Screening Early Modern Drama : Beyond Shakespeare 9781107248526, 9781107024939

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SCREENING EARLY MODERN DRAMA

While film adaptations of Shakespeare’s plays captured the popular imagination at the turn of the last century, independent filmmakers began to adapt the plays of Shakespeare’s contemporaries. The roots of their films in European avant-garde cinema and the plays’ politically subversive, sexually transgressive and violent subject matter challenge Shakespeare’s cultural dominance and the conventions of mainstream cinema. In Screening Early Modern Drama, Pascale Aebischer shows how director Derek Jarman constructed an alternative, dissident approach to filming literary heritage in his ‘queer’ Caravaggio and Edward II, providing models for subsequent filmmakers such as Mike Figgis, Peter Greenaway, Alex Cox and Sarah Harding. Aebischer explains how the advent of digital video has led to an explosion in low-budget screen versions of early modern drama. The only comprehensive analysis of early modern drama on screen to date, this groundbreaking study also includes an extensive annotated filmography listing fifty surviving adaptations. pascale aebischer is Senior Lecturer in Renaissance Studies at the University of Exeter. Her co-edited collection Remaking Shakespeare: Performance Across Media, Genres and Cultures (2003) and her first book, Shakespeare’s Violated Bodies: Stage and Screen Performance (2004), were followed by a wide range of articles in books and leading journals, including Shakespeare Quarterly, Shakespeare Bulletin and Shakespeare Survey. In Jacobean Drama (2010), her focus began to shift towards early modern performance studies, which she explored more fully in Performing Early Modern Drama Today (2012), a collection she co-edited with Kathryn Prince. As General Editor of Shakespeare Bulletin, she encourages conversations about early modern drama in performance and seeks to set Shakespeare alongside his contemporaries, both on early modern stages and in present-day performance practice.

SCREENING EARLY MODERN DRAMA Beyond Shakespeare

PASCALE AEBISCHER University of Exeter

cambridge university press Cambridge, New York, Melbourne, Madrid, Cape Town, Singapore, São Paulo, Delhi, Mexico City Cambridge University Press The Edinburgh Building, Cambridge cb2 8ru, UK Published in the United States of America by Cambridge University Press, New York www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9781107024939 © Pascale Aebischer 2013 This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press. First published 2013 Printed and bound in the United Kingdom by the MPG Books Group A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloguing in Publication data Aebischer, Pascale, 1970– Screening early modern drama : beyond Shakespeare / Pascale Aebischer, University of Exeter. pages cm Includes index. isbn 978-1-107-02493-9 1. Film adaptations – History and criticism. 2. English drama – Early modern and Elizabethan, 1500–1600 – Film adaptations. 3. Motion pictures and literature. 4. Motion pictures – Great Britain – 20th century – History. 5. Shakespeare, William, 1564–1616 – Film adaptations – History and criticism. I. Title. pn1997.85.a35 2013 791.430 657–dc23 2012044079 isbn 978-1-107-02493-9 Hardback Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this publication, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

Contents

page vi

List of illustrations Acknowledgements List of abbreviations and referencing

viii xi

Introduction: Beyond Shakespeare: the contemporary Jacobean film

1

1

Derek Jarman’s queer contemporary Jacobean aesthetic: Caravaggio and Edward II

20

2

The preposterous contemporary Jacobean film: Peter Greenaway’s Cook, heritage Shakespeare and sexual exploitation in Mike Figgis’s Hotel

66

3

Third Cinema, urban regeneration and heritage Shakespeare in Alex Cox’s Revengers Tragedy

104

4

Early modern performance and digital media: remediation and the evolving archival canon

143

5

Bend it like Nagra: mainstreaming The Changeling in Sarah Harding’s Compulsion

187

Conclusion: Anonymous: early modern dramatists on twenty-first-century screens

217

Appendix 1 Chronological list of surviving film adaptations Appendix 2 Annotated filmography: early modern drama on screen, 1926–2012 Bibliography Index

v

225 227 252 267

Illustrations

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13

Quer/queer love: Charlotte Rampling and Fabio Testi in Giuseppe Patroni Griffi’s Addio, fratello crudele (1971). Screengrab. page 16 ‘An Inigo Jones creation’: Elisabeth Welch in Derek Jarman’s The Tempest (1979). Film still, BFI. 27 Vanity: Tilda Swinton in Derek Jarman’s Caravaggio (1986). Film still, BFI. 34 In control: Tilda Swinton surrounded by ‘bodyguards’ in Derek Jarman’s Caravaggio (1986). Screengrab. 35 Queer youth: Tilda Swinton, Jody Graber and Nigel Terry in Derek Jarman’s Edward II (1991). Film still, BFI. 55 Isabella: Tilda Swinton in Derek Jarman’s Edward II (1991). Screengrab, with permission of Universal Pictures. 58 ‘Ev’ry Time We Say Goodbye’: Annie Lennox and Derek Jarman in ‘red, hot + blue’ (1991). Screengrab. 61 Consuming the female body (Laura Morante), the early modern text and food in Mike Figgis’s Hotel (2001). Screengrab. 81 Zoom: Max Beesley, Saffron Burrows and Mia Maestro in Mike Figgis’s Hotel (2001). Screengrab. 97 Reviving the dead: Rhys Ifans and Valentina Cervi in Mike Figgis’s Hotel (2001). Still by Mike Figgis. 100 The Liver Building: Christopher Eccleston in Alex Cox’s Revengers Tragedy (2002). Film still, BFI. 121 Lutyens’ Cathedral: Andrew Schofield and Christopher Eccleston in Alex Cox’s Revengers Tragedy (2002). Screengrab. 122 Publicity image: Christopher Eccleston in Alex Cox’s Revengers Tragedy (2002). Photoshop by Alex Cox. 130 vi

List of illustrations 14 Anachronistic mourning: Christopher Eccleston and Eddie Izzard in Alex Cox’s Revengers Tragedy (2002). Film still, BFI. 15 Out of joint: Irena Huljak, Jason Gray and Kyle McDonald in Kyle McDonald and Philip Borg’s Revenge for the Duchess of Malfi (2010). Screengrab. 16 Publicity still: Ray Winstone and Parminder Nagra in Sarah Harding’s Compulsion (2009). Courtesy of Size 9 Productions. 17 Rape: Parminder Nagra in Sarah Harding’s Compulsion (2009). Screengrab. 18 ‘Giddy turning’: Parminder Nagra in Sarah Harding’s Compulsion (2009). Screengrab. 19 Prologue: Derek Jacobi in Roland Emmerich’s Anonymous (2011). Screengrab. 20 The Babelsberg Rose: Mark Rylance in Roland Emmerich’s Anonymous (2011). Screengrab.

vii 135 168 188 209 210 219 221

Acknowledgements

My journey beyond Shakespeare, into what I feared might be a wilderness of forbiddingly alien plays and films and fiercely policed disciplinary boundaries, turned out to be a joyful, immensely enriching, if occasionally exhausting, experience. Instead of finding myself alone, I was accompanied by an ever-growing group of companions and friends, who helped me overcome obstacles and opened doors to new worlds. At ‘home’, the University of Exeter, I have the luck to be surrounded by smart and generous colleagues: warm thanks to Regenia Gagnier, Jo Harris, Joe Kember, Steve Neale, Ed Paleit, Philip Schwyzer, Vicky Sparey and Jane Spencer for providing early sounding-boards, and to Sally Faulkner, Gabriella Giannachi, James Lyons and Dan North for helping me along the way as I ventured into film studies and intermedial performance. Nela Vlaisavljevic-Kapelan and the Research Office provided very concrete assistance, as has the university, which granted me a much-appreciated period of study leave. That study leave was complemented by an Arts and Humanities Research Council Fellowship that made all the difference, in that it freed me up to travel to archives and conferences, work with colleagues in other institutions and act as the Higher Education Consultant for Stage on Screen from 2011 to 2012. It is thanks to the fellowship that I was able to engage in collaborations with Kathryn Prince, Roberta Barker and Sarah Werner that have given me a sense of urgency and shared purpose – and an exhilarating sense of naughtiness as we chaired ‘Counter-Shakespeares’ and ‘NonShakespearean Drama and Performance’ seminars at the International Shakespeare Congress (2011) and the Shakespeare Association of America meeting (2012) (thanks to the organising committees of both events for graciously indulging us). In and around those seminars and other conferences, and as I was writing pieces of work that have found their way into this book, I learned a great deal from a number of scholars who invited me to present my work and/or viii

Acknowledgements

ix

acted as sources of inspiration, vital information, encouragement, ideas and feedback: thanks to Susan Bennett, Jem Bloomfield, Nicola Boyle, Christie Carson, Nicoleta Cinpoeş, Christy Desmet, Alan Dessen, Michael Dobson, Suzanne Gossett, Ailsa Grant Ferguson, Susanne Greenhalgh, Andrew Hadfield, Andrew Hartley, Barbara Hodgdon, Farah Karim-Cooper, Eric Langley, Courtney Lehmann, Laurie Maguire, Kate McLuskie, Gordon McMullan, Paul Menzer, Lucy Munro, Catherine Silverstone, Emma Smith, Tiffany Stern, Garrett A. Sullivan Jr, Ann Thompson and Rowland Wymer. I am deeply grateful to those friends and colleagues who took time away from their own research to read chapter drafts: Roberta Barker, Mark Burnett, Maurizio Calbi, Kevin Ewert, Helen Hanson, Eric Mallin, Kim Solga, Geoffrey Way and Ramona Wray all made me work harder. Elizabeth Bowman, Lesel Dawson, Ewan Fernie, Ailsa Grant Ferguson, Susanne Gruss, Courtney Lehmann, Catherine Silverstone and Shell Zappa let me see their work; Meera Solanki shared her experience of growing up in a British Asian family; Adam Groves gave me an insight into Carmelo Bene; Steven Davies sent me a copy of his script of Cox’s Revengers; Bernard Horrocks and Dave McCall helped me secure permissions; and Tom Gordon, Tony Peake, Will Higbee and Michael Wiggs brokered some important introductions. The research for this book took me into a number of archives – and away from my family. I am the more grateful to Jonny Davies, Kathleen Dickson and Steve Tollervey at the BFI and Ruth Kitchin at the NMM for going beyond the call of duty to make those archive visits productive and short. At the BDC, Phil Wickham helped me find things I didn’t know existed, while Katie Pryme at the Open University saved me from having to travel to Milton Keynes. Even their kindness and generosity did not prepare me for the open door of Prospect Cottage and Keith Collins’s company that made my trip to Dungeness an unforgettable experience of beauty and peace mixed with feverish excitement, as I went to look for one thing and found another. When tracking down elusive films and researching their context, I often ended up being helped by members of the production team and by the filmmakers themselves: it was a privilege to have coffee with Elizabeth Freestone, Sarah Harding and Phil Rees; to talk to Don Boyd, Joshua St Johnston and the Willing Suspension team (Emily Gruber, Matthew Stokes and Holly Schaaf); and to be helped by Don Boyd, Mike Cordner, Mike Figgis (with Tara Li-An Smith), Mark Long, Kyle McDonald, Perry Mills, Douglas Morse, Barrie Rutter (with Sue Andrews), Jay Stern and Boff Whalley. Joshua St Johnston, Sarah Harding, Douglas Morse and Don

x

Acknowledgements

Boyd all responded generously to drafts I sent them. Alex Cox sent me copies of his unfilmed Jacobeans.net scripts; his sensitive feedback on my Revengers chapter prevented a howler from going into print. He, Mike Figgis and Michael Wiggs also kindly let me use their own visual materials as illustrations. Many thanks to them all for their enthusiasm, energy – and for doing the work they do. In the final stages of the book, I increasingly relied on the superb research assistance of Jen Barnes, who chopped through my sentences, knocked my referencing into shape and gleefully mocked my foibles. Her cheerful support was matched, at the Cambridge University Press end, by the grace and efficiency of Sarah Stanton and her team (particular thanks to Fleur Jones, Tom O’Reilly, Devi Rajasundaram, Sophie Rosinke, and to the alarmingly astute ‘Reader A’, who made me stop and think again). I am grateful to Cambridge University Press for permission to rework and develop my contributions to The Cambridge Companion to English Renaissance Tragedy (2010), Thomas Middleton in Context (2011), Christopher Marlowe in Context (2012) and Performing Early Modern Drama Today (2012). Thanks, also, to Shakespeare Quarterly for permitting me to expand on ‘Shakespearean Heritage and the Preposterous “Contemporary Jacobean” Film: Mike Figgis’s Hotel (2001)’ (2009). My deepest debt is to my family. Un grand merci and thank you to the grandparents who repeatedly stepped in to look after Rhiannon and Glyn when I was away. Merci, Rhinli und Glyn, dass Dir mi heit la schaffe. Most of all, thank you David for reading countless drafts, tolerating my obsessions and ensuring, with the children, that there is a life outside work to be shared with you. This book is for you.

Abbreviations and referencing

BDC BFI DB DJC NMM PC RSC

Bill Douglas Centre for the History of Cinema and Popular Culture, University of Exeter British Film Institute, London Don Boyd Collection, BDC Derek Jarman Collection, BFI National Media Museum, Bradford Prospect Cottage, Dungeness, Kent Royal Shakespeare Company

Quotations from early modern plays will, throughout this book, refer to David Bevington et al. (eds.), English Renaissance Drama: A Norton Anthology (New York: W. W. Norton, 2002), while quotations from Shakespeare refer to Stephen Greenblatt et al. (eds.), The Norton Shakespeare (New York: W. W. Norton, 2008).

xi

introduction

Beyond Shakespeare: the contemporary Jacobean film

1991, a cinema somewhere in North London, a screening of Derek Jarman’s Edward II. The film left me with the overwhelming sense of having watched something important I did not yet feel quite equipped to understand but would return to. The sensation was very different from that of watching Kenneth Branagh’s Henry V two years earlier, which had convinced me that Shakespeare was quite accessible. For my English Literature finals, I chose to work on Edward II alongside Henry V. The viva concentrated on Henry V; Edward II got no mention. Jarman had died; Branagh was filming Hamlet. 2012, Dungeness. The wind, in violent gusts, seemed in turns to propel me towards the black fisherman’s cottage with its yellow window frames and then, suddenly, to add to the difficulty of walking on the shingle beach. In the distance, the nuclear power station dominated the view, its square forbidding structure fenced in at the end of a vista filled with wild flowers, corroding fishing equipment and the row of huts along the Dungeness road. It had taken two cab rides and four trains to get me to my destination. As I approached the garden with its twisted sculptures made of rusting metal spikes and driftwood poles, I could see that the door of the cottage was ajar. On Derek Jarman’s desk, his weighty Shooting Script for Edward II was waiting for me, gilded and with an ‘It’s cool to be QUEER’ sticker on its cover; the script itself typed-up on an early word processor and annotated in Jarman’s elegant hand. I plugged in my laptop and went to work. This book tells a story that straddles these moments: the tale of a cultural struggle, played out on our cinema (and later our computer) screens, that uses the plays of Shakespeare and of his contemporaries as a means by which to express contrary political and artistic views. It is also the tale of multiple journeys: not just the road to Dungeness, but the often prolonged, difficult journeys travelled by filmmakers in their endeavour to bring early modern drama to the screen and to find ways of making these plays express something urgent about contemporary culture, politics and society. The landscape in which these struggles and journeys take place plays a decisive role in 1

2

Screening Early Modern Drama

shaping them: in the distance looms Hollywood, a gigantic structure protected by powerful financial interests, in the foreground the independent films that somehow manage to grow despite the aridity of their surroundings and that adapt with remarkable ingenuity to evolving technological developments, creating artworks of jarring beauty out of objects salvaged from the past. The overarching narrative of Screening Early Modern Drama, then, is that of the film adaptations of early modern drama which follow in the footsteps of Derek Jarman in their desire to step outside the boundaries of the Shakespearean canon and explore the dramatic legacies of Marlowe, Jonson, Middleton, Webster and Ford. The story begins in the 1960s and 1970s, with the efforts of European arthouse filmmakers who drew on early modern drama in their quest to create a cinematic language capable of speaking of transgressive desires and dissident identities. Their countercinematic work would pave the way for the cinema of Derek Jarman.1 Jarman chose to ignore the concentration of ‘quality’ revivals of early modern drama on British stages and television that attracted the critical attention of Wendy Griswold (1986) and Kathleen McLuskie (1989). These steadily popular revivals would merge with the television genre of the period drama and grow, by the mid 1980s, into what would be dubbed the English ‘heritage film’.2 I explain in Chapter 1 how Jarman loathed these films and instead looked towards the European avant-garde, American underground, British punk and to the paintings of Caravaggio for his inspiration on how to make the early modern period enter into dialogue with the present. While he started off using Shakespeare for his counter-cultural ends, in the 1980s, as his politics grew ever more radical and Tilda Swinton joined his team, he turned his back on Shakespeare as too conservative and sought a stronger political model and pre-text in Marlowe’s ‘Jacobean, sexy, and violent’ Edward II.3 Following close on the heels of Greenaway’s pastiche of ‘Jacobean’ motifs and aesthetics in The Cook, the Thief, His Wife and Her Lover (1989), Jarman’s Edward II marked a turning-point in the history of early modern drama on screen in the twentieth century. Writing in 1999, A. L. Rees gave a rather depressing account of the legacy left by Jarman and Greenaway: With no school to follow them, they remain sacred monsters of the British cinema, independent but to that degree also isolated. . . . Their impact on 1 2

I borrow the term ‘counter-cinema’ from Peter Wollen’s ‘Godard and Counter Cinema’; these European films adapting early modern drama share the distinguishing features of Godard’s work. Higson, ‘Re-presenting the National Past’, p. 109. 3 Jarman, Modern Nature, p. 293.

Introduction

3

cinema audiences has been greater than that of their artistic contemporaries – but this is not the point insofar as their continual influence is concerned. Jarman’s canon is now sadly closed, while Greenaway’s remains vigorously open, but it is difficult at this stage to see who will take up their cinematic options as film- and video-makers.4

What Rees could not foresee, based on the sorry example of Marcus Thompson’s Middleton’s Changeling (1998), was that Jarman’s work with early modern drama, even more than Greenaway’s, would, at the start of the next decade, begin to bear fruit.5 Mike Figgis’s Hotel (2001), the ‘period punk’ adaptation of The Duchess of Malfi, I discuss in Chapter 2 in relation to Greenaway’s Cook, and Alex Cox’s Revengers Tragedy (2002), the subject of Chapter 3, demonstrably build on Jarman’s work.6 The new breed of independent filmmakers producing microcinematic adaptations of early modern plays who I turn to in Chapter 4 may not be aware of the extent to which the path they tread has been opened up by Jarman’s determination to use the latest cheap technologies to shoot feature films at the lowest possible cost, though it is clear that his experiments with Super-8 films and video helped create a critical environment within which filmmakers of the 1990s and 2000s would be able to appreciate the flexibility of digital video cameras and the colour and grainy quality of the images they produce. Even the mainstream ITV adaptation of The Changeling as Compulsion in 2009, which I analyse in Chapter 5 and whose glamorous cinematography and conservative politics seem far removed from Jarman’s radicalism, includes a vista of Jarman’s Dungeness as an acknowledgement of his influence. Approaching the subject of Jarman’s legacy from the vantage point of film studies, Rees was also unaware of how Jarman’s films were affecting the work of editors and critics contributing to the Oxford Collected Works of Thomas Middleton (2007), and of the connections between academic discourses and theatrical productions.7 One of the principal strategies Gary Taylor, as the collection’s general editor, adopted in the publicity campaign that proclaimed Middleton to be ‘our other Shakespeare’, was to propose an equivalence between Middleton and Caravaggio that relied on a strikingly Jarmanesque view of Caravaggio as a painter of chiaroscuro contrasts, shocking style, dark realism and anachronistic sensibility. When, in 2008, 4 5 6 7

Rees, A History of Experimental Film and Video, p. 101. I choose not to discuss Thompson’s film here. For my views on it, see: Aebischer, ‘Middleton in the Cinema’, pp. 340–2; and Aebischer, ‘Early Modern Drama on Screen’, pp. 158–9. Figgis, Digital Film-Making, p. 68. On the opposition and equivalence this edition postulates between Middleton and Shakespeare, see Aebischer and Prince, ‘Introduction’, in Performing Early Modern Drama Today, pp. 8–11.

4

Screening Early Modern Drama

Melly Still staged The Revenger’s Tragedy at the National Theatre in London and used Caravaggio’s portrait of St Jerome with a skull as a backdrop for Vindice’s study, the imprint of Jarman’s Caravaggio was self-evident. Like many of the theatrical revivals of early modern drama in the past two decades that Roberta Barker8 and Kim Solga9 have scrutinised for their portrayal of problematic gender relations and acts of brutal oppression, the whole show was infused by an understanding of the Jacobean as transgressive, violent and sexually dissident – and modern. Many of the recent theatrical and cinematic revivals of early modern drama thus share a stress on ‘transgression, dissidence, and desire’ and a conception of the ‘Jacobean’ which Susan Bennett, in Performing Nostalgia (1996), identifies as involving ‘(moral) decay, excess and violence – deficiencies we also find in our contemporary moment and for which this past can apparently give expression and meaning’.10 When Bennett describes Howard Barker’s ‘collaboration’ with Middleton on Women Beware Women as a ‘contemporary Jacobean text’, her anachronistic welding together of the contemporary and the Jacobean offers an evocative label for the aesthetic cultivated by Jarman and his successors that I will adopt throughout this book.11 Like Jarman, who was fascinated by the defiance of norms of early modern art, contemporary Jacobean filmmakers seek their inspiration in the connection between early modern drama and countercultural movements. They communicate an alternative cultural memory, remember difference – and remember differently from mainstream cinema and ‘Shakespearean’ modes of representing the early modern period. As this suggests, contemporary Jacobean revivals stand in a conflicted and dialectical relationship with Shakespeare. On the one hand, they profit from the cultural capital of their association with the ‘Shakespeare brand’;12 they use Shakespeare as ‘a reliable cultural touchstone, a language “we all understand”’.13 On the other hand, they often define themselves against the conservative nostalgia inherent in the ‘Shakespeare and Elizabethan heritage industry’ that has seen the building of Shakespeare’s Globe, the continuing success of Shakespearean revivals in Britain’s largest subsidised theatres and the thriving Renaissance tourism focussed on National Heritage sites and Stratford-upon-Avon’s various Shakespeare sites.14 Shakespeare’s domination 8 10 11 12 14

9 Early Modern Tragedy. Violence Against Women. Bennett, Performing Nostalgia, pp. 80, 82. Bennett, Performing Nostalgia, p. 93. On the subject of the ‘neo-Jacobean’ theatre of the 1980s, see also Boon and Price, ‘Maps of the World’. Garber, Loaded Words, pp. 72–82. 13 Sanders, Adaptation and Appropriation, p. 52. Pidduck, ‘Elizabeth and Shakespeare in Love’, p. 130.

Introduction

5

of the British cultural industry is crushingly obvious in the 2012 Cultural Olympics: Guardian theatre reviewer Lyn Gardner exhaustedly notes that: ‘The official guide for the London 2012 festival lists 62 Shakespeare productions, and only 55 non-Shakespeare theatre and performance events.’15 It is in opposition to the Shakespeare industry’s reliance on ‘the idealized authenticity and authority of Shakespeare’s (great) texts’ that Bennett notes that ‘Jacobean revivals point to a less than perfect past’;16 for her, Greenaway’s Cook and Jarman’s Edward II model the manner in which the ‘Jacobean’ can provide ‘one site where the contradictory impulses of nostalgia perform themselves in a disruptive and occasionally emancipatory mode’.17 Most of the contemporary Jacobean films this book is dedicated to react against the ‘heritage Shakespeare’ films of the early to mid 1990s, epitomised by Kenneth Branagh’s ‘Renaissance Films’ adaptations of Henry V (1989), Much Ado About Nothing (1993) and Hamlet (1996).18 These films define what Samuel Crowl termed ‘the Kenneth Branagh era’ and have, in what is undeniably a simplistic understanding of the films themselves and their ability to attract Hollywood funding and international audiences, come to stand for everything the contemporary Jacobean films are emphatically not: mainstream in their popular appeal, ‘faithful’ and reverential in their relationship to their literary source, conventional in their film grammar and narrative approach, conservative in their politics and their ability to provide the visual pleasures of period and define essential ‘Englishness’ for an international audience.19 As Thomas Cartelli and Katherine Rowe remark, this (stereo)type of cinematic Shakespeare is ‘rooted in [the] realist and heritage conventions’20 associated with the archetypal heritage films that Andrew Higson influentially critiqued for displaying ‘the past . . . as visually spectacular pastiche, inviting a nostalgic gaze’.21 It is the contemporary Jacobean films’ articulation of their opposition to Shakespeare’s cultural dominance and his perceived complicity with Hollywood’s production methods, aesthetics, politics and funding that 15 17 18 19 20 21

Gardner, ‘Critic’s Notebook’, p. 11. 16 Bennett, Performing Nostalgia, p. 93. Bennett, Performing Nostalgia, p. 95. ‘Renaissance Films’ is, tellingly, the name of Branagh’s production company. For a discussion of ‘heritage Shakespeare’ films as a group, see Cartmell, ‘Fin de Siècle Film Adaptations’. See Emma French for a differentiated exploration of Branagh’s relationship to Hollywood and the film industry that dismantles many of these stereotypical assumptions. Cartelli and Rowe, New Wave Shakespeare on Screen, p. 16. Higson, ‘Re-presenting the National Past’, p. 109. Higson’s view of the heritage film has since been critiqued and refined. See, e.g.: Dave, Visions of England, pp. 27–44; Galt, New European Cinema, pp. 7–11; Hill, ‘Allegorising the Nation’, pp. 73–98; and Monk, ‘The British Heritage-Film Debate’.

6

Screening Early Modern Drama

binds these films together as a coherent corpus and that is at the centre of my argument in this book. Contemporary Jacobean films are striking for the consistency with which they propagate an oppositional, ‘dissident heritage’ aesthetic.22 Contrary to Rowland Wymer’s view that there is ‘no real tradition of filming non-Shakespearean Renaissance plays’, I show that not only is there such a tradition, but that failure to understand these films as interconnected reduces our ability to appreciate the counter-cultural work they are doing collectively to critique dominant modes of filmmaking and adapting Shakespearean drama to the screen.23 What is gained by arguing that these films belong to the contemporary Jacobean corpus is a recognition that they share a consistent attitude towards their source material and are subjected to similar constraints that affect their budget, style and politics in ways that crisply distinguish them from the nostalgic heritage Shakespeare film. One aspect of this book that will strike readers coming to it from the vantage point of Shakespearean performance studies as unusual, and that is intimately connected to the oppositional stance of contemporary Jacobean films, is my concern with the contexts of production. Contemporary Jacobean films have to be understood within an industry context in which, as Sarah Street demonstrates, it has become ever more difficult for independent British films to gain access to a market increasingly ‘dominated by American interests’.24 My attention to the gestation of these films is a corrective to the tendency, in criticism of screen Shakespeares, to ignore the films’ imbrication in a larger body of work and a film industry context that determines not only what can be filmed, but how it may be filmed. I stress the development of filmmakers’ ideas across time, in response to political events, industry pressures, technological developments and financial constraints, since all of these inform the meanings of the finished film. I also repeatedly put emphasis on connections between theatre and film because the crossover between stage and screen is more complex than has been hitherto acknowledged. This is not only a matter of filmmakers also being theatre-goers. It is also a matter of shared personnel: many films liberally borrow performers with Shakespearean pedigrees to initiate a complex ‘haunting’ of the films by their Shakespearean intertexts and trouble the distinction between the centre and the margins of the repertoire.25 The interdependence of theatre and screen performances of early modern drama is nowhere more obvious than in the online 22 24

de Groot, Consuming History, p. 212. Street, British National Cinema, p. 19.

23 25

Wymer, Jarman, p. 147. Carlson, The Haunted Stage.

