the subtitle “A Fable with Music” and it ran for 166 performances. Kops composed the lyrics 11

J. Giddin. Op. cit., p. 60.

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and Robert Procter the music.12 Later, in 1965, it was also adapted in a one-Act version for radio. Because of the songs, the story could be easily communicated through voices only and spared a mise en scene. As the synopsis stated, the plot was condensed and reduced to the relationship between the ghost and David, the section closest to the play’s Shakespearean source. As in the printed version13, the subtitle indicated ‘A Sad Comedy with some Songs’14. Such adaptations are revealing of the importance of the music score accompanying the characters throughout the play and being intrinsic to their moods and to the overall atmosphere of the story. In other words, the very originality of The Hamlet of Stepney Green lies in its subtle mixture of tragicomic effects: the ones being expressed by the plot and the looming spectre of Shakespeare’s script; the others resulting from the entertaining, throwaway musical interludes with which the play-text is permeated. As a recent press article underlined: “Kops can certainly switch rapidly — from prose to poetry, fantasy to realism, theme to theme --- and not always wait for his audience to keep pace.”15

The Jewish issue Just as Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead takes up a Shakespearean topos, i.e. metatheatre, in order to express the existential 12

Choreography: Allen Baker; scenery: Herbert Senn and Helen Pond; costumes: Connie Baxter; lighting: Richard Nelson; producers: Joe O’Brien and Rett Cone. Cast: Blanche Marvin (Chava Segal); Michael Gorin (Sam Levy); Menachem Rubin (Soly Segal); Dino Narizzano (David); Jeanette Roony (Bessie Levy); Clarence Hoffman (Mr. Stone); Miriam Phillips (Mrs Stone); Amnon Kabatchnik (Mr. Green); Maurice Edwards (Mr. Black); Harold Hernan (Mr. White); Peggy Cone, Carole Cone, Robin Chaikin, Peter Chaikin, Valerie Munda and Geoffrey O’Bien (Children’s voices). The action takes place in the fifties in a once elegant section of London’s East End, about two miles from Saint Paul’s. The musical is presented in three acts. 13 The Hamlet of Stepney Green was first published by Penguin Books in 1959, reprinted in 1960, 1964, 1968 and 1972. We are using this final version. 14 The audio transmission was produced by Charles Lefeaux and broadcast in 1965, April 5th at 20:30 (BBC Home Service). It lasted 90 minutes. The music was composed by Larry Adler and the cast included Andrew Sachs (David/Hamlet), Cyril Shaps (Sam/the Ghost), Patricia Leventon (Hava/Ophelia), Meier Tzelniker (Solty Segal/Claudius) among others. 15 Jeremy Solomons, “Bernard Kops - not just an East End chronicler”, The Jewish Chronicle Online, May 16, 2014. http://www.thejc.com/arts/books/118115/bernard-kops-not-just-east-end-chronicler

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perspective of a displaced Czech intellectual during the Cold War, Kops uses Shakespeare’s theme of filial allegiance to articulate his own sensibility as a post-war Anglo-Jew. Among the various distinctively Jewish allusions his play holds, we find prejudices (for example, the value of money to lead a decent life) side by side with more benevolent and naïve expressions of Yiddish traditions. The vocabulary as well as some melodies often refer to these traditions that have been kept alive within the family despite its integration into the East End of London16. References to rituals like the “Shiva”17 (p. 195) and the use of colloquial words like “meshuga”18 (p. 205), “Lochiam”19(p. 233), Cabella and Smaballah (p. 234), are idiosyncratic intrusions typical of Kops’ literary language; they contribute to build the originality of his own Hamlet. They are also part of the mise en scene when in Act Two, the family together with the three hawkers mourn around Sam’s body in observance of Shiva. The set, which is detailed in the stage directions, informs us about the moving intimacy of the scene and the sense of community which is reinforced through death. However, some comic incongruities remain to dilute the potential pathos, such as Sam’s implication in his own mourning: ‘[The voices |of the family and the three men| get softer and softer, until it is just above a whisper, and they continue with the Kaddush20. Meanwhile SAM interpolates his own chant]’ (p. 207) But one of the most direct transpositions Kops offers of his source is David’s version of the “To be or not to be” soliloquy, which in a farcical way, uses some Yiddish terms among other inappropriate, semi-burlesque vocabulary: To be or not to bloody well be, believe me, that is the question! Whether it is besser to ne a bisle meshuga. … Or to take alms for the love of Allah. To kick the bucket or to take forty winks. … To take forty winks no more 16 Let us remark however that the character of the East End has been shaped by Jewish immigration for centuries – integrating in Stepney Green would not necessarily mean becoming less Jewish in these respects. 17 Shiva (which means “seven”) corresponds to the week-long mourning period in Judaism. Mourning lasts for seven days, during which family members gather at home (preferably the home of the deceased) where visitors can come. 18 Meshuga means “crazy”. The word is used by Mr Stone in 2.2: “I don’t like saying this, Bessie, but your boy is meshuga.” (p. 209). 19 Lochiam: a Yiddish expression meaning “to life! ”, used during toasts. 20 Kaddush or kaddich (“sanctification”) is, according to the dictionary, one of the central aspects of Jewish liturgy. It has influenced several Christian prayers, including the Pater Noster.

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and by Ali Abracadabra to end sourous and the hire purchase, please God by you. … These are the consumer goods for the frum yids. To kick the bucket, to take a nap at the race-track ʊ ah! There’s the snag, for on that slip of paper what names were written ʊ blown away by the wind ʊ blown away, etcetera, you should live so long.

The parody does not concern Shakespeare’s script only. It also mocks the Jewish community and its faith in ritual, as “Ali Abracadabra” exemplifies. Kops ridicules a key passage of the Shakespearean tragedy, as though Hamlet is no longer adequate to articulate either the philosophical crisis of the traumatic post-war context or the banality of post-war everyday life. Some critics have considered Kops’ portrayal of characters who “escape their pain through destructive self-delusions” as “one long, manic vaudeville act”.21 It is true that in The Hamlet of Stepney Green, words and situations never sound convincingly tragic. The songs always interrupt what would otherwise sound austere or, at least, melodramatic. Some of them, being famous nursery rhymes, are sung in Russian or Yiddish, as the stage directions indicate (“Go to sleep, mine baby, go to sleep”, Act One, p. 192). Later on, the mourning chant is derogatorily converted into a Dance of Death when Sam (as a ghost) sings a Jewish melody with David while they both clap hands and encircle the three salesmen, who are terrified (Act Two, p. 203). In less parodic scenes, typical melodies are played on the gramophone, as in Act Three for instance (p. 230). As another critic stated, “Kops' work can be unashamedly Jewish. It is witty, dark, vulnerable, sad yet full of vitality22.” This mixture of contradictory characteristics is at once the result of conscious aesthetic choice and the mark of Kops’ particular experience. The writer confessed that in his childhood he became obsessed with Yiddish theatre, and remained nostalgic for this community-oriented, participatory form of drama in which “audiences believed they were part of the play”.23 Theatre gave people an opportunity to “balanc[e] the terrible lives that [they] were going through. They composed themselves into the drama ʊ they weren't divided from it”.24 Moreover, Kops added, one of the reasons for the emergence of Jewish writers in the 1950s 21 Jeremy Solomons, “Bernard Kops - not just an East End chronicler”, The Jewish Chronicle Online, May 16, 2014. http://www.thejc.com/arts/books/118115/bernard-kops-not-just-east-end-chronicler 22 Interview: Bernard Kops By Anne Joseph, December 8, 2011 http://www.thejc.com/arts/arts-interviews/59829/interview-bernard-kops 23 Ibid. 24 Ibid.

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ʊincluding Arnold Wesker, Harold Pinter and Peter Shafferʊ “was a reaction to the fact that theatre then was ‘very upper middle-class’”.25 As a result, with his first contribution to Jewish dramatic literature, Kops aimed to bring “[his] background, [his] experience and [his] traditions”26 to the English stage. Not surprisingly then, references to Yiddish folklore cohabit with the more dreadful memory of recent Jewish history. Very early in the play, an allusion to the recent Holocaust is voiced by Sam who is ironic about his fate. He, who dreaded to die under an “H-Bomb or the Z-Bomb or bacteria, rockets, or gas” (Act One, p. 168), will die naturally in his garden. As mentioned earlier, another evocation of the past occurs in Act Two when Bessie and Segal, Mrs and Mr. Stone gather for a spiritualist seance. Sam moves the tumbler to various letters so as to spell the word: HITLER (p. 222). The black-comic panic which the word triggers is however immediately softened by a benevolent phrase written by Sam again : “This is ʊ Sam ʊ Levy … I forgive you, Mr Segal ʊ take care of ʊ my Bessie …” (p. 223). This juxtaposition of sentiments of fear and relief typifies the ambiance of Kops’ play as a whole: in every tragic situation, there is always a glint of hope, and nothing must be taken too seriously. Kops’ Jewish Hamlet, David, also conveys the feeling that moroseness and even despair must never prevail over fraternal feelings and humour. Despite the constant reproaches David is victim of in the first Act, he often reacts with ironical distance. He, who does not intend to be a herring seller, provocatively claims that he has instead “got a job circumsizing yiddisher mice”27 (p. 184). If, as the play unfolds, he nourishes darker projects (such as poisoning his mother and Segal), the plot device into which he ultimately falls reveals his affable nature and his affection for his community. Indeed, Sam, whose only purpose is to reconcile his family and open his son’s eyes to Hava, has poured a love elixir in everyone’s glass so that, in the end, all celebrate and express sentiments of happiness and kinship, including David. Even Lottie (David’s sister), who is never seen on stage because she lives away and has married a CommunistCatholic with whom she has had five children, is eventually forgiven for her absence from her father’s death-bed.

25

Id. Id. 27 N.B. “circumsizing” is spelt with a “z” in Kops’ text. 26

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Benign human relationships and a strong feeling of Jewish are at once caricatured and affirmed throughout the play. Humour is distilled throughout the text as a provocative answer to death, and even death, it seems, cannot destroy family bonds. Characters like Bessie, the mother and the three insurance agents (Mr. Black, White and Green) often look excessive or ridiculous. Bessie’s hair is dyed blonde, “she is trying to look ten years younger,” Kops writes in the stage-directions, “and uses cosmetics profusely” (Act One, p. 176). She always complains and laments upon her situation while teasing her husband whom she does not take seriously: BESSIE: You disgust me, you old fool; and if you’re going to die, please do it before tea-time because I’ve got a sponge-cake in the oven. [Act One, p. 177.]

Likewise, the way the agents deal with death as a way of earning a living is treated with irony so that the tragedy never sounds effective. The following quickfire exchange between Black, White and Green verges on the Absurd style. At the onset of the final Act, where tragedy should reach its paroxysm, they inevitably provoke laughter. The scene occurs eight months after Sam’s death and burial. Bessie and Segal are celebrating their union and the tone counterpoints the melancholy that had prevailed at the end of Act Two. The three salesmen have been invited to the party, and are eating sandwiches, bathetic versions of the grander ‘funeral baked meats’ of Shakespeare’s play: GREEN: There seems to be a close parallel in our lives. BLACK: There certainly does. Where were you educated? GREEN: Jews’ Free School. Where were you? BLACK: Why, the same school. Who was your teacher? BLACK: Rosen also. What year? GREEN: About 1940 I left. BLACK: So did I. We must have been there at the same time. GREEN: Do you like football? BLACK: No. Do you like cricket? GREEN: Yes. BLACK: So do I. What a coincidence! BLACK: No. Do you like me? GREEN: No. How wonderful! [They shake hands and are all smiles.] [Act Three, p. 225.]

This very comic interval echoes the light-heartedness that prevails over despondency throughout the play. Kops makes fun of all serious topics,

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among which are money and even political issues, as when he dethrones historical communists, anarchists or dictators: SEGAL: Rasputin was a terrible man; evil and hypnotic. SAM: So was Ivan. SEGAL: So was Stalin. SAM: So they say. SEGAL: So was Bakunin. SAM: So was Trotsky. SEGAL: Oh, no, Trotsky was a wonderful man. SAM: Lenin was a wonderful man. SEGAL: Kropotkin was a wonderful man. SAM: My father was a wonderful man. [Etc.] [Act One, pp. 187-8.]

The Jewish author makes it clear that fatality has no grip on humanity: dreadful past and anxious future alike can become the material for a shared communal laugh. By turning the bad into good and using the Jewish context as a backdrop to subvert tragedy, Kops offers a very positive account of what life should be like, unconventional in dramatic form, unprescripted by inherited tragedy.

Is Hamlet Kops? Theatre and autobiography The son of Dutch Jewish immigrants, Kops was profoundly influenced by his poor East End upbringing. When he was a child, he desperately wanted to leave home, which did not prevent him from having a turbulent adulthood once independent. In a recent interview, he did not hide the fact that his personal experience was his principal source of inspiration, for example his concern with the individual who is trapped within the confines of a close Jewish family: “I've always said that the things you run away from, you run right into,” he confessed. “Family […] is the sustaining force. My life is dissected into all the concerns and joys of the family”. As the interview reveals, Kops acknowledges the irony that created the very thing he had wanted to escape: “It was sheer sheer luck that I met Erica [his wife] because [without her] I could not have survived.”28

28 Interview: Bernard Kops By Anne Joseph, December 8, 2011. http://www.thejc.com/arts/arts-interviews/59829/interview-bernard-kops

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In Shalom Bomb, Scenes from my Life29, an account of his background and career, Kops connects the end of his troubled existence (thanks to his love for Erica) and the beginning of a prolific career. The Hamlet of Stepney Green is by this account the first play he wrote with any degree of release or spontaneity: There and then I wrote the title, The Hamlet of Stepney Green, and after that there was no stopping me. I was just as surprised as my characters when they emerged into the room and performed before me. “Why are you talking to yourself?” Erica asked me through a yawn the next morning. “I’m writing a play,” I reminded her. “It’s all there inside. Just like your baby.” (p. 16)

Much of his writing has been about a journey, a quest to express his own eagerness to lead a better life30, especially since, in his youth, he was addicted to drugs. His own quest for a decent life resulted from this painful experience, which he ended late and with great difficulty. Despite this, and his destitute past (the Kopses were dirt-poor; “they led a harassed, handto-mouth existence, between the soup-kitchen, the pawnbroker and the Jewish Board of Guardians”31), Kops always honored the close Jewish community to which he belonged, most particularly their vivid language, and their sense of tribal solidarity. Needless to say, the particular area of the East End in which he grew up was Stepney Green. Once we bear in mind all these elements, the resemblance between David and Kops is flagrant: David has not found his place in a society that he despises (at least at first) because it lacks ambition. His prospect of gaining recognition in the wider world is slim, while the routine of his undistinguished daily life has become intolerable. Madness and suicide threaten. Love is the only cure for these wounds. In an account of his drug-addiction, Kops explains that “he tied himself to his bed because he was scared of throwing himself into the Thames”. His love for Erica finally saved him32. In The Hamlet of Stepney Green, the love elixir that Sam concocts at the end, works as a magic potion to save the lost souls and open their eyes to what life can promise. The play’s 29

Bernard Kops, Shalom Bomb, Scenes from my Life, London: Oberon Books, 2000. 30 See for example The Odyssey of Samuel Glass (David Paul, 2012). 31 See The World is a Wedding in Book Review by Michael Kustow, Jewish Quarterly. Autumn 2007 - Number 207. 32 In Michael Kustow, ibid. (no pagination).

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denouement is thus a way to reassert the powerful capacity of humanity to recover from all dangers, whether they be mourning and addictions, war and poverty, or exclusion and depression. It may be surprising however that Kops should have used Shakespeare’s Hamlet to convey such a hopeful message. His tale indeed rests on one of the most famous tragedies, a play which with its high body-count and concluding military takeover seems to leave no glint of hope in its final scene. And yet, more than to parody it, Kops used this play to reinforce his own thesis: despite opposite forces and an apparently star-crossed horizon, man can find his salvation.

Rewriting, Retelling, Reinventing Shakespeare Kops chose the Shakespearean myth as a primary source and yet, in a parallel movement, he has willingly distanced himself from it. Despite its personal and even autobiographical basis, his play inescapably implies a particular viewpoint towards Shakespeare as well as towards larger categories such as the postmodern33. Another question we must then raise concerns the reason why he based his plot on a classic canonical work of English literature even finally to assert his independence from it. The themes he has developed are characteristic of new modes of thinking, and it is up to us to reconsider Hamlet in the light of such a vision even though some aspects may remain hypothetical, even hermetic to any analysis. The other Hamlet who, as we have seen at the beginning of this chapter, stands in the background of the new play, is not so much relevant for his personal journey towards a possible revival as he is for the world he epitomizes. Anchored in the twentieth century, his story carries a quest for freedom or emancipation and hope; the spectrum is large because it offers a new vision of art that is cosmopolitan and imaginative, open to interpretations and literary horizons. Hugh Grady’s comparison between “modernist Shakespeare” and “postmodernist Shakespeare” offers a definition of post-world-war writers’ form of art that follows the line launched by Andy Warhol and J.S.G. Bogg in painting: […] art works […] considered most antithetical to art in order to create a complex comment that is itself a new form of art ʊ art not really 33 See on this aspect Michael Vanden Heuvel, “Is Postmodernism: Stoppard among/against the postmoderns”, in K.E. Kelly. Op. Cit., pp. 213-228.