Introduction

7

environment, where, as I argue in Chapter 4, it becomes evident that live theatre depends for its publicity and financial survival on its online remediations which, in turn, leave a tangible mark on the ways in which stage productions are conceptualised. It is furthermore crucial that we recognise the ways in which the films I analyse in this study often resist their identification as a single, finite object, the culmination of a process that ends abruptly with the release of the film. Not only do the performers bring in an intricate network of intertextual allusions that reach beyond the boundaries of the films, acting as hyperlinks of sorts to other performances in the past or (as I argue in Chapter 4) the future, but there often actually is no ‘finished film’. The object we identify as ‘the film’ is often a snapshot in a continuing process that has the potential to retroactively redefine the film’s boundaries and its meaning. While the resistance to closure is already evident in Derek Jarman’s Edward II, that tendency is exacerbated in the digital age: Figgis’s Hotel DVD blurs the division between the film and its paratexts to such an extent as to challenge the fixity of the work; Cox’s Revengers Tragedy is part of a much larger film project that might well spring back to life in a different medium; some of the short films released on the internet are embryonic versions of larger projects awaiting funding; many of the performances of early modern drama available online are part of an expanded theatrical experience that defies the insistence on the uniqueness of the live event that has become a central tenet of performance studies. One of the most important consequences of the open-endedness of these expanded films is that they invite us to revisit them, using a retrospective, anachron(ist)ic mode of reading them that allows later developments to impact on earlier ones. This preposterousness – a term I will unpack in its early modern polysemy in Chapter 2 – is also what enables the filmmakers I discuss here to treat the early modern texts as critical responses to presentday dilemmas. Several films challenge the chronological narrative techniques of mainstream cinema in fundamental ways and offer a model for reading early modern texts both for their role in shaping the society we live in and, more importantly, for their ability to respond to that society, critiquing it from the vantage point of the past while looking at the past, as Jarman would say, ‘through the eyes . . . of the present’.26 It is in recognition of the contemporary Jacobean films’ ability to put the past and present into dialogue that, at several points in this book, I follow their example in appropriating fragments of early modern thought to 26

Jarman, Smiling in Slow Motion, p. 176.

8

Screening Early Modern Drama

illuminate an aspect of the films. When I introduce Montaigne in Florio’s translation to think through the problems posed by the use of cannibalism as a trope for cultural production, or when I pore over George Puttenham’s Arte of English Poesie to dissect the rhetorical figures that govern Hotel, Revengers and Compulsion, I want the anachronism to unsettle. The aim is to stop the Jacobean from becoming simply contemporary and to point to the manner in which even a film like Compulsion, which hides its early modern origin from its popular audience and seemingly seamlessly integrates the contemporary Jacobean adaptation in ITV Drama’s prime-time programming, relies on the deep structures of its source text which trouble easy signification and disturb the surface narrative of assimilation. In espousing preposterousness, contemporary Jacobean films begin to apply their corrosive power to one of the most damaging side-effects of the resurgence of scholarly interest in early modern drama in the wake of New Historicism and cultural materialism. I was struck, when reading through mountains of criticism for my research on Jacobean Drama: A Reader’s Guide to Essential Criticism (2010), by the preponderance of studies that embed the plays in their historical, religious, cultural, social, bibliographical, theatrical contexts. The importance and value of this scholarship must not obscure the glaring disparity it creates between Shakespeare studies, where presentist approaches thrive alongside historicising criticism and where there is always at least an implicit acknowledgement that the plays are pleasurable, profound and intriguing regardless of their imbrication in the early modern period, and the wider field of early modern studies, which often disregards the plays’ intrinsic pleasurability and interest for a present-day reader, let alone the viewer of a performance on stage or screen. What the contemporary Jacobean films I discuss here quite consistently do is to insist precisely on the plays’ intrinsic interest, their ability not just to bridge past and present, but to be part of present-day culture. Rather than simply build on the cultural capital attached to Shakespeare, contemporary Jacobean films pose uncomfortable questions about what literary heritage is, and, more importantly, what it is to us and how it may be used within the political and cultural arena. As a result, contemporary Jacobean films are less deferential towards their source texts than their Shakespearean equivalents. Whereas Branagh’s Hamlet proudly boasted of its ability to present the ‘full text’ of the play in its combination of the Second Quarto with the Folio, thus tapping into the discourse of ‘fidelity’ that for a long time dominated adaptation studies of Shakespeare, this critical framework is blatantly inappropriate when applied to contemporary

Introduction

9

Jacobean films.27 Instead of treating their source texts as literary treasures that must be preserved and brought to a wider audience intact in all their original glory, locked into a temperature-controlled display case, contemporary Jacobean films treat the early modern literary tradition like an attic that can be ransacked, whose contents are just as likely to be discarded as rescued and reassembled into new artworks. My use of a museum metaphor here is meant to bring out the affinities between the work of the heritage Shakespeare films and Aleida Assmann’s important theorisation of the decisive role played by the canon in defining and shaping cultural memory. Assmann contends that cultural memory ‘is based on two separate functions: the presentation of a narrow selection of sacred texts . . . and the storing of documents and artifacts of the past that . . . are deemed interesting or important enough to not let them vanish’.28 The survival of the ‘sacred texts’, of which Shakespeare’s plays form a central example, is assured by what Assmann calls the ‘institutions of active memory’ which ‘preserve the past as present while the institutions of passive memory preserve the past as past’. Assmann goes on to explain: These two modes of cultural memory may be illustrated by different rooms of the museum. The museum presents its prestigious objects to the viewers in representative shows which are arranged to catch attention and make a lasting impression. The same museum also houses . . . other paintings and objects in peripheral spaces such as cellars or attics which are not publicly presented. . . . I will refer to the actively circulated memory that keeps the past present as the canon and the passively stored memory that preserves the past past as the archive.29

It is easy to see how Assmann’s distinction between the canon and the archive can be mapped onto the distinction between Shakespeare, and the well-funded institutions of active memory dedicated to preserve his work as present, and the ways in which the remainder of the early modern dramatic canon has been relegated to the institutions of passive memory (the universities) to preserve these plays as past. Contemporary Jacobean films, together with the recent proliferation of stage productions of early modern drama, are beginning to effect a gradual shift in the balance between passive and active memory by displaying ever more early modern plays as self-evidently belonging to the ‘past present’ of the canon. Because this shift is still ongoing, contemporary Jacobean films are most commonly directed at two audiences: one, a general audience that 27 29

French, Selling Shakespeare to Hollywood, p. 89. Assmann, ‘Canon and Archive’, p. 98.

28

Assmann, ‘Canon and Archive’, p. 101.

10

Screening Early Modern Drama

is presumed not to be familiar with the early modern texts, for whom the centre of gravity of the film lies somewhere other than in the relationship between the film and its source text, the other an elite audience of ‘insiders’. These viewers will appreciate the ways in which the film interacts not just with its source, but also with a wider intertextual network of literary, cultural and filmic reference points. Contemporary Jacobean films thus foreground the ‘dialogism’ seen by Mikhail Bakhtin as an intrinsic feature of all texts, and which has since been theorised as ‘intertextuality’ by Julia Kristeva.30 For Robert Stam, adaptations ‘are by definition caught up in the ongoing whirl of intertextual transformation, of texts generating other texts in an endless process of recycling, transformation, and transmutation, with no clear point of origin’.31 Contemporary Jacobean films conspicuously participate in the ‘intellectual game controlled by citational aesthetics’ identified by Cristina Degli-Esposti in postmodern cinema, where the film text can be enjoyed at different levels of knowledge: ‘When competence is weak, the citation may not be recognized at all; when it is strong, then the reference and intertextuality develop into a hypertext able to produce a true pleasure of recognition.’32 Paradoxically, then, some of these films that position themselves as fighting the elitism of Shakespearean canonicity and see themselves as politically radical can end up being more elitist than any Shakespeare film, appealing specifically to the intellectual and cultural elites that are equipped with the specialised knowledge of mainstream culture and late twentieth-century subcultures, of the literary canon and the archive. Their radical work to dismantle the boundaries between the archive and the canon is predicated on the additional cultural capital carried by obscurity. Contemporary Jacobean films, by positioning their source texts as rare and inaccessible objects that will appeal only to the initiated, render those objects more desirable and thus bring them into cultural circulation. As the digital media, with chatrooms, blogs and comment boxes, facilitate the exchanges of cinephiles hooked up to the internet, more shift from the camp of general viewers into the camp of specialists for whom knowledge of the early modern text becomes an important source of pleasure and group identity. The development of digital media is thus not only crucial to the affordability of filming early modern drama, but also to the dissemination of knowledge about those films and the plays they adapt.

30 32

Kristeva, Desire in Language. 31 Stam, Film Theory, pp. 209–10. Degli-Esposti, ‘Introduction’, p. 6.

Introduction

11

This movement from the archive to the canon, the margins to the mainstream, from Jarman to the proliferation of early modern drama on the internet and its integration in commercial television programming, is the dominant narrative arc of Screening Early Modern Drama. The apparent smoothness of my narrative, however, is troubled internally as each film I discuss resists total assimilation to this master narrative and strikes out in a slightly different direction and as other, parallel, narratives intersect with my argument. One important story that runs parallel to my narrative and should be borne in mind is beginning to be told by Thomas Cartelli and Katherine Rowe and Ailsa Grant Ferguson: they tell us of the challenges to the Shakespeare industry’s perceived conservatism originating from within the world of Shakespearean filmmaking. Blurring the boundaries between ‘conservative’ Shakespeare and ‘radical’ contemporary Jacobean, the lowbudget independent filmmakers of the ‘new wave Shakespeare on screen’ use many of the aesthetic and formal approaches and share the political radicalism of contemporary Jacobean films.33 The smoothness of my overarching argument is also troubled from within the corpus of early modern films discussed in this book, and this is reflected in the structure of my argument. For alongside the brilliant, politically and formally challenging work of Jarman, Greenaway, Figgis and Cox, early modern drama has also started to penetrate into online culture and educational filmmaking. Chapter 4 of this book accordingly focusses on the exchanges between the theatrical and digital cultures of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. The chapter homes in on the ways in which we use our computers to access digital video recordings of early modern drama made by independent filmmakers producing ‘microcinematic’ films as well as remediations of television and feature films that are now accessible on YouTube. As the worldwide financial crisis combines with the restructured film studios’ ever more risk-averse investment strategies, it is here that independent filmmakers seek refuge when they adapt early modern plays. Running counter to the emphasis I put on my selection of high-quality contemporary Jacobean films in much of this book, what my discussion of the digital environment in Chapter 4 shows is that it is there, in the cottage industry of microcinema and the concerted efforts of small businesses and scholars, that we can observe an ever-growing grass-roots movement dedicated to moving beyond Shakespeare. 33

Cartelli and Rowe, New Wave Shakespeare.

12

Screening Early Modern Drama

Four landmarks: films of the European avant-garde My focus in this book on a handful of films should not mislead anyone into thinking that what Courtney Lehmann terms ‘this sudden turn away from the “Golden Age”’ of Shakespeare and ‘toward the bristly, biting bent of the Jacobean’ since the 1990s does not rest on the foundations laid by a large corpus of film adaptations of early modern drama that deserves much closer attention in its own right.34 As my filmography of fifty surviving films at the end of this book shows, the corpus includes feature films that generically range from F. W. Murnau’s silent expressionist Faust (1926) – the oldest film I have found – to Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s Volpone-inspired Hollywood thriller The Honey Pot (1967).35 On the small screens, the chronological range goes from the exquisite 31-minute BBC Schools adaptation of Doctor Faustus (1958) and the historic recording of Donald Wolfit’s Volpone (1959) to the ongoing work of companies like Stage on Screen and Edward’s Boys and of individuals like Michael Cordner at the University of York, who continually produce new DVDs of stage productions. I provide an overview of this corpus in Performing Early Modern Drama Today (2012), the collection of essays Kathryn Prince and I have put together and which functions as a companion volume to Screening Early Modern Drama in that it maps out the broader performance context for contemporary Jacobean films. Here, I want to provide a brief account of the four European avant-garde films which, in their different ways, prepare the way for the contemporary Jacobean film. When Antonin Artaud, in 1932, called for ‘Works of the Elizabethan theater’ to be ‘stripped of the lines, retaining only their period machinery, situations, character and plot’, he was reacting to the veneration of the text that had in his view shackled the theatre and stopped it from expressing the ‘atrocity and energy’ which he saw as an essential ingredient of his ‘Theatre of Cruelty’.36 Artaud proposed to stage ‘Arden of Faversham or another play from that period’ alongside ‘One of the Marquis de Sade’s tales’ and had dreamed of directing The Revenger’s Tragedy to recover its ritualistic essence.37 Bertolt Brecht, too, saw in English early modern drama an 34 35

36 37

Lehmann, ‘Old Dad Dead’, p. 211. In 2002, Philippa Sheppard was able to list fourteen films in her Renaissance filmography. Many more films, in particular television adaptations, do not survive, either because they were not transferred to video and archived, or because they pre-date video and were transmitted live. Nicoleta Cinpoeş’s Warwick University web resource contains information about many lost films and is a useful complement to my filmography. See ‘Elizabeth and Jacobean Drama’, http://tinyurl.com/693upky. Artaud, ‘The Theatre of Cruelty’, pp. 76, 71. Artaud, ‘The Theatre of Cruelty’, p. 76; and Pollock, ‘Le Théâtre et la peste’, p. 172.

Introduction

13

important model for how to revolutionise the theatre. Lois Potter suggests that in Brecht’s view, ‘the fact that audiences were less emotionally involved with their characters than with Shakespeare’s’ enabled ‘a critical perspective on the play’s events’.38 Artaud’s and Brecht’s influence on performances of early modern drama throughout the twentieth century has been widely acknowledged; what has not been recognised, however, is the extent to which their conception of early modern drama as enabling a radical rethinking of dramatic art had an impact on the work of avant-garde filmmakers across Europe. Vilgot Sjöman’s Syskonbädd 178239 transposes the plot of Ford’s ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore, which an early caption acknowledges, to the Swedish Enlightenment. Sjöman’s inspiration came from Luchino Visconti’s Paris production of Ford’s tragedy, coupled with the real-life brother-and-sister incest that had hit the headlines in Sweden some years earlier;40 his recreation of the past, accordingly, was designed ‘to comment on the present’.41 Following Artaud’s advice, Sjöman abandoned Ford’s lines altogether, putting his emphasis on the atrocity and energy of the characters and plotlines. Giovanni becomes Jacob (Per Oscarsson), a young nobleman who returns from his European travels to find that his sister Charlotte (Bibi Andersson) has grown into a confident, fearless young woman whose engagement to Baron Alsmeden (Jarl Kulle) triggers the brother-and-sister incest the Swedish title ‘Siblingbed’ brutally announces. Jacob and Charlotte’s illicit passion, however, is less electric than are the disturbing power relations and the complex of guilt and defiance that develop between Charlotte and Baron Alsmeden, a ‘sensitive’ but admittedly power-hungry courtier who agrees to marry her regardless of her pregnancy. The transgressive sexuality (a signature Sjöman trait) and the ferocity of the ending apart, at first sight, this sparsely elegant black-and-white period drama might seem entirely conventional: the costumes and settings are beautifully observed, the film does not draw attention to its medium and there is nothing disruptive about the sequential development of the plot. What singles this film out as an important influence on Jarman is its use of the early modern tragedy as a springboard for a searching analysis of a society locked into a rigid class structure, ruthless penal system and oppressive sexual norms, supported by religious strictures. The plot may focus on the dissolute lives of the aristocrats, but these are always rubbing against their proletarian counterparts: Mother Külle, whose ears were cut off 38 40

Potter, ‘Tragedy and Performance’, p. 105. 39 Sweden, 1966; English title: My Sister My Love. Jungstedt and Löthwall, ‘Vilgot Sjöman’, p. 15. 41 Cowie, Swedish Cinema, p. 76.

14

Screening Early Modern Drama

because she bore her father’s child; her disabled son, whom Charlotte considers to be Mother Külle’s divinely sanctioned punishment; the obese alewife who exposes her bare rump during Charlotte’s wedding; the labourers who watch in silence as her carriage drives past. The glaring opposition of the aristocracy’s classic self-containment and repression with the proletarian grotesque works to underline how the aristocrats’ hidden excesses are ultimately more grotesque than the transgressions for which the labourers are whipped and dismembered. In Syskonbädd, all the characters are represented as the victims of hierarchies designed to crush individual happiness. Significantly, the centralised source of power, despotic King Gustav III, is talked about but never seen, and his abuse and humiliation of his courtiers seems to be at the root of their desire to control the women and peasants they can dominate. Meanwhile, the camera’s habit of resting on the still, observing, faces of the labourers and servants, and in particular on Mother Külle, confers on them the critical power and dignity it also affords Bibi Andersson’s Charlotte. Her transgression takes on symbolic proportions since it involves the resolute defiance of religion and the law for the sake of her absolute belief in a freedom that is as political as it is sexual. It is the kind of reluctance to edit the stillness of the faces that command our attention which Jarman was to use to spectacular effect in his attention to Tilda Swinton’s performance in Edward II. Giuseppe Patroni Griffi’s sparsely furnished Addio, fratello crudele (Italy, 1971) adopts strategies similar to those of Sjöman’s take on ’Tis Pity. The Press Book describes the adaptation as paradoxically ‘a free adaptation, in that the authors have taken the nucleus of the story’ and ‘faithful, because this work of adaptation was done to accentuate the core of the tragedy’.42 Because the dialogue was filmed partly in Italian and then dubbed in English, re-translating the Italian translation into modern prose, the dialogue is distanced both from the early modern text and from present-day speech, driving a wedge between what the characters do and what they say. This disturbing side-effect of Patroni Griffi’s decision to employ a multilingual cast – Anglophone Charlotte Rampling and Oliver Tobias play Annabella and Giovanni opposite Italophone Fabio Testi (Soranzo) and Antonio Falsi (Bonaventura) – adds to the temporal alienation created by designer Mario Ceroli’s juxtaposition of early modern Venetian architecture and detailed period costumes with abstract sculptures and set designs. 42

‘’Tis Pity She’s a Whore. Dir. Giuseppe Patroni Griffi’, Press Book (London: Smithson & Sons, 1971), no pagination.

Introduction

15

Addio’s anachronisms lift the plot out of the specificity of the early modern context, turning it into a potent fable of the violence inherent in heterosexual relations. Addio thus becomes an important model for the critique of gender relations from the homoerotic standpoint of one of Italy’s first openly gay filmmakers. This standpoint is achieved by Patroni Griffi’s transformation of Ford’s fumbling middle-aged Friar into a youthful Bonaventura whose conflicted love for Giovanni provides the ethical anchor for the film. The final scene invites us to adopt Bonaventura’s viewpoint, as his dignified grief and affection for Giovanni override the emotions of the other lovers, whose violent histrionics are the ‘queer’ flipside to his ‘straight’ love in a neat inversion of normative expectations. While the heterosexual lovers are visually trapped in enclosed spaces, inside houses, cages, grids, nets, frames and a deep well, Bonaventura remains free to move, love and mourn. Heterosexual ‘queerness’ finds a startling visual expression in the film’s most explicit, and normative, sexual encounter: that between Annabella and Soranzo, who desires Annabella with an intensity that rivals Giovanni’s incestuous passion. There is a slow, tense build-up to Annabella’s sensual surrender to him, which could be mistaken for the climax the film has been working towards: the power of matrimonial passion to contain transgressive desires. Yet this climax is immediately undercut by the fact that the image is rotated by 90 degrees, literally ‘queer’ (as in German quer/‘oblique’, but also in the OED sense of ‘not in a normal condition’).43 Patroni Griffi thus valorises homoerotic bonds by representing not only violent, selfdestructive incest, but also – and especially – marital sexuality as literally out of kilter. Patroni Griffi’s Addio thus marks the beginning of a challenge to normative order and sexualities in adaptations of Shakespeare’s contemporaries, a challenge that goes hand in hand with the graceful anachronisms of Ceroli’s symbolic sets and the alienating effects of the dubbing that gently work against the period style and conventional narrative sequentiality of Patroni Griffi’s film. If the straining against sexual and social norms in Syskonbädd and Addio remains linked to a relatively conventional mode of filmmaking, any adherence to cinematic norms is abandoned in Carmelo Bene’s carnivalesque Capricci (Italy, 1969), which anticipates the transgressions of Figgis’s Hotel and in whose ‘mannerist cinema’ Simon Field recognises a kinship with Jarman’s work.44 Capricci attacks realist traditions of cinematic representation and characterisation; its degraded image and deliberate 43

See also Hopkins, Screening the Gothic, p. 67.

44

Field, ‘Editorial’, 4.

16

Screening Early Modern Drama

1 Quer/queer love: Charlotte Rampling and Fabio Testi in Giuseppe Patroni Griffi’s Addio, fratello crudele (1971). Screengrab.

unpleasantness thwart the desire for the visual pleasures of period so lavishly afforded by Sjöman and Patroni Griffi.45 The film, which developed from avant-garde theatre practitioner and experimental filmmaker Bene’s 1968 stage production of Arden of Faversham,46 is a prime example of Kristevan intertextuality combined with a resolutely anti-auteurist stance; quoting Borges, Bene proclaims: ‘I cannot express myself, I can only cite.’47 The point is made through word, image and sound: the screenplay, which incorporates the anonymous Arden of Faversham (1592) alongside a plotline derived from Prévost’s Manon Lescaut (1731) and extracts from Barthes’s Mythologies (1957); the visuals, which cite the lurid colours and gaunt faces of George Grosz’s paintings and Goya’s Caprichos (hence the title of the film); and the operatic soundtrack that repeatedly offers a critical commentary on the action. The influence of Artaud and of Brecht’s Verfremdungseffekte is palpable throughout. It is hard to imagine a more consistent attack on what Barbara Hodgdon has termed the ‘psycho-physiological mode of acting’ in the Stanislavskian tradition,48 and what Artaud described as ‘everyday psychological theatre’,49 than that offered by the spectacle of Alice (Ornella Ferrari) roasting her foot in the fire in order to lend her performance of grief at her 45 47 49

Saba, Carmelo Bene, p. 51. 46 Saba, Carmelo Bene, pp. 51–2. Bene, ‘Entretiens 1’, p. 19, my translation. 48 Hodgdon, ‘Spectacular Bodies’, p. 105. Artaud, ‘The Theatre of Cruelty’, p. 64.

Introduction

17

mistreatment by her husband a credibility which is brutally undercut by the fact that her voice has been dubbed asynchronically to dissociate her wailing from the image of her pain. Nor could there be a more graphic dismantling of the realist framework and the conservative values Bene associates with it than his film’s opening scene. There, the hammer wielded by the painter from the Arden-plot (Tonino Caputo) locks with the sickle held by the poet from the Manon-plot and the two fighting men slash their way through the frame(work)s of several large paintings, toppling the ‘still lives’ (nature morte in Italian) the painter has composed out of real objects (dead fish, fruit) he has daubed with paint to make them look more like early modern Dutch art. Thereafter, the Manon and Arden plots separate and alternate so as to dismantle narrative coherence: while the poet and his prostitute girlfriend self-destructively crash one car after another, the scenes devoted to Alice Arden turn the Elizabethan domestic tragedy known for its dramatic realism into a surreal, oracular text of alienation. Lines are repeated like an incantation, emotions are divorced from words and young Alice’s character is fractured by the multiple voices and accents that are dubbed onto her mouth, giving her words, as Artaud put it, ‘something of the significance they have in dreams’.50 Alice’s passion for Mosbie is a performance that is as artificial as are the dishes, laced with poison, she presents to her geriatric husband (Giovanni Davoli). This is what the voice-over of Bene reading Barthes’s reflections on the cookery photography in Elle emphasises: the cuisine presented on the aspirational magazine’s pages traduces the crude and brutal nature of the food under the sauces and glazings of obvious artifice. It is this artifice of aspirational petit-bourgeois culture that Bene strips off – quite literally, in the case of the perpetually naked Alice. The aim of the adaptation seems not so much an illumination of the early modern text as the exposure of its intrinsic obscenity. As Allen S. Weiss says of Bene’s Shakespeare productions: ‘his plays were severe reductions of the originals, pushed to the limits of the absurd, manifesting the violence of editing and the brutality of adaptation’.51 French New Wave director Jacques Rivette’s Noroît (une vengeance) (France, 1976) is an adaptation of The Revenger’s Tragedy which uses the conventions of the Western and pirate film to tell the story of Morag (Geraldine Chaplin) who wants to avenge her brother’s death at the hands of pirate Giulia (Bernadette Lafont) and her gang. While not as excessive as Bene, Rivette nevertheless follows in his footsteps in producing 50

Artaud, ‘The Theatre of Cruelty’, p. 72.

51

Weiss, ‘In Memory’, 9.

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Screening Early Modern Drama

a film that is an experiment in literary adaptation, cinematic narration and the use of music and language as soundscape. Through his adaptation of The Revenger’s Tragedy, Rivette, for whom the play holds the key to Artaud’s Theatre of Cruelty,52 attempts a cinema of cruelty in which he probes the boundaries between theatre and cinema, past and present, the mythic and the real. Although the credits are unambiguous about Rivette’s indebtedness to ‘Tourneur’s’ tragedy, Rivette’s film, true to Artaud, almost entirely dispenses with the play, retaining merely the essence of the drive to revenge the death of a loved one, the theatricality of the play’s violence and the atmosphere of sexual debauchery coupled with lust for power. Whereas the film’s dialogue is spoken entirely in French, the few lines of the tragedy preserved in the film are spoken in English, out of context, rendering them ‘obscure and allusive, and most of all separate from all other exchanges, doubly theatrical and potentially magical’.53 As part of the film’s experimental soundscape, the theatrical, magical Middletonian text comes to stand for the medium of theatre. For Rivette, integrating theatre into film enables cinema to understand its own distinct identity. As embodied by The Revenger’s Tragedy, theatre is the archaic medium through which Noroît reaches for its mythological roots and against which it defines itself as cinema. In the opening scene, the Vindice-figure Morag mourns over the corpse of her brother Shane, who becomes a cipher for the fragmented early modern theatrical text which is to be reassembled and brought to life again in the film. When Morag raises her head and intones Vindice’s ‘Thou goddess of the palace, mistress of mistresses . . . let me blush inward’, she breathes new, cinematic life into the theatrical text.54 The point of the citation is not intelligibility or reference, but mystery and alienation, stripping the play of its text through the very act that celebrates its rebirth in the medium of cinema and driving a wedge between the performer, the spectator and the text. The Revenger’s Tragedy’s significance is reasserted in the middle of Noroît in a cluster of scenes that repeatedly re-enact the Duke’s poisoning with Gloriana’s skull in a manner that destabilises the boundaries between play and audience, fiction and reality. The cluster culminates in Morag’s melodramatic performance of Vindice’s murder of the Duke as a play-withinthe-film. As in Capricci, repetition results in a sense of alienation. Scraps of The Revenger’s Tragedy are compulsively repeated in Noroît, always 52 54

Wiles, Theatricality and French Cinema, p. 170. 1.3.6–10.

53

Morrey and Smith, Jacques Rivette, p. 160.

Introduction

19

reassembled differently, ever more theatrically, until at the end of this scene cinema’s ‘reality’ and ‘fixity’ intrude on the theatrical in the seemingly unmotivated gory murder of one of the audience members – the only time Noroît shows us blood. What had been a cruel piece of theatre is, in this citation of the fatal play-within-the-play of The Revenger’s Tragedy, transformed into Rivette’s unsettling attempt at creating a cinema of cruelty, in which viewers can never be certain of the status of the images presented and in which, as Artaud demanded, the ‘situations, character and plot’ of The Revenger’s Tragedy take precedence over text and meaning. While Addio has in recent years attracted some criticism by scholars writing performance histories of Ford, Syskonbädd, Capricci and Noroît have lingered in the archives of cinephiles. Yet these films are important in what they tell us about how, across Europe, the impact of Artaud’s and Brecht’s engagement with early modern drama began to bear fruit in the 1960s and 1970s. Even at their most extreme and apparently meaningless, these films use the English early modern canon not only to experiment with Brechtian alienation techniques and tap into the plays’ ‘atrocity and energy’ and their dissident sexual identities and politics, but to combine this exploration with a reflection on the process of literary adaptation and the medium of film. It is this combination of the ‘transgression, dissidence, and desire’ of the Jacobean with a reflexive attitude towards the structures and conventions of film itself that would form a source of inspiration for Jarman as he looked to Europe for models on how to make the early modern past speak to the present.

chapter 1

Derek Jarman’s queer contemporary Jacobean aesthetic: Caravaggio and Edward II

Jarman’s estate consisted of a fisherman’s hut in Dungeness, some flowerbeds and some films. But they are films that still have power to intrigue and fascinate. They are bold assaults on ‘decent’ film-making; molotovs hurled at the dull beige skein of naturalism that enfolds and suffocates us now.1

Alex Cox’s retrospective view of the legacy of Derek Jarman articulates the central dynamic of Jarman’s work and its legacy: a combination of simplicity and aggression, of peacefulness and radical activism. In Edward II (1991), Jarman produced a film that was consciously queer in its testing of norms, whether in terms of sexuality, genre, aesthetics, technology or politics. While Edward II is the culmination of Jarman’s engagement with the early modern period, Jarman’s influence on later filmmakers can only be fully appreciated if we take account of the profound intertextuality of his work, which links it not only to his own earlier Renaissance films and his many life-writing texts and film scripts, but which also absorbs elements of punk and European avant-garde cinema. The development of Jarman’s distinctive queer contemporary Jacobean style can be traced through the multiple texts produced by Jarman in the 1970s and 1980s. These survive as a series of published diaries, notes and screenplays, as well as letters, handwritten and typewritten notes, scripts and production materials scattered across several archives.2 They also survive in the shape of Jarman’s ‘Renaissance’ feature films in this period: Jubilee (1977), The Tempest (1979), The Angelic Conversation (1985) and Caravaggio (1986). I will begin by navigating between the first three of these films and Jarman’s writing before pausing on Caravaggio, which marks a turning-point in Jarman’s career and is the most important precursor to Edward II. Jarman’s approach to filming the early modern past requires an 1 2

Alex Cox, ‘This Is Indecent’, The Guardian, 19 February 2004. The BFI in London, the BDC in Exeter and Keith Collins’s private collection at Prospect Cottage.

20

Derek Jarman’s queer contemporary Jacobean aesthetic

21

understanding of the funding difficulties he faced as an independent British filmmaker with a counter-cultural agenda, the growing awareness of AIDSrelated discrimination against homosexuals, the related rise of queer theory, and the incorporation, in Jarman’s team, of performer Tilda Swinton and designer Sandy Powell. In Caravaggio, Swinton’s feminist agenda begins to penetrate Jarman’s vision, giving birth to the plural consciousness so strikingly captured by Angus McBean’s 1987 portrait of the two artists on the cover of this book. Caravaggio thus paves the way for Edward II, which powerfully combines Swinton’s Brechtian and queer theory-inflected performance of gendered identity with Jarman’s political vision and autobiographical expression. Edward II is intertextually connected to a range of Jarman’s films and screenplays: his highly experimental The Last of England (1987) and the published and unpublished screenplays for ‘28’, ‘Sod ’Em’ and the musical ‘Pansy’, which span the period from 1986 to 1991. Jarman’s shift of interest from Shakespeare to Marlowe via Caravaggio, from the ‘Elizabethan’ to the ‘Jacobean’, maps onto Jarman’s increasing, and politically inflected, interest in viewing the past through the eyes of the present, using a literally preposterous approach to Marlowe’s text. Edward II combines dissident sexuality and politics with the hijacking of early modern pre-texts and figures and with formal innovations in filmmaking that oppose mainstream cinematic practices while also setting themselves apart from much of art cinema. It is this transgressive aesthetic in which politics is wedded to form that constitutes the explosive substance of Jarman’s legacy.

Derek Jarman’s avant-garde Renaissance: influences and attitudes from the Slade to The Tempest (1979) Jarman, whose preoccupation with the Renaissance started during his formative years, combined his absorption in early modern culture with an acutely contemporary sensibility.3 For his degree in English and History at King’s College, London (1960 to 1963), Jarman read a number of early modern plays, including Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus, The Jew of Malta and Edward II.4 At the Slade School of Fine Art (1963 to 1967), he found himself ‘at the centre of a revolutionary art scene which both fuelled, and was fuelled 3 4

See Wymer, Jarman; Simons, ‘Elizabethan Texts’; and Hawkes, ‘The Shadow of This Time’. Jarman’s copy of M. R. Ridley’s Marlowe’s Plays and Poems: PC, which he acquired while at King’s, has all three plays ticked in the table of contents.

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by, revolutions in popular music and sexual behaviour’.5 While concentrating on painting and set design, including designs for Timon of Athens and Volpone, Jarman took an involved interest in avant-garde theatre and European arthouse film. A production of Spurt of Blood in 1967, which he later described as the ‘best piece of experimental theatre that I’ve ever seen’, exposed Jarman to Artaud’s Theatre of Cruelty.6 He also absorbed the cinematic influences of Visconti and Pasolini, whom he saw as part of a long line of homosexual artists that anchored on Shakespeare, Leonardo and Michelangelo and also included Eisenstein and Murnau.7 Genet’s Chant d’amour (1950), with its fascination with ‘rough trade’ masculinity and prison imagery, was particularly important to Jarman.8 In Patroni Griffi, meanwhile, Jarman found an early model for how to ‘depict a gay relationship’: the Italian’s Il Mare struck Jarman as ‘sexy, its camera-work elegant and mannered’,9 and his Addio appears to have left a trace in Edward II ’s abstract design, painterly cinematography and queer emphasis.10 It is Sjöman’s Syskonbädd, however, which Jarman repeatedly cited as a model and rare exemplar of a film that reveals ‘the potential of actually doing films historically’.11 Jarman’s admiration of European avant-garde cinema was counterbalanced by his abhorrence of Anglo-American period films: ‘There is nothing more excruciating than English Historical Drama, the stuff that is so successful in America . . . in which British stage actors are given free reign [sic] to display their artificial style in period settings.’12 Jarman not only deplored ‘heritage’ films like Brideshead Revisited 13 and Chariots of Fire,14 but also Olivier’s Henry V, which he saw as ‘caught between the artificiality of the medieval miniatures . . . and the damp naturalism of the Irish countryside’. Only Kozintsev’s Shakespeare adaptations are exempt from Jarman’s condemnation, since they avoid a clash between the setting and Shakespeare’s language.15 Jarman’s resistance to the Anglo-American approach to period is obvious in Jubilee (1977), his first Renaissance film, which ‘locat[es] a version of punk in the English past’ to create ‘a genealogy of resistance for the present moment’.16 In 1977, punk’s prime strategy of stylistic subversion was the 5

6 Wymer, Jarman, p. 21. Jarman, Dancing Ledge, p. 84. 8 Simons, ‘Elizabethan Texts’, pp. 265–6. Jarman, Smiling in Slow Motion, p. 19. 9 Jarman, Smiling in Slow Motion, p. 6. 10 Michael Wishart drew Jarman’s attention to Addio, and to Visconti’s 1961 Paris staging of ’Tis Pity, in two stapled postcards, dated 26 June 1979: DJC Box 53. 11 Jarman, Dancing Ledge, p. 14; and Jarman quoted in Lippard, ‘Interview with Derek Jarman’, p. 165. 12 Jarman, Dancing Ledge, p. 14. 13 1981, dir. Jarrold. 14 1981, dir. Hudson. 15 Jarman, Dancing Ledge, p. 186. 16 Ellis, Jarman’s Angelic Conversations, p. 50. 7

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combination of ‘elements which had originally belonged to completely different epochs’ and whose strategic deployment of everyday objects in incongruous contexts (for example, the safety pin as a facial adornment) was aimed at ‘interrupting the process of “normalization”’.17 Dick Hebdige defines this stylistic welding together of disparate influences and objects as bricolage, conflating Claude Lévi-Strauss’s anthropological observations with Max Ernst’s surrealism to theorise the punk subculture’s creation of an ‘explosive junction’ that ‘attempted through “perturbation and deformation” to disrupt and reorganize meaning’.18 Jubilee follows punk’s anarchic impulses in allowing the two Elizabethan periods to collide in such an explosive junction. Jarman includes signifiers of the present in the first Elizabethan period (for example, punk icon Helen Wallington-Lloyd as Elizabeth’s dwarf lady-in-waiting) and signifiers of the past (for example, Elizabeth’s crown jewel) in a present dominated by a gang of violent female punks and media mogul Borgia Ginz.19 Ginz, played by blind dancer and mime Jack Birkett, ends up commercialising the entire counter-culture presented in the film, while Elizabeth and Doctor Dee sadly retreat to the Elizabethan period. Meanwhile, the punks, played by punk stars(-to-be) Adam Ant, Toyah Willcox and Jordan, become ‘Demons of Nostalgia’ as they escape from the devastated, brutal urban landscape ‘to a dream England of the past: the England of stately homes, which are the indispensable prop for the English way of life’.20 Jubilee’s encounter between past and present thus enables a reading of the present as a carnivalesque inversion in which ‘all the positives are negated, turned on their heads’:21 framed, though not contained, by the Elizabethan past, the present is engulfed in a violent, often physically grotesque, release of popular festivity that starkly reveals how the upturning of norms can simply replicate those norms more crassly. The critique, from the vantage point of Dr Dee’s Elizabethan counterculture, of how economic forces can co-opt and commercialise countercultural movements such as punk, is central to Jarman’s Jubilee. Yet punk, with its invitation to everyone to be creative and ignore the structures of economic and cultural power that constrain individual creativity, was a movement which gave public expression to some views Jarman had held for many years. Jarman’s books attest repeatedly to his opposition to the 17 18 20

Hebdige, Subculture, pp. 18, 26. On punk’s bricolage, see also Fiske, Understanding Popular Culture. Hebdige, Subculture, p. 106. 19 Wymer, Jarman, p. 58. Jarman, Dancing Ledge, pp. 164, 173. 21 Jarman, Dancing Ledge, p. 170.

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structures that governed filmmaking in the United Kingdom; even though he did seek out funding from mainstream sources like the BFI and television for his various films, he prided himself on his ability to make films on exceptionally low budgets, letting the shape of the films be guided by the shared artistic vision of his collaborators and his restricted means. This, he insisted, was what ‘separate[d his] work from the British television and features industry, where the people who make the films, directors and technicians, are paid in an hierarchical order, and brought together for money, not by a community of interest’.22 The smallness of Jarman’s budget governed everything: from the people he worked with to choices regarding costume, setting and technology.23 The Angelic Conversation, his 1985 feature film adaptation of fourteen of Shakespeare’s sonnets, is a good example, as it was filmed for virtually nothing on Jarman’s Nizo Super-8 camera; the budget of £40,000 he secured from the BFI allowed him to slow the film down so it could be extended to feature length, creating a dream-like atmosphere; the money also paid for some additional effects and a soundtrack as he transferred the film onto video before blowing it up to 35mm.24 For Jarman, advances in technology such as his first encounter with the Nizo Super-8 camera in 1972 and ‘the invasion of video’ in 1983 represented both a threat,25 in that ‘each advance in technology reinforces the grip of central control and emasculates opposition’, and an opportunity, in that such cheap technologies could be used by independent filmmakers ‘to ensure that technology will promote greater independence and mobility. This is the key battle in our culture . . . Our centralized culture mounts a concerted attack on human expression.’26 As Jarman saw it, the challenge for filmmakers was to resist the corporate pressures of ‘Organizations like the BBC and the television companies’ and to continue to produce films that resisted these institutions’ pressure to be ‘historic and “quaint”’.27 In his writing and his films, Jarman thus embraced what later theorists were to recognise as punk cinema’s principal features: an emphasis on individually produced ‘do-it-yourself’ microcinema integrating a good dose of bricolage, collage and self-awareness, and a ‘constant resistance to 22 23 24 25 26

Jarman, Dancing Ledge, p. 197. On Jarman’s adherence to low-budget filmmaking, see also: Chedgzoy, Shakespeare’s Queer Children, p. 196; and Field, ‘Editorial’, 4. See Jarman quoted in Lippard, ‘Interview with Derek Jarman’, p. 169. Figure provided by producer James Mackay (Mackay, ‘Low-Budget British Production’, p. 56); Wymer names a figure of £35,000 (Wymer, Jarman, p. 84). See Jarman’s account in Dancing Ledge, p. 114; Wymer, based on Tony Peake’s biography, corrects Jarman’s dating of the event from 1970 to 1972 (Wymer, Jarman, fns. 23, 34). Jarman, Dancing Ledge, p. 219. 27 Jarman, Dancing Ledge, p. 220.

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capitalism’ and commodification.28 For Jarman’s Tempest, this did not mean that he refused to use the £150,000 Executive Producer Don Boyd managed to raise for the film, but that he worked with friends and acquaintances, who worked long hours on very modest pay, to create a film that invoked the trappings of period drama in order to dismantle them before our eyes.29 Jarman’s choice of location for the film is important: Stoneleigh Abbey, with its Tudor elements and association with Jane Austen, is ‘emblematic of the heritage film, which has a nostalgic investment in the lost glories of the imperialist past’.30 In order to dissociate himself from what he would later describe as the ‘gloss’ and ‘frantic race into nostalgia’ of such films,31 however, Jarman set his ‘punk heritage’ film in the Georgian wing of the building that had been devastated by a fire in 1960, furnishing his modern-dress Prospero’s study with his personal copies of seventeenthcentury alchemical texts.32 Significantly, Jarman once more drew on present-day counter-cultural icons when he cast Toyah Willcox as Miranda and Jack Birkett as Caliban. After a long search for the perfect match, Jarman chose poet and magician Heathcote Williams to play Prospero. As Don Boyd recalls, ‘the Shakespearean force [in Jarman’s Tempest] was undoubtedly Heathcote’.33 Williams would go on to work with Mike Figgis and Alex Cox, making him a key figure in contemporary Jacobean film. As is clear from notebooks dating from 1974 and 1976, Jarman’s initial idea for The Tempest had been to present the entire play from the point of view of a Prospero imprisoned in a ‘Renaissance palace’, whom the visitors to his private Bedlam consider mad and who is attended by prison wardens Stefano and Trinculo.34 The main figures – Miranda, Ferdinand, Caliban, Ariel – were to be Prospero’s projections of aspects of himself and dressed in costumes that were ‘Renaissance and very accurate’.35 The completed film is very different: not only does Jarman end up embracing the play as polyphonic, relinquishing the notion that Prospero can control the meanings generated by the dramatis personae, but this film also unmoors the play 28 29 30 32 33 34 35

Rombes, Cinema in the Digital Age, p. 17; and Thompson, ‘Punk Cinema’, p. 23. See also Hebdige, Subculture, pp. 102–6; and Ellis, Jarman’s Angelic Conversations, p. 50. Figure contained in a letter from Mody Schreiber at Berwick Street Films ‘C’ to Michael Klinger, 24 July 1979: BDC DB 256.666. Ellis, Jarman’s Angelic Conversations, p. 70. 31 ‘Caravaggio Book, 1985’: DJC Box 10. Ellis, Jarman’s Angelic Conversations, p. 67; and Jarman, Chroma, p. 75. Don Boyd, message to the author, 7 May 2012. For further discussion of the 1974 and 1976 notebooks, see Chedgzoy, Shakespeare’s Queer Children, p. 197. ‘Notebook Aug. 75’: DJC Box 28.1.

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from its Renaissance setting. As the production notes put it, ‘the film is not set in the Elizabethan period of Shakespeare, nor is it modern. Rather it is indistinct past, a conglomerate of many styles, emphasizing the timelessness of the play.’36 The film’s celebration of historical and cultural diversity culminates in the wedding masque for Miranda and Ferdinand, which integrates blues singer Elisabeth Welch’s camp rendering of ‘Stormy Weather’. The scene represents a significant convergence of the anarchic, violent chaos of Jubilee with the classical control of Shakespeare’s playtext with its observance of the unities of time and place. The costumes range from a pastiche of Renaissance style (for the members of the court), rococo (Miranda and Ferdinand), to the present (Ariel’s dinner jacket and bow tie, the sailors’ uniforms).37 The historical range is blended together in Welch’s extraordinary Juno costume, which designer Yolanda Sonnabend describes as ‘an Inigo Jones creation filtered through the movies’.38 Welch’s golden ruff, headdress, gown and veil do indeed reconcile the essence of some of Jones’s most famous masque designs for the Stuart court with the spirit of Hollywood glamour, reminding us of the kinship between the early modern theatre of illusions and film, which Jarman saw as ‘the wedding of light and matter – an alchemical conjunction’.39 Here, for the first time in Jarman’s cinema, the early modern period fully shapes and inhabits the present, using the frame of the camera as the equivalent of Inigo Jones’s proscenium arch: ‘In The Tempest we paint pictures, frame each static shot and allow the play to unfold in them as within a proscenium arch.’40

‘Years of distillation’:41Caravaggio (1986) Caravaggio, the film that absorbed Jarman’s energies from 1978 until 1986, creates a similarly ‘palimpsestic or layered historical space that includes multiple temporalities’.42 But where The Tempest is carnivalesque in a joyous, excessive festivity that includes the grotesque bodies of Sycorax, Caliban, Stefano and Trinculo, Caravaggio, in moving beyond Shakespeare 36 37

38 40 41

‘The Tempest: Production Notes’: DJC Box 28.3. See, also, Jarman’s comments in ‘Caravaggio Book, 1985’ (DJC Box 10), where he states that ‘In the Tempest the 300 odd years of the play’s existence became its period’, and in Dancing Ledge, where he describes the costumes as ‘a chronology of the 350 years of the play’s existence, like the patina on old bronze’ (p. 196). Sonnabend, ‘Fabric of This Vision’, p. 78. 39 Jarman, Dancing Ledge, p. 188. Jarman, Dancing Ledge, p. 194. For a discussion of Jones’s experimentation with the proscenium arch, see Peacock, ‘Ornament’. Jarman, The Last of England, p. 68. 42 Ellis, Jarman’s Angelic Conversations, p. 67.

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2 ‘An Inigo Jones creation’: Elisabeth Welch in Derek Jarman’s The Tempest (1979). Film still, BFI.

and focussing on the Renaissance in visual arts, aligns itself more readily with the control and sparseness of the classical register. Jarman’s notes on the film once more offer a crucial insight into his preoccupation with how to convey period in this film: ‘I am obsessed by the interpretation of the past. hands [sic] across time’, he wrote into his 1985 ‘Caravaggio Book’ before describing the continuity between Caravaggio’s painting and his own film as just such an example of hands reaching across time: How to present the present past. . . . For Caravaggio, the past was matter of fact it lived in his own back yard . . . I sat obsessively with the paintings in cheap reproduction. [H]ow and why did he put this or that here or there. Thank you Michele Caravaggio for your precision. [Y]our reticence. [A]nd your concentration on small gestures.43

It is this sense of a dialogue between two visual artists and of Jarman’s absorption in Caravaggio’s art as a proto-filmic style guide that was to help Jarman, with the assistance of his long-term design collaborator Christopher Hobbs and cinematographer Gabriel Beristain, to model the film’s look – in terms of the painterly, textured, yet minimalist sets and the 43

‘A Question of Time’ in ‘Caravaggio Book, 1985’: DJC Box 10.

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striking lighting effects – on Caravaggio’s paintings. The film’s austere miseen-scène and chiaroscuro lighting, often using a shaft of light coming from the top left of the frame to replicate the light source from a top left window in Caravaggio’s studio, combined with Hobbs’s recreation of Caravaggio’s paintings and Jarman’s tableaux vivants of Caravaggio’s models for those paintings, result in a deeply felt sense of period authenticity that is the stronger for the obvious artificiality of the devices employed.44 One of these devices is the use of a studio set for all scenes. As a result, throughout the film, the spectator is always, at some level, aware of the distance between the thing represented and the means of the representation, of the present lens through which the past is viewed. Using Caravaggio’s inclusion of figures in contemporary dress in his classical paintings as a justification for its own embrace of anachronisms, Caravaggio notoriously combines a typewriter, gold solar calculator, a truck and a motorbike with props that Jarman specified should be ‘in “period”’.45 Meanwhile, the costumes, inspired by the look of Italian Neorealist films by Visconti, Rossellini and de Sica, are ‘roughly in the ambience of an Italy before the last war began’.46 The one exception is the sequence set at a masked ball, which constitutes the film’s principal carnivalesque point of release and which ‘should be in period so at the center of the film is a recreation of the 1600’s’.47 The mixing of periods is accompanied by a disruption of linear narrative: the film starts with the dying Caravaggio (Nigel Terry) and then flashes back to various points in his life. Not only is the order of those flashbacks not strictly chronological, but the flashbacks even include scenes in which Caravaggio is not present. Even though the return to Caravaggio’s death bed at the end implies that all the meanings of the film can be stabilised in relation to that single point of reference, it is impossible to accept the flashbacks’ point of view as that of Caravaggio. In such an eclectic film, authenticity cannot be situated in the detailed recreation of period detail, however much Jarman and his designer Christopher Hobbs were avoiding ‘carelessness’ in their introduction of anachronisms.48 Instead, authenticity resides in the overall aesthetic, to which the consistency of the set and lighting lend remarkable unity. That aesthetic is based on what David Robinson, who visited the set of 44 45 46 47

On Gabriel Beristain’s lighting, see ‘Caravaggio Book, 1985’: DJC Box 10; and Jarman, Jarman’s Caravaggio, p. 22. ‘Caravaggio May 85’: DJC Box 6. ‘Caravaggio Book, 1985’: DJC Box 10; see also Jarman, Jarman’s Caravaggio, p. 82. ‘Caravaggio May 85’: DJC Box 6. 48 Christopher Hobbs, Interview, Caravaggio (BFI, DVD).

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Caravaggio, termed the ‘creative scholarship’ of Jarman’s team.49 The term is apt because of the stress on creativity that distinguishes Jarman’s approach from that of heritage cinema’s adherence to period and, more often than not, to pre-existing literary plots. In the absence of a literary or coherent biographical text on which to base the film, Jarman offers what is assertively a reading of Caravaggio’s artworks. The figures represented in the paintings lend themselves to Jarman’s construction of a biography for Caravaggio that is, at the same time, an autobiography of Jarman.50 Certainly, the finished film, with its tangle of homoerotic and heteroerotic attractions, invites a reading of the film as a portrait of the homosexual artist as a young man. To think of the film as primarily concerned with an autobiographical expression of Jarman’s erotic preoccupations, however, would be limiting. For one, it is a film that repeatedly invites the viewer to understand its portrayal of the early modern art scene as a comment on the ideological regulation of art in the 1980s. Caravaggio was kept on hold for several years before the BFI, with Colin MacCabe as executive producer, finally found a budget for it. Meanwhile, the filmmakers of the much-vaunted ‘renaissance’ of the British cinema in the early 1980s managed to secure large budgets for films (like Jarman’s pet-hate Chariots of Fire), which Jarman condemned for their ‘phoney production values’ and for their desire to create ‘an American product here, and convince them [Americans] it was British’.51 Disappointed by the failure of Channel 4 to deliver on its initial promise to provide funding for films representing minority standpoints and by the channel’s personally bruising withdrawal from a co-production deal for Caravaggio (although in the end it was Channel 4’s money that funded the film via the BFI),52 Jarman recognised a direct connection between arts funding past and present: ‘The feature film is the nearest equivalent to a large renaissance altarpiece. [F]ilm the chief chan[n]el of information and the mirror in which we see our lives is as jealously controlled by capital as the altarpiece was by the Church.’53 It is not for nothing that the Pope’s line ‘Revolutionary gestures in art are a great help . . .. Keeps the quo in the status’ survived consecutive rearrangements of the script and found its way

49 50 51 52 53

David Robinson, ‘A Painterly Eye for the Details: David Robinson Visits the Set of Caravaggio, the New Film by Director Derek Jarman’, The Times, 16 October 1985, press cutting: DJC Box 7. Jarman, Jarman’s Caravaggio, p. 132. Jarman, The Last of England, p. 112. ‘1st draft Caravaggio Book, Nov ’85’: DJC Box 11. See Jarman’s account of ‘The Tedious Tale of Channel 4’ in The Last of England, pp. 85–90; for a less biased account, see Dickinson, ‘The Encounter with Channel 4’. ‘Caravaggio Book, 1985’: DJC Box 10.

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into the film itself, where it brutally undercuts Caravaggio’s efforts to change his society through his art. However much Caravaggio ostensibly negates the power of art to alter the status quo, arguably such a change is precisely what Jarman was pursuing ever more actively in the 1980s. As Jarman was working on Caravaggio, he was evidently impressed by Laura Mulvey’s cinematic work, which attempted to translate some of the theoretical thinking of her essay ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’ of 1975 into screen practice.54 During that decade, too, Jarman’s lover Ken Butler, who would become Jarman’s assistant director on Edward II, brought Jarman into contact with queer theory. Butler was studying English at the University of Sussex during the heyday of Jonathan Dollimore and Alan Sinfield’s work on sexual dissidence and attended Michel Foucault’s seminars in Berkeley, excitedly telling Jarman about those seminars in his correspondence.55 The theories of Foucault, whose History of Sexuality and Archaeology of Knowledge Jarman owned,56 evidently rubbed off onto Jarman, who began to think about the politics of gender and sexuality in relation to film. Jarman is clearly taking on board Foucault’s thinking in The History of Sexuality when he writes of Caravaggio’s society: It’s difficult to know how the seventeenth century understood physical homosexuality. . . . The laws of the Church certainly forbade what it called ‘sodomy’ . . . The term ‘homosexual’ which identifies and ostracizes a group because of their desires and inclinations, is a nineteenth-century clinical invention, c. 1860.57

However receptive to Foucault’s notion that homosexuality is an invention of the late nineteenth century that cannot be projected back onto the early modern period, Jarman also found it impossible not to see Caravaggio as a homosexual in the modern sense of the term. In a diary entry, Jarman qualifies Foucault’s view by stating: ‘however the world of manners might change sexuality is constant’.58 This resistance to Foucault is not naïve. As Jarman wrote in his final diary: ‘It is not possible to look at works through the eyes of the past, only the present, and no one coming to Michelangelo or Shakespeare should ignore this unveiling. Civilisation is same sex.’59 The point is not historical 54

55 56 57 59

In a handwritten note on Caravaggio’s industrial context, Jarman lists Mulvey’s films in a list of BFIproduced films that ‘any producer in a less blinkered country would be proud of’. ‘CONTEXT TWO’, in ‘1st Draft of Caravaggio Book, Nov 85’: DJC Box 11. Letter from Ken Butler to Derek Jarman dated 25 April 1983: DJC Box 53. The date 1986 is inscribed in Jarman’s hand on the flyleaves of the books: PC. Jarman, Dancing Ledge, p. 21. 58 ‘Caravaggio June–July [1985]’: DJC Box 7. Jarman, Smiling in Slow Motion, p. 176.

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accuracy, but a politically motivated need to insist on the contribution formulations of same-sex desire have made to Western civilisation. In Caravaggio, Jarman succeeds in reconciling these two opposing views of his subject: the painter who starts off being identified as heterosexual as he is treated as a ‘rough trade’ object of desire for an early modern English tourist matures into a homosexual identity, which is queered once more by Caravaggio’s attraction to his model Lena. To see Jarman’s Caravaggio as ‘bisexual’ would be to miss the point: Caravaggio, rather, is queer, not bound by the oppositions between sexual orientations imposed by nineteenth-century legislation. It is Jarman’s immersion in 1980s queer studies which makes his collaboration with Sandy Powell and Tilda Swinton so significant. When Jarman cast Tilda Swinton in the part of Lena, he took on a relatively unknown, openly feminist performer who had just left the safety of the RSC in order to find better ways of expressing her ideas. Sandy Powell, too, was a newcomer to film whose politics and vision were to prove influential and who was to remain a crucial collaborator and friend for the remainder of Jarman’s life, designing the costumes for The Last of England (1987), Edward II and Wittgenstein (1993). Powell’s designs were to be crucial ingredients in the presentation of transgressive bodies and sexualities in key films of the fin-desiècle, working with Sally Potter on Orlando (1992), Neil Jordan on the notoriously gender-bending The Crying Game (1992) and Interview with the Vampire (1994), and, as we will see, Mike Figgis on Miss Julie (1999). Powell’s costumes and Swinton’s performance enabled Jarman to develop his preoccupation with the representation of the female body that is often ignored in readings of his work that concentrate on Jarman’s portrayals of the male body as an object of same-sex desire. This preoccupation is already visible in an early note on The Tempest in which Jarman saw Miranda as a possible projection issuing from Prospero’s mind: ‘Miranda might or might not appear if she does she is an icon maybe she is the painting a sort of Gioconda to which Prospero talks.’60 In the event, Jarman, in using Toyah Willcox for the part, produced a Miranda of extraordinary earthiness. In her one semi-nude scene, Miranda’s washing ritual is interrupted by Caliban, prompting an angry outburst that aligns her body with that of the film’s grotesque nude Sycorax rather than the Gioconda’s classically contained body. For Willcox, playing Miranda was an opportunity to present ‘a woman against what I called the Farrah Fawcett 60

‘Notebook Aug. 75’: DJC Box 28.1.

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Majors syndrome’, using a body that did not fit the Hollywood template to portray ‘the essence of femininity’ in a girl who is free from culturally imposed gender roles.61 The Gioconda’s body with its inscrutable facial expression, however, which may be talked to but which does not answer back, continued to trouble Jarman to the extent that, in 1980, he produced a script for an unrealised short film titled ‘The Smile on the Mona Lisa’. Jarman’s script pictures the sitter for the painting as a plain, talkative, English banker’s widow whose mouth is impossible to paint because of her incessant chatter. When, one day, her beautiful pageboy arrives to tell Leonardo da Vinci that she cannot sit for the painting because of her flu, Leonardo has oral sex with him and then paints ‘the boys [sic] satisfied smile on his mistress’ face’. Leonardo then instructs the boy to ‘[t]ell the Signora to lie in bed and rest the portrait is finished from the imagination and the smile well the smile is perfection.’62 The inscrutable perfect smile that has iconic status is achieved by projecting the beauty and sexiness of the boy onto the shapeless plainness of the widow. Caravaggio, too, is concerned with the problem of how to translate female plainness into sexually attractive beauty and to use the imagination to blend a male and a female body into a single embodiment of love. Tellingly, the first Caravaggio painting in the film is the ‘Medusa’, for which Caravaggio used a male model to paint a female icon. Conversely, Jarman chose a woman, Dawn Archibald, to pose as the provocative Cupid of Caravaggio’s ‘Amor Vincit Omnia’: gender distinctions are thus blurred no less than is sexual orientation. The film’s trajectory traces both Caravaggio’s sexual enthralment with his model Ranuccio (Sean Bean), a wrestler he picks up after a fight in a bar, and his growing idolisation of Ranuccio’s girlfriend Lena (Tilda Swinton) who, in the course of the film, is transformed from a dirty street girl smoking roll-ups in a grubby headscarf to Caravaggio’s stunningly beautiful ‘Mary Magdalene’ and, after her death, into his Virgin Mary for ‘The Death of the Virgin’. In his DVD commentary, Gabriel Beristain provides an account of how changes in make-up and lighting were aimed at showing how Lena is made ever more glamorous as an effect of Caravaggio’s favour: the change, he implies, is due to the external agency of Caravaggio the painter, Jarman the filmmaker and the 61 62

Toyah Willcox and Peter Middleton (cinematographer), Commentary, The Tempest, dir. Derek Jarman (Second Sight Films Ltd, 2004, DVD). ‘The Smile on the Mona Lisa / High Renaissance – the Tale of Mona Lisa’: DJC Box 43 (unpunctuated in the original).