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immanent in the images but rather an ‘art effect’ created through the interactions of artifact, context, and perception.34

This definition encapsulates the postmodernist movement that includes cinema productions side by side with theatrical works among which we find Kops’ challenging transformation of Shakespearean drama. As Grady’s definition would suggest, the aim of these artists is then to use a material with the sole view to creating their own theatrical landscape, which I believe is too restrictive an analysis. It is undeniable however that their link with Shakespeare becomes so loose that we are invited to consider this generation of writers as the precursor of a new art form more than as the heir of a preceding aesthetics. Contemporary playwrights thus shape a “work of art” bearing in mind an “aesthetic, moral and logical conclusion”35 to answer the demands of a personal creative process. Bernard Kops’ personal style has been shaped by a contrasted set of works among which poems, biographies, novels, radio and theatre plays that have punctuated his career. Even if Hamlet launched Kops’ literary success, Shakespeare’s plays did not stand at the core of most of the author’s concerns afterwards. The Hamlet of Stepney Green “catapulted Kops to recognition and success”, Anne Joseph wrote in her recent interview with the writer36, and, to commemorate Kops’ 85th birthday (he was born in 1926), the Jewish Museum in London celebrated with a sellout staged reading of his first play. Let us remember that Kops describes his Hamlet as “a sad comedy with some songs”, and yet, Anne Joseph adds, “it is also thought of as one of the cornerstones of the then new wave in British kitchen-sink realism, a trend that had begun with John Osborne's Look Back in Anger.” Indeed, in the fifties and sixties, when authors like Osborne, Wesker, Sillitoe or again Kops described the living conditions of their (anti-)heroes, they anchored their narratives in Britain’s working class set in uncomfortable accommodation, threatened by unemployment, alcohol addiction or racial exclusion and tempted by suicide as an exit door. In soft versions, poor yet fraternal communities, hazardous love or boredom due to a routine existence were also main issues.

34 Hugh Grady, “Modernity, Modernism and Postmodernism in the Twentiethcentury’s Shakespeare” in Michael Bristol, Kathleen McLuskie and Christopher Holmes, Shakespeare and Modern Theatre, The Performance of Modernity, London and New York: Routledge, 2001, p. 30. 35 In Rosancrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, London/Boston: Faber and Faber, 1967, Act Two, p. 58. 36 Op. cit.

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As we have seen, Kops rooted his Hamlet in this social atmosphere to present a vision of Jewish life in East-End London which was also Kops’ own social reflection. Interestingly enough, Kops used Shakespeare’s tale as a background canvas, if only to draw a parallel between two historical periods, the English Renaissance and post-Holocaust Europe, that shared common preoccupations. Yet why Shakespeare? And why in such a realistic context? Even if the morosity of David Levy’s life echoes Hamlet’s, it does not seem sufficient for an author to transform a revenge tragedy into a revised comedy of manners in which a literary ghost (Hamlet) and a physical one (Sam) are confronted. Shakespeare’s play merely served as a pre-text to Kops’ literary debuts, perhaps even as a foil to launch his career? Revisiting a myth is not a leitmotiv in the rest of his oeuvre, which includes TV movie scripts, novels, memoirs, and poetry. We cannot assert that Kops is a rewriter. His singular style, that mingles social matters, especially as far as post-War Jewish communities are concerned, and humour, shapes Kops’ individuality as a contemporary writer and coins an independent literary repertoire that does not limit him to serving as a belated footnote to Shakespeare but which rather stands as an innovative artistic expression.

PART THREE EUROPEAN SHAKESPEARES: CHALLENGING CONTEMPORANEITY

CHAPTER SEVEN THE BARD DOES NOT WANT TO DIE (BEHIND BARS): REWRITING SHAKESPEARE WITHIN VOLTERRA MAXIMUM-SECURITY PRISON MARIACRISTINA CAVECCHI

Italy is a country whose government has declared a state of emergency over its prison system. In these very prisons, however, theatre is a thriving phenomenon and Shakespeare is a vital and frequently staged author among theatrical companies of inmates. Many of these chronically overcrowded prisons, which even the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg has recently defined humiliating and unlawful (Davoli 2014), have become, despite all odds, a breeding ground for actors and directors, who very frequently appropriate the work of the Elizabethan playwright. Theatre in Italian prisons started in the 1980s and has since mushroomed, thanks to the encouragement of prison governors. It has recently come to the fore, attracting international interest due to some fortunate coincidences: Fabio Cavalli’s work with his company of the maximumsecurity prison of Rebibbia, in Rome, became the screenplay for Paolo and Vittorio Taviani’s film Cesare deve morire (Caesar Must Die), which won the Golden Bear at the 2012 Berlin Film Festival and made Italy’s official selection for the Best Foreign Language Film at the 2013 Academy Awards; and Matteo Garrone’s casting of Aniello Arena in his film Reality, which won the Grand Prix award at the 2012 Cannes Film Festival. A former Mafia hit man serving a twenty-year sentence in the prison at Volterra, where he was part of the company directed by Armando Punzo, Aniello interpreted the lead role to rave reviews. If the general public first became acquainted with the ‘Compagnia della Fortezza’ on this occasion, theatre people had already for some time been familiar with Armando Punzo and much appreciated his work with

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the company, which he has headed since its launch in August 1988. Inside this ancient Medici fortress, under Punzo’s guidance convicts have discovered that onstage ‘they have the opportunity of dealing with cultural and philosophical questions which they would never have attempted to address outside’ (Didonna 2012). Often, the medium for these reflections have been Shakespeare’s works, in performances such as Macbeth (2000), Amleto (2001), Hamlice – Saggio sulla fine di una civiltà (2010), Romeo e Giulietta – Mercuzio non vuole morire – Primo Studio (2011), Mercuzio non vuole morire – La vera tragedia in Romeo e Giulietta (2012). Punzo’s company has distinguished itself for both its experimental and artistic qualities, so I will try to read the Volterra experience within the more general context of Italian prison companies, showing how the experiment has pulled down, and continues to pull down, geographical and metaphorical barriers. Also, I will analyse the reasons for which Shakespeare has been appropriated by this company and the ways in which his plays have been rewritten as compelling shows which may be truly defined as post-dramatic in their merging of staging and choreography, words, music and actions, as well as in their fundamental conception as a rite of communion between performers and spectators, between the inside and the outside of the prison. In fact, Punzo’s performances tend, as it were, to ‘escape’ from the prison where they were designed and to progressively invest larger portions of the audience and territory.

All the jails are a stage In Italy prison theatre was born at the beginning of the Eighties, much later than in the Anglo-Saxon world. Its exact date of birth is noted by the website of the Italian Ministry of Justice (Ministero della Giustizia) as the 5 July 1982. That day, for the first time in Italy, six convict-actors were allowed to perform in Jean Genet’s Deathwatch before an audience of more than five hundred spectators in the Albornoz fortress in Spoleto. They were part of the company ‘Teatro – Gruppo’, founded by Antonio Turco and based in the prison of Rebibbia. Today, the company – the very same that inspired Tavian’s film – is known as the ‘Compagnia stabile assai’. For the staging of Genet, the management of Rebibbia collaborated with the ‘magistrato di sorveglianza’ (a parole officer with judicial authority) Luigi Daga, who chose to give a wider interpretation of article 30 and, accordingly, allowed the six convict-actors leave to perform outside the prison. His work to ensure ‘both the development and

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implementation of humane standards for prisons and proper training and recognition of staff was the cause of many positive changes in prison systems worldwide’, and indeed, this first experience was soon followed by others. Luigi Pagano created a theatre workshop in the prison of Brescia in 1984; in 1989, when he was appointed director of ‘San Vittore’ in Milan, he introduced theatre workshops here too, establishing a collaboration with the company ‘Ticvin Teatro’, the brainchild of Olga Vinyals and Donatella Massimilla, the present director of CETEC (Centro Europeo di Teatro e Carcere) (Bernardi 2000: 94). It was thanks to the controversial 1986 prison reform law introduced by Luigi Gozzini and bearing his name (Marino 2006) – a law aimed at rewarding the good behaviour of inmates with an early release, at increasing their chance of working outside the prison and spending brief holidays with their families, that on 22 December 1986, fifty-three convict-actors of the ‘Teatro – Gruppo di Rebibbia’ made their début in Bazar napoletano at the Teatro Argentina, one of Rome’s most important theatres. It is significant that the company performed in the very venue in which the previous year Rick Cluchey and Alan Mandell’s Waiting for Godot opened the season with ‘The San Quentin Drama Workshop’ – the company founded in 1958 in the San Quentin State Prison in San Francisco and supported by Samuel Beckett. The performance had a very strong impact on Italian audiences and critics and certainly contributed to further accelerate the process of growth and experimentation of the newlyborn workshops of the Italian prison system. Over time, theatre in prison has spread to many regions and cities of Italy. According to director Gianfranco Pedullà, who wrote a report for the volume Art and Culture in Prison (Pedullà 2012), the credit is due to the Ente Teatrale Italiano (Institute of Italian Theatre), the national representative body for drama, which in 1997, by means of a memorandum of understanding with the Ministry of Justice, launched some pilot projects in a large number of juvenile detention centers, such as the Teatro Kismet in Bari. However, Pedullà points out in particular that over the years the most prolific output, in terms both of artistic quality and of the number of theatrical projects in prisons, has come from Tuscany, thanks to the strong support of its regional council. The ‘Laboratorio Teatrale nel Carcere di Volterra’ (The theatrical laboratory in the prison of Volterra) launched in August 1988 by the cultural association Carte Blanche, directed by Armando Punzo, stands out among other Tuscan experiences in this area, for its artistic and

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experimental qualities. Over the years this theatrical laboratory has grown progressively and has turned into the ‘Compagnia della Fortezza’, a company involving on a regular basis about fifty inmates, some as actors, others behind the scenes. According to Pedullà, about half of Italy’s more than two hundreds prisons have theater programmes, but ‘none is as renowned as the Compagnia della Fortezza, which has become an important phenomenon in Italian theatre’ (Pedullà 2012) and which has won some of Italy’s most prestigious theater awards, such as the Ubu Prize, a national theater prize which the company has won four times. Over more than twenty-five years of work, the company has produced almost one new show a year. Since 1993, thanks to paragraph 21 of Italian prison law, the performances have also been staged outside the prison and have been hosted by the major Italian theaters and festivals, as well as by many major international festivals. In 1994, the Tuscany Region, the Province of Pisa and the town of Volterra signed an agreement for the establishment of the first ‘Theatre Centre and Prison’, based in Volterra, which became the first step towards the joint protocols signed by the Ente Teatrale Italiano, the Department of Penitentiary Administration of the Ministry of Justice, the Tuscan Region, the Province of Pisa and the city of Volterra for the creation, in 2000, of the ‘Centro Nazionale Teatro e Carcere’ (National Theatre and Prison Centre). The objectives of the national coordinating group for theatre in prison, are ‘to register and monitor the particulars and operating details of each project; create contacts and connections amongst these; build an archive of all available documentation and create a data bank; organise contacts with the public in order to have exchanges and discussions on a National and international level; manage the flow of information and create means of communication through internet sites and other electronic or literary facilities; train instructors; maintain institutional and regional contacts. The national coordinating group also has the goal of organising a festival on a national level in which performances will be staged and discussions on this aspect of Italian theatre will be held’ (Pedullà 2012: 77-86). Furthermore, besides leading a European Socrates project entitled ‘Theatre and Prison in Europe - the training, development and dissemination of innovative methods’, since 1997 Carte Blanche has taken over the artistic direction, as well as the organisational and administrative management of the VolterraTeatro Festival. This means that every year in July, the thousands of people who come to Volterra to attend the festival

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can watch the performances staged by the Compagnia della Fortezza (the company produced a new show every year). Volterra’s drama programme has been so successful that Armando Punzo was invited by Zeina Daccache, the founder and the executive director of Catharsis, the Lebanese Center for Drama Therapy, to hold a workshop in the prison of Roumieh, a village north-east of Beirut. This is an absolute novelty for a prison in the Arabic world. Slowly, the experiment has become ‘a seed of cultural revolution which pushed open the door - just where you would not think that culture would gain an entrance’ (Didonna 2010).

A New Challenge: a Permanent Theatre in Prison Punzo, who worked as an actor with avant-garde troupes before beginning his adventure at Volterra, has chosen to live his life inside the prison, working six days a week: ‘the theatre must be present every day, otherwise the space becomes a prison again’(TimeOut 2011). Sticking tenaciously to his purpose, he has built up a company of about fifty people, working as actors, stage-hands and technicians, and a challenging repertoire, including plays based on works by Bertolt Brecht, Peter Handke, Jean Genet and William Shakespeare. According to Punzo, the very fact that the prisoners had never been exposed to theatre made them much more interesting to work with, since this allowed them to explore things they would never before have tried to come to terms with, and acting has ultimately changed their relationship with both fellow prisoners and the institution. ‘I simply didn’t see a prison,’ Punzo declares as he recounts the birth of the Compagnia della Fortezza: ‘I saw a theatre through the bars. My view didn’t stop at the barriers. I began to see a potential in the inmates’ qualities which was not immediately obvious. That’s why they began to believe in my project, and in me. We started working together and achieved astounding results’ (Didonna 2010). Even though his work has contributed to building the convicts’ selfrespect and love for theatre, he has never been inspired by notions of psychological assistance, therapy or social reform; indeed, as he suggests, ‘it’s not about giving the inmates an outlet or a recreational break. It’s work’ (Povoledo 2009). The prison has become a professional space in an uncommon setting, set up by people who are not professionals, but who have discovered the attraction of the stage, because onstage they have learnt to demolish the commonplaces of reality with its fixed masks and roles, delving into their own potentialities and measuring their opportunities

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for change. Onstage they have discovered the practice of ‘the impossible’ and have learnt to consider the theatre as a type of madness that can change reality – a reality that, especially in prison, constantly reminds you of who you are and prevents any possible metamorphosis. Interestingly, in one of his manifestos, Per un teatro stabile in carcere (Towards a permanent theatre in prison), Punzo unmasked the double nature of the prison: both ‘the site of the real and the metaphor of the veiled prison in which we are all held.’ Remarkably, in Alice in Wonderland, a Theatrical Essay on the End of a Civilisation, the company director played the part of Carroll and during one scene wore chains round his neck which he tied to prison bars. It was obviously a powerful visualisation of the core of this ‘tragedy of power’, in which all the characters try to break free from the roles imposed on them by their playwrights, but it was also a strong visual metaphor of life as a prison. According to Punzo,’underneath it all we are all in prison if you think that we spend our lives inside a role. That sentence is taken to its extreme in prison’ (Povoledo 2009). Indeed, not only does Punzo’s ‘theatre of the impossible’ aim to reveal the constrictive and oppressive nature of reality and the strict relationship between life inside and outside prison, but it also aspires to guide his actors and spectators towards ‘dreaming and a greater freedom’, (Punzo 2013: 29) towards new, ‘impossible’ and utopic worlds. After more than twenty-five years of activity and after convincing many people to believe that an Institute of Punishment can be turned into an Institute of Culture (Punzo 2013: 88), Punzo and Carte Blanche have been working on the building of the first permanent theatre in a prison, ‘the most extraordinary (permanent) theatre ever imagined or seen in the world’ (Punzo 2013: 279). It is a visionary project of a ‘Galera Ideale’ (an Ideal Prison) – the ‘majestic image of a theatre ship nestling in the Tuscan hills – that, in its essence, will be the transformation of a prison into a theatre’. In his manifesto Verso la Galera Ideale (Towards the Ideal Prison) which Punzo signed as The Architect of the Impossible, he wrote that the time has come for the fortress to change its final destination: conceived as a site of punishment, it has to be rethought and transformed into a place that pays tribute to human intelligence and sensibility. This project of the imagination is at the same time very concrete: a group of well-known architects will re-design and turn the prison into spaces where plays can be put on and where workshops for the theatrical, technical and philosophical-literary arts can be hosted. According to the specific project, ‘a prestigious, multiracial theatre’, actors, singers, ballet dancers, musicians, technicians and organisers will be selected/cast on a national level with auditions taking place in all the prisons. As a matter of fact, it

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sometimes already happens that inmates ask to be transferred from another prison to Volterra in order to be part of Punzo’s work. This happened with François Kanouté, as well as with Jamel Soltani, a Tunisian who was transferred from another prison to Volterra, where he discovered the theatre. Even though he is now on a work-release programme and could be on parole during the day, he prefers to spend his time in prison. ‘I’m sacrificing my freedom. I should be out, but I chose to be here,’ he said. ‘People tell me I am crazy, but I am an actor.’ (Povoledo 2009) Punzo concludes his manifesto by venturing to affirm that the realisation of this ideal prison will shake the foundations of our sleepy Italian culture: ‘According to the worm-like minds of the mortal enemies of life, we are an inexplicable triumph that puts to shame the deadly lack of culture of all the lackeys’. Punzo’s ambition is to create a stable repertory company, with a full season, more and more productions and a permanent theater. Despite being one of Europe’s most-recognised theatre companies, if the Compagnia della Fortezza wants to transform into a national public theatre it has to establish clear cut agreements with government ministries and local administrations, and, therefore, this change is still facing resistance. Punzo knows that it is not just question of financement and that only ‘cultivated and clever patrons might be able to fully appreciate the significance of this revolution of the human soul and start this enterprise’. However, he refuses to give in and stubbornly continues his work on projects aimed at shortening the distance separating the inside from the outside of the prison and at awakening public opinion about the dream he shares with the ‘Compagnia della Fortezza’.