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cinematographer and make-up artists who applied themselves to transforming Swinton’s passive body.63 Just as crucial to effecting Swinton’s astonishing transformation into an icon of femininity, however, are her costumes and performance: in stark contrast with Lena’s drab post-war Italian costumes at the beginning of the film, Powell’s design for Lena’s masked ball gown is ‘larger than life’, literally increasing Swinton’s visual presence in the film. The sheer size of the gown, and its elaborate gold embroidery, ensure that the gaze that, up to this point, is invited to rest on beautifully oiled and lit male torsos now comes to rest on a body wrapped in multiple layers of gorgeous fabrics. On receipt of the gown, Lena kisses Caravaggio and then, holding the gown in front of her, literally upstages Ranuccio by stepping onto a plinth in front of him. In her next appearance, Lena is wearing the enormous gown, backlit by an open window, and holding up a hand mirror in the iconic pose of Vanity. She pulls off her headscarf, for the first time revealing her lush amber hair, and then defiantly turns her head towards the camera, steadily holding the gaze of the viewer.64 With no diegetic viewer present, Lena’s gaze acknowledges the presence of the camera that is capturing her image and announces her agency in presenting herself to be gazed at. Lena switches from the narcissism of gazing at herself to meeting the gaze of the camera. The creator of this image is not Caravaggio, but Swinton-asLena daring Jarman-as-viewer to look at her. The deliberateness of the moment and the time and care invested in it invite us to read this image as the turning-point in the film in which Swinton’s Lena, by offering herself to the cinematic gaze, engages directly with Laura Mulvey’s theorisation of the woman as an object of the gaze, characterised by her ‘to-be-looked-at-ness’ in mainstream narrative film.65 In a film that insists so strongly on the nude male body as the privileged object of the gaze in defiance of conventional cinema, the assertiveness of Swinton’s performance, combined with the exaggerated costume, demands that we see her fully dressed body as pleasurable, while insisting that we do so on her own terms, not those of conventional narrative cinema. This is reflected in the diegesis: after this scene, Lena begins to dictate the conditions of her availability as an object of visual and sensual 63 64

65

Beristain’s commentary, Special Features, Caravaggio (BFI, DVD). Jarman’s Caravaggio scripts this moment as: ‘LENA, dressed in her glittering gown, admires herself in a hand mirror. She pulls off her scarf and lets her golden hair fall out slowly as, with a look of triumph and determination, she turns to face the camera’ (p. 84). See also Dillon, Jarman and Lyric Film, pp. 146–7, for a reading of this image as an exploration of vanity and narcissism. Mulvey, Visual and Other Pleasures, pp. 21–2.

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3 Vanity: Tilda Swinton in Derek Jarman’s Caravaggio (1986). Film still, BFI.

pleasure. ‘Virgins are expensive’, she hisses at Caravaggio during the masked ball at which she disappears with a Cardinal. Pregnant, she patiently sits for Caravaggio’s ‘Mary Magdalene’ and refuses to break her pose even when invited to do so. As Caravaggio tells Ranuccio of Lena’s pregnancy, she enters the room with two bodyguards, flaunting her beauty in the golden glow of the lighting while insisting on her unavailability for either man since she is now the Cardinal’s mistress. With Lena thus increasingly attractive and in control of the pleasures she conveys, Caravaggio drowns her ‘like Ophelia’.66 In a series of interviews with Lizbeth Goodman in 1989, Swinton complains that mainstream theatre and ‘the “classic plays” are by men, about men, or about things that mean something to men but don’t necessarily mean the same thing, or any thing, to women’, implying a connection between her assertively feminist politics and her decision to leave the RSC and work outside a canon in which ‘very few women characters . . . actually determine their own 66

Jarman’s Caravaggio, p. 102.

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4 In control: Tilda Swinton surrounded by ‘bodyguards’ in Derek Jarman’s Caravaggio (1986). Screengrab.

destinies’.67 Hamlet is Swinton’s main example of such male-centred drama that ‘bears no real relevance to [her] life at all’.68 Swinton recalls that her input into Jarman’s films was principally ‘about casting visual images, and specifically, because that’s what we have been interested in, it’s been about casting recognizable images and then subverting them, in whatever ways seemed appropriate’.69 Crucially, Swinton compares the character of Lena to her improvised performance of the bride in The Last of England who, having gone through the ‘typical bride-like torture, wherein she is having to pose for the photographer, over and over again, for a series of artificially posed photographs’, ends up taking a pair of enormous scissors to her wedding dress while performing a crazed dance of liberation. Swinton comments: ‘What’s unusual about this film is that she is finally allowed to rebel (whereas, in Caravaggio, she dies).’70 For Swinton, Lena’s Ophelialike drowning represents the fatal stifling of a woman’s rebellious appropriation of the right to control the gaze and direct it onto herself, to rebel against traditions that entrap women in passive poses that render them vulnerable. The period Jarman described as ‘years of distillation’ thus resulted in a film that brings together key elements that shape Jarman’s work on Edward II: a portrayal of sexual dissidence informed by queer and feminist theory and politics that extends its critique of normativity to defy the conventions of 67 69

Goodman, ‘Subverting Images’, 218. Goodman, ‘Subverting Images’, 218.

68 70

Goodman, ‘Subverting Images’, 219. Goodman, ‘Subverting Images’, 218.

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mainstream narrative cinema.71 Crucially, the excesses that characterised Jubilee and The Tempest are replaced by the ‘concentration on small gestures’ for which Jarman thanked Caravaggio. The sparseness of mise-en-scène of Caravaggio’s paintings, the beauty of the saturated colours in sharply contrasted lighting, the early modern painter’s anachronisms and the stillness of his figures become part and parcel of a painterly approach to cinema that marries meaning to form. Equally important, Caravaggio brings together a team of collaborators – Hobbs, Powell, Swinton – who worked with Jarman on creating visual images that, while catering to the visual pleasures critiqued by Mulvey in mainstream cinema, resist the sexual politics of that cinema. The bodies of Caravaggio speak of alternative ways of looking and being looked at, of desiring and being desired, grounding their queerness in the early modern period while insisting that, as Jarman puts it, ‘The past is present.’72

‘The Swan of Avon dies a syncopated death’: section 28 and the gestation of Edward II The sense that we can only access the past through the lens of the present is crucial to Jarman’s work on Edward II. Marlowe’s play became increasingly important to Jarman as, on 18 December 1986, at the height of the Thatcher era, Conservative Peer Lord Halsbury tabled a bill that took issue with the tolerant attitude towards homosexuality in local governments, setting out clear battle lines between ‘us’ and ‘them’ by suggesting that heterosexuals will be ‘pushed off the pavement [by homosexuals] if we give them the chance’.73 At the Conservative Party Conference in 1987, Margaret Thatcher built on Halsbury’s bill with her references to ‘extremist teachers’ who ensured that ‘[c]hildren who need to be taught to respect traditional moral values are being taught that they have an inalienable right to be gay.’74 By 1988, the essence of Lord Halsbury’s thinking was distilled into Section 28 of the Local Government Act, forbidding the ‘promotion of homosexuality’ by local governments.75 Four days after Lord Halsbury tabled his bill, on 22 December 1986, Jarman was diagnosed as a bearer of the HIV virus. Jarman thought himself ‘fortunate to be forewarned so that one can wind one’s life up in an orderly fashion’.76 71 73 74 75

Jarman, The Last of England, p. 61. 72 Jarman, The Last of England, p. 175. Official Report, House of Lords, 18 December 1986, col. 310, quoted in Smith, ‘Imaginary Inclusion’, 63. Margaret Thatcher, ‘Speech to Conservative Party’, 9 October 1987. Thatcher Archive: CCOPR 664/ 87, http://tinyurl.com/73yafmk. Smith, ‘Imaginary Inclusion’, 60, 63. 76 Jarman, The Last of England, p. 17.

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Jarman had filmed The Last of England, a devastating assessment of the state of the nation, earlier that year.77 Without any funding available to begin with, he had built on the ‘punk’ approach of The Angelic Conversation, filming with his Super-8 camera and asking his friends to improvise their contributions in the absence of a screenplay. James Mackay, who had been responsible for the project development in Caravaggio and who co-produced The Last of England, describes how with Hobbs, Terry, Swinton and Powell by his side, Jarman ‘had essentially devised an alternative system of film-making’ in terms of technology (combining Super-8, video and 35mm film) and approach (an improvised treatment of an idea).78 As the multiple impact of an intensification of state-sanctioned homophobia and his HIV diagnosis hit home, The Last of England was in postproduction. It was now that, through Simon Fisher-Turner’s soundtrack and the editing, a narrative of sorts was shaped to hold the disparate elements of the film together. As Nigel Terry, in a voice instantly recognisable from the voice-overs in Caravaggio, intones ‘outside in the leaden hail, the Swan of Avon dies a syncopated death’, a young man tramples the canvas of Caravaggio’s ‘Amor vincit omnia’ (the prop painted by Christopher Hobbs for Caravaggio); later sequences lead up to the execution of Spencer Leigh, Caravaggio’s Jerusaleme, who is mourned by Tilda Swinton’s bride. Jarman thus pastes together images and texts that speak of the annihilation of the careless, cheekily transgressive love of Caravaggio’s Renaissance, the demise of Shakespeare, and the devastation of countryside and people. Only Swinton’s bride embodies a feeble hope for a future in which the fabrics of oppression that lead to Lena’s death in Caravaggio can be as literally rent as she can hack away at her wedding dress.79 Framing this view of an England from which the population seeks to exile itself (‘The Last of England’ refers to Ford Madox Brown’s painting depicting emigrants leaving the white cliffs of Dover behind) are shots of Jarman at his desk in 1986 and home videos of Jarman with his sister and mother at various points of his childhood. If Alan Sinfield is right in arguing that for homosexuals, the ‘diasporic sense of separation and loss’ often ‘attach[es] to aspects of the (heterosexual) culture of our childhood, where we are no longer “at home”’, then these tender images of childhood games Jarman includes in his film 77 78 79

On The Last of England as a ‘state-of-the-nation’ film, see Hill, British Cinema, pp. 153–61. Mackay, ‘Low-Budget British Production’, p. 57. See Hill’s excellent reading (British Cinema, pp. 158–9). See also Jarman, The Last of England, pp. 205–7.

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combine his sense of desolation at the devastations of the present with nostalgia for a pre-sexual time and place, a home, an England, from which one need not seek to escape.80 The aggression of The Last of England’s editing and the new focus on the family provided in the inclusion of home video footage are also evident in Jarman’s other immediate artistic response to the proposed bill and the news of his HIV status: if the published copyright date is to be trusted, then the screenplay of ‘28’ that represents Jarman’s first treatment of Marlowe’s Edward II might date from 1986.81 The script is the first of a series of interrelated draft screenplays loosely related to Marlowe’s tragedy that speak of the intensity and speed with which Jarman, as he wound up his life, interwove his political activism with his creative work.82 Together, the screenplays permit us to gain a much more nuanced understanding than has hitherto been possible of Jarman’s thinking about Edward II and its place in present-day culture and political debates. They show a long evolution from the early 1960s when Jarman, as a student at King’s, had marked up homoerotic passages but also paid attention to Isabella’s desire for her husband and Edward’s wilfulness in setting Gaveston above foreign policy.83 ‘28’ and ‘Sod ’Em’, Jarman’s angry scripts of the late 1980s, by contrast, disregard Isabella and foreign policy altogether, until Swinton’s Isabella reclaims her share of the limelight in Jarman’s 1991 film. By mid 1991, however, Isabella has disappeared again, making way for a surprisingly carnivalesque final spin on Marlowe’s tragedy in Jarman’s script for the musical ‘Pansy’. ‘28’ imagines a near-future world in which Section 28 of the Local Government Act has been introduced as ‘the first of many similar acts of legislation restricting human rights’.84 On the Index of criminal elements is ‘Derek Jarman, with an identifying number, and the words “Orders to Eliminate,” culminating with Christopher Marlowe, with similar text’.85 Presiding over this brave new world is ‘Prime Minister, Margaret Reaper, known as grim’, a barely disguised representation of Margaret Thatcher, who is assisted by blind chief of police Cesspit Charlie. Their fascist regime targets homosexuals, carriers of HIV, adulterous wives, Labour supporters 80 82

83 85

Sinfield, Gay and After, p. 30. 81 Copyright date for ‘Sod ’Em’ in Jarman, Up in the Air, p. 185. ‘28’ is a truncated draft of ‘Sod ’Em’, which survives as a typescript in the BDC (DB), as a nearidentical typescript dated ‘Feb. 1989’ (PC), and as the screenplay published posthumously in Jarman, Up in the Air. In 1988–9, the material bifurcates into the film Edward II (1991) and ‘Pansy’. The Shooting Script of Edward II (the basis of the published screenplay Queer Edward II) and two scripts for ‘Pansy’ survive in PC. Annotations in Jarman’s copy of Ridley (pp. 240, 246): PC. 84 ‘28’ (6): DJC Box 43.9. ‘28’ (6): DJC Box 43.9.

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and, above all, the young actor Edward, for whom a warrant for arrest has been issued following his performance of the king in Marlowe’s banned Edward II. Edward’s father, who also appears as homophobic Edward I, is a military man very reminiscent of Jarman’s own father. Edward’s lover Johnny/Gaveston is also the Prince in the soap opera ‘The Family’, which keeps ‘Mr. and Mrs. average [sic]’ happy with scenes of royal escapism.86 Sequence 1 shows Edward naked and shivering in a dungeon. It is his voice-over narration we hear throughout the film, commenting on the state of the nation and blending his own experiences of repression with those of Edward II. Against the background of ‘a series of views of Great Britain, filmed in the manner of The Last of England, of castles, cathedrals, wild desolate landscapes, the white cliffs themselves, everything charged and burning in an orange light’, Edward’s narration, supported by ‘a complex soundtrack which like that in The Last of England will tell much of the story’, holds together the disparate visual elements of the film.87 Vignettes of life under Reaper are intercut with images of Nazi book-burning and concentration camps, footage of wreath-laying at the Cenotaph and critical moments in Edward’s life: childhood home videos, a row with his father who vows to destroy Edward’s relationship with Johnny, the under-thecounter acquisition of a copy of Marlowe’s Edward II, the brutal raid on the bookshop stocking illicit copies of Plato, Shakespeare and Marlowe.88 Then, suddenly, Edward is crowned King and Johnny speaks Gaveston’s opening monologue in Marlowe’s Edward II. The screenplay hurtles to a precipitated conclusion with ‘Mrs. Smith’ stoned by her neighbours for her adultery, the Archbishop of Canterbury thanking God for the 20,000 stonings of adulterous wives, God exclaiming ‘Fucking mess’, and a choir of serious little children singing ‘Onward Christian Soldiers’.89 The screenplay does not use all of its dramatis personae: ‘Brittania [sic], an abseiling lesbian heroine’ and her friend ‘Venus, a fifties style heroine’ who ‘sings filthy songs in the bath’ do not feature in the action, but their virtual presence speaks eloquently of the connections between ‘28’ and Jubilee, with its punk rendering of ‘Rule Britannia’ by Jordan’s character Amyl Nitrate. Described by Jarman as a film that ‘veers from tragedy to comedy, from comedy to farce’, ‘28’ is significant for the ways in which, from its inception, Jarman’s project to work on Edward II combines the most important strands of his lifelong engagement with the Renaissance to make a forceful 86 89

‘28’ (1–2): DJC Box 43.9. ‘28’ (14): DJC Box 43.9.

87

‘28’ (4): DJC Box 43.9.

88

‘28’ (11): DJC Box 43.9.

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political statement about the present. The breadth of reference and anarchic energy of Jubilee and The Last of England are brought together here with Caravaggio’s emphasis on a single destiny. The film’s viewpoint is that of Edward, Jarman and the wider homosexual community in the 1980s. Explicit comparisons to the visuals and soundtrack of The Last of England in the script suggest that Jarman was thinking of this film as another ‘punk’, low-budget production using a combination of Super-8 and home video footage. Orange, the dominant colour in The Last of England, is the light in ‘28’ that symbolises the burning of books and the ‘charge’ of a country devastated by the right-wing economic and social policies of its leaders and the complacency of its people.90 Crucially, in view of how the project was to develop into Edward II, ‘28’ builds on the retrospective technique of Caravaggio in narrating the events from the vantage point of Edward in the dungeon awaiting his execution. The film thus offers what Catherine Silverstone describes as ‘a traumatic flash forward in relation to the time of its writing, where trauma in the present is the ground upon which that which has not yet happened is imagined as having happened’. Her term ‘proleptic traumatic response’ neatly sums up the temporal contradictions of a screenplay in which the early modern past and the political present are projected into the future, where they merge into a single fact of timeless alienation and oppression.91 Edward cites Old English poetry (three lines from The Exeter Book’s ‘The Wanderer’, a tale of the warrior’s exile, loneliness and grief) while the visuals show desolate views of present-day Britain; Gaveston’s soliloquy from Act 1 Scene 1 of Marlowe’s play is sandwiched between a view of the ‘burning pages of Marlowe’s Edward II’ in an incinerator and Prime Minister Margaret Reaper being made-up for a television address. Under the pressure of the proposed homophobic legislation and its creation of ‘a monotonous monoculture’ that leads to the withering of ‘all opposition and plurality’, temporal diversity, too, has withered and past and present oppressions are indistinguishable.92 ‘Sod ’Em’, the next iteration of the script which seems to have been written within a few months of ‘28’, builds on ‘28’ by adding fifty-five new sequences to the early screenplay’s nineteen sequences.93 In ‘Sod ’Em’, Jarman also introduces a new character, General Genocide, who heads the 90 91 93

The link between economy and repression is evident in Prime Minister Reaper’s insistence on the cost-effectiveness of the stoning of adulterous wives. Silverstone, Shakespeare, p. 85. 92 ‘28’ (8): DJC Box 43.9. I concentrate here on the version of ‘Sod ’Em’ published in Jarman, Up in the Air, which differs very little from the BDC and PC typescripts. The largest variant is the introduction of a sequence titled

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‘SAS (for “Straight and Sexist”)’, an appellation that clarifies the link between homophobia and sexism and identifies both with the military backbone of the government. Homophobic repression has become even more extreme in this screenplay: Reaper and Cesspit discuss the costeffectiveness of hanging, drawing and quartering and Johnny/Gaveston is tortured on a medieval rack before being shot by a firing squad. The complicity of the Arts in the extermination of homosexuals is implied by the notion that executions should be accompanied by music (the ‘choir of clean children’ plays a prominent role). Jarman specifically targets the film industry in his vision of film studio sets being used as shooting ranges in which the army can practise with ‘HIV condemned’ ‘volunteers’ who are interned in Pontins holiday camps. God, on the other hand, has clearly joined the queer opposition, since s/he appears as ‘a bearded lady in an enormous scarlet ballgown’, who has a sympathetic ear for the petition on behalf of Edward and Johnny made by Wilde, Shakespeare, Marlowe and Byron.94 Sequence 67, ‘Berkeley Castle’, returns us to the dungeon of the film’s beginning, where Edward and his executioner speak Marlowe’s dialogue from Act 5 Scene 6, right to Edward’s final line. Although it remains unclear whether the film is meant to show the moment of Edward’s death, Margaret Reaper’s statement, in the following scene, ‘I’ve shoved a poker up that faggot’s arse’, leaves the viewer in no doubt about what has happened. As Reaper is crowned ‘First of England Queen, Dictator and Defender of the Faith’ and Edward and Johnny linger in purgatory, God finally has Reaper thrown in the Jaws of Hell and resurrects Edward and Johnny, who are back in their squat, where they kiss over a cup of tea.95 The film Jarman describes as ‘a violent cut-up collage of that time’ is thus suspended between two Marlovian moments: the opening monologue of Gaveston’s repeal towards the beginning (Sequence 11) and Edward’s death scene near the end (Sequence 67).96 Marlowe’s Edward II, which makes its first physical appearance in response to Edward’s reflection ‘And I thought, how can I represent all this?’, provides the narrative arc that unites the fragments of time. Through Edward’s statement ‘Time was scattered, the past and the future, the future, past and present, our lives erased by the great

94 96

‘The Liberals Man the Walls of the Ghetto’ that slots into the middle of sequence 55 of the published script (p. 214). It features a Channel 4 Announcer, who introduces the screening of the Derek Jarman film ‘Hadrian and Antinuous’, which the ‘faint-hearted’ might find ‘offensive’ because of its homoeroticism. ‘Sod ’Em’, Bill Douglas Centre: DBC 490, no pagination; ‘Sod ’Em’, PC, no pagination; and Jarman, ‘Sod ’Em’, p. 224. Jarman, ‘Sod ’Em’, pp. 198, 199, 205. 95 Jarman, ‘Sod ’Em’, p. 222. Jarman, ‘Sod ’Em’, p. 185.

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dictator’, ‘Sod ’Em’ pins the responsibility for the dissolution of lives and times, which already marked ‘28’, squarely on Margaret Reaper.97 Remarkably, after years of using Shakespeare as his ‘best weapon’, and in a screenplay in which Marlowe and Shakespeare rub shoulders in God’s queer heaven, Jarman associates the destructive force of Reaper with Shakespeare.98 As Edward is cornered by the SAS, a newscaster announces: . . . Now Reaper fills the fields of Blighty, Blessed by the Lord Almighty, She cuts the national cake Misquoting, Francis Augustine and Paul, Those times, she said were out of joint, And killed a mouse to prove the point The fires she unleash’d ran quickly through the nation Turning old city streets to rubble . . .99

The blurring of the battle lines in the doggerel’s association of Shakespeare’s Hamlet with the forces of oppression is symptomatic of Jarman’s changing attitude towards Shakespeare and Marlowe in these years. The syncopated death of the ‘Swan of Avon’ proclaimed in The Last of England that was accompanied by the trampling of Caravaggio’s provocatively careless Cupid represents the elegiac mourning of the obliteration, by the jagged rhythms of the present, of a ‘Shakespearean’, gentle, free and forgiving conception of the Renaissance. As Jarman’s fight against Section 28 intensified and he began to distance himself from other prominent homosexuals who opted to work with the Conservative Government, however, he increasingly identified Shakespeare with the cultural and political establishment.100 When Ian McKellen accepted a knighthood and an invitation to Downing Street, Jarman publicly expressed his indignation.101 OutRage!, the activist group Jarman was working with, opposed such assimilationist politics, employing aggressive tactics that ‘challenge[d] homophobia and political discrimination in a retaliatory fashion’.102 Significantly, Jarman mapped the divide 97 98 99 100 101

102

Jarman, ‘Sod ’Em’, pp. 194, 222. Derek Jarman. Interview by Cynthia Kee, London Magazine, press cutting pasted into ‘Caravaggio June–July [1985]’: DJC Box 7. Jarman, ‘Sod ’Em’, pp. 119–20. On Jarman’s change in attitude, see also: Chedgzoy, Shakespeare’s Queer Children, p. 182; and Wymer, Jarman, p. 143. See discussions of the knighthood controversy in: Barratt, Ian McKellen, pp. 149–51; Del Re, Jarman, p. 83; Friedman, ‘Horror, Homosexuality, and Homiciphilia’, 574–9; Peake, Jarman, pp. 464–6; and Wymer, Jarman, p. 143. I discuss the relationship between McKellen and Jarman and their two films of Edward II in detail in Chapter 4. Richardson, Queer Cinema, p. 39.

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between his own radical political views and McKellen’s willingness to talk to the Conservatives onto the opposition between Shakespeare and Marlowe: ‘I suspect if Elizabeth I was dishing out knighthoods, Shakespeare would have been at the front door with a begging bowl, Marlowe would have run a mile.’103 By the time he filmed Edward II and wrote the polemical accompanying screenplay, Queer Edward II, which he dedicated to ‘the repeal of all anti-gay laws, particularly Section 28’, Jarman was ready to endorse A. L. Rowse’s view of Shakespeare as ‘a conservative’ and of Marlowe as ‘much more radical’.104 What Marlowe enabled Jarman to do is to approach the Renaissance no longer as a time of sexual liberation (which is how he repeatedly imagined fifteenth-century Florence),105 but as the origin of a history of sexual and political repression he identified with Jacobean England. Not for nothing does Jarman describe Nigel Terry’s coinage of Mortimer’s insult ‘girlboy’ as ‘Jacobean’.106 His Edward II, he came to realise in 1990, was growing ‘increasingly Jacobean, sexy, and violent’.107 Jarman’s diary entry recording his reaction to the first screening of the completed film reads: ‘Marlowe the mirror in which Shakespeare finds himself’.108 This period thus sees the emergence of an opposition of Marlowe as a radical, violent and sexy ‘Jacobean’ playwright, whose plays act as catalysts for a political engagement in the present day, with a more conservative, gentle (if not quite genteel) ‘Elizabethan’ Shakespeare, whose political edge is dulled. This opposition is fundamental. It underpins not only the popular conception of Marlowe as, anachronistically, a dramatist with a ‘Jacobean’ mind-set that aligns him with the Jacobean dramatists’ reputed ‘transgression, dissidence, and desire’,109 but it also was to inform the thinking of Jarman’s most prominent successors. It is here that Jarman’s queer Renaissance begins to be ‘contemporary Jacobean’ in its welding together of past and present politics and histories of repression and transgression. It is Jarman’s queer contemporary Jacobean aesthetic in Edward II that makes it such a powerful model for subsequent filmmakers (and, arguably, stage directors), giving their work with early modern drama a distinctly counterShakespearean angle that is bound up with oppositional aesthetics and approaches to filmmaking.

103 105 107 109

Jarman, Smiling in Slow Motion, p. 162. 104 Jarman, Queer Edward II, p. 112. 106 See, e.g. his section on Ficino in Chroma, pp. 57–8. Jarman, Queer Edward II, p. 142. Jarman, Modern Nature, p. 293. 108 Jarman, Smiling in Slow Motion, p. 30. Bennett, Performing Nostalgia, p. 80.

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Derek Jarman’s queer Edward II: (preposterously) looking through the eyes of the present Jarman’s work on ‘Sod ’Em’ clearly paved the way for Edward II. Yet the film signals a radical shift in the filmmaker’s approach to the material, as he focussed his attention on Marlowe’s play and dropped the frame narrative of Margaret Reaper’s England and her ‘Straight and Sexist’ police state. Aspects of that frame remain present in the inflated attention Jarman gives to Nigel Terry’s SAS-uniformed Mortimer and Tilda Swinton’s Isabella, as well as to the middle-aged women of the homophobic ‘Chorus of Nobility’, who seem to have borrowed their handbags and blouses from Margaret Thatcher’s wardrobe. The scripts for Edward II use Marlowe’s verse, yet combine a remarkably close adherence to his words with a willingness to cut, shuffle and update. A comparison of the Shooting Script (PC) with Briggs’s edition of Edward II, which Jarman began to mark up after September 1988 (the date on the flyleaf), reveals the care with which he repeatedly revisited the play, gradually paring it down until he arrived at the extreme economy of the dialogue in the film. The Shooting Script, too, bears multiple traces of deletions and, less frequently, insertions. Keith Collins remembers that these took place throughout the filming process, as some performers shed more lines and Swinton asked for deleted lines to be reinserted.110 ‘Cut the dialogue / too much of it’, Jarman agitatedly jotted in the margin of Sequence 73, the scene in which Isabella and Mortimer jostle for space on Edward’s throne – and cut nine of Mortimer’s lines. Although the pared-down film includes images and sounds that reference the medieval period of Edward’s reign – Simon Fisher-Turner’s ‘medieval’ soundtrack, the armoured body of Edward I lying in state, the throne – the action of the film firmly takes place in the present. In the published screenplay, Queer Edward II, Jarman explains his approach to ‘period’ and to the Marlovian text in a way that, once more, explicitly sets him in opposition to the Shakespeare industry: The image is the image, and the word, oh don’t muck around with that, in the beginning was the word. Filmed history is always a misinterpretation. The past is the past, as you try to make material out of it, things slip even further away. ‘Costume drama’ is such a delusion based on a collective amnesia, ignorance and furnishing fabrics. (Lurex for an Oscar). Vulgarity like this started with Olivier’s ‘Henry V’ and deteriorated ever after. 110

Keith Collins, personal interview, 23 June 2012.

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Social realism is as fictitious as the BBC news which has just one man’s point of view. Like my film. Does this answer the question: ‘Why are you doing it in modern dress?’ Our ‘Edward’ as closely resembles the past as any ‘costume drama’ (which is not a great claim).111

By the time Andrew Tiernan’s Northern working-class Gaveston, cradling a mug in his hand, concludes his statement about ‘the multitude, that are but sparks / Raked up in embers of their poverty’ with the exclamation ‘Fuck them!’, the viewer is keyed into the film’s dissident heritage attitude and its ability to present several simultaneous temporalities: an early modern play, the medieval reign of Edward II and the abusive present.112 Uniting all three periods is the overall aesthetic of the film which, in the manner of Caravaggio, combines Christopher Hobbs’s set design and Ian Wilson’s cinematography to create a timeless space of stone walls, intersected by shafts of light that suggest different localities and moods. All scenes are shot in the studio, with the four big blocks of textured stone walls that make up the flexible set arranged in different positions to create various prison-like environments. This allows Jarman to pay tribute to the prison setting and erotic fascination with criminality of Genet’s Un chant d’amour.113 It also returns Jarman to the idea of the early modern play as a physical and mental prison which he toyed with in the early Tempest screenplays. Within that grim, grey environment, Jarman, often using Caravaggesque lighting from the top left of the frame, creates a sensual feast of colours with the help of Sandy Powell’s lush costumes for Isabella and the court musicians, adopting what Rosalind Galt describes as an ‘aesthetic of visual plenitude’ that goes against the grain of avant-garde British filmmaking in the same period.114 The unity of space and lighting allows Jarman to exercise ‘classical’ control over his sensually excessive material even as it threatens to burst the seams of Marlowe’s tragedy with images of grotesque violence and the insertion of extradiegetic material that insistently binds the individual experience of Edward to Jarman’s own 111 112

113

114

Jarman, Queer Edward II, p. 86. 1.1.20–21. See Julianne Pidduck for a reading of Jarman’s work as deploying the ‘oppositional period aesthetic’ associated with ‘Queer Costume Drama’ (Pidduck, Contemporary Costume Film, pp. 139, 145). See also Chedgzoy, Shakespeare’s Queer Children, p. 213 and, especially, David Garner’s discussion of Genet’s influence on Jarman and the way ‘Prison is a privileged space of desire in Edward II’, with Lightborn evoking boiler-suited figures in Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin and Fassbinder’s Genetadaptation Querelle de Brest (Garner, ‘Perverse Law’, p. 39). Galt, Pretty, p. 78. Galt is writing about Jarman’s Super-8 films; her observation applies equally to Jarman’s use of rich colours in Edward II.

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historical moment: a homoerotic nude rugby scrum, OutRage! demonstrators fighting against riot police, the fusillade of three lesbian women (modelled on Goya’s ‘El tres de mayo de 1808 en Madrid’),115 musical and dance interludes bringing in extraneous performers. The timelessness of set and lighting is reinforced by Jarman’s restructuring of the plot into a sequence of episodes that disrupt the emphasis on continuity which remained mostly uncontested in early 1990s mainstream cinema. Even though the budget of £750,000 that Working Title, the production company, had managed to raise for the film was by far the largest budget Jarman had ever disposed of, it was too small to allow him to rival Sjöman’s Syskonbädd in its narrative continuity and attention to period.116 As Jarman said: ‘I don’t think we could have done Edward II [like Sjöman’s film]. We didn’t have the resources. . . . I always said the budget was the aesthetic.’117 Once more, Jarman was forced to fall back on his experiences with punk filmmaking, using a mixture of professional actors and friends as performers and letting Christopher Hobbs convert pepper mills into an oversized chess set. Most importantly, he relinquished linear storytelling because ‘the cost of narrative makes it prohibitive – essentially narrative is an exercise in censorship because of that’.118 Instead, Jarman used the technique he had trialled in Caravaggio and imagined for ‘28’ and ‘Sod ’Em’, starting the film from the vantage point of Edward in the dungeon approaching the moment of his death and remembering key episodes in his life. Edward II’s back-to-front structure anticipates the approach to the play that was to become dominant in academic discussions of Marlowe: reading the play ‘backwards’, as it were, from the vantage point of Edward’s sodomitical murder. In doing so, he employs an approach that is literally preposterous, in the rhetorical sense of the term, in that it reverses the relations between that which should come before and that which should follow after. As Jonathan Goldberg interprets the rhetorical figure and I will explain in detail when discussing Mike Figgis’s prominent use of this figure in Hotel in my next chapter, the preposterous signals a transgression of spatial decorum that implies a similar transgression of sexual decorum.119 By starting the film with a scene that recognisably belongs to the end of the play, Jarman translates into his narrative form the transgression of sexual 115 116 117 119

A photocopy of Goya’s painting is pasted into the Shooting Script of Edward II: PC. Wymer, Jarman, p. 145. There is disagreement over the figure: Jarman puts the figure at £850,000 (Jarman, Queer Edward II, p. 34). Lippard, ‘Interview with Derek Jarman’, p. 165. 118 Jarman, Queer Edward II, p. 110. Goldberg, Sodometries, p. 4.

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norms that is the subject matter of his film. The ‘proleptic traumatic response’ of the earlier screenplays is transformed into a retrospective, preposterous traumatic response in which Marlowe’s 400-year-old play provides some of the answers to the questions posed by current political conflicts. Comparison with Branagh’s Henry V, filmed just two years beforehand, or even with Jarman’s own War Requiem (also 1989), which set Britten’s mass to devastating visuals of trench warfare, loss and grief, makes it clear that Jarman’s Edward II is not interested in representing a nation at war in the manner of the chronicle history play. This point is made explicitly in the Press Book for the film, which uses the ‘fact’ of Marlowe’s homosexuality to explain the difference between Marlowe’s and Shakespeare’s historiography: Marlowe . . . wrote a very different sort of history play to Shakespeare’s semiofficial accounts of the rise of the Tudor dynasty: namely the story of a king whose love for his favourite might have involved what Marlowe’s contemporaries regarded as an abominable vice, but who attains full tragic stature nonetheless. ‘What’s so interesting about EDWARD II’, Derek Jarman says, ‘is it touches on areas that still aggravate people, unlike “Henry V” for example.’120

Instead of recreating period detail and proceeding in the linear manner of Branagh’s Henry V, the film uses the final encounter between Edward and his executioner as a framing device that authorises and then regularly penetrates the chronological progression of the plot. The frame itself is gradually infiltrated by the plot, so that, for example, we find Steven Waddington’s Edward abjectly offering his crown not to Mortimer (Nigel Terry), but to Lightborn (Keith Collins, credited as Kevin Collins). The dungeon becomes a psychic landscape in which Edward and Lightborn experience despondency, hope and an erotic interdependence that gradually supplants Edward’s attachment to Gaveston. The film preposterously filters the play through the lens of Edward’s death-by-sodomy so as to zero in on the sodomitical relationships between Edward and Gaveston/Lightborn. In Edward’s murder, the play’s political and sexual conflicts are conflated: ‘anus’, proclaims one of Greg Taylor’s slogans in Queer Edward II, ‘– the last place the government . . . should be poking its nose’.121 The battle lines between the sexual dissidents who support Edward and the faction combining Isabella, Mortimer and the caricatured Tory MPs seem very clearly demarcated: in a reversal of Lord Halsbury’s speech to the 120

BDC item 67736: Edward II Press Book (1991), pp. vi–vii.

121

Jarman, Queer Edward II, pp. 80–2.

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House of Lords, the ‘us’ of the film is sexually dissident; the ‘them’ the heterosexual norm. The loving relationship between Edward and Gaveston, who are shown cuddling in a warm orange light, is contrasted with a coldly lit, asexual bedroom scene in which Isabella, with a face mask on and cucumber slices over her eyes, lies on the bed while Mortimer reads a book about the Gulf War. Two further scenes show that Mortimer’s heterosexuality is most happily expressed through masochistic submission to prostitutes. It is therefore tempting to find that the film stages a carnivalesque, ‘heterophobic’ and misogynistic inversion in which ‘[h]eterosexuality is vilified . . . in much the same way homosexuality has been throughout much of the cinema’s history.’122 Such polarising readings preposterously let the sodomitical murder determine all the meanings generated by the film. Edward II as a whole, however, forbids such a polarising approach while courting it throughout. The film’s portrayal of homosexuality as ‘the eruption of excess, of jouissance’ that, as Michael O’Pray recognises, fractures the ‘repressive, supposedly “rational” law of heterosexuality’, does not preclude a critical look at individual homosexual characters that disturbs the spectator’s uncritical identification with their viewpoints.123 In particular, Jarman is quite reconciled to the idea that Andrew Tiernan’s thuggish Gaveston is repulsive in his sexual humiliation of the Archbishop and ‘very alienating’ in his mock-seduction of Isabella.124 ‘Not all gay men are attractive’, he comments on the latter scene, ‘I am not going to make this an easy ride. Marlowe didn’t.’125 The binary oppositions set up by the film and the screenplay are symptoms of the either/or mentality that Jarman so effectively queers in Caravaggio and sets out to disturb again in Edward II. Key to this is understanding Jarman’s resistance to the term ‘gay’, which he thought reductive in its binary opposition with ‘straight’, and his preference for the more capacious term ‘queer’. As theorised by Michael Warner, ‘queer’ involves not just sexual dissidence but a general ‘resistance to regimes of the normal’: The preference for ‘queer’ represents, among other things, an aggressive impulse of generalization; it rejects a minoritizing logic of toleration or simple political-interest-representation . . . ‘queer’ gets a critical edge by 122

123 125

Friedman, ‘Horror, Homosexuality, and Homiciphilia’, 580; and Arroyo, ‘Death, Desire and Identity’, p. 82. See also Chedgzoy for an account of how ‘Jarman . . . considers the carnivalesque use of strategic inversion to be a useful way of prompting people to reconsider assumptions which are normally so taken-for-granted that they effectively become invisible’ (Chedgzoy, Shakespeare’s Queer Children, p. 208). O’Pray, ‘Edward II’, 188. 124 Annotation to Sequence 23 (Shooting Script, Edward II): PC. Jarman, Queer Edward II, p. 46. See also p. 20.

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defining itself against the normal rather than the heterosexual . . . The insistence on ‘queer’ . . . has the effect of pointing out a wide field of normalization, rather than simple intolerance, as the site of violence.126

Jarman shows the influence of Foucault’s thinking and of queer theory in statements such as: ‘We have academics who dispute Shakespeare was gay. Well, he wasn’t – that term hadn’t been invented and the either/or ghetto with it. He was much more likely to be queer, which includes all of us.’127 When Simon Callow responded to Jarman’s Edward II ‘as a gay man’, Jarman irritably wrote in his diary that he did not make the film ‘for “gay men”, I made it for queers’.128 The screenplay’s provocative title Queer Edward II ‘highlights, in a direct and aggressive manner, the film’s affinities with contemporary queer theory’.129 Significantly, Jarman co-authored the book with Tilda Swinton and Ken Butler, that is, with two collaborators who were immersed in feminist performance practice and queer theory.130 It is during the collaborative process of shooting the film, it seems, that Jarman changed Isabella’s question, ‘Is it not strange, that he is thus bewitched?’ to ‘Is it not queer . . .’, so as to draw attention to the word and its implications.131 In an open address to Jarman written in 2002, Swinton recalls that at the time of their collaboration, ‘There was a fashion for a thing called “normal” and there was a plague abroad called “perversion”.’132 Her address makes it clear that the normality in question is not just sexual, but political, cultural and artistic, and that it involves what Jarman himself referred to as ‘normal film’.133 Swinton remembers how it irked the inhabitants of ‘Planet Jarmania’ to see themselves marginalised as ‘the arthouse’, a designation they resisted because it sounded ‘disparaging’ and implied ‘that there was only ever one mainstream’. Jarman’s ‘internationalist brigade. Decidedly pre-industrial. A little loud, a lot louche. Not always in the best possible taste’, in Swinton’s description, is a point of resistance to the normative regimes of compulsory heterosexuality and the sex/gender system as much as to the ‘dead hand of Good Taste’ that dominates the cultural sphere. Jarman’s queer cinema, she implies, offers an alternative normality, a view 126 128 130 131

132 133

Warner, Fear of a Queer Planet, p. xxvi. 127 Jarman, Smiling in Slow Motion, p. 161. Jarman, Smiling in Slow Motion, p. 59. 129 Cartelli, ‘Queer Edward II’, p. 213. Stephen McBride, who appeared in The Garden, is listed as a further co-author. Insertion in Jarman’s hand in Sequence 19, equivalent to 1.2.55 in Marlowe’s tragedy, where the line belongs to Mortimer (Shooting Script, Edward II: PC). See Armstrong’s and Del Re’s comments on the substitution (Armstrong, ‘More Jiggery than Pokery’, p. 148; and Del Re, Jarman, p. 83). Swinton, ‘No Known Address’, p. 11. Quoted in Lippard, ‘Interview with Derek Jarman’, p. 161.

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of the arthouse-as-mainstream that upsets the hegemony of a cinema driven by the availability of funding that is linked to the ability ‘to be identified as national product’.134 The stress Swinton puts on the word ‘queer’ in Edward II draws attention to a challenge to normality that goes far beyond the sexual in involving the disruption of narrative continuity associated with ‘normal film’, the erosion of the boundaries of an individual work of art, and the dissolution of the separation of past from present, of film from context, of fiction from autobiography. In its rejection of the either/or logic of the binary oppositions that underpin ‘normality’, Jarman’s Edward II builds on the dynamic tension between opposing views that makes up the fabric of Marlowe’s tragedy. As Muriel Bradbrook pointed out long ago, Edward II is full of instances of a type of antithesis in which one character’s statement is modified by another character’s reply, with the substitution of just one or two words turning the initial statement on its head.135 Thus, for example, the definition of treason – and therefore of what constitutes rightful government – is questioned in this stichomythic exchange: king edward Lay hands on that traitor Mortimer! mortimer sr. Lay hands on that traitor Gaveston!136

Similarly, an exchange between Isabella and Gaveston juxtaposes the two definitions of ‘lord’, and through that word, a whole nexus of sexual and courtly power relations that stand in an unresolved tension throughout the play: queen [to Gaveston] Villain, ’tis thou that rob’st me of my lord. gaveston Madam, ’tis you that rob me of my lord.137

Evidently, Jarman was struck by the balance of these lines, since he marked them up in the copy of the play he worked on as a student. Lancaster’s confused statement ‘In no respect can contraries be true’ pinpoints how the play repeatedly weighs up opposite viewpoints that both have a claim to be ‘true’.138 The play’s ability to sustain multiple ‘truths’ is also evident in the tragedy’s frequent deployment of conditional statements: ‘if’ is a key word that allows two realities to live alongside each other. Edward’s repeated assertion ‘If I be king’139 implies the possibility of its opposite, just as his death is already implied in his declaration ‘if I live’.140 By the end of the play, 134 135 136

Swinton, ‘No Known Address’, pp. 11, 13. Bradbrook, Themes and Conventions, p. 93. See also Kuriyama, Hammer or Anvil, pp. 177–8. 1.4.20–1. 137 1.4.160–1. 138 1.4.249. 139 1.4.105, 3.1.135. 140 2.2.96–7, 5.1.111.

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as Tom Pettit observes, Edward’s death-by-spit in the sewer marks the monarch himself as a figure who is ‘ambivalent (he may belong to one category or another); he is liminal (situated athwart the boundary between two categories); he is interstitial (falling into the gap between categories). However we term it, Edward is not merely problematic in relation to categories, he problematizes categorization.’141 The punishment that marks Edward as the other against which the heterosexual norm defines itself is also a punishment that queerly highlights the problematic nature of such binary categorisation. The most obvious way in which Jarman challenges a reading of the film as centred on the protagonist’s death-by-sodomy, and therefore as locked into the oppositional, binary logic of ‘normality’, is by resisting the closure of that act and following the scene with an alternative ending, in which Lightborn throws the poker into the dungeon’s pool before kissing Edward. In the Shooting Script, the threat of death that hangs over the unexpected redemptive kiss is visualised starkly: on the page facing the dialogue, Jarman has pasted a large, jaggedly cut-out and crumpled square of paper painted black.142 For Colin MacCabe, ‘With this kiss a whole history of homophobia and violence is annulled, a whole new history becomes possible.’143 Yet this annulment is not complete, nor is it overturned, as Wymer suggests, by the fact that ‘the climactic anal rape and murder of Edward . . . lasts longer and has considerably more impact than the brief loving kiss which displaces it’: both endings are kept in play, neither is privileged to the exclusion of the other.144 This is the more significant since Jarman was in hospital on the day the gruesome murder of Edward was to be shot, so that the scene was directed by Ken Butler.145 Not only did Jarman keep Butler’s footage, but he gave it the attention needed in the editing and the synchronisation of the soundtrack to condense into this scene the emotional complexity of ‘Sod ’Em’, with its incongruous juxtaposition of the horror of Edward’s execution with the singing of the ‘CHOIR OF CLEAN CHILDREN’, followed by the petitions to God that result in the resurrection of Edward and Johnny/ Gaveston. In Edward II, the only sound that can be heard as four men in studded leather jackets force the struggling Edward down onto a table and Lightborn approaches with a red-hot poker is an extradiegetic choir of 141 142 143 145

Pettit, ‘Skreaming Like a Pigge’, 98. Page opposite Sequence 79 (Shooting Script, Edward II): PC. MacCabe, ‘Post-National European Cinema’, p. 153. 144 Wymer, Jarman, p. 149. Jarman, Queer Edward II, p. 160.

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children singing ‘resurrexit’ (he is risen). The moment of the poker’s insertion is marked by a close-up of Edward’s contorted face; his scream pierces through the voices of the children. The rupture in the soundtrack reproduces the physical assault and provokes the type of visceral response in the viewer advocated by Artaud.146 Here, the formal control and joyous promise of resurrection of the children’s Latin chant is ruptured by Edward’s scream. His pain becomes the viewer’s pain, breaking through the boundary separating audience from spectacle before engulfing the spectator and the image of Edward’s slumped body in the total silence of death. The shot and its accompanying silence is maintained just long enough to accept the finality of that ending before a cut returns us to the image of Edward sleeping on the floor of his dungeon, raising his head at the sound of an opening door. Edward looks towards a light on the left of the frame; the next shot shows Lightborn entering in a shaft of light from the right of the frame as Edward addresses him with ‘These looks of thine can harbor naught but death; / I see my tragedy written in thy brows.’147 The sequence is unsettling not just because we see Edward fearing for his life when we have just accepted the finality of his death, but also because the spatial organisation of the characters and light in the adjoining shots seems, briefly, impossible. The second, happy, conclusion of this scene does not simply supplant the first, tragic conclusion; rather, each alternative is readable as a dream from the point of view of its other, each equally offered to the viewer as both ‘true’ and impossible: contraries can indeed be true. Equally true and impossible is the way the film, through its prominent use of orange and red light in the scene of the murder, allows a reading of even that horrible moment as one of love and hope. Throughout the film, Jarman uses the glow of Lightborn’s fire, coupled with the gentle presence of Keith Collins’s Lightborn – the casting of the man Jarman on his death bed described as his ‘true love’ is certainly telling – as a source of warmth and comfort for Edward.148 At one point, Jarman imagined Lightborn using his furnace to prepare a cup of tea, bringing the harmonious domesticity of ‘Sod ’Em’’s final sequence into Edward II.149 The warmth of Lightborn’s fire contrasts with the icy rain into which the exiled Gaveston is thrust and with the cold shafts of blue light that often give Isabella’s face a bluish tint 146 147 149

See Janet Clare on the links between Marlowe’s dramaturgy and Artaud’s ‘Theatre of Cruelty’ (Clare, ‘Marlowe’s Theatre of Cruelty’, p. 87). 5.5.72–3. 148 Jarman, Smiling in Slow Motion, p. 387. Sequence 18, Shooting Schedule of 5 March 1991 (Shooting Script, Edward II): PC.

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that aligns her with ‘Sod ’Em’’s blue-blooded Margaret Reaper. Orange is the light of Edward and Gaveston’s moment of tender intimacy before the latter’s banishment, and it recalls how Jarman imagined England’s ‘wild and desolate landscapes’ in ‘28’ and ‘Sod ’Em’ ‘burning in an orange light’ that itself evoked the fires burning in The Last of England. The deep red radiating from Lightborn’s stove during the execution is both hellish and comforting, the scene both an execution and an erotic fantasy that can be resolved by awakening to a kiss. Looking back to ‘Sod ’Em’ once more, possibly the closest equivalent to the fire imagery and the nexus of pleasure and pain in this scene is not Sequence 67, ‘BERKELEY CASTLE’, but Sequence 70, ‘A PURGATORY IN BORROWED TIME’, in which Edward and Johnny/ Gaveston meet in purgatory (the cleansing fires in the liminal space between heaven and hell) to reflect on the erasure of their lives and the crumbling of civilisation.

Swinton, Powell and Lennox: deconstructing gender Significantly, the film does not end with either of its alternative destinies for Edward, but projects itself out of the psychological realism that governs Steven Waddington’s performance throughout the film and into an expressionistic image that suggests the consequences the sexual and political battles of the film have had for young Edward III. The boy king is played by 11-year-old Jody Graber, a witness figure Jarman used in several films and personally identified with.150 In Edward II, little Edward is an important character whose allegiance to both his normatively heterosexual mother and his dissident homosexual father complicates audience responses to him and his parents, as he repeatedly moves between camps and starts to combine his mother’s fashion accessories with the martial toys with which Gaveston has taught him to play. Throughout the film, young Edward’s ‘questions, perceptions, and experiments in gender displacement speak eloquently on behalf of subjects and sexualities still in the process of formation’.151 In the film’s final moments, Edward III, wearing his mother’s signature earrings, make-up and teetering high heels, dances on top of a cage containing Mortimer and Isabella, who are both covered in white dust. Tchaikovsky’s ‘Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy’ on the soundtrack emphasises the marionette-like quality of the scene, in which an unseen puppeteer 150 151

In an interview, Jarman explained: ‘There is an element of young Edward being me, but everyone identifies with the child and he is the same child in all my films’ (O’Pray, ‘Edward II’, 11). Cartelli, ‘Queer Edward II’, p. 220.

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seems to guide the motions of his figures. In the context of the debates about Section 28, which centred on the detrimental influence on children of their potential confrontation with homosexual subject matter and role models, the scene invokes such puppet-like cultural determinism only to mock it.152 The boy’s transgressive cross-dressing is clearly inspired not by his homosexual father and his partner, whose gender performances are masculine even as their desires are same-sex, but by the exaggerated femininity of his heterosexual mother. As played by Tilda Swinton and costumed by Sandy Powell, Queen Isabella becomes a potent figure of sartorial extravagance and feminine masquerade.153 A preposterous reading that starts not with the sodomitical murder but with the image of the dust-covered, mad-looking Isabella sitting in a cage while her son peers down at her through the bars, allows us to see Isabella as always already destined, by forces greater than herself, to act out this final image of deranged femininity. A cross between mad, flowerobsessed Ophelia with loose hair and a catatonic reincarnation of the bride of The Last of England, who is rendered unable to tear her way out of the structures and conventions that encase her, Tilda Swinton’s Isabella in this last scene is a tragic figure whose humiliation compounds the tragedy of Edward II. The ending suggests that this is a film that interrogates the mental structures that lock Isabella into the prison of her sex-gender matrix as much as it attacks the political and social structures that oppress the sexually dissident Edward and his companions. Swinton’s Brechtian performance, with its critical distance of performer from character, permits us to see the construction of normative femininity at work; Swinton foregrounds, and thus undermines, the ‘to-be-looked-at-ness’ of the woman in narrative cinema.154 For Roberta Barker, Swinton’s Isabella functions ‘as a figure of phantasmatic excess . . . [she] is not a “natural woman” but a commodity, a constructed figure so determined by cultural images of femininity that she becomes a parody of them’.155 Key to this construction are Sandy Powell’s costumes, which, like Lena’s masked ball gown in Caravaggio, draw the spectator’s gaze away from the 152

153 154

155

Martin Quinn-Meyler looks at young Edward in the context of Section 28 and concludes that ‘Jarman’s prince Edward is an emergent, oppositional queer who suggests that existing efforts at compulsory heterosexist education are not only unacceptable, but also ultimately futile’ (‘Opposing “Heterosoc”’, p. 126). Chedgzoy, Shakespeare’s Queer Children, pp. 211–12. See the superb readings of Swinton’s performance by: Talvacchia, ‘Historical Phallicy’; Chedgzoy, Shakespeare’s Queer Children; Richardson, The Queer Cinema of Derek Jarman; and, most recently, Barker, Early Modern Tragedy. Barker, Early Modern Tragedy, p. 129.

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5 Queer youth: Tilda Swinton, Jody Graber and Nigel Terry in Derek Jarman’s Edward II (1991). Film still, BFI.

spectacle of the nude male bodies Jarman’s camera often privileges, making it rest on Isabella’s glamorous figure. Powell, who had just designed the eclectic costumes for Gerard Murphy’s RSC production of Edward II in 1990, created a whole range of gowns in rich colours (gold, green, blue, red) that enable Swinton’s ‘look’ in the film to reference a multitude of Hollywood stars and political figures. In the Press Book, Swinton lists an extraordinary number of templates for her performance that makes it impossible to pinpoint a single dominant model.156 This resistance to identification, it becomes apparent in the screenplay, was precisely what Swinton was aiming for: when her collaborators identified her with various female icons, ‘Tilda said as long as they don’t all agree on the reference – she’s happy.’157 By exceeding referentiality, Swinton’s Isabella queers, and thus empties of signification, dominant cultural understandings of

156

157

‘“As for the influences for Isabella,” [Swinton] explains, “they would have to include such people as Audrey Hepburn, Jean Shrimpton, Princess Grace, The Princess of Wales, Ivana Trump, Jackie Onassis, Margaret Thatcher and the Empress Wu.”’ BDC item 67736: Edward II Press Book (1991), p. xii. Jarman, Queer Edward II, p. 148.

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femininity that insist on the necessary and stable connection between biological sex, gendered behaviour, sartorial style and sexual orientation. How central Swinton is to her character’s generation of meanings, and to the film as a whole, is evident from her prominent involvement in the writing of the screenplay, where her contributions are signed ‘IR’ for ‘Isabella Regina’.158 Commenting on the image of Isabella in the cage, Jarman pointed out how Swinton had insisted on having ‘the dead flowers in her hands’: the iconographic detail that enables a reading of Isabella here as connected to the Ophelia imagery of Caravaggio and the bride of Last of England originates not with Jarman, but with Swinton.159 A letter Swinton wrote to Jarman on 30 June 1987 sheds further light on the thinking that underpins her performances. It reveals how her work as a feminist performer complemented Jarman’s work as a queer filmmaker: I’m having all sorts of thoughts about Performance . . . I’m thinking so obsessively about what the difference is between being a woman filmed and being a man – not that I’m interested here in the eye of the filmmaker (another kettle of fish ALTOGETHER) but more HOW TO BEHAVE. Not what is chosen, but what is GIVEN OUT. And what I as a woman . . . What I give that men don’t / can’t – and what I can give that other women don’t / can’t. My hunch is – a new kind of REALNESS, RAW . . . I think what I’m on about is – if we can tap what . . . are the ESSENCES that we want / that we believe are worth putting on a screen, then we’ll be on to something so fundamentally thrilling . . .160

The letter bears witness to the intensity of Swinton’s thinking about the specific contribution she, as a performer, can make to a film, a contribution she explicitly differentiates from Jarman’s ‘eye of the filmmaker’ while uniting their respective work in the emphatic ‘we’ who choose what essences are worth putting on a screen. Swinton’s letter chimes with Barker’s observations about the reticence of her performance and the way she seems to filter the character’s emotions so as to only let the viewer access those signs of selfhood she is willing to make accessible. Isabella’s first appearance in the film, as she silently straddles Edward in bed and goes through the motions of heterosexual seduction, is not ‘horrific’, as MacCabe sees it, because of her inability to arouse the king, but because, as Barker recognises, ‘her face refuses to mirror the emotional 158 159

See also the testimonials by members of the production team on the DVD Commentary. Edward II, dir. Derek Jarman (Second Sight Films Ltd, 2010), DVD. Quoted in O’Pray, ‘Edward II’, 11. 160 Letter from Tilda Swinton to Derek Jarman: DJC Box 53.