Chosen by Shakespeare ‘The author does not exist’, declares Punzo, explaining that ‘it is human nature that produces the writing and the author is simply the medium that mirrors humanity’ (Ronzani 2009). It is therefore not quite correct to say that he and his actors choose the pieces to be staged. In fact, as he says: ‘in a way we do not choose, we are chosen: there are some themes that we have to deal with, and we allow ourselves to be guided’ (Esposito 2013: 90). Shakespeare ‘chose’ them relatively late, in 2000, following the productions of plays deeply rooted in Italian theatrical culture, such as De Simone’s La gatta cenerentola (1989), Elvio Porta and Armando

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Pugliese’s Masaniello (1990), Elvio Porta’s ‘O juorno ‘e San Michele (1991) and Il Corrente (1992), as well as plays of international renown, such as the company’s pièce de résistence, Peter Weiss’ Marat/Sade (1993), Kenneth H. Brown’s The Brig (1994), and Jean Genet’s Les nègres (1996). Shakespeare came powerfully to the company’s attention when they began reflecting on the theme of power. Initially Julius Caesar was selected as the play most suited to stimulate the actors to think about the dynamics of power; the company then turned to Richard II until, finally, ‘something happened’ that pushed them towards Macbeth, since Shakespeare’s tragedy presented them with the opportunity to come face to face with their condition of human beings and of inmates, and to fathom their own souls: ‘A time arrives when it is impossible to escape from oneself. After so many years of work in the prison we could not avoid dealing with the good and the evil, the offence, the crime, the murder, the nightmare and the cathartic and educational function that Macbeth should exert both on the spectators and the actors’. Soon after the Scottish tragedy, Hamlet, staged in 2001, offered them a chance to reflect on ‘the power of the scene’ and the mechanisms of the theatre – a theatre that, while seeming alive and vigorous, is on the contrary often fossilised and dead. Punzo therefore invited the company to read Hamlet through the lenses of Heiner Müller’s Hamletmaschine. The play that, according to the director, most represents the essence of theatre (Punzo 2013: 107) became the occasion for reflecting on the borders between life and art, life inside and outside the prison, but also for questioning the relationships between society and art. Hamlet had to be destroyed so as to show that nothing can ever be as it had been. Thus, in the wake of the European avant-garde experimentation, from Antonin Artaud to Carmelo Bene, Leo De Berardinis, and to Charles Marowitz, Punzo aims to dissolve the logocentric hierarchy, assigning the predominant role to elements other than dramatic logos and language – a feature that his theatre shares with what Hans-Thies Lehmann has defined the postdramatic theatre (Lehmann 2006: 93). As a matter of fact, all Punzo’s rewritings of Shakespeare’s plays can be interpreted in the light of this new theatre aesthetics. Punzo stages the revolt of the characters against ‘the father’ (Shakespeare), who is guilty of having entrapped them in roles they do not want to interpret anymore. The director speaks of ‘a cosmic revolution that happens contemporarily in all his characters’ (Punzo 2013: 213) and, interestingly, the revolution ends up investing the practice of theatre, as well. Punzo’s is a theatre of enigmatic patterns, processes and stories, but with hardly any plot. Thus,

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his rehearsal process becomes a space of experimentation in which Shakespeare can be set free from mere repetition and prejudices. Indeed, rehearsal is a stimulating and, at the same time, unpredictably open process, that takes place collaboratively. On the one hand, the director, who wants to get to know his ensemble not as convicts with personal histories and long-term sentences, but as performers with specific modes of speaking and gesturing, invites everybody to collaborate actively, by choosing lines and suggesting movements. On the other hand, for the actors the act of reading, speaking and improvising without a plot or a definite role represents a challenge. It is also interesting to note that the fact that each convict actor is free to choose whether to speak in his own language or in dialect is crucial to the deconstruction and rewriting of Shakespeare. Italian theatre critic Massimo Marino, who has often collaborated with the company and who wrote the introduction to Punzo’s volume È ai vinti che va il suo amore. I primi venticinque anni di autoreclusione con la Compagnia della Fortezza di Volterra, writes that the actors of Volterra work as actors of the commedia dell’arte or as members of a gang planning a robbery: each actor has a personal repertoire of parts, cues and gestures, from which, at the moment of the performance, he selects the parts, cues and gestures he needs in accordance with a given canovaccio, which has previously been built up collectively by the company. This canovaccio changes continuously from performance to performance, according to the situations, the locations (the prison, a theatre, a square), the placing or composition of the audience, and the director asks his actors to be ready and reactive, prepared to improvise and, above all, to free their energies.

Hamlet in the fortress Adaptability and energy were certainly required when Shakespeare’s tragedy of power, Hamlet, met and intertwined with Alice in Wonderland and Carroll’s anarchy. Both the play and the novel became part of a biennial theatrical project that debuted in 2009 inside the prison of Volterra, with its first part, Alice in Wonderland – Essay on the End of a Civilisation, winning the UBU Prize for best direction. Loosely based on Lewis Carroll’s novel, the text intersperses it with soliloquies from Shakespeare, predominantly from Hamlet, but also from Genet, Pinter, Chekhov and Müller. In July 2010 it was followed by Hamlice – Essay on the end of a civilisation, again performed in the prison of Volterra, but also

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outside, at the Persio Flacco Theatre in Volterra, at the Fabbricone in Prato and, the following year, at the Hangar Bicocca in Milan, against the impressive background of Anselm Kiefer’s The Seven Heavenly Palaces installation.

Armando Punzo in Hamlice (2010). Courtesy of the the photographer Stefano Vaja.

Punzo started to work with the image of ‘transformation’: the possibility the characters have of freeing themselves from their written, fixed, roles. According to the director, the Shakespearean characters had to be thought as ‘thinking spirits undergoing a continuous transformation’: ‘through contamination with other books by other authors, they move away from the books that confine them as if imprisoning them within immutable roles, in search of other words, other actions, other (perhaps as yet unimagined) possibilities.’ Significantly, graffiti and letters composed the dominant visual feature of the show. In fact, spectators were admitted into the prison of Volterra through a door that had been modified to look like the cover of a copy of Hamlet, and found themselves trapped inside a claustrophobic ‘bunker of words’ (Ciari 2011: 34), whose walls, floors, ceilings and furniture were covered with words from Hamlet. Inside this book/bunker, Armando Punzo/Hamlet welcomed everybody with a prologue consisting of a collage of fragments from Shakespeare’s tragedy, while the absence of all other characters and therefore of any action forced

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the spectators to concentrate on the scenography and on those words written everywhere that Punzo read aloud ‘as if they were the names of people who had been slaughtered’ (Ciari 2011: 36). Soon afterwards, among the various characters who crowded into the corridor and the rooms of the bunker protesting against ‘the book’, Claudius appeared reciting Tommaso Marinetti’s Futurist Manifesto, which voiced the revolutionary invitation of abolishing traditional syntax and using ‘words in freedom’. Freedom is also a feature of the way in which the spectators experience the performance. By means of a non-hierarchical use of signs aimed at a synesthetic perception and contradicting the established hierarchy at the top of which we find language, diction and gesture, Punzo’s theatre leads spectators to the experience of simultaneity. Nobody is able to take in all the simultaneous events, because the carnivalesque performances of the actors take place at the same time in different spaces of the prison. Hamlet, Alice, Humpty Dumpty, the Mad Hutter, Don Catellino and Donna Gesualda from Annibale Ruccello’s Ferdinando, the Ghost of Hamlet’s father, the Queen of Hearts, the White Rabbit, the Ghosts of the alphabet, Black Ophelia, Polonius, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, Horatio, the Drag Queen and many others, all simultaneously perform their repertoire of improvised actions in the corridor, in ‘the dressing room’, in ‘the tearoom’, in ‘the chamber of chains’, in ‘the sculptor’s workshop’ or in the ‘stanzetta del teatrino’ (the little room of the little theatre). The spectators move around the theatrical space and are allowed the freedom to select individually and independently what fragments they want (or are able) to watch, which means that, sometimes, they can experience frustration since they perceive they are missing out on something important which is taking place somewhere else. Their ‘desire for orientation turns out to be disavowed’ (Lehmann 2006: 88). This ‘shared space’, equally experienced and used by performers and spectators is another important ingredient Punzo’s theatre shares with postdramatic theatre. On the one hand, the actors ‘are not afforded the protection of the stage, being open to all sides […] to the gaze, the de-concentration, perhaps also the disturbance and aggression of impatient or annoyed visitors’ (Lehmann 2006: 88). On the other hand, by entering the theatrical space, the spectator cannot avoid becoming himself a ‘participant’ from the point of view of the other spectators; moreover, the physical proximity to the actors involves entering into direct contact with them through the eyes or even possibly through fleeting bodily contact and this inevitably leads one to reflect on the modalities and norms of interpersonal communication. By the mere fact of their presence, the spectators become

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responsible for the theatrical process, which they can contribute to but also destroy with their behaviour. Marinettian (or even a Joycian) dance of letters came at the end, outside, in the prison’s yard, where spectators found a heap of huge polystyrene letters. In a liberating outburst actors and spectators joined in throwing vowels and consonants into the air: like upside-down rain the flow of letters rose up to erase all the well-worn words and stories, so that they could be rewritten all over again, following a different grammar. Left to the mercy of the weight of the air and of chance, all those letters were finally free to match up into new and different combinations and to finally say things never before said, nor imagined.

Hamlice (2010). Courtesy of the photographer Stefano Vaja.

Dressed as the Black Queen, Punzo played the role of the officiant and guide of a liberating rite, in which actors and spectators alike took part (Ill. 3): The revolt of the words. / Out out out out… / Out, out! All the words in revolt. […] Light, light, letters, light, light / Out the revolt falls to all / all take part / all lighten these words, these letters / these letters fly fly / fly in the theatre of the court / fly these letters / fly in the theatre of the court / fly light light light / and compound new words / never imagined and never said / just dreamt of / fly fly the letters in the court / light letters light letters / to compound new images / to compound new dreams / to

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compound new words / to compound new images / to think what has not yet been thought. (Punzo 2013: 211, 220)

It is a vision in which not only the spectators share the same space as the performers, but they are actually invited to take part in scenic actions and in a choral rite that implies a strong sense of belonging to a community. As a matter of fact, Punzo’s performances liberate ‘the formal, ostentatious moment of ceremony from its sole function of enhancing attention and valorise[s] it for its own sake, as an aesthetic quality, detached from all religious and cultic references’ (Lehmann 2013: 69).

Volterra is a stage and Mercutio does not want to die Romeo and Juliet next became the pretext for a new challenge: a grand-scale production also involving the inhabitants of Volterra and of the nearby provinces. The project, which aimed at further tightening the links between the prison and the territory, comprises a first study by Punzo, Romeo e Giulietta – Mercuzio non vuole morire, and an extended version of this previous performance, entitled Mercuzio non vuole morire – La vera tragedia in Romeo and Giulietta, both of which premiered at the Festival VolterraTeatro, respectively in July 2011 and 2012. During his work in progress Punzo customarily explores multiple texts, themes and artists, morphing his theatre into a permanent discovery laboratory, which constantly strives to engender transformations in both space and spectators. In the wake of his re-mythologising of Shakespeare, and thinking perhaps also of Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead (1967), which may be evoked in his title through reference to death, Punzo re-reads the tragedy from a different perspective and, as Stoppard does in his comedy with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, promotes Mercutio to the leading role, in place of the two lovers. In Shakespeare’s tragedy Mercutio is a secondary character who dies very early in the plot. In fact, as Punzo argues, he dies even before the duel that ultimately kills him, when, after the Queen Mab speech, his friend Romeo reproaches him for ‘talk[ing] of nothing’ (1.4.95) and for being too much of a dreamer and a visionary. Like Italo Calvino, Punzo believes firmly that Mercutio embodies lightness (Punzo 2013: 243); like Calvino, he too, would wish his life spared and would like ‘Mercutio’s dancing gait to come along with us across the threshold of the new millennium’ (Calvino 1988: 18). Queen Mab’s friend, Mercutio is ‘the poet, the actor, the artist, the philosopher’ and stands for all those things that nowadays appear useless: imagination,

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lightness, culture. ‘His sacrifice in Shakespeare is unbearable, unacceptable’ (Punzo 2013: 231), not only because his death marks the beginning of the death of youth itself, overwhelmed by the fight between Capulets and Montagues, but also because it means the destruction of a whole world of poetry and beauty. Since sparing Mercutio would mean saving Romeo and Juliet, but also both poetry and theatre, Mercutio escapes from his written role and written destiny, and rewrites his story with a new ending, in which a different world is possible. However, and most importantly, in his effort to build a new world Mercutio needs help and therefore Punzo calls up as many people as he can and invites them to share Mercutio’s dream. Mercuzio non vuole morire is a unique project, which has become a symbol of renaissance, redemption, hope for the prisoners, for Volterra and for Italian culture. Significantly, this performance/happening has toured in many Italian theatres but also in many important non-theatre locations, such as the Palazzo Strozzi courtyard in Florence (3 July 2014). For the premiere at the VolterraTeatro Festival, the action took over the entire Tuscan town and the audience became protagonists themselves, not only by sharing the town with the performers, but also through their involvement in a number of symbolic actions. This compelling reinterpretation of Romeo and Juliet, unique in its kind, merged theatre and happening in a theatrical experience that turned the town itself into a theatre capable of staging an alternative version of Shakespeare’s play. Punzo started by explaining to the spectators that he needed their help. He first asked them to get their hands painted red, thus immediately turning them into accomplices of the many murderers in Shakespeare’s tragedy, those Capulets and Montagues that Punzo defines ‘evil essences, butchers of all hope’ (Punzo 2013: 231). Their hands, like so many Lady Macbeths, soiled with blood of youth, they marched through the narrow streets of the medieval Tuscan town to the wild beating of drums until they arrived in Piazza dei Priori, where some girls were lying on the ground. This procession of people holding up their red hands was accompanied by others who denounced the intolerable violence of the situation by holding up a huge white cloth on which, in black letters, appeared the words ‘mentre loro si disputano i nostri migliori figli muoiono’ (‘While they [Capulets and Montagues] quarrel our best children die’).

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Mercutio non vuole morire (2012). Juliets in Piazza dei Priori, Volterra. Courtesy of the photographer Stefano Vaja.

Several Juliets, previously selected amongst the audience, were made to lie down in the middle of the Piazza dei Priori to represent Juliet’s death; others carried artificial red roses and lay them on the breasts of the dead Juliets. Interestingly, during the rehearsal, to create the figure of Juliet, Punzo collaborated with some students from ‘Scuola di Teatro Sociale e Arti Performative’ in Florence, whose director, Elena Turchi, is also the company’s assistant director. It was their idea to think of Juliet as a kind of marionette and partner the actress playing Juliet with a Juliet marionette, her actions mirroring those of her wooden alter ego. When the performance had almost come to an end, the spectators were invited to hold the books they had been asked to bring to the performance in different ways and pose in a tableau vivant. The powerful, if surreal, composition aimed at visually and metaphorically representing the communal effort to disrupt the ordinary experience of reading. Everybody was then invited to read out loud a passage from his/her book so that an extremely moving polyphony of different voices and languages resounded in the square, reminding everyone present of the importance of words and culture and of their circulation. The final action of the performance was equally significant. The grief and the sorrow of the characters in the play

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became one with the individual sorrows and grief of the spectators in the very moment in which they were invited to imagine that the bags or suitcases they had been asked to bring contained a tear, ‘a tear shed for some personal pain’, explained the director. Punzo asked the audience first to make physical contact with the suitcase (to hug it, to hold it, to sit or to lie on it), and then to run with it through the streets of Volterra and back into the square where everybody, having cast aside their ‘suitcases of sorrow’, finally danced a joyfully cathartic and liberating ring-a-ring-o’roses. By strengthening the sense of sharing between convicts and spectators, this finale as indeed all the finales of Punzo’s rewritings of Shakespeare seem to question the position of the performance within the tradition of “prison Shakespeare”, a tradition, as Amy Scott-Douglass argues in her volume Shakespeareinside. The Bard Behind Bars, that insists on the idea of a salvific Shakespeare, perceived as ‘a creative, social and spiritual life force; a vital and necessary reminder that, no matter what, we are all human beings’ (Scott-Douglas 2007: 129).

CHAPTER EIGHT A CONTEMPORARY APPROPRIATION OF THE TEMPEST CALLED ‘CALIBAN’S CASTLE’ MARGARET ROSE

Caliban’s Castle. If pigs could fly, my sequel to Shakespeare’s The Tempest, stems from a fascination with the character of Caliban, dating back to the late 1979. During rehearsals for Giorgio Strehler’s production of The Tempest, I watched as the director magisterially brought Caliban to life. In contrast to Tino Carraro’s Prospero, whose dignified and regal carriage announced his status as a powerful Renaissance duke, Michele Placido’s Caliban was longhaired and unkempt. Still the latter, Strehler insisted, was not a ‘monster’ or ‘uncivilised’ since he spoke a language (English, according to Strehler) which he had learnt from Prospero and Miranda. (A. Serpieri in G. Restivo, 2010: 158-159) Here was an outsider difficult to define, compared to the bunch of royals and courtiers who visit the island. A question kept niggling me. Who exactly was Caliban? In an introduction to The Tempest, Virginia Vaughan (Vaughan, 1991:7) succinctly expresses the difficulty critics have likewise experienced regarding the interpretation of this island dweller: ‘Caliban is the most enigmatic and the most susceptible to drastic fluctuations in interpretation. He is Shakespeare’s changeling.’ Vaughan’s statement is supported by a rapid glance at the divergent exegeses concerning Caliban through the centuries, many of which is seems to me are influenced by the definition of Caliban in the cast list of the 1623 Folio as ‘a salvage and deformed slave’ . Six decades after Shakespeare penned The Tempest, John Dryden defines Caliban as ‘the monster’ of the play, going on to affirm that he (Caliban) is, ‘a person which is not in nature, a boldness which, at first sight, would appear

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intolerable. For he makes him a species of himself, bigotten by an Incubus on a Witch.’ (Dryden, 1676: 269) Dryden’s deprecatory remarks marked the beginning of a long line of critical essays, as well as stage productions, where Caliban was represented as a kind of fish, a dog with two heads, a lizard, a monkey, a half man, half snake, or even a turtle. Painters, starting from William Hogarth in 1736, followed suit, portraying this native of the island, with an animal face, cleft feet, claws instead of hands, and other physical disabilities (M. Spicci in Restivo G., 2010: 361-400) This critical trend and production history extends until the second half of the twentieth century, when Caliban finally came in for a reappraisal. At that point he received greater critical attention than either Prospero or Ariel, leading Frank Kermode (Kermode, 1954: xxv) in the 1954 Arden edition of The Tempest to remark, ‘He is the ground of the play’, while in 1992 Harold Bloom (Bloom, 1992: 1) went even further, affirming Caliban’s absolute centrality, ‘We are now in the age of Caliban rather than in the Time of Ariel or the Era of Prospero.’ Bloom rightly underscores that it is through Caliban that Shakespeare invites Europeans to review the misdeeds committed in our colonial past It was with this recent critical reappraisal of Caliban in mind that in 2009 I began writing a sequel to The Tempest, where Caliban looms large.