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reactions spoken by her body’.161 The mechanical manner of the attempted seduction aligns her with the prostitutes who go through the motions of an S&M ritual for Mortimer’s benefit: Isabella is going through the motions of marital duty in a manner that mimics – and mocks – the playtext’s insistence on her submissive attitude to her ‘lord’. Her dispassionate composure in this sequence is only made more emphatic by the artful disarray of her hair and the contrast with the excessively emotional response of Edward, who bangs his head against the wall that traps both of them in their impossible heterosexual bond. If the shell-like emptiness of Swinton’s facial expression is troubling in this scene, it is trumped by her rendering of the queen’s monologue in Marlowe’s Act 1 Scene 4, which Jarman cuts in two and preposterously inverts so as to present us first with the entirely silent spectacle of how ‘the sister of the King of France / Sits wringing of her hands and beats her breast’ before, in a separate scene, allowing her to speak the lines that justify the spectacle of emotion.162 The physical expression of emotion, which becomes mere spectacle, is mechanically disconnected from the intellectual and emotional processes that might justify the emotion. As Isabella kneels, with little Edward by her side, and wrings her hands while a tear beautifully trickles down one cheek, the running commentary provided by the Chorus of Nobility who observe her presents her as an object to be looked at, admired and pitied. The theatrical mise-en-scène of the shot, however, in which Isabella is facing the viewer in the foreground while the nobles enter from behind, while a Caravaggesque shaft of lighting lights Isabella’s and young Edward’s faces from the top left, troubles our understanding of the looking relations in the scene: from where the nobles stand, it is impossible for them to see Isabella emoting; her performance of distress is therefore patently aimed outside the diegesis. It is our empathy, not that of the nobles, that the performance transparently solicits. The scene is matched by the even more disturbing later sequence in which Isabella recites the monologue of Act 1 Scene 4. The run-up to that moment sees the queen in a simple white shift surrounded by four seamstresses; the scene shows us ‘the steps taken to produce the garments that will emanate her visual splendour later on’.163 Edward breaks into this all-female sphere and, having dismissed the seamstresses, accuses Isabella of adultery with Mortimer, grabbing her neck and forcing it down in a gesture that asserts his power. What is remarkable, in view of the way the queen’s simple 161 162

MacCabe, ‘Jarman’s Renaissance Cinema’, 506; and Barker, Early Modern Tragedy, p. 116. 1.4.187–8. 163 Talvacchia, ‘Historical Phallicy’, 123.

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6 Isabella: Tilda Swinton in Derek Jarman’s Edward II (1991). Screengrab, with permission of Universal Pictures.

shift and isolation from her women code her as vulnerable, is the control she continues to exercise over her facial expression. Only her voice trembles as she rejects the accusation. Left entirely alone, Isabella stands, sways a little, and then dramatically drops on her knees to deliver her soliloquy. As Barker describes it: Swinton delivers this soliloquy in a long, static take and in extremely tight close-up . . . [Her] facial expression hardly changes; she delivers her lines very slowly and almost without inflection. Isabella’s words express longing to be something other than what she is, or even to be a socially acceptable nothing (a corpse) rather than a socially anomalous nothing (a rejected wife). Swinton bodies forth an Isabella who is almost literally nothing; left alone, she seems denuded of emotion, of reaction, of identity itself.164

If it had not been for a stock failure, the nothingness might have been more alarming still: the Shooting Script contains sixteen more lines than made it into the film (five in the typescript; eleven added by hand), into which Jarman wrote: ‘We had to reshoot this for a stock fault. Thank God[.] The longest take was nearly four minutes – of huge long pauses.’165 Queer Edward II contains an intriguing reference to another scene that failed to be included in the film because Swinton had pushed her 164 165

Barker, Early Modern Tragedy, p. 118. Sequence 36 (Shooting Script, Edward II): PC. See also the description in Queer Edward II, p. 74.

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performance of nothingness beyond the boundaries of what even Jarman thought acceptable. The screenplay specified that: ‘The Queen, distraught with jealousy, hangs over the edge of the bed’ while saying ‘I love him more / Than he can Gaveston – would he loved me / But half so much. / But half so much / Were I treble blessed.’ Here is what Jarman says Swinton did: Tilda cut the lines . . . She lay with her hair over the edge of the bed, did nothing. Action. Mesmerised I watched, nothing happened, perhaps she would move, I’d better not say cut, perhaps she was building up to an outburst of genius which I might ruin. So I waited and waited, and Ian [Wilson, the cinematographer] looked at me, and I at him, and Tilda didn’t move. I said ‘cut’ quite gingerly, and the longest static take ended on the cutting room floor.166

Going back to Swinton’s letter and to her comments to Goodman about her reluctance to perform in ‘the classical repertoire in mainstream theatres’, the emotional void of these almost impossibly static sequences seems absolutely their point: at the moment when the eye of the filmmaker gives her the scopophilic attention ‘normal’ cinema gives its heroines, allowing her to stop the forward momentum of the narrative in its tracks by focussing on Swinton’s physical beauty and her pitiable vulnerability, the performer withholds her character’s emotions and even her words. What she, as a woman, as a performer, can give out that others can’t or don’t, is the raw and quite shocking emptiness of a character whose emotions and entire existence are disconnected from any essence. Or, to put it another way, of a character whose essence is that she is a plot function rather than a threedimensional figure, like Waddington’s Edward or a figure like Hamlet, whose thoughts trigger emotions that are readable through facial expression. Instead of tearing up a wedding dress like the bride in The Last of England, Swinton dismantles the fabric of Marlowe’s play by emphasising its dependence on a construction of femininity that is entirely determined by the needs of the three-dimensional male characters who dominate the play. What Swinton bodies forth is that Isabella, like Ophelia, is always already ‘nothing’, a cipher in a play whose focus is as male-centred as is that of Hamlet. It is no wonder, therefore, that in her final appearance in the film, Swinton chose to present Isabella as a catatonic dust-covered Ophelia in a cage. Swinton’s mask-like performance, which is as divorced from emotion when she is laughing with Mortimer, digging her teeth into Kent’s neck to 166

Jarman, Queer Edward II, p. 24.

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drink his blood, or seducing Lightborn into carrying out her husband’s murder, both undermines the coherence of the ‘classic’ text and is what enables the projection onto her blank face of the meanings needed to generate Edward’s tragedy. Swinton’s blankness also connects her to the other prominent blank-faced performer in the film: Annie Lennox, who appears as Edward bids Gaveston goodbye to perform Cole Porter’s ‘Ev’ry Time We Say Goodbye’, while the men dance in hospital pyjamas that reference Jarman’s repeated hospital visits during the period of filming.167 Lennox was already in Jarman’s mind for the role of Lena as he was casting Caravaggio; this was quite possibly motivated by the fact that the singer had pulled a major publicity stunt at the Grammy Award ceremony in 1984, where she appeared in drag as Elvis Presley to sing the Eurythmics hit ‘Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This)’.168 The performance established Lennox as ‘a distinctly androgynous figure in British and American popular culture’, a woman whose camp sensibility made her adopt a ‘code of appearance and behaviour that mocks and ironizes gender norms’ in much the same manner in which Swinton set about deconstructing iconographic representations of gender in her film work.169 Embedded within Jarman’s Edward II, Lennox’s performance of Cole Porter’s song complements Swinton’s performance of Isabella. Lennox’s androgynous persona – stressed here in her combination of a cropped platinum-blonde haircut and trouser suit with strong eye make-up and lipstick – acts as a reminder that, as Marlowe scripted Isabella and Jarman thought of casting her in his film, she was going to be played by a boy.170 More so, Lennox doubles Swinton in that she, too, acts as a blank figure onto which viewers and filmmaker can project their personal and cultural memories. Like Swinton, Lennox reconciles the emotionally charged content of her song (the lyric ‘every time I say goodbye I die a little’, as Ellis recognises, extradiegetically ‘register[s] the cumulative effects of AIDS deaths on the community’ while referring to the impending separation of the lovers in the diegesis) with a bland facial expression.171 In Queer Edward II, Jarman makes no secret of the fact that Lennox’s cameo in the film is connected to her performance, in 1990, of the same song for the AIDS benefit album ‘red, hot + blue’, for which Lennox asked him to direct 167 168 169 170

At one point, Andrew Tiernan (Gaveston) was meant to wear Jarman’s own hospital pyjamas, which were a gift from Swinton (Jarman, Queer Edward II, p. 62). Lennox’s name is mentioned and then crossed out in the ‘Notes on the leading players’ in ‘Caravaggio May 85’: DJC Box 6. Piggford, ‘Who’s That Girl?’, p. 284. See also Gamble, Feminism and Postfeminism, pp. 237–8. Jarman, Modern Nature, p. 233. 171 Ellis, Jarman’s Angelic Conversations, p. 216.

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7 ‘Ev’ry Time We Say Goodbye’: Annie Lennox and Derek Jarman in ‘red, hot + blue’ (1991). Screengrab.

the music video.172 When Jarman was hospitalised and could not direct the video, Lennox paid tribute to the filmmaker by singing the song as home movies of Jarman’s childhood were projected onto her face and body.173 These home movies not only reference the filmmaker himself, but also bring a much wider intertextual network into play, since they are recognisably the same videos of Jarman and his sister Gaye playing on the beach and in their mother’s garden as those Jarman included in The Last of England, where they act as a nostalgic reminder of a heterosexual home from which Jarman’s sexuality has exiled him. More significantly yet, one of the home movies appears to be the same footage Jarman wanted to include in ‘28’ and ‘Sod ’Em’, as the ‘IMAGE: HAPPY FAMILIES [Home movie of EDWARD aged six, playing in a garden]’. There, the image of young Edward/Jarman was to be accompanied by a voice-over explaining: ‘It never occurred to me, 172 173

Jarman, Queer Edward II, p. 62; and Jarman, Modern Nature, p. 220. Annie Lennox, ‘Ev’ry Time We Say Goodbye’, dir. Ed Lachman. red, hot + blue: A Benefit for AIDS Research & Relief. Special 2-disc edn (King Cole, Inc and Shout! Factory LLC, 2006). See Talvacchia, ‘Historical Phallicy’, 117.

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when I felt the first stirrings of my sexuality at six, that there could be any other land than that of REPRESSION.’174 It is this story of the discovery of sexuality and the simultaneous discovery of repression that is told through Annie Lennox’s performance in the ‘red, hot + blue’ video. There, the lyrics ‘How strange the change from major to minor’ cue a switch from an earlier home movie, showing a very young Derek and Gaye happily paddling in the sea naked, to an image of the children aged about six, still playing together but now both ostentatiously wearing bright red swimming pants. The ‘change from major to minor’ in the Cole Porter lyrics represents a fall from innocence into sexual awareness and repression that is played across the queer face and body of Annie Lennox. In the video’s self-referentiality, this fall into sexual knowledge is compounded by the knowledge of how gender and sexual roles are encoded in representation. Lennox’s performance of the same song in Edward II, lit by a spotlight that recalls the light of the projector in the music video, explodes the frame of the film by importing not only, as Ellis has it, Lennox and Jarman’s AIDS activism and ‘the autobiographical dimension of Jarman’s own experience with AIDS’, but also the filmmaker’s reflection on sexuality, childhood, repression and the state of the British nation across several films and texts.175 Through Lennox’s performance, Jarman succeeds in dismantling some of the most normative binary oppositions in early 1990s culture and society: the binary opposition of genders as well as the opposition between ‘mainstream’ entertainment and ‘arthouse’ cinema. In its intertextual referentiality, the song erodes the boundaries of the individual work of art and artist and unites film and context, fiction and autobiography, past and present. In this queerest and most pleasurable moment in Edward II, Jarman’s integration of Lennox’s tribute to him demands that the viewer remember the filmmaker’s gradual death from a disease of the late twentieth century, remember his films and his childhood, and beyond that, remember the lives of Christopher Marlowe and King Edward II. The layered citationality of this moment transcends the limits of the film, bringing past and present into play and enabling Edward II, and through him, Marlowe’s ‘dusty old play’, to enter the spotlight and dance centre stage once more.176 It is largely thanks to the crossover appeal of Jarman’s Edward II, an appeal facilitated by the inclusion of mainstream pop icon Lennox in Jarman’s queer contemporary Jacobean film, that the play has left its place in the archive and forcefully re-entered the canon of works that, in Assmann’s terms, are part 174 176

Jarman, ‘Sod ’Em’, p. 192. 175 Ellis, Jarman’s Angelic Conversations, p. 215. Jarman, Queer Edward II, p. ii.

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of the active repertoire of culture. Conflating queer and feminist politics and offering the hope of escape from repression in Lennox’s exit into a ray of light, the farewell sequence encapsulates the essence of Jarman’s queer nostalgic engagement with the Renaissance. It is this joyful rupturing of cultural, sexual and cinematic norms that constitutes the assault ‘on “decent” film-making; molotovs hurled at the dull beige skein of naturalism’ that Alex Cox described as Jarman’s legacy for independent filmmakers who look at the early modern past through the camera lenses of the present.177

Coda: ‘to the future’ When I travelled to Prospect Cottage, I did not expect that the ‘workbook’ Keith Collins had promised to show me would actually be the gilded Shooting Script that is featured in Jarman’s hands on two photographs in Queer Edward II.178 Nor did I expect, when I opened that book, to find evidence of the extent to which Jarman had hesitated over how to end his film. In the film, a shot tracks over the immobile figures of the OutRage! protesters while a final voice-over by Edward hauntingly speaks: But what are Kings, when regiment is gone, But perfect shadows in a sunshine day? I know not, but of this I am assured, That death ends all, and I can die but once. Come death, and with thy fingers close my eyes, Or if I live let me forget myself.

The voice comes from beyond the grave and puts a final mournful spin on the tragedy, denying it, at the very end, the promise of redemption held by Lightborn’s kiss and the victory of queerness symbolised by young Edward III’s dance on the cage containing Isabella and Mortimer. In the Shooting Script, however, it is young Edward III who is imagined as speaking these lines, ‘with a book, as if he has been reading the story’. Additional handwritten notes show uncertainty about further elements of the mise-en-scène and the positioning of the scene: ‘mothers dress’, reads a note in black ink; ‘poker after this’ is added in blue biro, while at the bottom of the page, Jarman cryptically wrote in red: ‘add this scene as original as well monks robe crucifix and scull [sic]’.179 As imagined and reimagined by Jarman, 177 178

Alex Cox, ‘This Is Indecent’, The Guardian, 19 February 2004. Jarman, Queer Edward II, pp. 74, 93. 179 Sequence 81 (Shooting Script, Edward II): PC.

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Edward II is a tragedy of the past read by the queer young ruler of the country. If, when travelling to Prospect Cottage, I had not expected to find an alternative ending in the Shooting Script, I was even less prepared to find that Edward II did in fact not represent the end of Jarman’s engagement with the material of ‘28’ at all, but that he returned to it once he had completed his film. The first traces of what was to become the script of the musical ‘Pansy’ appear in two scripts of ‘Sod ’Em’ from 1989.180 In its fullest incarnation, dated August 1991, ‘Pansy’ recycles the tragic material of ‘28’ and ‘Sod ’Em’ in the mode of a satirical comedy. While it ostensibly excises the Marlovian material that was at the centre of the earlier drafts, Edward II remains spectrally present not only because Marlowe continues to feature in a list of banned books and to ‘poker your arse’ is part of the homophobic repertoire of a gang of bullies, but more so because ‘Pansy’ seems to pick up where Edward II ends, continuing the story of young Edward III.181 The film tells the story of Pansy, the son of an unsympathetic heterosexual mother (Lady Homophobia, played by a pantomime dame, married to the closeted Lord Kincorra), through whose biography Jarman wished to ‘[chart] the progress of law reform from 1953 to the present’ and show how ‘the Queer Nation are still second class citizens in our society’.182 Pansy grows up in the 1960s and is bullied at school, from where he is rescued by his abseiling fairy godmother, the black bus conductor Stormin’ Norma (a reincarnation of Britannia, the ‘abseiling lesbian heroine’ in ‘28’). In the 1980s, Margaret Reaper is at the helm of the government, Cesspit Charlie is in charge of the Police and Archbishop Caring heads the Anglican Church; a new contagious disease spreads through the country and homosexuals are persecuted. With his lover Homobonus, Pansy joins the group of political activists who take on the ‘middle-roaders’, the gay men who propose to work with the government. The middle-roaders’ representative in the script is Sir Thespian Knight, a merciless lampooning of the freshly knighted Sir Ian McKellen. When a young drug addict dies of the new disease, Sir Thespian Knight’s blithe proclamation ‘To be or not to be / That is the question’ once more associates Shakespeare with the forces of Conservatism.183 On the side of radical Marlowe, Pansy speaks the words that merge Jarman’s own biography with that of Edward in ‘28’, words that .

180 181 182 183

‘Sod ’Em – Novel’ is dated ‘Feb. 1989’; ‘PANSY in Sod ’Em’ is annotated in the hand of David Lewis (attribution by Keith Collins), with whom Jarman was working in 1989. ‘Pansy’ screenplay pasted into ‘Pansy’ workbook (8, 31): PC. Handwritten note, reverse of ‘Pansy’ workbook, September 1991, no pagination. PC. ‘Pansy’ screenplay pasted into ‘Pansy’ workbook (30): PC.

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are evoked by Annie Lennox’s song in Edward II: ‘It never occurred to me, from the moment I felt the first stirrings of my sexuality at six, that there could be any other land than that of THE REPRESSION.’184 This time, however, Jarman does not let his protagonist suffer Edward’s ignoble end, but makes Stormin’ Norma rescue Pansy. They crucify Reaper, who has had Homobonus executed, and Norma crowns Pansy king of a realm now dedicated to ‘sexual freedom’.185 In his last stab at writing the ending of Edward II, Jarman thus imagined a conclusion in which the political order is changed for good. The last, hopeful, words of the screenplay are the young king’s: ‘To the future.’186 184 185 186

‘Pansy’ screenplay pasted into ‘Pansy’ workbook (28): PC. ‘Pansy’ screenplay pasted into ‘Pansy’ workbook (37): PC. ‘Pansy’ screenplay pasted into ‘Pansy’ workbook (38): PC.

chapter 2

The preposterous contemporary Jacobean film: Peter Greenaway’s Cook, heritage Shakespeare and sexual exploitation in Mike Figgis’s Hotel

Jarman’s development, between 1986 and 1991, of a distinctly counterShakespearean conception of ‘Jacobean’ Marlowe and the evolution of his queer contemporary Jacobean aesthetic overlapped with Peter Greenaway’s work on The Cook, the Thief, His Wife and Her Lover (1989), a film inspired by a similarly violent conception of the ‘Jacobean’. This period also saw the emergence of Mike Figgis as a distinctive new presence in British film and the Hollywood industry. Mike Figgis’s Hotel (2001), the adaptation of The Duchess of Malfi I concentrate on in this chapter, is the most difficult and potentially alienating film adaptation of an early modern play I discuss in detail in this book. Some might even contest that it is an adaptation of Webster’s play at all, since the film appears, at first sight, to be more concerned with the bizarre exchanges taking place between a Venetian hotel’s cannibalistic staff and its various guests than with the film crew staying at the hotel who are following the rules set down in the Dogme 95 manifesto of filmmaking to shoot an adaptation of The Duchess of Malfi. As a consequence, Hotel has been either left out of critical discussions of the afterlives of Webster’s play altogether or has tended to receive only cursory or dismissive comments, through which the accusation of pornography repeatedly reverberates.1 For Wymer, it is clear that ‘some of the film’s erotic scenes, such as those involving lesbian sex, seem to be there mainly because they strike the director himself as erotic rather than because they make a statement about the modern film industry or Jacobean drama’.2 1 2

See Desmet, ‘A Survey of Resources’, p. 161; Marcus, ‘Introduction’, pp. 110–12; and McMullan, ‘Plenty of Blood’. Wymer, ‘The Duchess of Malfi on Film’, p. 276.

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Yet that is exactly what I argue Figgis’s film does: it uses Webster’s tragedy – purposefully to the point of abuse – in order to strike at the core of the filmmaker’s own implication in a Hollywood film industry that deploys conventional narrative and visual methods so as to camouflage the deep-seated misogyny of the industry and its products. If the film is alienating, that is, and exploitative in its portrayal of female bodies, it is so quite deliberately to provoke a debate about Western culture’s investment in the control of women’s bodies. Webster’s tragedy is central to this critique: not only does it offer a model for the type of domination and control that is exposed and unpicked in Hotel, but the early modern text acts as a response to the film and its portrayal of the present-day film industry. Hotel may be abstruse and bordering on the pornographic, but it also represents the most disturbed and disturbing articulation of a set of questions that, by the end of the 1990s wave of heritage Shakespeare films, had become most pressing: what is at stake when filmmakers exhume literary heritage and make it come to life again on our screens? Is there a way in which we can ‘think outside the box’, escape the constraints of the cinematic medium with its single square screen and also avoid the oppressive structures transmitted through literary tradition? Aware of these constraints and structures, can we nevertheless use the cinematic screen to articulate a recognition of the ways in which literary tradition, as represented by a text like The Duchess of Malfi, might incorporate a critique of oppression? How may the past be used not in the service of nostalgia but as a means of building social structures and art forms for the future? It should already be clear from this description that Hotel, in many ways, represents a development of Jarman’s queer contemporary Jacobean aesthetic and of the experimental approach and conscious opposition to the mainstream Hollywood-style narrative heritage film that Jarman had decried and that was to grow from strength to strength in the 1990s. Figgis’s debt to Jarman is strongly signposted in his casting of Heathcote Williams, the Prospero in Derek Jarman’s Tempest, as Malfi’s Bosola and as John Charley, the scriptwriter for the film-within-the-film of The Duchess of Malfi (a role Williams also played outside the fictional world of Hotel, where Figgis entrusted him with adapting Webster’s tragedy). Hotel absorbs the anarchic energy of Jarman’s punk bricolage in Jubilee and The Tempest – it is not for nothing that Figgis describes his film as a ‘sort of period punk’ adaptation of Webster’s tragedy – and his experiments with the digital camera’s ability to work in extreme lighting conditions, creating startling visual effects and an image that is both resolutely digital in its visible pixellation and painterly in the dashing colours that recall Jarman’s work

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with flares in The Last of England and his deliberate degradation of the image in The Angelic Conversation.3 It is also clear that Figgis makes Jarman’s improvisational technique in The Last of England his own. Meanwhile, the fruitful intertextuality of Edward II, in which the presence of a performer like Annie Lennox and the lyrics of a song can body forth a complex network of associations that erodes the boundaries of the film as a single work of art, has a strong impact on Figgis’s approach to casting and the creation of an allusive soundtrack. It is not only in look and technique, however, that Figgis follows in Jarman’s footsteps. Hotel also takes Jarman’s and Swinton’s attack, in Caravaggio, The Last of England and Edward II, on the scopophilic tendencies of mainstream film to another level, staging the exploitation of women – that of the Duchess of Malfi as well as her Doppelgängers in the film – so as better to puncture it. Hotel’s attack on mainstream cinema’s exploitation of female bodies and its addiction to linear storytelling is expressed through content and form, to the extent that Figgis often appears to be pulling at the threads that conventionally make up the fabric of his cinematic medium until it threatens to unravel before our eyes. Most clearly, perhaps, Hotel pushes to an extreme the preposterousness that characterises Jarman’s episodic storytelling in the Edward II scripts, from ‘28’ through ‘Sod ’Em’ all the way to the finished film itself. By doing so, Figgis harnesses the subversive, queering power of the rhetorical figure of the ‘preposterous’, whose transgressive force in the early modern play continues to trouble narrative and sexual order. While Figgis is thus tangibly indebted to Jarman, his Malfi adaptation also owes much to several films, starting with Greenaway’s Cook, which feed off early modern culture and literature. The cannibalistic scenarios of Greenaway’s Cook and Figgis’s Hotel build on Montaigne’s trope, in his essay ‘Of the Caniballes’, of cultural consumption as a form of cannibalism.4 It is with Montaigne and Julia Kristeva’s discussion of the relationship between the self and its abject (cannibalistic) other, then, that I start this chapter, pausing on Greenaway’s elaboration of Montaigne’s reflections on culture and consumption in Cook before moving on to the cannibalistic personae played by Anthony Hopkins in The Silence of the Lambs,5 Titus6 and Hannibal.7 Figgis’s representation of the consumption of the Duchess 3 4 5

Figgis, Digital Film-Making, p. 68. Title as spelled in John Florio’s translation of Montaigne. For evidence of Webster’s use of Florio’s translation, see Bradbrook, Webster, pp. 50–68. Dir. Jonathan Demme, 1991. 6 Dir. Julie Taymor, 1999. 7 Dir. Ridley Scott, 2001.

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of Malfi/The Duchess of Malfi in Hotel turns out to be the most multifaceted and thought-provoking among these filmic responses to Montaigne’s essay, reworking it into a reflection on how to preposterously incorporate our literary heritage in film not in a nostalgic return to the past but as a precondition for creating a new work that speaks to the cultural concerns of the present.

Montaigne’s gourmet cannibalism: consuming the Renaissance on fin-de-siècle screens Montaigne’s essay ‘Of the Caniballes’, the locus classicus of Western discourses of cannibalism, is famous for its even-handed examination of the colonial encounter with the cannibalistic Amerindian Tupinamba tribe. In his essay, Montaigne takes issue with the opposition between the civilised self and its savage, abject other on which early modern colonialist encounters with the New World depended.8 Such an opposition had been operative in the travel narratives of Amerigo Vespucci, Richard Hakluyt and other early modern explorers, for whom cannibalism had been abject, in that it was ‘a prime example of the “crossing over of the categories of the Pure and Impure”’ that justified colonial violence.9 In her influential theorisation of abjection, Kristeva suggests that the dynamic between the self and its abject other is based on the infant’s formation of an individual identity. In order to secure an identity separate from that of its mother, Kristeva explains, an infant (or ‘subject’) has to repress and reject the corporeal aspects associated with the mother’s body. These corporeal aspects provoke feelings of profound disgust, what Kristeva refers to as ‘abjection’. The abject that is thus rejected defines what the subject is; we create our identity by rejecting what we do not wish to be. The abject is ‘what disturbs identity, system, order’;10 hence its association with ambiguity, the blurring of boundaries, the disjunction between appearance and essence and its connection with the act of cannibalism which, in its absorption of the other into the self and consequent erasure of difference, poses a potent threat to the symbolic order. From the start of Montaigne’s essay, such an opposition between the self and the abject other, by virtue of which aggression against that other is justified, is dismantled by the essayist’s portrayal of the European explorers 8 9

See, e.g.: Marchi, ‘Montaigne and the New World’, 36; and Guest, ‘Cannibalism and the Boundaries of Identity’, p. 1. Peucker, Material Image, p. 112. 10 Kristeva, Powers of Horror, p. 4.

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as overly greedy consumers of the New World and its inhabitants. These inhabitants, Montaigne insists, are neither ‘barbarous’ nor ‘savage’.11 To the contrary: they are ‘yet neere their originall naturalitie’ and have not yet been ‘bastardized’ by European laws and customs.12 True enough, the Tupinamba bring home the heads of their enemies as trophies and ritually kill their prisoners before roasting and then eating them. This custom, however, is less barbarous than the way in which Montaigne’s compatriots treat offenders ‘under pretence of pietie and religion’: I am not sorie we note the barbarous horror of such action, but grieved, that prying so narrowly into their faults we are so blinded in ours. I thinke there is more barbarisme in eating men alive, than to feed upon them being dead; to mangle by tortures and torments a body full of lively sense, to roast him in peeces, to make dogges and swine to gnaw and teare him in mammockes . . . than to roast and eat him after he is dead.13

The virtue of the cannibals’ way of life is obvious in the manner in which they themselves, when taken prisoner by an enemy, ‘would . . . rather be slaine and devoured, than sue for life’, which is all that is required of them to gain their freedom.14 Cannibalism is not only a choice for the eater, but also for the eaten; an incorporation of the adversary that is embraced by all involved. For Montaigne, then, cannibalism, far from justifying colonial violence against the abject other, becomes a pretext for an analysis of barbarian customs practised by the Europeans themselves: what starts out as an investigation of difference is contaminated by cannibalism’s attraction to sameness and transformed into an acknowledgement of fundamental similarity. Montaigne’s use of alimentary metaphors when describing Europeans – the greediness of their bellies, their gorging on commodities, the way in which they permit their dogs and swine to devour their fellowcitizens – redirects cannibalism’s abjection towards the Europeans. The consumption of human flesh by the Tupinamba, by contrast, is civilised and measured: once killed, ‘they roast, and then eat [their prisoner] in common, and send some slices of him to such of their friends as are absent’, rather like slices of wedding cake.15 As Michel Jeanneret and Dudley Marchi have argued, Montaigne’s appreciation of the cultural value of literal cannibalism is accompanied by a 11 12 13 14 15

Montaigne, The Essayes of Michael Lord of Montaigne, p. 219. Montaigne, The Essayes of Michael Lord of Montaigne, p. 220. Montaigne, The Essayes of Michael Lord of Montaigne, pp. 223–4. Montaigne, The Essayes of Michael Lord of Montaigne, p. 225. Montaigne, The Essayes of Michael Lord of Montaigne, p. 223.