Contemporary Milan and Glasgow, Important Triggers for Caliban’s Castle Seeing that I live and work in Milan, the play took shape against a backdrop of Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi’s rightwing government. During his time in office Berlusconi created a string of political scandals, provoking the rage of people on the Left at the way he made a mockery of politics, merging his private and public interests, by blatantly running his own television empire while governing the country. It was this Milan, the same city which Shakespeare’s Prospero was forced to leave in the early seventeeth century, that stood as the setting for my play. In 2009 the city was, and still is, one of striking contrasts. As I penned Caliban’s Castle, Milan had a right wing City Council, which seemed to be doing very little to solve the serious environmental problems, where pollution sometimes spiralled so high traffic could no longer circulate and the Milanese found themselves gasping for breath. Green zones in Milan are hard to find, and the existing ones are badly cared for. Since the early 1990s, moreover,

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there has been a massive influx of migrants (around 15 percent of Milan’s population), and it seemed to me that the authorities hadn’t drawn up a viable plan to find these people homes and jobs. On the other hand, Milan is an international city of fashion and design, which appears in the media as a glitzy and trendy place to live. Many of these factors trickled into my sequel.

A visit to Glasgow I was already writing the play when, on a visit to Glasgow, I dropped by at the Institute of Contemporary Art, where a meeting of guerrilla gardeners was taking place. Many of them were members of Kabloom, a small design company based in Scotland promoting eco-friendly products (www.kabloom.co.uk). Having set out stalls piled with flowers and plants, they were giving away seedboms (a compressed mix of seeds and soil). I listened as they explained the history behind the guerilla gardening movement, which started in the 1970s and has since spread to many parts of Europe and America. It was fascinating to hear how the members made regular forays in Glasgow and its hinterland in order to scatter their seedboms and recoup derelict land. Having travelled back to Milan with a couple of seedboms in my case, I threw them in the grounds of the Sforza Castle, making a wish they would thrive. This meeting in Glasgow proved fundamental to the subsequent development of Caliban’s character.

Caliban’s Castle, a utopian fantasy Instead of leaving Caliban on the island as Shakespeare does at the end of The Tempest, in Caliban’s Castle I imagine that Caliban manages to stowaway on the royal boat, heading for Naples. Then catastrophe strikes. During the journey, Ferdinand dies of a fever, destroying any hope of a royal wedding between him and Miranda. This twist of fate means that Prospero decides to head back to Milan, taking Miranda and Caliban with him. The trio arrive at Prospero’s former palace, which I imagine to be Milan’s Sforza Castle, even if Shakespeare makes no specific reference to this. In 2009 the grounds and gardens were badly kept, stray cats roamed everywhere, giving the place an air of abandonment. The sequel’s subtitle, ‘if pigs could fly’, underscores the play’s utopic nature. Shakespeare’s Gonzalo in The Tempest envisages a new “golden age”, where all members of the commonwealth would be equal, nobody would work, but just the same there would be an abundance of food. (Bate, ed., 2008: 46) In his own way, my Caliban envisages a new golden age where life in

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Milan will be drastically different. Even if a recently arrived migrant from a remote island, he succeeds not only in settling down in Milan, but joins a group of guerilla gardeners, who aim to improve the quality of life in the city, by recouping disused areas and turning them into green zones. Subsequently Caliban takes possession of Milan’s Sforza castle and sends Prospero packing for a second time. With the Duke out of the way, together with Miranda, Caliban is able to set into motion an environmentally friendly plan for the future of the castle and the city. As my story evolved it grew steadily more rooted in contemporary Milan. All three characters abhor the urban degradation. Prospero is disgusted at the state of the grounds and gardens, the transformation of his private library into a public lending library and the thousands of pigeons that regularly foul the lawns. To voice his anger, he agrees to give a live interview on one of Berlusconi’s private television channels, but is swiftly taken off the air. With Ariel no longer around to carry out his orders and having foregone his magic arts, this former mage feels helpless and at play’s conclusion returns to the island. As for Miranda, she is initially captivated by Milan’s fashion scene and delights in shopping in the stellar boutiques of Via Monte Napoleone. Like her father, she sometimes has vague reminiscences of the island, but unlike him, she settles down and in the end joins forces with Caliban. She, too, desires a sort of “brave new world” that Shakespeare’s Miranda alludes to. It is Caliban, however, who is the driving force behind the play. From the minute he arrives in Italy, he feels physically sick due to the noise and sound pollution of city living. CALIBAN: Strange sounds and voices fill my ears Tic tac, tic tac As the boy loads the shelves Click click, click click As she digits her card number Bang bang, bang bang As he plonks the bottles down Noises I’ve never heard before My head’s thudding My fingers running over plastic, tin foil, film wrap My nose takes in the thousand smells My head’s reeling I collapse in the aisle, People are running “There’s this strange sailor bloke,

A Contemporary Appropriation of the Tempest called ‘Caliban’s Castle’ 139 he’s fainted, call an ambulance.” I heave myself up A mouse jumps out of my pocket The trolley’s chock full of … Don’t know how … I shoot towards the exit, crash through the door crash, crock, clang Air, sunlight, breeze, They’re in pursuit, on my scent And I’m racing back to the castle.

Shakespeare’s Caliban, in conversation with the two Neapolitans, Stephano and Trinculo, claims he knows ‘every fertile inch of the island’ and vows to Stephano, ‘I’ll show thee the best springs. I’ll pluck thee berries. I’ll fish for thee and get thee wood enough.” (Bate, ed., 2008, 56, lines 159 and 160). Likewise my Caliban stays close to nature, taking care of the cats, who roam around the Castle grounds, and the mice in the castle dungeons. Miranda, talking to audience, as Caliban starts fondling a cat that wraps itself round his neck MIRANDA The cat’s sniffing him, brushing his legs, mewing a kind of recognition. Erm … don’t know why. Another moggy’s just jumped onto his shoulders, it’s pitch black, and he’s smiling from ear to ear. Its wrapped its tail round his neck. I’ve never seen Caliban laughing like that before.

It soon becomes apparent that like Shakespeare’s Caliban who swears, “This island’s mine by Sycorax my mother’, a line, revealing how proud he to be king of the island, my Caliban is soon motivated by a sense of responsibility which pushes him to try and clean up Milan. CALIBAN Prospero’s castle here in central Milan, No real sea, but this huge moat, Circling the castle walls, Dirty water, mosquito infested. Cats roaming high and low, Lovely creatures better than humans. I fell for them the moment I saw them. Mice, hundreds, no thousands, Moonlight dancers, multiplying on my grub. The lawns need weeding, yellow and brown, Where grass and flowers should be. The trees, wilting and uncared for.

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More outgoing and determined than Miranda and Prospero, this islander is dead set on turning Milan into the greenest city in Europe. Caliban’s achievements closely resemble the agenda of those gardeners I met in Glasgow, who were convinced you could improve the environment, using sustainable, responsible strategies. Here is how a television newsreader describes them during the play: NEWSREADER: The police have declared a state of emergency. Via Dante, Piazza Scala, Piazza Duomo are rapidly being covered by flowers, thousands of red poppies and giant yellow sunflowers, some of them, 26 feet tall. Christmas trees have shot up on street corners, defying the summer heat. Lavender’s bursting from litter bins in and around the castle, covering the usual stench of cigarette ends and beer cans. A man, with strange feet, was sighted on CCTV cameras near the Scala opera house at two minutes past midnight. He hasn’t been seen since. A police spokeswoman announced that a note was found, signed, “the green fingered elf”. The contents of which are being withheld until further notice.

Publication and production The same year that I finished Caliban’s Castle I found a publisher (Rose, 2009: 56-62), and a year later Francesca Angeli made an Italian translation. Still the thing I most wanted was missing. I couldn’t find a company interested in staging my play. Finally in 2013 Massimilliano Manca, director of Teatro dell’Armadillo, told me he was keen to produce it. He wished to create a promenade performance at Villa Burba in Rho, a town at ten kilometres from Milan. A visit to Rho confirmed that the venue was highly suitable. Inside, what is a beautiful seventeenth-century villa, Massimiliano had chosen a large room complete with a fireplace and old paintings, while in the surrounding parkland squirrels scurried and turtles basked in the sun on the edge of ponds. Massimiliano and his actors organised a couple of sessions when we worked together on the Italian version of the play, exploring the main ideas, the characters and the language. Seeing that the actors, playing Prospero and Miranda hailed from the North of Italy, it soon became evident that their accented Lombard Italian, made the play’s criticism of Milan’s degradation very powerful, and we decided to introduce further Lombard expressions. As for Caliban’s Italian, at the outset it sounded slightly foreign, but improved as the character’s grew gradually more selfconfident.

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For the opening of Caliban’s Castle at Villa Burba in June 2014, the audience was a mixed one, including children and old people. As Prospero curses Berlusconi’s television empire and the horrendous changes in his formerly beautiful city, mimicking Berlusconi’s way of talking and mannerisms, the audience was buzzing. Caliban first appears as a ragged, dishevelled individual who has just disembarked in Genoa. His appearance called to mind the many boat people, who have landed in Southern Italy in recent times. However, he slowly transformed before our eyes into a savvy Milanese business man ready to take over the Castle. Miranda, too, underwent a sea change; from being a rather naïve young woman, she gains in confidence and in a string of audience addresses persuades spectators to support her plan to help Caliban with his audacious project. In a Q and A session after the performance, it was clear from the remarks of audience members that they had embraced the characters’ anger at the scandals and problems engulfing Milan and the rest of Italy. I was delighted that the play had struck them as so relevant to their lives.

Caliban’s Castle, a short story, with illustrations by Emily Chapell Since writing Caliban’s Castle, Caliban’s energy and determination have acted as a catalyst for other projects. In 2011 I turned the stage play into a short story in which Caliban tells his tale in the first person. The story has since been illustrated by Manchester born artist, Emily Chapell, whom I met at the Glasgow meeting mentioned earlier. The owner of a thriving allotment in Glasgow, where she lives and works, Emily immediately related to Caliban’s sense of adventure, daring, enthusiasm, his rebelliousness in the face of authority and most of all his commitment to environmental issues. In 2014 the story was published as an e-book (Rose1, 2014), while in July 2014 Roberta Verde completed an Italian translation, currently being illustrated by Nicole Leonardi.

Caliban’s future In a European Horizon project planned to begin at the same time as Milan’s Expo 2015, “Feeding the Planet”, I am coordinating an interdisciplinary team in Milan that, together with partners in Nice and Manchester, hopes to create Shakespearean teaching gardens in our respective cities. We aim to devise innovative teaching methods that will create a new generation of gardener-artists who are aware of the

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environmental problems facing our planet. In Milan there will hopefully be a “Caliban’s Garden”, containing as many as possible of the herbs and plants Shakespeare mentions in his plays. In the garden a Caliban figure, a sort of contemporary Virgil, will teach children and young people about the plants there, encouraging them to work in the garden and engage in a series of artistic activities, stemming from their experiences in nature. In our digital era when the rupture with Nature is growing steadily deeper, I hope these gardens and our modern-day Calibans will provide an antidote to the largely online lives of many young people.

CHAPTER NINE TOPSY-TURVYING THE MERCHANT OF VENICE: SHYLOCK AS WESKER’S RESPONSE TO THE RENAISSANCE JEW ANNE ETIENNE AND ESTELLE RIVIER

Introduction: getting rid of Shakespeare’s shadow It is only since I began writing plays that I have discovered how great a playwright Shakespeare is and I have a strong inclination to recommend that he be banned from the theatre for about fifty years in order to give a new generation of playwrights the opportunity to flower.1

Despite his admiration, Arnold Wesker felt unnerved by the ‘shadow of Shakespeare’ (Leeming, 125) and the haunting stereotype of the Jew created by the Bard. In 1975 he nonetheless decided to write his Shylock – initially titled The Merchant.2 Interestingly, the original title was closer to Shakespeare’s play: The Merchant calls forth the ghost of its ancestry while evoking the pivotal theme of capitalism. One may suggest that, by avoiding the obvious, Wesker initially and uncommonly shied from giving Shylock its centre-stage place.3 This new play, for Wesker rightly insists against it being viewed as a re-writing, emerged as a personal response to a character that appeared unrealistic no matter how he was performed. It was also to amend the universal vision of Shylock, a representation of the Jew which was utilised by Hitler to confirm his Holocaust, that Wesker set

1

Arnold Wesker, ‘Shakespeare - 400 years’. Thirty lines commissioned by the Moscow Literary Gazette, 4 April 1964. Not printed. 2 The first draft was completed on 19 May 75. This study is based on the ninth and final version of the script, finalised after the London workshop production directed by the author at The Riverside Studio, London in 1989. 3 A mistake rectified, thanks to the oft-repeated pleas of Wesker’s German translator.

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out to modernise and humanise a theatrical villain.4 According to him, it is impossible for contemporary spectators not to know the original play. Hence, his composition borrows from the same three sources, openly keeping the ‘pound of flesh’, the caskets and Jessica’s love story as the central elements of the plot. Beyond this common structural skeleton, the fleshing up of the characters points to a willingness to replace the twodimensional stereotype of the Jew by a variety of contrasted Jewish images and voices, by humane and recognisable characters who need no apology. In the following study, we aim to compare Shakespeare’s and Wesker’s plays. We will investigate the contexts in which they crafted the character of Shylock and how those cultural, political and personal backgrounds will have influenced the authors’ depictions of the emblematic Jew. While the absence of the ‘politically correct’ may have enabled Shakespeare to playfully navigate between a villainous and comic portrayal, Wesker’s contemporary and personal standpoint would equally affect the understanding of the character and the genre of the play. The productions of the plays further force upon us the question of the realism of the character in that it will not, in our post-Holocaust era, be represented and viewed as the cruel vengeful caricatural personage but is used to question international history. Thus, the study takes into account the very relevance of the writing process which triggers a dialogue between two authors, making the one survive through the other, and inducing an audience to be a critical reader of both

Shakespeare’s Shylock: an unrealistic portrayal of the Jew What can hardly be discussed is that The Merchant of Venice (159698) is one of the most controversial plays written by Shakespeare. A short time before, Christopher Marlowe’s own play entitled Jew of Malta had been performed by the Lord Strange’s Men in 1592. Marlowe’s play probably served as a source of inspiration to Shakespeare’s own work and can also be viewed as a response to it5. Marlowe had already depicted a mischievous and malevolent Jew called Barabas – after the Biblical 4

See the interview of Julia Pascal: ‘[The Merchant of Venice] was used by Hitler as propaganda – the Nazis loved that play. We can’t ignore that.’ Coup de théâtre, 2014, p. 210. The argument of Shylock as ‘poster boy for German Nazi propaganda’ is also developed in Horowitz’s ‘Shylock after Auschwitz’. 5 It is conveniently stated that Shakespeare probably wrote The Merchant between 1596 and 1598 while Marlowe wrote The Jew of Malta in 1589 or 1590.

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Barabbas, a thief who was pardoned from crucifixion in place of Jesus (Matthew 27, v. 16–21). His work appeared as a symbol of anti-Semitism because his main character, Barabas, is a villain who steals, cheats, and indulges in murder. Shakespeare’s own play was born in a still religiously-agitated period resulting from Henry VIII’s schism, followed by Protestant Edward VI, Catholic Mary Tudor and Anglican Elizabeth I. ‘The controversies stemming from the confrontation between two fraternal religions, fanaticism and intolerance, … hatred and resentment continuing even after a theoretically settled peace, led to greater trouble, freed vile instincts of vengeance and violence, and roused discords,’ Maurice Abiteboul asserts in his depiction of Shakespeare’s Renaissance. (Abiteboul, 2005:71)6 One may wonder how a people marked by constant changes that were challenging their faith and convictions, and even questioning both the Pope’s authority and the monarch as a Supreme Governor of the Church of England, could remain spared from doubts? Later on, when Elizabeth’s compromise known as the ‘Elizabethan Settlement’ helped establish a kind of tolerance among religious groups in 1559, it did not fully eradicate suspicions and persecutions. As James Shapiro develops in his study, Shakespeare and the Jews, the question of Jewishness was connected to the English people’s own anxiety about religion and the notion of race. To define their own identity as a nation, English men and women would assess the value of other communities’ traits such as the Jews’.7 When in parallel, we consider the history of Jews in Renascent Italy, we are aware of the persecutions they had suffered for decades and still suffered from when Shakespeare wrote The Merchant of Venice. Venice was one of the major centres where they had gathered after their exile from Avignon-based popes and Spanish Inquisition. As merchants or bankers, the Jews found better living conditions there, as well as in Florence, Genoa or Pisa. The ghetto of Venice which serves as background canvas to Shakespeare’s Merchant was created in 1516 in an abandoned site of a 14th-century foundry that produced cannons. From this place derives the word ‘ghetto’ since ‘geto’ is old Venetian dialect for ‘foundry’. There, the 6

« Les controverses, nées de l’affrontement entre deux religions sœurs, le fanatisme et l’intolérance (…), les haines et les rancœurs, qui persistèrent même une fois le calme revenu et la paix théoriquement rétablie, eurent pour effet de déchaîner les passions, de libérer les instants les plus bas de vengeance et de violence, de réveiller les discordes. » 7 James Shapiro. Shakespeare and the Jews. See Introduction, pp. 1-12.