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valorisation of literary cannibalism. His Essays are appropriations and incorporations of a wide variety of sources, from the Ancients to more recent travel writings and even Montaigne’s own conversations with Amerindians. What Jeanneret calls ‘the cannibalism phase’ of Montaigne’s writing involves his absorption of other texts to such an extent that a Eucharist-like ‘communion is established’ between the Renaissance author and his sources, a textual incorporation that enables Montaigne’s fashioning of his individual identity as an original author.16 As Montaigne himself states in ‘Of the Institution and Education of Children’, this process of literary incorporation must be transformative, for: ‘It is a signe of cruditie and indigestion for a man to yield up his meat, even as he swallowed the same: the stomacke hath not wrought his full operation, unlesse it have changed forme, and altered fashion of that which was given him to boyle and concoct.’17 In Marchi’s words: ‘The way in which the Tupinamba absorb the power and valor of their ancestors, is how Montaigne formulates literary production: the aggressive appropriation of materials achieved through the assimilation of an array of textual sources whereby their energies are regenerated into a new body.’18 Montaigne’s deconstructive dynamic is central to The Cook, the Thief, His Wife and Her Lover. Greenaway’s film has long been recognised as an expression of its director’s ‘antipathy toward Thatcherism [which] stems from an ethical and aesthetic dislike for the philistinism and vulgarity of her regime . . . her social philosophy of frugality and order for the poor combined with greed and license for the rich’.19 It uses the trope of cannibalism to indict the 1980s combination of boorish ignorance with conspicuous consumption with a vehemence that is not far behind the condemnation of the Thatcher Government’s homophobia in Edward II, which Jarman also allied to the conspicuous display of wealth in Isabella’s sartorial extravagance. Crucially, Greenaway’s film, while set in the present of 1989, identifies ‘culture’ with the art and literature of early modern Europe and the values of the French Revolution. The early seventeenth century is ubiquitous in details of Greenaway’s compositions and mise-en-scène, such as the stilllife tableaux of ‘abundant food with its attendants’ in the kitchen, which the screenplay specifies should be ‘reminiscent of Dutch 17th Century painting’.20 The wall of the Le Hollandais restaurant in which the action is set is decorated with a gigantic replica of Franz Hals’s Banquet of the Officers of the 16 17 18 20

Jeanneret, ‘The Renaissance and Its Ancients’, 1050. Montaigne, The Essayes of Michael Lord of Montaigne, p. 156. Marchi, ‘Montaigne and the New World’, 45. 19 Wollen, ‘Last New Wave’, p. 254. Greenaway, The Cook, the Thief, His Wife and Her Lover, p. 10.

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St. George Militia (1616). Jean-Paul Gaultier’s elegant pastiche of Cavalier fashion worn by the Thief and his designs of ‘seventeenth-century Cardinals’ robes’ also root the film’s look in the seventeenth century.21 The visual dominance of the early modern period in the film is complemented by a profound structural and thematic indebtedness to early modern English tragedy. Greenaway’s screenplay, tellingly, pinpoints Ford’s ’Tis Pity – a play in which the brother-sister incest is figured through tropes of cannibalism22 – as a model for his film. Greenaway explains: In writing this script for the film, the model is classic Revenge Tragedy out of ‘the theatre of blood’ with its obsession for human corporeality – eating, drinking, defecating, copulating, belching, vomiting, nakedness and blood . . . Most particularly it could be modelled on the example of a drama like John Ford’s Tis Pity She’s a whore [sic] that looks seriously, compassionately and without flinching, at a taboo subject on the far reaches of experience.23

Greenaway’s statement connects Jacobean revenge tragedy with Bakhtin’s register of the ‘grotesque’ (Kristeva’s ‘abject’), which challenges the integrity of the classical body (or the ‘self’). In an interview with Marlene Rodgers, Greenaway implicitly differentiates Ford’s transgressive tragedy from the work of Shakespeare, to which he was to turn in Prospero’s Books.24 For Greenaway, ’Tis Pity belongs to an ‘alternative tradition’ of dramatic texts in which ‘Jacobean drama’ plays a pivotal role in mediating between disturbing aspects of the past and present: There is an alternative tradition, that starts with Seneca and goes on through Jacobean drama to be picked up later by people like de Sade, and then much later by people like Genet, Bataille . . . and perhaps it is also picked up by filmmakers like Buñuel and Pasolini. So I’m fascinated by an alternative examination of cultures, which . . . basically examines the center of the human predicament by going to the edges, to the extremes, to see in fact how far one can stretch the examination of various forms of aberrant behavior.25

Striking, in Greenaway’s listing of the figureheads of this ‘alternative tradition’, is the extent to which it overlaps with Jarman’s queer tradition and some of the main influences on Jarman’s work: even though Jarman disliked Greenaway, the filmmakers are united in an uneasy partnership 21 23 24

Bruzzi, Undressing Cinema, p. 9. 22 Dawson, Lovesickness and Gender, pp. 143–9. No pagination. See also Greenaway’s comments in Lawrence, The Films of Peter Greenaway, p. 174. Greenaway, Prospero’s Books (1991). 25 Rodgers, ‘Prospero’s Books’, 12.

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through their common conception of how their work slots into an ongoing ‘alternative tradition’ in which the transgressiveness of the ‘Jacobean’ may function as a means to explore the culture of the present.26 In Greenaway’s ‘Jacobean’ Cook, Helen Mirren, who had built up a considerable reputation for playing the unruly heroines of Jacobean drama on stage and screen, plays the Wife who accompanies her husband, the Thief (Michael Gambon), to dine in the Cook’s (Richard Bohringer) Le Hollandais restaurant.27 Greenaway threads a generic ‘Jacobean’ plotline through the succession of scenes he itemises with the help of menu cards and that take place on successive evenings. The Wife meets her bookish Lover (Alan Howard) while dining with her husband. They have sex in the ladies’ room and, protected by the French Cook, in larders and fridges. As the film progresses, Greenaway increasingly associates the Wife and her Lover not merely with the enjoyment of delicious food, but with the appreciation of art and culture of which the Thief will forever remain incapable. Upon his discovery of his Wife’s infidelity, the Thief kills the Lover by stuffing him with his books, proclaiming, in the fashion of a Giovanni or Vindice savouring the aesthetics of his revenge: ‘they are going to say it was a dignified revenge killing, they are going to admire the style, he . . . was stuffed with books, the crummy little bookkeeper was’. The equivalence, in Jacobean revenge tragedy, between transgression and method of revenge makes it obvious that the lovers’ adultery is trumped by their cultural transgression: focussed on the consumption of books and/ as food, the lover’s execution signals the triumph of ignorance over bibliophilia. Whereas for the Lover, who is repeatedly shown eating while reading a book, consumption of food and of books are cognate, complementary ways of appreciating the art of the Cook and the culture of the past, for the Thief, eating is about correct table manners and his ability to purchase culture (cultural capital in the fiscal sense of the term). Drawing on the conventions of early modern revenge tragedy, in which, as in Titus Andronicus, the cannibal of the Thyestean banquet is always tricked into eating his or her own offspring, the film’s climax features the Wife forcing the Thief to eat the elaborately roasted and glazed body of her Lover. As Crystal Bartolovich observes, the body is presented ‘surrounded by vegetables’ in yet another ‘mocking allusion to still life painting’, transforming it into an early modern 26 27

Peter Wollen remarks that ‘Jarman is notorious for his vitriolic attacks on Greenaway’, which also punctuate his life-writing texts (Wollen, ‘Last New Wave’, p. 249). For a list of Mirren’s Jacobean roles, see Aebischer, ‘Early Modern Drama on Screen’, pp. 156–7.

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work of art.28 Like Bene’s Capricci (see my introduction), Cook thus offers a comment on the nature morte of early modern art, turning objects themselves into representations and erasing the line between the literal and the Thief’s metaphorical proclamation that he would eat the Lover. Barthes’s reading of aspirational food presentation as desirable yet beyond reach for the working classes in Mythologies and Capricci is given obscene physicality in the glazed, ornamented body of the Lover. That body, it appears, constitutes Greenaway’s single oblique reference to Shakespeare in Cook, since the menu for the revenge banquet is adorned with, as Greenaway points out, an ‘isolated sprig of rosemary for remembrance’ that commemorates the bookish Lover.29 Invoking Ophelia’s mourning, the sprig of rosemary signals the absent presence of Shakespeare’s corpus in the corpse of the Lover, making Shakespeare the ultimate delicacy, to be enjoyed only by genuine connoisseurs and bibliophiles.30 In the film’s climactic scene of cannibalism, Greenaway’s editing and camera work strikingly align the viewer with the Thief, so that the scene becomes a statement about his and our inability to access and enjoy the cultural heritage epitomised by the Shakespearean corpus/corpse. Up to that moment, Greenaway’s narrative and camera allow the viewer to share, if not in the Lovers’ point of view – the camera work carefully avoids pointof-view shots throughout – then at least in their affair, allowing us to partake in their intimacy and bibliophilic attachment to the past. When the Wife points her gun at the Thief and forces him to eat, however, we are taken from her viewpoint, watching the Thief vomit and then eat a fork-full of flesh, to the position of the Thief as the Wife shoots him. In the film’s concluding close-up, the Wife’s gaze is directed at both the dead Thief and the viewer as she spits out the word ‘cannibal’ as the ultimate insult and indicator of difference.31 The charge of cannibalism is what excludes us forever from being able to appreciate the past, and we are punished for this transgression both by being ‘shot’ by the Wife and by being shut out from the culinary theatre of revenge, as thick red curtains drop to separate us from the scene. Like Montaigne’s essay, then, Greenaway’s film operates a reversal of viewpoint: ready to indict others as savages for their lack of cultural sophistication, it is our own philistinism that is exposed and punished. 28 29 30 31

Bartolovich, ‘Consumerism’, p. 204. Quoted in Lawrence, The Films of Peter Greenaway, p. 214. See also Bennett, Performing Nostalgia, p. 103. See Ruth D. Johnston’s superb analysis (‘The Staging of the Bourgeois Imaginary’, 34).

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But unlike Montaigne, Greenaway does not engage in cultural relativism: he follows the colonialist logic of early modern travel narratives in treating literal cannibalism as an absolute marker of difference that warrants the extinction of the savage other. Both viewer and Thief are caught in a vicious double-bind: we are savages because we cannot absorb our cultural tradition, and when we are made to absorb it at gunpoint, the act of consumption confirms our savagery and justifies our expulsion from the elite from which we are always already excluded. The arrival of Hannibal Lecter on the scene, first in Thomas Harris’s novels and soon thereafter in The Silence of the Lambs (1991), where he is played with gusto by Anthony Hopkins, marks a shift from Greenaway’s absolute condemnation of cannibalism towards a position that is closer to Montaigne’s. As in Greenaway, consumption of early modern art is, in Harris’s novels and their film adaptations, associated with cannibalism. In The Silence of the Lambs, Lecter’s prison cell is decorated with his drawing of Florence’s Renaissance Duomo. After his escape, Lecter/lector, whose Greenaway-esque bibliophilia is encoded in his name,32 resurfaces in Hannibal (novel 1999, film 2002) as a curator of Renaissance art in Florence, where he also displays particular expertise in early modern Italy’s more eccentric methods of execution and revenge. The crucial difference between the cannibalism of the Thief in Greenaway’s Cook and that of Hannibal Lecter lies in the fact that whereas the Thief is fundamentally incapable of absorbing cultural heritage, Lecter’s cannibalism is portrayed as the expression of a sophisticated engagement with the early modern period that is condemned by philistines but understood, if not always partaken in, by sensitive creatures like FBI agent Clarice Starling and the reader/viewer. As embodied by Anthony Hopkins, cannibalism is an expression of civilisation, since the victims are selected among the more offensive characters populating Lecter’s world. Significantly, in Hannibal, that opposition between civilisation and savagery is replayed in terms that allude to Montaigne’s essay and its opposition between the Tupinamba’s civilised cannibalism and the Europeans’ barbaric way of throwing their fellowcitizens to the swine: Lecter’s enjoyment of delicately cooked ‘free-range rude’ (as he memorably calls his prey), and the refined desire with which he inhales the scent of Clarice Starling, is contrasted with the barbarism of his enemy, Mason Verger, who hopes to see Lecter devoured by wild boars. In 32

See also Brigitte Peucker’s suggestion that Lecter’s name references both reading and licking (German ‘lecken’), thus conflating the consumption of books and bodies (Peucker, Material Image, p. 185).

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the figure of Hannibal Lecter, revenge cannibalism turns into gourmet cannibalism, and crucially the viewers are made complicit with the pleasures of cannibalistic consumption at the end of The Silence of the Lambs, when Lecter tells Clarice that he is ‘having an old friend for dinner’. This conception of gourmet cannibalism as an expression of cultural superiority seeps into Julie Taymor’s Titus (1999). Taymor’s casting of Hopkins as Titus, the cook of a cannibalistic gourmet dinner, at a time when the actor was preparing to play Lecter once again in Hannibal, enables the figure of Titus to merge with that of Hannibal in a manner that disturbs the decorum of heritage Shakespeare.33 When, preparing Chiron and Demetrius for their transformation into a pie, Hopkins’s Titus smacks his lips, the sound cues an instant recognition of the appropriateness of the imminent consumption of these particular ‘free-range rude’. Early modern revenge cannibalism, seen through the prism of the late twentieth-century blockbuster horror film, becomes the gourmet cannibal’s expression of cultural refinement and respect for tradition that contrasts starkly with the lack of education and intelligence that characterises Tamora’s sons, who, in their struggle to read Latin and their addiction to video games, are children of the twentieth century. It matters little, with the logic of The Silence of the Lambs imprinted on Titus, that the person who ends up eating the son-pie is Tamora, not Titus: it is Hopkins’s Titus who is presented by the film as the cultured connoisseur who, following an early modern template, produces and consumes an exquisite dish of revenge.

‘A fast-food McMalfi ’: food, female bodies and the literary text in Mike Figgis’s Hotel While Taymor’s Titus thus uses Hopkins’s Lecter persona to give a piquant flavour to his portrayal of Titus, it is not until Mike Figgis’s Hotel that Lecter’s gourmet cannibalism resurfaces in a way that makes it central to the film’s reflection about the relationship between the consumption of literary and cultural tradition and the production of new works of art.34 The film, that is, returns both to Montaigne’s cultural relativism and his insights regarding the cannibalism of cultural production in order to propose a model for the consumption and re-production of early modern textual 33 34

On the casting of Hopkins, see also: French, Selling Shakespeare to Hollywood, p. 44; and Burt, ‘Shakespeare and the Holocaust’, p. 308. Elizabeth Bowman describes the cannibalism in Hotel as ‘based on the ravening act of adaptation’ (Bowman, ‘Gender Memory’).

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and physical bodies that seeks a way out of the impasse mapped out in Greenaway’s Cook, where the viewer is forever excluded from the possibility of participating in the consumption of culture. To this purpose, a complex web of associations between the re-membering of Renaissance drama and culture and the notions of processing and consumption is spun early on in Figgis’s film, is threaded through its middle and builds up to Hotel’s climactic Last Supper. If we take the frame narrative of Figgis’s film seriously and read it as a reflection on the relationship between cannibalism and cultural consumption that responds to Montaigne and late twentiethcentury film, it becomes clear that, no less than Greenaway’s work, Figgis’s Hotel deserves Douglas Lanier’s label of ‘immanent theory’, that is, ‘an artefact meditating on the theoretical grounds of its own existence’.35 Hotel is part of Figgis’s ongoing practical and theoretical reflection on cultural production, heritage and cinema as a medium and an industry. Figgis is remarkable for combining British avant-garde performance work with a successful career in the Los Angeles film industry. Having started out as a jazz musician, he joined The People Show, a London-based experimental company whose risk-taking approach to theatre relies on improvisational team work and an emphasis on sound and image as structural frameworks.36 With Stormy Monday (1988), his first feature that incorporates a cameo appearance of his People Show collaborators, Figgis moved into mainstream film. Having directed several Hollywood films, Figgis’s growing unease with the American studio system led him to shoot Leaving Las Vegas on 16mm film on a comparatively small budget in 1995.37 Encouraged by the film’s four Oscar nominations, Figgis began to experiment with cinematic form and digital technology. Most prominently, Timecode (2000), Figgis’s first digital video feature, uses a split screen to simultaneously show four single takes of 93 minutes that each follow a different strand of a narrative set, self-reflexively, in a Hollywood film studio. Timecode thus dispenses with two of the mainstays of classical narrative cinema: cinematic montage and the uniqueness of the viewpoint at any one moment. It continuously requires its viewer to choose which quadrant to focus on; the viewer, as a consequence, with some guidance from the soundtrack, is empowered to ‘edit’ his/her own version of the film. Timecode’s production notes describe Figgis as ‘foresee[ing] a 35 36 37

Lanier, ‘Drowning the Book’, p. 204. ‘Brief History’, People Show, http://tinyurl.com/d55qvcl and http://tinyurl.com/cygsemk. Budget figure estimate on IMDB of $3,600,000, http://tinyurl.com/yvbrx7. Figgis describes the budget as ‘practically nothing’ within a Hollywood context (Figgis, ‘Elizabeth Shue’, p. 5).

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new era of cinema – precipitated by advances in digital technology – that will be like the punk era in music. That is, stripped down, rule-breaking and totally revitalizing’.38 It is this punk rule-breaking and revitalisation of cinema that is pushed further still in Hotel (2001), a film for which Figgis avoided industry control as much as possible, working with a ‘small’ budget in the region of $3 million and using a star cast alongside The People Show’s Mark Strong (as the creepy hotel kitchen manager) and newcomers who had offered to ‘work for [him] for nothing’ as technicians.39 In Hotel, Figgis not only returned to the improvisational methods of The People Show, but he also turned from an exclusive focus on Hollywood to a more historically informed reflection on the limitations of fin-de-siècle filmmaking and the consumption and production of ‘the Renaissance’ and our cultural heritage. It is in Miss Julie (1999), an adaptation of Strindberg’s play on which he worked with Jarman’s designer Sandy Powell, that Figgis lays the foundations for Hotel’s engagement with heritage film and that his indebtedness to Greenaway’s Cook first becomes apparent as, for the first time, he uses a literary ‘classic’ as a way of challenging the conventions of heritage cinema. Set almost entirely in the busy – and then suddenly eerily empty – vast kitchen of Miss Julie’s aristocratic residence, Miss Julie opens with hectic scenes of choreographed activity that provide a visual riff on the equivalent camera pans over scenes of food preparation in the kitchen of Greenaway’s Le Hollandais. The similarity of the two settings is emphasised by Figgis’s instrumental score for the opening, a pastiche of Michael Nyman’s score for Cook, and by the shots of a beautifully glazed whole pig on a vegetable platter that looks alarmingly like the Lover’s body in Greenaway’s film. Against this backdrop combining gourmet food and a homage to early modern Dutch painting, Paul Mullan’s ambitious servant Jean and Saffron Burrows’s condescendent aristocrat Julie give in to their transgressive desire and, like Greenaway’s lovers, have sex in a larder. Their love-making breaks both with social conventions and the reassuringly traditional film grammar of the heritage film, as Figgis unexpectedly splits the screen in two. Two synchronised cameras use different viewpoints onto the same scene to tell noticeably divergent stories about the shifts in power relations between the mistress and her servant that motivate the second part of the film. 38 39

Quoted in Chaudhuri, ‘Dogma Brothers’, p. 156. Figgis, Digital Film-Making, p. 50. Budget figure provided by Tara Li-An Smith of Red Mullet. Message to the author on behalf of Mike Figgis, 10 July 2012.

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When Saffron Burrows resurfaces in Hotel as the Duchess of Malfi, she imprints her earlier performance of a desire that breaks through boundaries of class and gender onto that film and also brings to it a residual flavour of Greenaway. Even without Hopkins physically present, there is an additional, distinctive seasoning of Lecter’s gourmet cannibalism in Hotel from the moment John Malkovich, having checked into Venice’s Hotel Hungaria under the name of ‘Omar Johnsson’, is shown sitting at a candlelit dinner table behind bars that evoke Hannibal Lecter’s imprisonment and cannibalistic feasts. On the other side of the bars sit his hosts, all employees of the hotel, who engage Johnsson in amicable conversation. The hotel maid (Valentina Cervi) gets up, walks to a corner of the room and picks up a platter of cured meat. A camera tilt reveals two human arms and legs on hooks hanging off the ceiling, ready to be carved. In a tribute to Lecter’s olfactory fixation, the maid deeply inhales the smell of the meat on her platter before offering it to Johnsson, who helps himself to some. As he is savouring the meat, Johnsson enquires whether it is low in cholesterol and is reassured that it is, since it’s ‘our special, special meat’, which is the result of ‘a global agricultural harvest, so to speak’. This moment is made into a more complex reflection on the links between cannibalism and cultural consumption by the inclusion, at the dinner table, of the hotel’s British tour guide, who offers guests an ‘arts and culture tour’ of Venice. Played by Julian Sands, whose casting brings to mind the values of A Room with a View (1985), the quintessential ‘heritage’ Forster adaptation in which Sands starred as a young man immersed in Renaissance Florence, the tour guide attempts, in the opening scenes, to establish himself as the true authority on cured meat, Renaissance Venice and cultural production. Showing a line of expertise very similar to that of Lecter in his role as a curator of Renaissance art in Hannibal, Sands’s guide enthusiastically explains to some tourists how Venetian citizens would find the dismembered entrails of their friends and neighbours hanging from gibbets. He describes Venice as ‘the first police state’, in which the quality of life was ‘as magnificent as the patriarchy that ruled it’. When the tourists, whom he attempts to impress with his listing of ‘Tintoretto, Titian, Tiepolo’, come across the film crew of Malfi, it soon becomes clear that their guide not only admires that patriarchy but also embodies its values. Advising the tourists to ‘bypass this display of not very interesting street theatre’, he shouts ‘The Duchess of Malfi was a slut!’ The guide thus sets himself up as the ultimate judge of which bits of the Renaissance and cultural production are worth remembering and consuming and which are not: disembowelled Venetians alongside Tintoretto and Titian are,

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whereas Malfi, with its portrayal of the Duchess’s transgressive sexuality, is not. No wonder that, munching a tasty bit of flesh in the opening sequence, he roundly condemns the film of Malfi, explaining that ‘in this case, “Dogme” means unwatchable, unwatchable garbage. They’ve got a completely senseless interpretation of The Duchess of Malfi.’ This reference to The Duchess of Malfi at the cannibalistic dinner table stresses the thematic link between the human limbs on meat hooks and the way in which Webster’s play almost obsessively unearths, displays and instrumentalises various real and fake body parts or corpses. Ferdinand’s macabre exhibitions are accompanied by recurring allusions to and metaphors of cannibalism, which are most coherently applied to the Duchess-asfood. Her body, which is described as a ‘salvatory of green mummy’,40 is to be ‘hewed . . . to pieces’41 and ‘fed upon’ by ‘many hungry guests’42 and in particular by her brothers, as she specifies in her dying words: ‘Go tell my brothers when I am laid out, / They then may feed in quiet.’43 Bosola’s reference to the Duchess’s brothers as blood-consuming ‘most cruel biters’44 rounds off their consistent representation as cannibalistic in their efforts to control the Duchess’s body and sexuality. The play’s obsession with corpses thus boils down to an obsession with the body of the Duchess, which is to be investigated, carved up and consumed. In the opening sequence of Hotel, the evocation of The Duchess of Malfi’s cannibalistic obsession with the heroine’s body is linked to the tour guide’s account of an unresolved riddle left by his housemaster before he died. ‘What’s the difference between a duck?’ is the puzzling question that hangs in the air as the screen goes black for a series of credits that culminate in ‘The Duchess of Malfi by John Webster / Adaptation by Heathcote Williams’. A cut returns us to the dinner table, where Omar Johnsson thanks everybody ‘for having [him]’ in a Lecterian double-entendre before the camera pans and zooms in to the human limbs, over which the credit ‘directed by / Mike Figgis’ appears. Omar Johnsson, the sacrificial victim who, in the fashion of Montaigne’s Tupinamba captives, willingly embraces his own ingestion as part of a civilised exchange, is therefore not the only body – and certainly not the principal body – offered for consumption in the film: Hotel is much more concerned with the processes whereby both the Duchess of Malfi and the eponymous textual body of Webster’s play are to be investigated, carved, seasoned and served up as a new dish concocted by Heathcote Williams and Mike Figgis along the lines of a recipe provided by John Webster. 40

4.2.122–3.

41

2.5.31.

42

4.2.196.

43

4.2.233–4.

44

5.3.360.

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8 Consuming the female body (Laura Morante), the early modern text and food in Mike Figgis’s Hotel (2001). Screengrab.

The equivalence between production and consumption of food, the exploitation of female bodies in a patriarchal society and the consumption and (re)production of Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi is made startlingly obvious in the next sequence, where the screen is split into four equal parts showing three simultaneous scenes. The first shows a corpulent middleaged man in his hotel room ordering a meat sandwich and criticising a beautiful woman for her failing looks. We will later be able to identify the man as Boris, the financial backer of the film-within-the-film, and the woman as his long-suffering wife Greta. In the second scene, the hotel maid is frothing milk in the kitchen and taking Boris’s order for a meat sandwich – the meat, in close-up, looks conspicuously red (is that what is left of Omar Johnsson?). In the third, a man’s hand is drumming on the Penguin edition of John Webster: Three Plays. Hotel thus starts with a visual equation between the scrutiny and commodification of the female body, the preparation of (bodies-as-)food and the literal handling of the early modern textual body. As the composite image evolves, the drumming hand and Penguin edition turn into the image of the actor playing Ferdinand memorising his marked-up script while also consulting the Revels student edition of The Duchess of Malfi: three different versions of this play which has come down to us in a single quarto edition dating from 1623 are thus deployed in quick succession and juxtaposition, with the effect that the relative textual stability

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of the play is undermined from the outset. That there is no single, ‘correct’ text for The Duchess of Malfi is suggested by the speech the actor is rehearsing, in which Ferdinand wishes that the Duchess and her lover had . . . their bodies burnt in a coal pit with the ventilation stopped so that their cursed smoke might not ascend to heaven, or boil his ill-born bastards into a broth and give it to their lecherous father and have him retch up his ungodly life with his own liquid offal.

Ferdinand’s desire for a Thyestean revenge banquet gives a revenge tragedy twist to the urbane scene of cannibalism which precedes it and links the frame narrative of the film, in which tourists are processed into the meat they feed on, with the memorising of Webster’s play by the actor. Evidently, however, the process of memorisation is not, as Montaigne would put it, a ‘yielding up of the meat even as it was swallowed’: Webster’s lines have changed by the process of their consumption, differing markedly from the text transmitted in the Revels edition. When, in a later scene, an actor complains that the script, as it now stands, has lost some of the poetry, scriptwriter John Charley/Heathcote Williams explains that the film team have decided to ‘cut the iambic pentameters, heptameters, archaisms in order to create a fast-food McMalfi, as it were, that would be very easily digestible and accessible even to aspiring Hollywood stars’. The early modern text, Hotel insists, will inevitably change as literary cannibalism transforms the indigestible dramatic corpus into a palatable film adapted to the present-day market. As is clear from Williams’s comment, Hotel unapologetically incorporates the abject, the alien, the difficult, and is determined to concoct something edible out of the scraps of early modern culture. This may not lead to the desired ‘easily digestible and accessible’ result, since the pseudo-Jacobean ‘have him retch up his ungodly life with his own liquid offal’, which replaces Webster’s ‘to renew / The sin of his back’, is clearly indicative of indigestion. But it does suggest a fresh attempt to take on board Montaigne’s questioning of the colonialist logic of cannibalism and his portrayal of literary cannibalism as a positive force for cultural renewal. The bizarre dinnertable riddle of ‘what’s the difference between a duck?’, in resisting the binary logic of difference and differentiation, deconstructs the opposition between self and other that underpins the representation of cannibalism in colonial texts and the elitist and exclusive visions of Greenaway and Lecter. Instead, it embraces cannibalism’s desire for the same: the difference between a duck is that it is a duck; there is no object in the sentence because the object is identical to the subject (the traditional answer to the riddle makes the same

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point: ‘one leg is both the same’ suggests just such a radical unthinking of difference).45 Cultural consumption – whether of The Duchess of Malfi or the Renaissance culture of Venice as a tourist destination – is transformative of both the object and subject of consumption: like Montaigne, Hotel presents cannibalism as a form of communion which is chosen by both the consumed and the consumer – hence Omar Johnsson’s partaking in the cannibalistic feast and gracious acquiescence in his own consumption. Hence also the imagery of the Last Supper with which the film concludes: as the Producer of McMalfi (David Schwimmer) willingly walks to his death at the hands of the hotel staff cannibals, all the other members of the film crew enjoy a dinner served by the cannibalistic hotel maid – a consumption/ consummation devoutly to be wished. In this positive, productive view of cannibalism, producing and consuming McMalfi for the twenty-first century seems to require the willingness to partake in the incorporation of Renaissance culture and its literary traditions into a contemporary Jacobean film.