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Jews were victims of humiliations until Pope Sixtus V (1585–1590) allowed them to reside in all parts of Italy, repealed some of the previous regulations and gave them more freedom. This period corresponds to Shakespeare writing The Merchant and we may consider that he was aware both of the Jews’ hardships and of their renewed hopes. Yet, Shakespeare wrote his play in England, and would therefore also be aware of the opinion of his counterparts towards the Jews when he shaped Shylock. If there were virtually no Jews in England during his lifetime, and if those of Jewish descent were not persecuted, there was one major event which Shakespeare could not have ignored: in 1593, Queen Elizabeth’s physician Roderigo Lopez was accused of trying to poison her. He was convicted of treason and executed in public, and the fact that he was a ‘Marrano’, i.e. a Jew who had converted to Christianity from Judaism, led to an outbreak of anti-Jewish sentiment in the country. Furthermore, there were also rumours circulating through sermons, pamphlets or illustrations that would contribute to portray the Jew as a villain. Among them was the Jewish practice of ritual murder which consisited in abducting and circumcising Christians. All these contrasted feelings towards Jewish people may have led Shakespeare to depict Shylock as a two-fold or mixed portrait. He was certainly influenced by history that offered a strictly biblical interpretation of the Jew being either revered (Moses) or despised (Jesus’ murderers), and by a more melodramatic approach emerging in the Renaissance. For instance, some critics, such as Erich Auerbach, have depicted Shylock as being a multi-faceted hero, tragic, melodramatic and farcical: … [Shylock] endows a kind of dark and very human grandeur at the same time; and generally speaking, he is not deprived of a disturbing depth, of strength and passion, of a powerful countenance. In the end however, Shakespeare … [who] had already strongly underlined the Jew’s ridicule and grotesque tendencies, his avarice and his somewhat senile concerns, … [shows] him [as] a truly farcical character.8

8 ‘[Shylock] revêt une sorte de grandeur sombre et en même temps très humaine ; et d’une manière générale, il ne manque pas d’une inquiétante profondeur, de force et de passion, de puissance dans l’expression. À la fin, pourtant, Shakespeare … [qui] avait déjà fortement accentué les traits ridicules et grotesques du Juif, son avarice, son inquiétude quelque peu sénile, … [le montre] franchement [telle] une figure de farce.’ E. Auerbach, Mimésis. La représentation de la réalité dans la littérature occidentale. p. 317.

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Others, like Evangeline O'Connor, point to Shakespeare’s intention to present him as an unforgivable vengeful tyrant who despises Christians to the extent of almost murdering Antonio: [Shylock's] impassioned appeal in the first scene of the third act, "Hath not a Jew eyes," etc., is the only place where Shakespeare seems to intend arousing the least sympathy for the usurer. In all other scenes his meanness and avarice are dwelt upon almost to the exclusion of his justifiable resentment at the insults to his race. He hates Antonio more for spoiling his business than for reviling his religion; and he would gladly see his only child dead before him if he might regain his ducats. There seems to be no reason to believe that Shakespeare intended any rebuke to the Jew-hating spirit of his time.9

These opposite views lead us to observe two realities: firstly, as Shapiro points out, Shakespeare’s opinion about the Jew cannot be clearly defined by a twentieth (or twenty-first) reader or audience10. Secondly, Shakespeare’s Shylock is a complex character that the playwright alternately presented as a rogue and as a victim. In the opening scenes, Shylock exhibits every sign of being the piece's villain, the unpleasant money-hungry Jewish usurer, with asides to the audience: I hate [Antonio] for he is a Christian: But more, for that in low simplicity He lends out money gratis, and begins down The rate of usance here with us in Venice. [I.3.39-42]

Then Shakespeare has him act out another stereotype – a ritual murder when in Act IV, scene 1, Shylock insists on getting his pound of flesh rather than ducats: You’ll ask me why I rather choose to have A weight of carrion flesh, than to receive Three thousand ducats? I’ll not answer that: But say it is my humour; … [V.1.40-43]

Yet, throughout the play, Shakespeare also depicts a man who suffers much at the hands of his fellow men: the audience is repeatedly informed of the Christians spitting upon Shylock, spurning him and insulting him.

9

E. O’Connor, An Index to the Works of Shakespeare, p. 324. “ (…) what would have been obvious to sixteenth-century writers remain anathema to their twentieth-century interpreters.” J. Shapiro. Op. cit., p. 226. 10

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Here is an example showing Shylock blaming Antonio for his misbehaviour and disdain: Signior Antonio, many a time and oft In the Rialto you have rated me About my moneys and my usances: Still have I borne it with a patient shrug, For sufferance is the badge of all our tribe. You call me misbeliever, cut-throat dog, And spit upon my Jewish gaberdine, And all for use of that which is mine own. … You spurn'd me such a day; another time You call'd me dog; and for these courtesies I'll lend you thus much moneys'? [Shylock. I.3. My emphasis.]

We may eventually fancy that Shakespeare might have wanted to use Shylock, the emblem of the Jew, as a metaphor for another oppressed people of his time: the English Catholics. Just as the Jews, the Catholics —whom Shakespeare was part of— were constrained to convert depending on who was the monarch. Although no evidence can be given on this aspect, The Merchant could then be seen as a covert criticism of religious oppression in Shakespeare’s lifetime11.Today, in a post-Holocaust world, Shylock is often seen as the Elizabethan-Jewish archetype and the play of a condemnable racist kind even though Shakespeare did not depict a onedimensional manichean character. Besides, other characters in the play are mocked under his pen, which proves that scorn was not reserved for Jews alone. At that time, all foreigners were regarded with distrust because they were seen as a threat to the security of the English nation. In her analysis, Pauline Blanc remarks that ‘an Elizabethan audience in 1596 would have 11 For a depiction of the various interpretations of Shylock’s character, see Richard Jones, and Franklin T. Baker, Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice. (New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1903. Also in Shakespeare Online. 20 Feb. 2011.) He quotes Herr Honigman who wrote in the Jahrbuch of the Shakespeare Society of Germany: ‘Here it is that Shylock figures as the deputy and avenger of his whole shamefully maltreated race. In his tones we hear the protest, crying to heaven, of human rights trodden under foot, against the love of humanity paraded by the hypocritical mouths of his oppressors; and if his towering revenge mounts to fanaticism, it is verily of a different stamp to the fanaticism of usury and greed which the critics are fain to find in his character.’

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been familiar with the playful, xenophobic stereotyping that Portia indulges in when discussing her suitors.’ For instance: [The Neapolitan Prince] doth nothing but talk of his horse. … [The county Palentine] doth nothing but frown. … I had rather be married to a death’s head with a bone in his mouth, than to either of these: God defend me of these two. … [The French lord, Mounsier Le Bourne] is every man in no man … [who] will fence with his own shadow. … [Fauconbridge, the young baron of England] … hath neither latin, French, nor Italian …. [I.2.] (P. Blanc, ”Stereotypical National Characterizations in the Europe of Shakespeare’s Day”, p. 28-29 )12

No better is said about the Scottish and the German suitors. These remarks eventually indicate that if Shakespeare’s portrayal of the Jew might have answered the Elizabethan expectations about this community, it probably also served in humanizing an individual who acted out of passion and despair. The end of the play which lets the comedy and the poetical enchantment prevail over a tragic situation also recalls that The Merchant of Venice must be regarded with hindsight and level-headed judgment. As differing views illustrate, nothing can be taken for granted once and for all, which leaves space for contemporary investigation, reinterpretation and rewriting.

Wesker’s Shylock: a realistic portrayal of Jews? Critics have both tried to rehabilitate Shakespeare’s antisemitic reputation by arguing that Marlowe’s Barabas was much more ignominous and by emphasizing the wrongs endured by Shakespeare’s Shylock as well as his subsequent plea. Wesker’s play shares plotlines and characters with The Merchant of Venice, yet these direct acknowledgements of the previous text only serve to highlight his intentions to offer not a politically correct reading but a contemporary corrective distanciation. Wesker aims to replace the iconic, unrealistic Jew by a complex, patchwork figure that corresponds to his intimate knowledge of Jewish people and values.13 12

Pauline Blanc adds that ‘Portia’s allusions to the prince of Morocco are tainted with the usual racial prejudice associated with blackness, that Renaissance emblem of barbaric alterity, that demonised other in its paradigmatic form, a black face — “the complexion of a devil” (I.1.124). The nex-to-last of the suitors, the haughty Spanish Prince of Araggon, is dubbed a “deliberate fool” (II.9.80) after the lesson in humility he is given through the dramatist’s device of the caskets.’ Shakespeare et l’Europe de la Renaissance, (Yves Peyré ed.), p. 28-9. 13 Jewish Book Week (March 2003) – a seven minute contribution.

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Thus turning his back on Shakespeare’s model provides a useful clean slate to compose his own play and weave his own themes and rhythms into a familiar tale. Shylock Kolner defines himself in the opening scene, where we find him and his best friend the merchant Antonio cataloguing his library: ‘I’m a hoarder of other men’s genius. My vice. My passion. Nothing I treasure more, except my daughter’ (Shylock. I.1, p. 190). In one stroke, Wesker establishes Shylock’s love for knowledge and for his family, as well as his ambiguous relationship with the city. His closest friend is a Gentile, with whom he is unearthing the books he had to hide for ten years to save them from burning. The Inquisition, the ‘warriors of God’, presents itself from the opening as a precursor of the Holocaust, and religious fanaticism takes the additional form of autodafes in Portugal and a daughter thief in Venice.14 This early reference to History, ancient and modern, also closes the first act with a pregnant image, visually and aurally, burdening the character with a further implacable and reductive identity as his Jewishness imprints a physical stigma: the curfew bells remind him he must don his yellow hat once more and hurry back to the Ghetto Nuovo. Shylock prefers to shrug off these artificial constraints to reclaim his belief in the power of the written word and in education: Knowledge, like underground springs, fresh and constantly there, till one day – up! Bubbling! For dying men to drink, for survivors from dark and terrible times. I love it! When generals imagine their vain glory is all, and demagogues smile with sweet benevolence as they tighten their screws of power – up! Up bubbles the little spring. Bubble, bubble, bubble! (I.7, p. 229)

However, the play’s ending denies this childlike optimism to exhibit a Shylock defeated by the political system, reminded that he is an alien among the Venetian citizens, bitterly proven that the law will not be toyed with nor interpreted by a member of the Ghetto. His life is spared, but anything which enriches it is taken from him as penalty for his irreverence: (sardonically and with finality) Take my books. The law must be observed. We have need of the law, what need do we have of books? Distressing, disturbing things, besides. Why, dear friend, they’d even make us question laws. Ha! And who in his right mind would want to do that? Certainly not 14

Seeking Shylock’s assistance for the Portuguese Jewish community who need safe passage, Usque and Rebecca da Mendes (based on real personalities) report ‘Fifty people burnt at the stake’ (act 1, scene 3, p. 19)

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old Shylock. Take my books. Take everything. […] Perhaps now is the time to make that journey to Jerusalem. Join those other old men on the quayside, waiting to make a pilgrimage, to be buried there – ach! (II.5, pp. 258-9)

Jerusalem, as another intertext, invites a mixed response: throughout the play it was the haven which persecuted and learned Jews alike were trying to reach in safety; now it offers no more for the disillusioned, homeless Shylock than a place to die. For Wesker, the complexity of drawing a believable Shylock was overcome by using naturalistic tools, such as basing his narrative on Renaissance Venice on historical and critical research – an acknowledged fact that led to criticism of the play being unnecessarily overloaded with words rather than action15 – and writing the play from the perspective of Shylock. The other task was to construct a plot which would lead to Shylock exclaiming ‘Thank God!’ when he is spared from murdering Antonio. As is found in his preliminary notes, this was engineered by making the Gentile merchant Antonio and the Jewish usurer Shylock best friends, and their ‘merry bond’ a prank aimed at proving the inequality of the Venetian laws when applied to its Christian or Jewish inhabitants16: Antonio. The law demands it: no dealings may be made with Jews unless covered by a legal bond. Shylock. That law was made for enemies, not friends. […] We’ll have a bond. […] A lovely, loving nonsense bond. To mock the law. […] Barbaric laws? Barbaric bonds! Three thousand ducats against a pound of your flesh. Antonio. My flesh? Shylock. […] Yes. If I am not repaid by you, upon the day, the hour, I’ll have a pound of your old flesh, Antonio, from near the part of your body which pleases me most – your heart. Your heart, dear heart, and I’d take that, too, if I could, I’m so fond of it.

15 For Hayman, ‘Wesker’s research has yielded some fascinating material, but too much of it is crammed, undramatized, into the conversation’ (115). Critics of the New York production in 1977, such as Richard Eder for The New York Times, and the Birmingham production in 1978 have also alluded to the occasional lack of drama in an otherwise intelligently written play. 16 Arnold Wesker Papers 76.7, Harry Ransom Center, University of Austin, Texas, ‘Notes on how a play came to be written’: ‘I knew with great certainty that the real Shylock would have stood up and cried out ‘Thank God!’. The question followed: how did he become involved in a contract from which he was obviously grateful to be relieved?’

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Chapter Nine Pause as Shylock waits to see if Antonio accepts. Antonio. Barbaric laws, barbaric bonds? Shylock. Madness for the mad. Antonio. Idiocies for the idiots. Shylock. Contempt for the contemptuous. Antonio. They mock our friendship – Shylock. – we mock their laws. Antonio (pinching himself). Do I have a pound of flesh? I don’t even have a pound of flesh. Shylock (pinching him). Here, and here, and here, one, two, three pounds of flesh! (I.4, pp. 211-3)

Irreverence again – a trait which Wesker identifies as typically Jewish – and a yearning for a justice that adapts itself to men rather than having men submit blindly to the letter of the law prompt the contract in a movement that tupsy-turvies the intention of the bond: it has become a response by friends to a law ‘made for enemies’, as well as a response to Shakespeare’s apparent blood-thirsty usurer. While this dramaturgic solution functions coherently, it fails to convince Hayman, who raises further ‘moral and technical problems’ that hinder the realism of the play: ‘Having established a humane, tolerant, enlightened Shylock who loves Antonio, Wesker has to convince us that the situation changes sufficiently to make him insist on his pound of flesh’.17 Interestingly, this contentious point is also singled out as flawed on the occasion of the American production in 1977. Because ‘Jewish law expressly forbids the taking of one life in order to save other lives and, most emphatically, a man may not commit murder even if a whole community is held in hostage’, the play contains a religious impossibility which was not lost on the Jewish community.18 Most critically for the historiography surrounding Wesker’s career, this is the issue which, according to Wesker, unsettled irrevocably his relationship with director John Dexter. Sir John Clements, the actor who played Antonio, suggested that the whole scene be rewritten to have Shylock throw the knife on the

17 Hayman, p. 120. It must be noted that Hayman’s overall negative response to the play is based on the version of the script The Merchant as published in the journal Adam, nos 401-3, in 1977-8. The play was further revised afterwards, and Wilcher proposes a comparative approach in his Understanding Arnold Wesker. 18 Letter from Rabbi Gabriel Maza, Suffolk Jewish Centre, New York, to John Dexter, 10 November 1977. Reproduced in Appendix 9 of The Birth of Shylock and the Death of Zero Mostel, p. 381.

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floor and show mercy: ‘Mercy – the supreme virtue before which every principle must fall. And there you have a real coup de théâtre’.19 As a secular Jew, Wesker may have forgotten a few religious rules on the way to rehabilitating Shylock.20 As an individual, he would not, despite his dramatic bravado to Dexter, cut his friend’s flesh.21 As a dramatist, he gave an answer which proved neither moral nor technical: You’re talking about another kind of play. My play is about ‘barbaric laws – barbaric bonds’, simply that. That’s all I want to explore. […] You want a play about what happens when a man actually has to kill his friend ? […] I don’t know what Shylock would do and so I didn’t let the situation get that far. I use Shakespeare’s device and bring in Portia. Fault me for that but that’s the play I want to write. (The Birth of Shylock and the Death of Zero Mostel, p.141)

The knife scene as reimagined by Clements to include an equivalent to the ‘quality of mercy’ speech would offer an easy resolution. However, it would not only contradict the friendship between Shylock and Antonio – for Shylock would not leave his friend in suspense if he was aware of the impossibility of the bond –, but would also deny the tragic quality and intensity of the trial scene, thereby exchanging the ‘catastrophe’ for a cheap melodramatic coup de théâtre. Both Robert Wilcher and Heiner Zimmermann have recognised the tragic dimension of Shylock: Shylock himself, the defeated protagonist of Wesker’s nearest approach to formal tragedy, surrenders to the negative attitude that denies utopian dreams to future generations. (Understanding Arnold Wesker, p. 122.) Antonio and Shylock’s friendship embodies the ideal [of an enlightened society] and therefore must end tragically. (Arnold Wesker – A Casebook, p. 64)

Of course, for Penny Gay, ‘it is virtually impossible in the postHolocaust world to see Shylock as anything other than tragic’.22 However, 19

The Birth of Shylock and the Death of Zero Mostel, p.140. Wesker’s religion appears to be a fluctuating concept as exemplified in his Shylock: he claims that religion is ‘the condition of being Jewish, like pimples with adolescence’, a witty introduction to blasphemy when he reinvents Abraham’s role in biblical history (act 1, scene 3, p. 195). 21 See The Birth of Shylock and the Death of Zero Mostel, p.141. 22 The Cambridge Introduction to Shakespeare’s Comedies, p. 55. 20

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I would suggest that the tragic in Wesker’s play and eponymous character functions beyond both the underlying presence of the Holocaust (Shylock’s search for justice in a racist society is bound to fail) and the Aristotelian elements of tragedy (his tragic blindness, his fall from prosperity to destitution, all engineered by the bond). As Zimmermann and Wilcher evoked here, it is the quest for the ideal, Wesker’s familiar theme of utopia, which sets the tragedy in motion, reminding us of the modernity and authorial identity of the play.

The modernity of Shylock In Shylock Wesker explores the tragic, ‘a structure of feeling’ and experience of loss as redefined by Carney, who explains that, post-1960s, ‘the central role of the political playwright is the representation and interrogation of human suffering from a dialectical perspective’.23 For Shylock, the resolution of the dialectics reinforces his feeling of loss at the end of the trial which dispossesses him: ‘What do I care! My heart will not follow me, wherever it is. My appetites are dying, dear friend, for anything in this world. I am so tired of men’ (II.5, p. 259). It is interesting to note that Carney borrows from Raymond Williams the notion that ‘the essential tragic experience is that of irreparable human loss’ which points to ‘the predicament of human alienation, of which tragedy is the supreme literary expression’ in view of Williams’ influence on Wesker’s cultural involvement in the 1960s.24 Hence, Shylock ought to be regarded as a tragedy of loss and a political play. Notwithstanding its intertextual sources, it is a play of its generation and very much a Wesker play, because of its rhythm, its familiar themes and female characters, and its central humanism which is still flavoured by 1950s socialism. If Wesker returns the play to its historical origins, a Venice where the uneasy collaboration of Jews and Christians offers something to all parties, it is not only to anchor his play in naturalistic surroundings constructed to promote alienation but also to better mark the distance with the Shakespearean comedy.25

23

The Politics and Poetics of Contemporary English Tragedy, pp. 3 and 10. Raymond Williams, Tragic Drama, p. xii, quoted in Carney, p. 13. 25 As he explained in an interview with Glenda Leeming, Catherine Itzin and Trussler published in Theatre Quarterly, 28 (1977), ‘I sloughed more and more of the original as I went along’. The interview is reprinted in Distinctions, p.133. 24

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At the core of the play, Wesker is rewriting his belief in education as the great solver of inequalities, injustice, violence, and in the necessity for man and woman to hold ideals towards which to strive. This is the foundation block of the friendship between Antonio and Shylock – the opposite relationship to that in The Merchant – and this dialogue between patrician and alien develops other strands throughout the play to counteract the darkness of Venitian prejudice with the idealism of the friends who naively think that books could ‘save the world’. (I.3, p. 195) When Shylock is attacked by Lorenzo for mudding his friend’s mind with knowledge, it is the enlightened Antonio who – having found his voice like Beatie Bryant – takes his defence: ‘You say a man is happy with no knowledge or art? […] How alive is a man with muscles but no curiosity? You wonder why I bind my fate to Shylock, what is see in him? Curiosity!’ (II.5, p. 251) Nurtured by Shylock’s schooling, his voice will unmask the hypocrites, though it will remain ineffective in exacting humane justice. Compromise is the reality they must face, like Andrew Cobham, since their utopian dreams cannot be achieved. Through Lorenzo Wesker offers not a rebel, as Leeming contends, but a contemporary prototypical villain to match Shakespeare’s Shylock. Wesker therefore gives him his only direct borrowing from The Merchant, the infamous plea of the Jew, which prompts the outraged response of a Shylock whose tragic fault is to believe in progress and equality: Lorenzo. Has not a Jew hands? Shylock. Is he presuming explanations on my behalf? Lorenzo. Has not a Jew organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions? Shylock. (with incredulity) Oh no! Lorenzo. Is not the Jew fed with the same food, hurt with the same weapons, subject to the same diseases, healed by the same means, warmed and cooled by the same winter and summer as a Christian is? Shylock. No, no! Lorenzo. If you prick him, does he not bleed? Shylock. No, no, NO! […] Plead for me no special pleas. I will not have my humanity mocked and apologised for. […] My humanity is my right, not your bestowed and gracious privilege.26 (II.5, pp. 254-5) 26

In the origianl script: “ […] Hath not a Jew eyes? hath not a Jew hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions? fed with the same food, hurt with the same weapons, subject to the same diseases, healed by the same means, warmed and cooled by the same winter and summer, as

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The detested verses, renowned for their apparent humanity, function to refute the image created by Shakespeare as they are here pronounced by a hateful Lorenzo and broken up by an outraged Shylock. Lorenzo is a power hungry, egotistical, religious fanatic, repulsive traits which find no stable equivalent in Wesker’s writing. Portia is another character that proves topsy-turvied since her Shakespearean ancestry. Undisguised, she intervenes at the trial, using her intellect, and translates her distrust for the laws of Venice which bring no justice: ‘I would not carry a sword in one hand and scales in the other. That image always seemed to me ambiguous’. (II.5, p. 258) Wesker not only created Rivka, Shylock’s down-to-earth sister, and Rebecca da Mendes, but also transformed Portia, Jessica and Nerissa into characters whose contemporaneity is expressed through their language and behaviour. Jessica and Portia in particular are educated – a central theme since the Trilogy -, make the wrong choice but free themselves from their potentially dire consequences. Jessica runs away as much because she is bewitched by the poetic and radical Lorenzo as because she refuses to be controlled by her father (a modern generational issue). She soon realises that Lorenzo is a bigot who sees her as doomed and wants to convert her. Portia submits to her father’s will by accepting the choice of the caskets, but understands that the manipulative Bassanio is not the husband her father would have hoped for. The last act presents the image of a will to be reckoned with as she reveals that ‘Bassanio will come to know his place, accept it, or leave it’. (II.6, p. 260) Wesker further distanced himself from The Merchant by creating a modern rhythm to his play. He proposes a two-act structure: the first act is slow and careful, introducing the characters, at a time of prosperity and happiness, and the contract; the second act unfolds the consequences of the first act, such as Portia’s casket and Jessica’s elopement subplots as well as the resolution of the contract. The rhythm translates the urgency of the situation in a world that opposes Jews and Christians, the old and the young, the dark Ghetto and the

a Christian is? If you prick us, do we not bleed? if you tickle us, do we not laugh? if you poison us, do we not die? and if you wrong us, shall we not revenge? If we are like you in the rest, we will resemble you in that. If a Jew wrong a Christian, what is his humility? Revenge. If a Christian wrong a Jew, what should his sufferance be by Christian example? Why, revenge..” William Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice. (III.1.)

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luminous Belmont, monologues and silences. This apparent dichotomy permits an easy access to the play and gives Wesker space to construct his Shylock. A ‘free spirit’, as defined by Wesker himself, who defies the arbitrariness of Venitian authority, Shylock at once irritates because he wants to have the last word and attracts sympathy because he wants to believe in the utopian ideal of an enlightened society. The character eludes conformity, shows equally enthusiasm and melancholy, thereby resembling many other Weskerian characters, notably of the 1970s. His monologues are fragmented to emphasize the rhythm of his thoughts and his sense of humour, structured to stress Shylock’s passion for words and ideas, and written in a way which suggests implicitly how the scenes are to be directed and the set designed. Despite his intimate knowledge of the character27 and visual sense of the stage, Wesker only directed a rehearsed reading of the play in 1989 at the Riverside Studios in London, a production which gave birth to the ninth and final version of the playscript and which elicited positive responses: The Guardian deemed it a ‘work of wit and intelligence which engages us intellectually and emotionally. It is a challenging play and it will be a travesty if it does not reach the West End stage’28. Yet, since its international première as The Merchant in 1976 at the National Theatre of Stockholm, Shylock has been performed in the US, in Denmark, in Germany, in Japan, in Turkey, and in England, but still awaits its London production, leaving the main stage to new contemporary readings of The Merchant of Venice and directors’ attempts at rehabilitating the original Shylock. Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice has been continually produced internationally as a response to the ambiguous portrait it drew of the Jew. It was a way for directors to respond to the everlasting question on whether the Shakespearian play is anti-Semitic or not. At the ComédieFrançaise for instance, the play was produced twice in the twentieth century, which informs us about the importance of the debate it triggered. For in such a venue, the choice of the repertoire is highly significant as it often translates the political mood of the nation and its social consequences (see for instance Emile Fabre’s Coriolanus in 1933). Furthermore, the whole Shakespearean canon is far from having been staged there, and when a play is chosen twice out of thirty-seven 27

Wesker admits that he was inspired by friends and by himself Arnold Wesker Papers 78.9, Harry Ransom Center, University of Austin, Texas. ‘Reading between the lines’, by David Lemon. Guardian, 18 Oct 89. 28

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possibilities (without mentioning The Sonnets), it is revealing. Luca Ronconi’s 1987 and Andrei Serban’s 2001 Merchant had nothing in common. Ronconi’s direction focused on a scenographic renewal, giving ample space for machinery and the financial question epitomized in the play (possibly to silence polemics of Shylock’s own nature); Serban first produced it in the American Repertory Theatre (Boston), thus carrying a prejudiced background that would highlight to what extent The Merchant, in its original context though appearing as one of our contemporaries, still conveyed ambiguous undertones regarding the Jew. Serban’s choice in setting the play in the vaporous atmosphere of Turkish baths and showing judges wearing pointed hats in the trial scene highlighted his desire to make short-cuts with History, whether to remind the public of the Holocaust or of the Ku Klux Klan. In both cases, it underscored Shakespeare’s play’s probable disparaging judgment about a religious minority. The production set off harsh criticism and momentarily cast a shadow on the good reputation of the French Institution. It is again doubtful however whether Shakespeare was really resentful towards the Jewish community as his play, originally titled The Jew of Venice (emphasis mine), seemed to echo Marlowe’s unequivocal play. But, as René Girard noted in Shakespeare, les Feux de l’envie, it is undeniable that the ambivalence remains in this play as to whether Shylock is a scapegoat or an anti-Christian. Those remarks eventually bring us back to Wesker’s clear-cut position in favour of the Jew as the Christians’ friend, not his enemy, as has been developed above. Current productions of Shakespeare’s play hardly manage to wipe away the longlived portrayal or the caricatured greedy ginger-bearded Jew (as he was already presented on the Elizabethan stage). In his thorough analysis of productions of The Merchant, including a comparison between Wesker’s play and Shakespeare’s, Arthur Horowitz has shown to what extent Nazi Germany’s appropriation of the myth proved devastating, especially through Werner Krauss’ interpretation (Lothar Müthel’s 1943 production), red-wigged, beak-nosed and filthy-looking, which rendered the play “unplayable” afterwards. In 1966, George Tabori’s production of a playwithin-the-play was a very daring, ingenuous and gut-wrenching proposal that would rehabilitate the Jew as a victim: set in a concentration camp The Merchant’s characters appeared as inmates while the audience on stage stood for the Nazi prison guards. At the end, Shylock, who had tried to stab a Nazi judge, was executed by a prison guard. The post-Holocaust staged versions of The Merchant of Venice undoubtedly influenced further appropriations of the play-text, even after

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the fall of the Berlin Wall in the late nineties and still today, and especially by Jewish directors – a notable point in case being The Shylock Play (produced at the Arcola Theatre in 2007) by writer-director Julia Pascal, a re-writing which borrows extensively from the original text. Wesker’s ending showing Shylock shamefully stunned offers more than a corrective answer to the original Merchant in shedding a new light on the fabled villain. He has reappropriated a theatrical figure and submitted it to a humanising process derived as much from personal experience as from a political one. For Leeming, the context of reception played a central role in the fate of the play: in Great Britain, ‘the validity of the new version was taken for granted – in fact several thought it was a jolly good idea. But it seemed that some aspects of Wesker’s play were being judged not on their own merits but by reference to the original’29. The modernity of Wesker’s play lies there also, in his continuous exploration of the pressures of society upon the individual, rather than in the (easy) depiction of a stage villain.

Conclusion: “the close becomes clear by the filter of the distant”, and vice versa.30 The closing scene of Wesker’s Shylock presents the aftermath of the tragedy, in sunny Belmont. Unlike The Merchant, it contains no comedic ending – albeit Nerissa’s ironic comment that the young male generation gorging on food and thinking of sex are ‘heroes indeed’. Jessica is lost to Lorenzo, one isolated shape on stage; Portia’s passionate impulses will nurture her intellect only as she has no expectations of a happy marriage. Because of its structure, its economy of action and language, the (re)creation of characters, its movements from dark to light, its rhythm and themes, Shylock shares with The Merchant no more than common sources and the name of a character that has become a pejorative common noun. Yet, the ghost of Shylock still hovers over the play, leading Christopher Innes to reduce it as ‘a point by point reversal of its source, justified as “accurately reflecting historical reality” opposing Shakespeare’s “racist fantasy”.’

29

G. Leeming. Wesker the Playwright, p. 125. “Parabole où le proche s’éclaire par le filtre du lointain”, Frédéric Maurin, “Le Marchand de Venise dans la mise en scène de Peter Sellars”, in F. Laroque & F. Lessay, Esthétiques de la nouveauté à la Renaissance, p. 142. [My translation] 30

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One of the remaining paradoxes is that while the figure of the Jew is very ambiguous Shakespeare’s play nonetheless ended as a comedy. Wesker’s choice between friendship and duty in favour of the Jewish community clearly cannot offer a positive denouement. His benevolent representation of a friendship between a Christian and a Jew is not a sufficient answer to the downgrading inimical ‘bonds’ that have opposed the two communities for centuries (much before Shakespeare). The ghost of the holocaust play as a corrective presence to trump the ghost of Shakespeare denies the possibility of a happy ending even for a writer as idealistic as Wesker . The revision of a myth usually permits us to interrogate the original meaning of a text and its impact today. In the case of The Merchant/Shylock, the contemporary text has not enabled the source to be stripped of its bad reputation. It does not pay tribute to Wesker’s talent in “topsy-turving” one of Shakespeare’s most “problematic” plays but at least, it challenges contemporary interpretation and dramatic creation that relentlessly debate upon the implications of a text in relation with its time and its posterity.

GENERAL CONCLUSION

[C]elui qui voit, celui qui, à la lecture, se sent être ou ne pas être Hamlet, conserve la jouissance terriblement douce, après cet instant long de plus de sept heures, qu’on éprouve à creuser dans un regard impersonnel, n’appartenant ni à tous ni à personne. (Enrico Ghezzi1)

Is it possible for an author to claim an everlasting authority over a story? In everyone’s mind Shakespeare is THE author of Hamlet, Macbeth, The Tempest, Romeo and Juliet and so on and so forth, full stop. Yet, as anthologies have traced and as the history of drama has proved, a character and his or her fictive environment fluctuate over the centuries. Shakespeare borrowed from pre-existing tales, poems and plays to write his own drama, and after him, authors have constantly tried to appropriate these same myths in order to reinvent them in the light of their contemporaneity. In that sense, regarding one of Shakespeare’s most famous plays, Enrico Ghezzi’s remark (quoted above) metaphorically expresses a reality: just like “impersonal eyes, [Hamlet] belongs neither to someone, nor to anyone.” It is also one of the reasons why Peter Brook has imagined Shakespeare’s possible reaction had he witnessed the evolution of his text: We can now conjure up the gravedigger scene in Hamlet. Perhaps Shakespeare the actor is the gravedigger. At his feet, he sees his own skull. He takes it in his hand and for a long while peers wryly into the future. Then he murmurs softly, ‘Alas, poor Yorick.’ [The Quality of Mercy, Reflections on Shakespeare, p. 17.]

Since the Renaissance, what indeed have his successors done with his material? Are his plays, under the pens of others, still recognizable? Have contemporary authors and artists merely attempted to transform and 1 Enrico Ghezzi « Out of Joint », Introduction of Hamlet, Pavel Florenski, pp. 1819. “The one who sees, the one who, when reading, feels him- or herself to be or not to be Hamlet, retains the terribly sweet ecstasy, after this seven-hour-long moment, that one feels when one looks into impersonal eyes which belong neither to everyone nor to anyone.” [My translation]

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appropriate some material which happened to have attracted Shakespeare before them, or have they mainly wanted to pay a kind of tribute or register a kind of critique when they reshaped these famous tales? Perhaps an achronic Shakespeare might also have congratulated the new generations of playwrights, choreographers, painters, or actors for their own inventiveness, their capacity to transform a ready-made product into a challenging expressive form that is able to question the world, raise metaphysical questions and sound poetic. Referring to his Gertrude ʊ The Cry, Howard Barker has spoken of the necessity authors are under to borrow ancient tales so as to refresh their meaning, in the process helping to keep them eternal: As painters have always revisited the subjects of the masters, so dramatists must go back to plough the terrain of earlier works for fresh meanings pertinent to their time, an activity surely not reserved for stage directors alone.2

More precisely concerning Gertrude, he wrote: In shifting the focus to her fatal eroticism (a hypnotic regard which engulfs Claudius and wounds him grievously), I have set out to reinvigorate an ancient theme, annexed by Shakespeare from earlier texts, and turn it as he did to yet further extremes3.

In that way, Barker elegantly showed that contemporary authors continue the old tradition, practiced by Shakespeare himself, whereby a text naturally passes from hand to hand for a good cause. Furthermore it seems impossible for a writer, particularly when his career is developing in Great Britain, to ignore Shakespeare’s heritage. This fact has been even more obvious when the dominant cultural paradigm has been that of postmodernism with the text construed as an object whereby the author/subject is supposed to disappear behind. Furthermore, Shakespeare’s authority has been fluctuating over the past few decades so that his canon has been opened anew to the interpretations and experiments of current authors. According to Terence Hawkes4, our link to the original meanings of Shakespeare’s plays has loosened to such an extent that it has now vanished under the weight of proliferating and contradictory new senses. 2

http://www.thewrestlingschool.co.uk/Gertrude.htm Ibid. [My emphasis] 4 T. Hawkes, Meaning by Shakespeare, op. cit. Mentioned in V. Khamphommala, op. cit., “Nous parlons moins de Shakespeare que nous ne parlons à travers lui.” p. 28. [My translation] 3

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We no longer know what to think about the mere spectres left by Shakespeare: “we do not speak of but through Shakespeare.” The proliferation of analyses about Shakespeare’s texts has reached such a climax that we can understand why playwrights, and subsequently scholars, have expressed the need to move away from the so-called original plays and the desire to excavate their supposedly original meanings, even if actually relinquishing them has proved impossible. Once again, Shakespeare’s ghost looms over new literary productions, and it definitely seems impossible to ignore him completely. As Roland Barthes remarks in Le Degré zero de l’écriture, it is impossible for a writer, whoever he/she is and whatever he/she writes, to get free from a kind of influence because “words have a memory”5, which he calls the “memorizing freedom” (“liberté souvenante”). As a consequence, any author is always the prisoner of someone else’s words. A sort of “obstinate persistence” (“rémanence obstinée”) comes from all previous writings. The latter cover the present voice of the author’s words. Here Barthes’ observation precisely echoes Genette’s image of the palimpsest, whereby every text is merely the uppermost layer of a pile of preceding ones, even as it announces the birth of another. No “zero degree”, to use Barthes’ phrase, exists in the act of writing. Likewise, no text is to be considered alone – though this does not however imply that a rewriting lacks originality. Such a fundamental paradox makes the act of rewriting, i.e. of composing a text in relation to a past and to a future one, particularly relevant. As it is, in today’s theatrical landscape, it seems natural that contemporary versions of Shakespeare’s plays ʊwhether in the form of extravagant scenographies or adaptations for the musical theatre, the opera or the cinema, or as rewritingsʊ progressively replace attempts at reconstructing traditional Elizabethan performances or preserving the integrity and totality of the first published texts. Productions of original Shakespearean plays may outnumber productions of avowed rewritings, but the very existence of new versions overthrows a sort of established order, full of clichés and prejudices, by which the multiple iterations and contexts of Shakespearean performance (even by those few companies who ever use uncut texts) are somehow construed as expressions of the same timeless truths. In practice our attraction towards the Shakespeare canon is only reinforced bythe myriad of adaptations that gravitate around it, just as the 5

« Les mots ont une mémoire ». R. Barthes, Le Degré zéro de l’écriture , Paris : Seuil, 1972, p. 28. [My translation.]

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sun’s value is reaffirmed by the planets’ urging need to have it shine. But the survival of Shakespearean drama and of all that derives from it is reciprocal: one is never as praiseworthy when the other is absent. This is one reason, then, that Shakespeare, far from being a burden, is a necessary reference-point from which extrapolations gush. As we have seen throughout this volume, though, this source of inspiration is not really a simple model for repetition with slight differences, because the contemporary writers’ styles always claim their independence from the dangerously familiar Shakespearean originals and because the new works in any case serve new meanings, influenced by the authors’ own environment and time. One of the key tricks of the art of rewriting, then, is to propose a new reading of a past story-line while responding to the expectations of a contemporary reader/audience. As this collection of essays has shown, new versions of plays like Hamlet, The Tempest, The Merchant of Venice, King Lear, Macbeth or Julius Caesar are useful, and even necessary, to question fundamental issues raised in Shakespeare’s texts while extending the latter’s horizons beyond the semantic frontiers of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Contemporary authors and artists voice the plays’ silences or, at least, amplify issues only latently embedded in the Shakespearean plays: for instance, the difficulty of finding one’s place in society, the urge to be recognized as an individual, the wish to arouse admiration, envy or desire, the fear of being ostracized. Some characters have replaced others; some have been created when others have been excavated from Shakespeare’s dark worlds, and all this has given birth to challenging compositions, both aesthetically and semantically, as though Shakespeare’s presence had softly evaporated to the benefit of new invigorating dramaturgies. Likewise, we can say that all the new texts discussed here open the field of interpretation about Shakespeare’s works but in a subterranean way. We do not have the feeling of reading a “Shakespeare revisited6” version; we even forget the original author, which is perhaps the best way to be able to come back to him afresh, as Peter Brook has rightly observed: “It is when we forget Shakespeare that we can start finding him.”7

6

Film adaptations of Shakespeare’s works are often mentioned as « revisitations ». See Shakespeare Retold in Annexes. 7 Peter Brook, Avec Shakespeare, Paris: Actes Sud-Papiers, 1998, p. 20.

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Rewritings, retellings of Shakespeare also dialogue with one another. Some ostensibly, like Bene who wrote his Amleto Di Meno as a response to Laforgue’s version; others unconsciously. Through the contributions above we hope to have shown that, just as exploring a Shakespearean text amounts to digging into a bottomless pit, examining our contemporaries’ works leads into labyrinthine territories, involving the analysis of language, characterisation, and performance perspectives without always finding the keys to all the interpretative doors. Palimpsests being intrinsically unfinished documents, there is always scope for new ideas and appropriations of the Shakespearean myths. Rewriting for the contemporary stage is another way of keeping the doors open to further explorations and debates.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Chapter One Adelman, Janet. “Suffocating Mothers in King Lear.” In Suffocating Mothers. Fantasies of Maternal Origin in Shakespeare’s Plays, Hamlet to The Tempest, 103-129. New York: Routledge, 1992. Boose, Lynda E. “The Father and the Bride in Shakespeare.” PMLA 97, no. 3 (May 1982): 325-347. Brauner, David. “‘Speak Again’: The Politics of Rewriting in ‘A Thousand Acres’.” The Modern Language Review 96, no. 3 (July 2001): 654-666. Cakebread, Caroline. “Remembering King Lear in Jane Smiley‫ތ‬s A Thousand Acres.” In Shakespeare and Appropriation, edited by Christy Desmet and Robert Sawyer, 85-102. London: Routledge, 1999. Genette, Gérard. Palimpsestes. Paris: Seuil, 1992. Griggs, Yvonne. “‘All our lives we‫ތ‬d looked out for each other the way that motherless children tend to do’: King Lear as Melodrama.” Literature Film Quarterly 35, no. 2 (2007): 101-107. Hutcheon, Linda. A Theory of Adaptation. New York: Routledge, 2006. Kahn, Coppelia. “The Absent Mother in King Lear.” In Rewriting the Renaissance: The Discourse of Sexual Difference in Early Modern Europe, edited by Margaret W. Ferguson, Maureen Quilligan, and Nancy J. Vickers, 33-49. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986. Lange, Jessica, and Michelle Pfeiffer. A Thousand Acres. DVD. Directed by Jocelyn Moorhouse. Burbank: Touchstone, 1997. Schiff, James. “Contemporary Retellings: A Thousand Acres as the Latest Lear.” Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction 39, no. 4 (1998): 367-381. Shakespeare, William. King Lear. Edited by R. A. Foakes. Third Series. London: Arden Shakespeare, 1997. Smiley, Jane. A Thousand Acres. London: Harper Perennial, 2008. —. “Shakespeare in Iceland.” In Transforming Shakespeare: Contemporary WomenҲs Re-Visions in Literature and Performance, edited by Marianne Novy, 159-180. New York: St. Martin‫ތ‬s Press, 1999. Sturgess, Kim C. Shakespeare and the American Nation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004.

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Chapter Two Babbage, F. Re-visioning Myth: Modern and Contemporary Drama by Women. Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 2011. Print. Barthes, Roland. Mythologies, translated by Annette Lavers. New York: Hill and Wang, 1972. Baum, L F, and W W. Denslow. The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 2000. Print. BBC News. “Thailand film censor bans ‘divisive’ Macbeth film”. 4 April 2012. BBC Animated Tales – Macbeth. YouTube. Bradshaw, Jon. “Tom Stoppard, Nonstop: Word Games with a Hit Playwright.” Ed. Paul Delaney. Tom Stoppard in Conversation. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1994. Print. Brauner, Sigrid, and Robert H. Brown. Fearless Wives and Frightened Shrews: The Construction of the Witch in Early Modern Germany. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1995. Print. Burger, Alissa. “Wicked and Wonderful Witches: Narrative and Gender Negotiations from The Wizard of Oz to Wicked”. in Beyond Adaptation: Essays on Radical Transformations of Original Works. Frus, Phyllis and Christy Williams, eds. North Carolina: Mcfarland & Company, Inc., 2010. Cohn, Ruby. Modern Shakespeare Offshoots. Princeton, N.J: Princeton University Press, 1976. Print. Debord, Guy. Society of the Spectacle. Detroit: Black & Red, 1970. Print. Fischlin, Daniel and Mark Fortier, eds. Adaptations of Shakespeare: A Critical Anthology of Plays from the Seventeenth Century to the Present. London: Routledge, 2000. Print. Frus, Phyllis and Christy Williams. “Introduction: Making the Case for Transformation”. in Beyond Adaptation: Essays on Radical Transformations of Original Works. Frus, Phyllis and Christy Williams, eds. North Carolina: Mcfarland & Company, Inc., 2010. Kimbrough, Robert. "Macbeth: The Prisoner of Gender." Shakespeare Studies. 16 (1983): 175-190. Kinney, Arthur F. Lies Like Truth: Shakespeare, Macbeth, and the Cultural Moment. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2001. Print Lyotard, Jean-Francois, The Postmodern Explained: Correspondence 1982-1985, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1992. Maguire, Gregory. Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West. New York: Harper, 1995. Print.

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Msomi, Welcome. “Mabatha.” Adaptations of Shakespeare: A Critical Anthology of Plays from the Seventeenth Century to the Present. Eds. Daniel Fischlin and Mark Fortier. London: Routledge, 2000. 164-87. Print. Romeo + Juliet. Dir. Lurhmann, Baz. Bazmark Films, 1996. Film. Shakespeare, William. Macbeth. New York: Signet Classic, 1998. Print. Stoppard, Tom. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead: A Play in Three Acts. New York: Samuel French, 1967. West Side Story. Dir. Jerome Robbins, 1961. Film. Warner, Marina. Six Myths of our Time: Little Angels, Little Monsters, Beautiful Beasts, and More. New York: Vintage Books, 1995. Print.

Chapter Three Primary sources Bene, Carmelo ([1979] 2004), Richard III ou l’horrible nuit d’un homme de guerre. traduit de l’italien par Jean-Paul Manganaro et Danielle Dubroca, in Carmelo Bene et Gilles Deleuze, Superpositions. Minuit: Paris. Chartreux, Bernard (1984), Cacodémon roi. Paris: Dérives-Solin. Chaurette, Normand (1991), Les Reines. Montreal/Arles: Leméac/ Actes Sud - Papiers. Verhelst, Peter (2007), Richard III. Translated from Flemish by Christian Marcipont. Unpublished text. Christophe Triau, personal communication. Shakespeare, William (2000), The Tragedy of King Richard III, ed. John Jowett, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Secondary sources Arasse, Daniel (1996), Le Détail. Pour une histoire rapprochée de la peinture, Paris : Flammarion. Carlson, Marvin (1993), ‘Daniel Mesguich and intertextual Shakespeare’ in D. Kennedy (ed.), Foreign Shakespeare: Contemporary Performance, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 213-31. Doležel, Lubomir (1998), Heterocosmica. Fiction and Possible Worlds, Baltimore and London: John Hopkins University Press. Eco, Umberto ([1979] 2004), Lector in fabula. Le rôle du lecteur ou la Coopération interprétative dans les textes narratifs, trans. Myriam Bouhazer, Paris: Grasset.

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Eco, Umberto (1994), Six Walks in the Fictional Woods, Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Genette, Gerard (1997), Palimpsests: Literature in the Second Degree, trans. Channa Newman and Claude Doubinsky, University of Nebraska Press. Huffman, Shawn (2004), ‘Amputation, Phantom Limbs, and Spectral Agency in Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus and Normand Chaurette’s Les Reines’, Modern Drama, 37, 63-78. Hutcheon Linda (2006), A Theory of Adaptation, New York & London: Routlegde. Kaiserbruber, Danielle and Antoine Vitez (1976), ‘Théorie/ pratique théâtrale’, Dialectiques, no. 14, 7-9. March, Florence (2010), ‘Shakespeare at the Festival d'Avignon : the Poetics of Adaptation of L. Lagarde (Richard III, 2007), T. Ostermeier (Hamlet, 2008) and I. van Hove (The Roman Tragedies, 2008)’, Shakespeare en devenir - Les Cahiers de La Licorne - Mise en scène de pièces de Shakespeare | L'Oeil du Spectateur | N°2 - Saison 20092010. http://licorne.edel.univ-poitiers.fr/document.php?id=4739 March, Florence (2012), Shakespeare au Festival d’Avignon, Montpellier: Editions Entretemps. Pavel, Thomas (1988), Univers de la fiction, Paris: Seuil. Ryan, Marie-Laure (1991), Possible Worlds, Artificial Intelligence and Narrative Theory, Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press. Saint-Gelais, Richard (2011), Fictions transfuges. La transfictionnalité et ses enjeux, Paris: Seuil. Sanders, Julie (2006), Adaptation and Appropriation, London & New York: Routledge.

Chapter Four Bakhtin, Mikhail, The Diaologic Imagination, four essays, ed. by Michael Holquist, (USA: University of Texas Press, 1981). Bond, Edward, Lear (London: Methuen, 1972). Cartelli, Thomas, Repositioning Shakespeare: National Formations, Postcolonial Appropriations (London: Routledge, 1999). —, ‘Shakespeare in Pain: Edward Bond’s Lear and the Ghosts of History’, Shakespeare Survey 55: King Lear and its Afterlife, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007). Coetzee, J.M, Doubling the Point, Essays and Interviews, (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1992).

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—. Disgrace (London: Vintage, 1999). Doniger, Wendy, The Hindus, an alternative history, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010). Delaney, Paul, ‘King Lear and the Decline of Feudalism’, PMLA, Vol. 92, No. 3 (May, 1977). Holquist, Michael, Bakhtin and his world, (London: Routledge, 1990). Lehnhof, Kent R., ‘Relation and Responsibility: A Levinasian Reading of King Lear,’ Modern Philology, Vol. 111, No.3 (February 2014). McDermott, Sinead, ‘Memory, Nostalgia, Gender in A Thousand Acres,’ Signs, Vol. 28, No.1, Gender and Cultural Memory (Autumn, 2002). Mehigan, Tim, (ed.) A Companion to the Works of J.M Coetzee, (New York: Camden House, 2011). Mistry, Rohinton, Such a Long Journey (London: Faber and Faber, 1991). —. Family Matters (London: Faber and Faber, 2002). Novy, Marianne, (ed.) Transforming Shakespeare: Contemporary Women’s Re-Visions in Literature and Performance (Basingstoke: Macmillan Press, 1999). Rich, Adrienne, ‘When we dead awaken: writing as re-vision,’ in College English, No.34, Vol. 1, Women, Writing and Teaching, (October, 1972). Ryan, Kiernan, (ed.) King Lear, (London; Palgrave, 1993). Shakespeare, William, King Lear, ed. by RA Foakes, (London: Arden, Third Series, 1997). —. Twelfth Night, ed. by Keir Elam (London: Bloomsbury Arden Third Edition, 2009). Smiley, Jane, A Thousand Acres, (London: Harper Perennial, 2008). Spivak, Gayatri Chakravarty, ‘Ethics and Politics in Tagore, Coetzee, and certain scenes of Teaching’, Diacritics, Volume 32, Number 3-4, FallWinter 2002.

Chapter Five Abrahams, Roger D. Deep Down in the Jungle . . .: Negro Narrative Folklore from the Streets of Philadelphia. Chicago: n.p., 1975. Abrahams, Roger. The Man-of-Words in the West Indies: Performance and the Emergence of Creole Culture. Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1983. Ashcroft, Bill. Caliban’s Voice: The Transformation of English in Postcolonial Literature. London, New York: Routledge, 2009.

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Ashcroft, Bill, Gareth Griffiths, Helen Tiffin. The Empire Writes Back: Theory and Practice in Post-Colonial Literatures. New York: Routledge, 1989. Austin, J. L. How to do Things with Words. Eds., J. O. Urmson and Marina Sbisà. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1962. Benitez-Rojo, Antonio. The Repeating Island: The Caribbean and the Postmodern Perspective. Trans. James E. Maraniss. Duke University Press, 1996. Bhabha, Homi. “Of Mimicry and Man: The Ambivalence of Colonial Discourse”. Modern Literary Theory: A Reader. Eds. Philip Rice and Patricia Waugh. London: Arnold, 1989. pp. 234–41. Bulman, James C. “Introduction: Shakespeare and Performance Theory”. Shakespeare, Theory and Performance. Ed. James Bulman. London: Routledge, 1996. pp. 1-11. Campbell, Carl C. The Young Colonials: A Social History of Education in Trinidad and Tobago 1834-1939. Mona: The Press University of the West Indies, 1996. Carr, Andrew. “Pierrot Grenade”. Caribbean Quarterly 4: 3&4 (1956), pp. 281-314. Crask, Paul. Grenada, Carriacou, Petite Martinique. Guilford, Connecticut: Bradt Travel Guides, 2012. David, Christine. Folk Traditions of Carriacou and Petite Martinique. Belmont, Carriaou: Christine David, 2006. Dionne, Craig. “Commonplace Literacy and the Colonial Scene: The Case of Carriacou’s Shakespeare Mas”. Native Shakespeares: Indigenous Appropriations on a Global Stage. Eds. Craig Dionne and Parmita Kapadia. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008. pp. 37-55. Fayer, Joan M. “The Carriacou Shakespeare Mas’: Linguistic Creativity in a Creole Community”. Contact Englishes of the Eastern Caribbean. Eds. Michael Aceto and Jefferey P. Williams. Amsterdam, Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 2003. pp. 211-26. Fischer-Lichte, Erika. Theatre, Sacrifice, Ritual: Exploring Forms of Political Theatre. London, New York: Routledge, 2005. Gates, Henry Louis. “The ‘Blackness of Blackness’: A Critique of the Sign and the Signifying Monkey”. Critical Inquiry 9.4 (Jun 1983), pp. 685-723 Hawkes, Terrence. Meaning by Shakespeare. London, New York: Routledge, 1992. Hill, Errol. “The Trinidad Carnival: Cultural Change and Synthesis.” Cultures 3.1 (1976). UNESCO Serial Article. pp. 54-86.

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Hodgson, Barbara. “Looking for Mr. Shakespeare After “The Revolution”: Robert Lepage’s intercultural Dream machine”. Shakespeare, Theory and Performance. Ed. James Bulman. London: Routledge, 1996. pp. 71-94. Interview with Christine David, February 2013. Interview with Cosnel McIntosh, February 2013. Interview with Edward Modeste, February 2013. Interview with Kimberlin Mills, February 2013. Interview with Millar David, February 2013. Interview with Stephen Andrew, February 2013. Interview with Vibert Douglas, February 2013. Joseph, Valerie. “How Thomas Nelson and Sons’ Royal Readers Textbooks Helped Instil the Standards of Whiteness into Colonized Black Caribbean Subjects and Their Descendants”. Transforming Anthropology: Journal of the Association of Black Anthropologists 20.2 (2012), pp. 146-58. Kapadia, Parmita. “Bastardizing the Bard: Appropriations of Shakespeare’s Plays in Post-Colonial India”. PhD dissertation, University of Massachusetts, Amherst, 1997. Kidnie, Margaret Jane. Shakespeare and the Problem of Adaptation. London, New York: Routledge, 2009. Leyshon, Rob. “Shakespeare Mas’”. Caribbean Dispatches: Beyond the Tourist Dream. Ed. Jane Bryce. Oxford: Macmillan Caribbean, 2006. pp. 128-36. Lomax, Alan. “Dressing for Shakespeare Mas (1991)”. Published on August 17, 2012, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0GRhj1LfNow&feature=youtu.be. Accessed June 2013. “Long Time Mas: The ‘Roaring Lion’ talks to Keith Smith”. Mas Parade. Magazine. Port of Spain: Key Caribbean Publications, 1975. pp. 6-13. McMurray, Joan F. and Joan M. Fayer. “The Carriacou Mas’ as ‘Syncretic Artifact’”. The Journal of American Folklore 112.443 (Winter, 1999), pp. 58-73. Morgan, Sophia S. “Borges’s ‘Immortal’: Metaritual, Metaliterature, Metaperformance”. Rite, Drama, Festival, Spectacle: Rehearsals Toward a Theory of Cultural Performance. Ed. John J. MacAloom. Philadelphia: Institute for the Study of Human Issues, 1984. pp. 79101. Salter, Denis. “Acting Shakespeare in Postcolonial Space”. Shakespeare, Theory and Performance. Ed. James Bulman. London: Routledge, 1996. pp. 117-36.

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Schoenmakers, Henri. “Festivals, Theatrical Events and Communicative Interactions”. Festivalising! Theatrical Events , Politics and Culture. Eds. Temple Hauptfleisch, Shulamith Lev-Aladgem, Jacqueline Martin, Willmar Sauter, Henri Schoenmakers. Amsterdam, New York: Rodopi, 2007. pp. 27-37. Scolnicov, Hannah. “Introduction”. The Play Out of Context: Transferring Plays from Culture to Culture. Eds. Hannah Scolnicov and Peter Holland. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989. pp. 1-6. Sullivan, Lynne M. Adventure Guide to Grenada, St Vincent & the Grenadines. Edison, NJ: Hunter Publishing, 2003. Tiffin, Helen. “The Institution of Literature”. A History of Literature in the Caribbean Volume 2: English- and Dutch-Speaking Regions. Amsterdam, Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Company, 2001. pp. 43-66. Trivedi, Harish. Colonial Transactions: English Literature and India. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995. Walker II, Victor Leo. “Introduction”. Black Theatre: Ritual Performance in the African Diaspora. Eds. Paul Carter Harrison, Victor Leo Walker II, Gus Edwards. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2002. pp. 1317.

Chapter Six Primary sources Kops, Bernard. The Hamlet of Stepney Green. London: Penguin Books, 1972 (1959), pp. 163-240. Shakespeare, William. Hamlet. Edition bilingue. Traduction Jean-Michel Déprats. Paris : Gallimard. Folio-Théâtre (Coll.). 2005. —. G. R. Hibbard (ed.). Hamlet. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994 (1987). Stoppard, Tom. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead. London/Boston: Faber & Faber, 1967.

Theoretical Works on the Art of Rewriting and Drama Durvye, Catherine. Les Réécritures. Paris : Ellipses, 2001. Engélibert, J.P & Cie. La littérature dépliée : reprise, répétition, réécriture. Rennes : Presses Universitaires, 2008. Genette, Gérard. Figures I. Paris : Editions du seuil, 1966.

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—. Palimpsestes, La littérature au second degré. Paris : Editions du seuil, 1982. Giddin, J. Postwar British Fiction: New Accents and Attitudes. University of California Press, 1962. Hubert, M-C. Les formes de la réécriture au théâtre, Nice: PUP. Textuelles Théâtre (Coll.), 2006. Maquerlot, Jean-Pierre. Réécritures. Rouen : Publications de l’Université de Rouen. 2000. Ryngaert, Jean-Pierre & sermon, Julie. Le personnage théâtral contemporain : décomposition, recomposition. Montreuil : Éditions théâtrales, 2006.

Critical analyses Allred, T. “Hamlet: Anti-hero”. Delta Winds: A Magazine for Student Essays. Delta College, n.d. Web. 3 November 2013. Also available on: http://www.deltacollege.edu/org/deltawinds/DWOnline12/hamlet.html Angel-Perez, Élisabeth and Boireau, Nicole, (ed.). Le Théâtre anglais contemporain. Klincksieck. Angle ouvert (coll.), 2007. Bristol, Michael, McLuskie, Kathleen and Holmes, Christopher. Shakespeare and Modern Theatre, The Performance of Modernity. London and New York: Routledge, 2001. Joseph, Anne. Interview with Bernard Kops. December 8, 2011 http://www.thejc.com/arts/arts-interviews/59829/interview-bernardkops Kops, Bernard. Shalom Bomb, Scenes from my Life. London: Oberon Books, 2000. Kustow, Michael. “The World is a Wedding”. Book Review. Jewish Quarterly. Autumn 2007 Number 207.

Solomons, Jeremy. “Bernard Kops - not just an East End chronicler”, The Jewish Chronicle Online, May 16, 2014. http://www.thejc.com/arts/books/118115/bernard-kops-not-just-eastend-chronicler

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Marino, M. (2013). “Hamlice: dopo la tempesta”, Corriere di Bologna.it, boblog.corrieredibologna.corriere.it/2010/07/31/hamlice_dopo_la_tem pesta/ (last access 27.9.14). Pedullà, G. (2012). ‘The bottom rung on stage. Theatre in Italian prison’, in Art and Cultur in Prison (Fiesole: Fondazione Giovanni Michelucci), pp. 77-86, http://justicia.gencat.cat/web/.content/home/departament/projectes_inte rnacionals/serveis_penitenciaris/art_cultura.pdf. (last access 27.9.2014). Povoledo, E. (2009), ‘Maximum security and a starring role’, The New York Times, 22 July, www.nytimes.com/2009/07/23/arts/23ihtpovo.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0 (last access 27.9.2014). Punzo, A. (2013). È ai vinti che va il suo amore. I primi venticinque anni di autoreclusione con la Compagnia della Fortezza di Volterra (Firenze: Clichy). Ronzani, V. (2009). ‘Amleto incontra Alice nel regno dell’anarchia’, Corriere Fiorentino, Volterra, 24 luglio. Scott-Douglass, A. (2007). Shakespeareinside. The Bard Behind Bars (London: Continuum). The Charter of Prisoners’ and Internees’ Rights and Duties. Decree of the Minister of Justice of 5th December 2012; www.giustizia.it/resources/cms/documents/Carta_dei_diritti_inglese.p df (last access 27.9.2014). TimeOut Beirut Editors (2011). ‘Armando Punzo’, TimeOut Beirut, www.timeoutbeirut.com/art/article/4849/armando-punzo.html?iArticle ID=4849 (last access 27.9.2014).

Chapter Eight Bate, J., E. Rasmussen (ed), The Tempest, Basingstoke, Macmillan, 2008. Bloom, H. (ed), Caliban, New York, Chelsea House Publishers, 1992. Dryden, J., “The Grounds of Criticism in Tragedy”, Preface to Troilus and Cressida (1679), The Works of William Shakespeare, Maximillian E. Novak, ed., Berkeley, University of California Press, 1984, vol.13. Kermode, F. (ed), The Tempest, Arden Shakespeare, 6th edition, London, Methuen, 1954. Restivo, G., R. S. Crivelli, A. Anzi, (eds), Strehler e oltre. Il Galileo di Brecht e La tempesta di Shakespeare, Bologna, Clueb, 2010. Rose, Margaret, Caliban’s Castle. If pigs could fly, Plays international, London, 2009.

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Chapter Nine Auerbach, Erich. Mimésis. La représentation de la réalité dans la littérature occidentale. Paris : Gallimard, 1965. Carney, Sean. The Politics and Poetics of Contemporary English Tragedy. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2013. De Grazia, Margreta and Wells, Stanley. The New Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare. 2nd ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010. Dornan, Reade W. (ed.) Arnold Wesker: A Casebook. New York and London: Garland Publishing, 1998. Gérard, René. Les Feux de l’envie. Paris: Grasset, 1990. Gay, Penny. The Cambridge Introduction to Shakespeare’s Comedies. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008. Hayman, Ronald. Arnold Wesker, 3rd ed. London: Heinemann, 1979. Holderness, Graham. Shakespeare and Venice. Farnham: Ashgate, 2010. Horowitz, Arthur. ‘Shylock after Auschwitz: The Merchant of Venice on the Post-Holocaust Stage – Subversion, Confrontation, and Provocation’, JCRT 8.3 (Fall 2007) http://www.jcrt.org/archives/08.3/Horowitz.pdf Jones, Richard and Baker, Franklin T. Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice. New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1903. Leeming, Glenda. Wesker the Playwright. London: Methuen, 1983. --- (ed.) Wesker on File. London: Methuen, 1985. Marrapodi, Michele. Shakespeare, Italy, and Intertextuality. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2004. Maurin Frédéric, « Le Marchand de Venise dans la mise en scène de Peter Sellars », in Laroque François & Lessay Franck, Esthétiques de la nouveauté à la Renaissance, Paris : Presses de la Sorbonne nouvelle, 2001, p. 141-155. Meyer-Plantureux, Chantal. Les Enfants de Shylock, Paris : Editions Complexe, Le Théâtre en question, 2005. O’Connor, Evangeline. An Index to the Works of Shakespeare. London: Kegan Paul, Trench and Co., 1923/2010, Peyré, Yves (ed.). Shakespeare et l’Europe de la Renaissance. Paris: Société Française Shakespeare, 2004.

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Pittman, L. Monique. Authorizing Shakespeare on Film and Television. New York: Peter Lang, 2011. Wesker, Arnold. Distinctions. London: Jonathan Cape, 1985. —. Shylock and Other Plays. Penguin Plays, Volume 4. London: Penguin, 1990. —. The Birth of Shylock and the Death of Zero Mostel. PENDING, 1999. Wilcher, Robert. Understanding Wesker. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1991. Shapiro, James. Shakespeare and the Jews. Columia University Press, 1996.

CONTRIBUTORS

Mariacristina Cavecchi is a Senior Lecturer at Milan State University. Her main areas of interest include the 20th and 21st-century appropriations of Shakespeare’s plays for theatre and cinema, Prison Shakespeare, Shakespeare in contemporary popular culture and modern British theatre. She is the author of Cerchi e cicli. Sulle forme della memoria in Ulisse (2012), and Shakespeare mostro contemporaneo. Macbeth nelle riscritture di Marowitz, Stoppard e Brenton (1998). She co-edited Caryl Churchill. (2012); Tra le lingue, tra i linguaggi. Cent’anni di Samuel Beckett (2007); Shakespeare & Scespir (2005); Shakespeare Graffiti (2002); EuroShakespeares. Exploring Cultural Practice in an International Context (with Mariangela Tempera, 2002). She organised the international conference “Shakespeare in the Maze of Contemporary Culture” (Milan, 2012) and she is currently working on the appropriation of Shakespeare in graffiti art. Michael Dobson is Director of the Shakespeare Institute, Stratford-uponAvon, and Professor of Shakespeare Studies, University of Birmingham.He is also an honorary governor of the Royal Shakespeare Company, an executive trustee of the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust, and a board member of the European Shakespeare Research Association. He studied at Oxford (where he won the Charles Oldham Shakespeare Prize in 1981) and completed his Oxford PhD while a visiting scholar at Harvard; he taught extensively in North America, before returning to the UK in the late 1990s, where he taught at the Roehampton Institute and the University of London before taking up his current appointment in 2011. He has held scholarships and visiting appointments in California, China, and Sweden. His publications include The Oxford Companion to Shakespeare (new revised edition, with Stanley Wells, Erin Sullivan and Will Sharpe, 2015), Shakespeare and Amateur Performance (Cambridge, 2011), Performing Shakespeare's Tragedies Today (Cambridge, 2006), England's Elizabeth (with Nicola Watson, 2002) and The Making of the National Poet (Oxford, 1992). Among other work in collaboration with theatre and film practitioners, he is a trustee of Flute Theatre. At present he is engaged in preparations to co-host the 2016 World Shakespeare Congress.

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Anne Etienne lectures in Modern Drama in the School of English, University College Cork. Her research focuses on three fields: theatre censorship in 20th-century England, Arnold Wesker, and contemporary Irish theatre. Her work on 20th-century British drama and theatre is based on archival research and hinges on an interdisciplinary approach which involves a reflection on the political and cultural contexts. She has published extensively on the issue of theatre censorship in England. She has also published a biographic chapter, a critical article, a translation and co-edited journal issue on Wesker, and am currently pursuing new projects on his literary and cultural heritage. She has been interested in local theatre since her appointment at UCC and is working on an edited volume on contemporary Irish theatre. Dana Monah is Teaching Assistant at the Department of French, “Al. I. Cuza” University of Ia‫܈‬i. She holds a PhD in French Literature and Theatre Studies from the Al. I. Cuza and Paris III Sorbonne Nouvelle Universities (joint supervision), with a dissertation on contemporary theatrical rewriting. Her research interests include adaptations and rewritings of Shakespeare in contemporary theatre, performance studies and contemporary Francophone literature. She has published articles in collections of essays and theatre journals (Alternatives Théâtrales, Studia Dramatica) and wrote the introduction to Richard III for a new Romanian translation of Shakespeare’s Complete Works, edited by George Volceanov. Anne-Kathrin Marquardt currently teaches English language, literature and culture in “classes préparatoires littéraires.” She is a former student of the Ecole Normale Supérieure de Lyon, where she obtained her Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees, as well as her “Agrégation,” in English literature. She also holds a Master’s in European studies from the Freie Universität Berlin. She is currently working on a larger research project focusing on gift-giving and commercial exchange in Shakespeare’s theatre, and has published extensively on the subject. She is also the author of a booklength study of Julie Taymor’s film adaptation of Titus Andronicus. Allene Nichols has a doctorate in humanities from the University of Texas at Dallas. Her research focuses on the representation of gender and sexuality in twentieth and twenty-first century art, literature, and popular culture. She is particularly interested in the changing representations of the witch as they relate to the representation of women. Her poems have appeared in a variety of journals and anthologies, including Naugatuck

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River Review New Plains Review, Conclave, Lunch Ticket, Ginger Piglet, Southwestern Haiga and Haiku and Dance the Guns to Silence: One Hundred Poems for Ken Saro-Wiwa. Her plays have been produced in California, Texas, Wisconsin, and New York. Giselle Rampaul is a Lecturer in Literatures in English at The University of the West Indies, St Augustine Campus. She has co-edited two collections of essays, The Child and the Caribbean Imagination (UWI Press, 2012), and Postscripts: Caribbean Perspectives on the British Canon from Shakespeare to Dickens (UWI Press, 2014). She is also the producer of the podcast series The Spaces between Words: Conversations with Writers. Her research interests include the intersections between British and Caribbean Literatures, and she is currently working on a manuscript on Shakespeare in the Caribbean. Maggie Rose teaches British Theatre Studies at Milan State University. She has published widely in the areas of translation studies, contemporary British drama and Shakespeare in performance. A dramatist and translator, she spends part of the year in the UK for her writing and research. Her stage and radio plays reflect her interest in issues of migration and multiculturalism as well as Shakespeare and have been produced in the UK and Italy. She has recently penned the site-specific, Shakespeare, Secret Agent, A Walk in Shakespeare’s Garden, Harlequin and Shakespeare Ltd, for Botanical gardens and villas in Italy. These plays reflect her current researches into food and the environment in Shakespeare’s work. Her stage translations have been performed in Europe and America. She cotranslated Edward Bond’s Warplays, directed by L.Ronconi and Alan Bennett’s The History Plays directed by Elio de Capitani e F. Bruni. She led the EU workshop WWW.Venice, and co-led the three-year seminar “Intercultural Dialogues”, supported by British Council in collaboration with Milan and Warwick Universities. In the context of Shakespeare 400, she is currently developing the international conference-festival, “Shakespeare Forever Young” devoted to Shakespeare in popular culture. Estelle Rivier is a senior lecturer at the University of Maine (France). She has published studies on French and British contemporary scenographies of Shakespeare’s plays (Etude scénographique des pieces de Shakespeare, Peter Lang, 2006 ; Shakespeare dans la maison de Molière, PUR, 2012) and co-edited a collection of essays after an International symposium she organized with Eric C. Brown in France and in America, Shakespeare in Performance (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2013). She has recently

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presented a professional thesis (HDR) on the Rewriting of Hamlet by Bernard Kops, Tom Stoppard and Howard Barker. As a stage practitioner, she has graduated in a Conservatoire d’Art Dramatique and is the director of an amateur theatre company (Act’en scène). She is also the author of a collection of poems. Preti Taneja is Postdoctoral Research Fellow in Global Shakespeare at Queen Mary, University of London and Warwick University, where she works on Shakespeare performances in relation to human rights abuses and in humanitarian situations. She is also the editor of Visual Verse, an online anthology of art and words. As a human rights advocate she co founded ERA Films, working on issues as diverse as Iraq’s refugee crisis, in Rwanda with survivors of the genocide and with women in slum areas of Nairobi, Kenya.Her fiction film and documentary work with Ben Crowe is critically acclaimed. Preti's first novella, Kumkum Malhotra is out now from Gatehouse Press. Her debut novel, We that are young will be published in January 2017, by Galley Beggar Press.