Putting the cart before the horse: the preposterousness of the contemporary Jacobean film Cannibalism in Hotel, comparison with Greenaway’s Cook suggests, is portrayed as a force for good, as a mode of incorporation that is ultimately productive. Yet even this film that celebrates the exhumation and processing of literary tradition is affected by cannibalism’s intrinsic abjection, the selfdestructiveness that makes cannibalism such a potent challenge to the self and the symbolic order. As the reference to Hollywood in the scriptwriter’s wry comment about his transformation of Webster’s tragedy into ‘McMalfi’ suggests, Hotel ’s unearthing of Webster and the processing of his corpus for the consumption of a modern audience takes issue with the film industry’s ongoing gorging of its viewers on processed literary-tradition-as-heritagefilm, which is here associated with ‘Hollywood’ as a shorthand for the Anglo-American film industry more generally. Rather than taking on the Anglo-American film industry from the inside, Figgis follows Jarman in jabbing at it from the marginal position of independent film and the Jacobean text. He capitalises on the transgressive connotations of the ‘Jacobean’ by deliberately focussing the script of The Duchess of Malfi on ‘six scenes – the weirdest bloodiest, sexiest scenes in 45

The riddle is in online circulation; it also appears in Allan Ahlberg’s The Ha Ha Bonk Book.

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John Webster’s extraordinary play’.46 Malfi’s challenge to gendered hierarchies, the re-visioning of the present through the eyes of the past in Jarman’s Edward II, and Greenaway’s use of a ‘Jacobean’ template to think through the operations of cultural consumption together provide powerful models for Figgis’s creation of a contemporary Jacobean film that is yet more deliberate than Jarman’s work in its fracturing of linear narrative, disruption of chronologies and determination to use the past as a means of critiquing the present. The principal ingredient which allows Figgis to push Jarman’s experimentation one step further is a rhetorical figure which was recognised in the early modern period as both powerfully generative and potentially deeply unsettling. The ‘Histeron proteron’ or the ‘preposterous’, George Puttenham explained in The Arte of English Poesie (1589), is ‘disordered speech’, a figure in which ‘ye misplace your words or clauses and set that before which should be behind & è conuerso’. Most of Puttenham’s examples of the trope are temporal – for instance, ‘My dame that bred me up and bare me in her wombe’.47 It is in this sense that Jarman’s approach to Marlowe’s play was preposterous, since it consistently took as its starting point the execution of the king with which the early modern tragedy concludes. As Puttenham explains, preposterous misplacements can also be spatial: in his attempt to explain the figure, Puttenham refers to the ‘English prouerbe, the cart before the horse’.48 The spatial use of the preposterous is suggestive of a different order of transgression than the confusion caused by anachronism: it becomes a matter of precedence, of the disruption of social hierarchy and the ‘natural’ order of things. Moreover, as Jonathan Goldberg notes, Puttenham’s stress on how close the preposterous is to ‘notoriously undecent’ ways of speaking makes it ‘a trope involving questions of sexual decorum’ which can be applied to describe images of sodomy.49 Patricia Parker explains that ‘References to such preposterous inversion appear in early modern texts in contexts both heterosexual and homosexual’ and that the term ‘preposterous venery’, in particular, was ‘also implicated in other discourses of insubordination and subversion, part of a larger network of unorthodoxy’.50 The preposterous as a transgressive trope which disturbs temporal, social, sexual and gendered order thus shares some of the key features of the threat to the symbolic order represented by cannibalism. It is no coincidence that, commenting on his Cook, Greenaway describes its 46 50

Figgis, In the Dark, p. 158. 47 3: 141, 142. 48 3: 141. 49 Goldberg, Sodometries, p. 4. Parker, ‘Building a Sustainable UK Film Industry’, pp. 26–7.

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presentation of ‘cannibalism in a sophisticated Western restaurant’ as his ‘film’s preposterous notion’.51 Whether cannibalism is located in Cook’s Le Hollandais restaurant or in the kitchen of Venice’s Hotel Hungaria, it speaks of a dislocation of both its spatial and temporal dimensions, as Greenaway recognises: We come across cannibalism when a small plane goes down in what’s left of the Amazonian forest, and the pilot eats the passengers or vice versa. But we’re not used to seeing cannibalism portrayed as it exists in our own sophisticated lives . . . [T]hese are the kinds of taboo areas Jacobean drama investigated so thoroughly.52

Both Cook and Hotel preposterously deploy cannibalism, an abject cultural practice that belongs to the elsewhere of the Amazonian forest or taboobusting Jacobean drama, in the sophisticated here and now of their kitchens, pushing the preposterous anachronism of their contemporary Jacobean films into the realm of the abject. Unsurprisingly, Puttenham, too, considers the preposterous to be potentially abject, ranking it alongside other ‘figures Auricular working by disorder’ under the general name ‘Hiperbaton’ or ‘trespasser’, intimating that the preposterous is close to modes of speaking ‘so foule and intollerable’ in their threat to rhetorical order as to be downright ‘vicious’.53 No less than cannibalism, the preposterous, then, is profoundly ambivalent, able to function as a force for good in its queering of oppressive norms (as it does in Jarman’s work), but also bringing with it the danger of disorder so great as to confound meaning altogether. The wilful transgressiveness and disorder of Hotel is not confined to its cannibalistic subject matter, but extends to its technology and approach to filmmaking. Figgis seizes on the technical possibilities afforded by digital video so as better to challenge the grammatical order of mainstream cinema and the ways in which, as Catherine Belsey argues, the medium of film works to narrow down the meanings of a Shakespearean play to a single interpretation.54 The split screen in Hotel that juxtaposes the preparation of food with the policing of the female body and the handling of the textual body is an example of Figgis disrupting the conventions of linear storytelling and inviting, at that point, an analogical mode of viewing across the three scenes that share the screen. At other points, the split screens offer contrasting narrative strands, are seemingly disconnected altogether or, as in Miss 51 52 54

Quoted in Bartolovich, ‘Consumerism’, p. 205. Quoted in Bartolovich, ‘Consumerism’, p. 205. Belsey, ‘Shakespeare and Film’, p. 68.

53

3: 140.

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Julie, offer different views of the same scene that destabilise the coherence of the single image. Hotel switches between single and split screens, three different frame sizes, steady cameras and hand-held cameras employing rigs of Figgis’s own design (nicknamed a ‘Fig-rig’), daylight, candlelight and night vision. The experience of watching Hotel, consequently, is one of constant adjustment to the shifting demands of the medium, jolting the viewer out of any sense of complacency and forcing her/him to continuously decide what to watch and how to watch it. At every opportunity, the film breaks with the illusionist conventions Belsey deplores in the Shakespeare film and offers a plurality of meanings that is more attuned to the multiple viewpoints offered by the early modern stage. Hotel was screened at various film festivals and in selected cinemas, yet it is as a DVD that the film comes into its own: stoppable, searchable, viewable at various speeds and with variable volume by the individual viewer ‘editing’ his/her own version of Hotel out of the fragments Figgis has chosen to include in the film and its supplementary features.55 Played on a personal computer, Hotel makes obvious its deployment of Figgis’s ‘desktop aesthetic’, which ‘cannot help but point to the visual syntax of the computer screen and its cacophony of frames and layers’.56 Hotel, even more than Jarman’s markedly intertextual Edward II, embraces a logic of supplementarity that explodes the boundaries of the film as a finite text. The grotesque and violent excesses of the Jacobean text are replicated in the DVD’s production of excessive meanings. Not only does Hotel in its DVD form challenge the unique viewpoint of the mainstream Shakespeare film and the singularity of Webster’s text, regardless of the fact that there are no rival early modern texts to contest the authority of the 1623 quarto, but it resists its own presentation as a finished single object and prefers to embrace the fundamental incompleteness of the work of art that Nicholas Rombes has identified as ‘One of the consequences of the digital turn’.57 Figgis’s inclusion, on the DVD, of a ‘Making-of Documentary’ that doubles his incorporation, within the film, of a documentary film crew creating a ‘Making-of Documentary’ of the McMalfi adaptation, and his generous supply of ‘Web Shorts’ of unused footage and additional scenes, makes of 55

56

The DVD of Hotel, evidently, is not unique in supplying supplementary features; what I argue here is that it is an example of a film where the collage-like features of the film itself, combined with the availability of a large number of supplementary web shorts, invites a particularly interactive mode of viewing and that in 2000/01, Figgis was at the vanguard of this sort of reconceptualisation of what a DVD can offer for digital filmmakers. On Figgis’s views about an interactive DVD for Timecode, see ‘An Interview with Mike Figgis, Director of Time Code’, Next Wave Films, May 2000, http://tinyurl.com/cy9ny4v. Willis, New Digital Cinema, p. 39. 57 Rombes, Cinema in the Digital Age, p. 43.

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the Hotel DVD what Chuck Tryon calls an ‘expanded film [text]’ that ‘provide[s] new ways of thinking about how we engage with the cinema’ and subjects ‘the very definition of what counts as a film text . . . to reinterpretation’.58 Critically, the film’s embedding in supplementary materials fundamentally undermines the very idea of a correct order in which the DVD may be viewed: any order of viewing might be preposterous, no order is self-evidently ‘correct’. The DVD (which, it must be remembered, predates the launch of YouTube by four years) thus anticipates some of the crucial developments in digital viewing practices I will discuss in Chapter 4 of this book. It is when viewed as a cinematic print, however, in its most stable condition and without access to the DVD’s supplements, that Hotel’s intrinsic preposterousness most forcefully comes to the fore. As Figgis explains, the combination of the newer digital film technology with celluloid’s older sound technologies led to an inversion of order that would make Puttenham shudder in his grave: In 2000 I shot a film called Hotel on four Sony PD100 digital cameras. But most people who saw it saw it projected as a 35mm print, and there were all kinds of problems in getting it on to 35mm – for instance, it had to project at a different speed from the speed I shot it [24 frames per second instead of 25]. And it had to have Dolby sound on it [Dolby being an older technology]. So at a certain point you have to ask: is the cart pulling the horse or the horse pulling the cart?59

Figgis’s echo of Puttenham’s ‘the cart before the horse’ to describe the effect of using outdated technology to screen his material highlights the film’s preposterousness that seemingly affects every aspect of Hotel. Apart from the extracts from the heavily edited Duchess of Malfi and the hotel maid’s monologues which I will discuss later, the film’s dialogue was entirely improvised by the actors. In the DVD’s ‘Making-of Documentary’, Figgis explains to the understandably confused and uncomfortable Burt Reynolds that the plot, and a sense of how the different characters and strands of the emerging story relate to each other, was to be created through editing after the completion of the shoot. To Reynolds’s request for more information about the characters, Figgis replies: figgis: As I said, that will come in an editing process. reynolds: . . . I’m just telling you that for the actors, you need just a little bit of ‘what is my name, what is the relationship, how long does it last’. Do, do we 58

Tryon, Reinventing Cinema, p. 4.

59

Figgis, Digital Film-Making, p. 6, my emphasis.

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get together, and make that up ourselves and bring that to you and show it to you? figgis: The idea is that, that unlike a regular film, I guess, where people do come and say ‘my name is Pete and this is my wife’ and so on, erm, I would, obviously with an ensemble of over thirty people, if everybody did that, then there wouldn’t be any time left to do anything else.

From the position of received ideas about cinema, represented by poor Burt Reynolds, it is preposterous to act a scene before the script is written, to be in a story which is yet to be created, to impersonate a character who will emerge only in post-production through the director’s editing and his addition of the soundtrack (scored, once again, by Figgis himself). Hotel is insistently not a ‘regular’ film: it is as preposterous in its approach to plot and characterisation as it is in its use of technology. The unconventional nature of Figgis’s film is even more striking when juxtaposed with the much more conformist approach to filmmaking evident in John Madden’s Shakespeare in Love (1999), itself a ‘novel, postheritage kind of costume film’ centred on the performance of an early modern play, to which Hotel provides a riposte of sorts.60 Shakespeare in Love has been praised for its ‘post-modern irreverence towards canonical narratives’, but it has also been critiqued for its ‘safely conventional sexual politics’ and, crucially, for its reproduction of ‘the Bard as the dominant popular cultural icon for our particular sociohistorical moment’.61 The film’s all-star cast, encompassing widely recognised RSC-veterans Judi Dench, Antony Sher and Joseph Fiennes and Hollywood crowd-pullers Gwyneth Paltrow and Ben Affleck, brings about a fusion of high culture and popular culture which reinforces the message of Shakespeare’s ‘universality’: ‘Shakespeare’ as cultural glue binds together our society in a moment of communal understanding and rejoicing at the transhistorical power of love transmitted by ‘the Bard’s’ immortal words. In his answer to Shakespeare in Love, Figgis, too, employs an all-star cast combining British and American headline names (Rhys Ifans, David Schwimmer, Salma Hayek) alongside an array of top-tier continental actors including Ornella Muti, Chiara Mastroianni and Mia Maestro. Notably absent from the list, however, are established British actors with Shakespearean screen credentials or extensive experience working for the RSC. The significant exception is Heathcote Williams, who scoffs at the 60 61

Pidduck, ‘Elizabeth and Shakespeare in Love’, p. 130. See also Claire Monk’s categorisation of the film as ‘post-heritage’ (‘The British Heritage-Film Debate Revisited’, pp. 181–2). Pidduck, ‘Elizabeth and Shakespeare in Love’, pp. 131, 133; and Klett, ‘Shakespeare in Love’, p. 25.

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‘Ridiculous Shite Company’ for which he never appears to have worked, but who signposts Figgis’s indebtedness to Jarman’s Tempest.62 Williams’s doubling as the scriptwriter of McMalfi and as Bosola, the spy whose gaze surveys and directs the action, makes him an author/director figure in whom Prospero-like control and Ariel-like spying are wrapped into one. Figgis’s casting, which he says is based on ‘very precise decisions, to be made after a lot of thought and observation’, advertises Hotel’s position as a preposterous contemporary Jacobean film that eschews Shakespearean associations.63 The rejection of the Shakespearean performance tradition and challenge to Shakespeare’s cultural hegemony is carried further within the film. There, at the beginning of the shoot of Malfi, Charlee Boux, the obnoxious documentary filmmaker in charge of the ‘Making-of Documentary’ within the film, interviews Jonathan Danderfine, the Producer of McMalfi, about the project: danderfine: The tentative title is Malfi. Ergh, from The Duchess of Malfi, which is a play written in, written by one . . . boux: What do you mean . . . danderfine: . . . of Shakespeare’s contemporaries. John, John Webster. boux: John Webster? Do we have a chance to interview him later on? Is he around?

The scene is a striking reversal of the scene in Shakespeare in Love in which it is revealed that the sadistic urchin who loves Titus Andronicus for its gore, revels in torturing mice and meanly betrays the cross-dressed heroine to the authorities is, in fact, John Webster. In Paul Arthur’s gloss on the scene, ‘Gratuitous violence, represented by the casual cruelties of an adolescent John Webster, is implied as inimical to humanistic values, and consequent social cohesion, imputed to Shakespeare’s work.’64 In Figgis’s answer to Shakespeare in Love, the corresponding assumption, by Danderfine, that Webster can be understood in relation to Shakespeare falls spectacularly flat as Charlee Boux’s preposterous anachronism reveals her ignorance of that supposedly stable point of reference and its associated humanist values. The butt of the joke is the Shakespeare industry which, by insisting that Shakespeare is our contemporary and universal, has succeeded in erasing his historical specificity.

62 63

Email from Williams to David Schwimmer (quoted in Figgis, In the Dark, p. 202). Figgis, Digital Film-Making, p. 135. 64 Arthur, ‘Writers’, p. 338.

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‘Man’s control of women’s sexuality’: voyeurism, fetishistic scopophilia and the apparatus of film The joke evidently was important to Figgis since it reappears, in a slightly different form, in the DVD’s web short entitled ‘Charlee Boux’. This time, her interviewee is Heathcote Williams’s ‘John Charley’, the scriptwriter of Malfi: boux: You are the writer of Duchess of Malfi. Can you please tell us, what was your inspiration for this very tormentous [sic] piece? charley: No, I’m not the writer of The Duchess of Malfi. It was written by John Webster, who was a contemporary of Shakespeare. boux: Oh, I got confused with the Johns, same thing. Is he around? charley: No I’m afraid he’s not, no. He’s [sic] died four hundred years ago. boux: Well, I guess we can’t interview that John . . . charley: But you’re very resourceful, you could dig up the bones . . . boux: . . . but we have this John, sweetiepie! [grabs CHARLEY’s face and squeezes it] charley: Ooh! boux: Okay, I would like to know . . . what’s your character’s name . . . charley: My character is Bosola. boux: Bosola. charley: He’s a spy, yes. boux: He was a spyyyyyy, you dirty man. Who did you spied [sic] on? charley: I spy on the Duchess. Would you like to know what the Duchess of Malfi is about? boux: What was she doing, that little . . . charley: [laughs] Trying to get married. boux: Well, that’s not so bad! charley: No, not in this day and age. But it’s a play really about man’s control of women’s sexuality . . .

While Charley’s suggestion that Boux exhume Webster’s bones for the purposes of an interview may seem like an offhand remark, it is thematically linked to The Duchess of Malfi, with its multiple use of images of exhumation that are epitomised by Ferdinand walking around at midnight ‘with the leg of a man / Upon his shoulder’.65 Earlier in the play, the guilt-ridden Ferdinand had warned Bosola: ‘The wolf shall find [the Duchess’s] grave and scrape it up, / Not to devour the corpse but to discover / The horrid murder.’66 The image of exhumation associated with Boux’s desire to interview the author of The Duchess of Malfi is hence merged with the desire, within Webster’s play, to unearth the Duchess herself, to discover 65

5.2.9–15.

66

4.2.310–12.

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her ‘horrid murder’. Play and titular character become one in that the unearthing and revival of the one will lead to the discovery of the crime committed on the other. The interview thus touches on a number of crucial strands that run through the film: it challenges Shakespeare’s status once again, it makes of the production of Webster a literal re-membering of his bones and it draws attention to what the play is ‘really about’: ‘man’s control of women’s sexuality’. The web short, that is, pinpoints the same equivalences that we saw advertised in the film’s first split screen, with its stress on the connections Figgis asks us to see between the exhumation and consumption of the Jacobean text, the processing of food and the policing of women’s sexuality. As that early signpost indicated, the domination and control of women described by the screenwriter as the central feature of Webster’s tragedy pervades the film and is reflected in the other female characters, who embody aspects of the Duchess’s character and function as her Doppelgänger figures. Hotel in this way uses The Duchess of Malfi as a pre-text for an examination of the control, oppression and consumption of the female body and female sexuality both in Webster’s play and in contemporary culture, as epitomised by the ideological apparatus of the film industry. The tragedy’s distinction between the idealising, fetishising gaze of Antonio and the inquisitive and punishing gaze of Ferdinand and his ‘creature’ Bosola, which are both defied by the Duchess in her search for autonomous expression of her active desires, anticipates Laura Mulvey’s influential analysis of conventional cinema with which, in my last chapter, we saw Tilda Swinton taking issue. Mulvey’s ‘fetishistic scopophilia’, whereby the male figure ‘builds up the physical beauty of the [female] object [of his gaze], transforming it into something satisfying in itself’ can be mapped neatly onto Antonio. Meanwhile, its nasty twin ‘voyeurism’, which ‘has associations with sadism: pleasure lies in ascertaining guilt . . . asserting control and subjugating the guilty person through punishment or forgiveness’,67 aptly describes Ferdinand’s punitive scrutiny of his sister. It is the latter which Figgis, as a filmmaker, finds particularly challenging: he admits to having ‘always had a problem with cinema’s essentially singular, voyeuristic eye’, an eye which puts the artist ‘suddenly in an area of perversity’.68 Accordingly, Figgis’s film translates the active desiring gaze of Webster’s Duchess and her quest for autonomy into a 67

Mulvey, Visual and Other Pleasures, pp. 21–2.

68

Figgis, In the Dark, p. 68.

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defiance of the film industry’s dominant modes of representation of the female subject. That this is partly what is at stake in Hotel becomes apparent early on, when Isabella (Valeria Golino), the actress playing Julia, complains about the wholesale cutting of her and Cariola’s lines. Her concern that she doesn’t want to be ‘upstaged by [her] tits’, as she is to appear naked in both her scenes, exposes the way the female actors’ bodies are offered up for consumption by the male-dominated industry which, says Mulvey, uses ‘the woman as icon, displayed for the gaze and enjoyment of men, the active controllers of the look’.69 The juxtaposition of the actress’s complaint with the ‘patriarchal’ tour guide’s appropriation of Ferdinand’s lines ‘Foolish men, / That e’er will trust their honour in a bark / Made of so slight weak bulrush as is woman, / Apt every minute to sink it!’ creates a link between early modern misogyny, the authority of the cultural elite, and the cinematic exploitation and control of the female body.70 It also establishes a phenomenon which could be called a ‘Duchess-effect’ and/or ‘Duchessfunction’, whereby one female character after another acts out aspects of the Duchess’s oppression and rebellion, until the film is crowded with Doppelgänger figures who reflect the struggles of Webster’s defiant heroine.71 The oppression and sexual exploitation of Isabella/Julia, in both Figgis’s film and Webster’s play, is made nastily obvious in the only scene of Malfi we ever see her in: told by the director to ‘get down, suck his cock’, Isabella crawls under the Cardinal’s robes as he is warning the Duchess not to remarry and re-emerges only to wipe her mouth. The jab at the film industry is reinforced by the bracketing of the episode of her complaint with two sequences centred on Greta, Boris’s attractive wife. In the first of these (the split-screen sequence I discussed above), Boris brusquely tells her she is getting fat and that she needs cosmetic surgery. In the second, we see Greta internalising Boris’s critical and controlling gaze as, left alone in her hotel room, she takes her shirt off in front of the mirror to inspect her body. While for the Duchess, looking in the mirror and acknowledging that she is ageing leads to a defiant assertion of her power over others (‘When I wax grey I shall have all the court / Powder their hair with arras, to be like me’), 69 70 71

Mulvey, Visual and Other Pleasures, p. 21. See also Figgis’s discussion of the exploitation of female actors in the Hollywood system (Figgis, ‘Shue’, pp. 7–10; Figgis, ‘Hayek’, pp. 157–8; and Figgis, ‘Lowe’, pp. 258–9). 2.5.33–6. I borrow the terminology from Cartelli and Rowe’s discussion of Lear-functions and Cordelia-effects: ‘A function does things, performs behaviours that are integral to the working out of a dramatic design; an effect suffers or embodies the consequences’ (Cartelli and Rowe, New Wave Shakespeare, p. 154).

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Greta is subjected by the gaze of the man who, as the McMalfi film’s financial backer, shares control over its representation of the female body.72 Unlike Greta, the Duchess’s other Doppelgänger Isabella, though she is literally brought to her knees during filming and has her mouth filled with semen instead of lines, is offered an alternative to the domination of the male gaze. Having stormed out of the rehearsal room, she is accosted by ‘Claude’ (Chiara Mastroianni). Claude, whose gender-neutral name and cigar smoking signal her appropriation of the phallus, compliments Isabella on her beauty and kisses her abruptly and passionately. Isabella later willingly follows Claude into the underground passages of the hotel. The night vision camera – significantly an inversion of the mode of viewing associated with ‘regular film’, to borrow Figgis’s term – shows Claude’s seduction of Isabella. Made to sit down on a chair with her eyes bound, Isabella is as ‘stark blind’ as the Duchess makes Antonio through her revelation of her transgressive desire.73 The preposterous class and gender transgression of the Duchess of Malfi’s wooing of her steward is both inverted and troped as lesbianism here as Claude, a member of staff, seduces a hotel guest, introducing her to a hidden underground world of transgressive desire. If, as Bonnie Burns argues, classic Hollywood cinema consistently represents lesbianism as ‘at the limit of the visible, or indeed, as the limit of the visible’, this perception is literalised in Hotel’s representation of lesbian desire as blinding and located in the underground space of the repressed, the dark – the space of cannibalism, another form of transgressive desire for ‘the same’.74 Figgis’s use of the split screen, which he sees as a means of ‘somehow [diffusing] the perversity’ of voyeurism by making it possible for the viewer to ‘look more analytically’, allows him to juxtapose this lesbian encounter with three other, related, sequences.75 Two of his screens in this sequence show scenes of exploitative heterosexual intercourse in which the woman is at the service of a man. Above Isabella and Claude we see Greta, who has been mistaken for a prostitute (yet another Doppelgänger), having sex with a stranger because she believes this is what her husband has asked her to do. The other screen shows us the prostitute at work with the man Greta was supposed to meet. The interchangeability of the two women suggests the affinity between marriage and prostitution, giving a sinister twist to 72 75

3.2.58–9. 73 1.1.402. 74 Burns, ‘Dracula’s Daughter’, p. 98. Figgis, In the Dark, p. 68. See also Figgis’s comments in his interview with Howard Ho, ‘Flexing his Quads: Interview with Mike Figgis’, Daily Bruin (University of California, Los Angeles. 28 July 2003), http://tinyurl.com/cue3llc.

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Ferdinand’s suggestion that a woman who remarries is no better than a whore.76 The last of the four screens, by contrast, shows the face of the comatose Trent Stoken, the director of McMalfi, whom Rhys Ifans, in the first part of the film, plays as a manic, control-obsessed drunk. Now, in a seemingly endless take lasting almost five minutes, the gaze of the misogynistic film director, who wanted his actresses naked, deprived them of their lines and told his assistant to ‘go shave [her] legs’, has been disabled by an assassin’s bullet. Significantly, this disabling of the director’s gaze and his transformation from subject to object of the gaze has been carried out with a gun extracted from between the legs of the lesbian cannibal Claude. Whereas in The Duchess of Malfi, it is a man who is thought to have been caught threatening the Duchess with a pistol/pizzle extracted from his crotch and who is declared to be a ‘wicked cannibal’ for having a ‘firelock in’s codpiece’, here, cannibalism is associated not with male control of women’s sexuality, but rather with the power of female transgressive desire to disable male control.77 Though lesbian sex might seem far removed from Webster’s Duchess of Malfi, a connection to the play is established in the scene of the Duchess’s offer of marriage to Antonio, which is central both to Figgis’s metacinematic reflection and to his interpretation of Webster’s play. The scene is pleonastic in that, like the joke about interviewing Webster, it occurs twice, creating the multiple viewpoints onto the early modern text foreclosed by conventional film. The first time, Stoken surprises the actors playing Antonio (Max Beesley) and the Duchess (Saffron Burrows) while they are rehearsing the wooing scene on their own as a ‘straight’ love scene, with the Duchess set up as the object of Antonio’s fetishising desire. Stoken’s criticism of the actors’ version of the scene amounts to a programmatic rejection of the ‘heritage’ films of the Merchant-Ivory team which keep haunting Hotel: ‘But, of course, you must try all different ways, and I love the Merchant-Ivory version you’re doing at the moment. Sweet, pungent smell of rose meadows, Earl Grey and a wet saddle on the back of a horse. That sort of thing. It’s fucking shit!’ Minutes later, having just instructed ‘Antonio’ that he must ‘fuck [the Duchess] like a criminal’ during the scene, Stoken is shot. The ‘shagging scene’, as Stoken had called the wooing, is reprised in the second half of the film with producer Jonathan Danderfine in charge. This time, the subject-object positions are reversed as the Duchess undresses 76

1.1.294.

77

2.2.47–8.

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Antonio in her bedchamber, turns him around, pulls up her dress and energetically sodomises him. The transgression of social boundaries in the play is troped as doubly preposterous female-on-male sodomy. The groans of the Duchess’s orgasm mutate into the groans of labour as she collapses on her bed, is told by Cariola, who has been there all along, to ‘push, push’, and gives birth to twin plastic babies. Lying on her bed after the delivery, the Duchess is framed by the figures of Antonio and Cariola, who kisses her on the mouth. At the margins of this scene of the Duchess’s preposterous desire which transgresses gender and class boundaries, this desire is associated with lesbianism. The threesome on the bed embodies and sexualises the implicit causal link, in Webster’s play, between the mutual affection of mistress and maid and the Duchess’s ability to express her autonomous identity and her desires. It is the homosocial (and potentially homoerotic) egalitarian intimacy between the Duchess and her female bedfellow, an intimacy which, as Valerie Traub has argued, is ‘insignificant’ in Renaissance culture (in that it is not seen as a threat to order because it does not in itself challenge heterosexual marriage), which is exposed in Hotel as the unacknowledged origin of the Duchess’s preposterous heterosexual transgression of class and gender boundaries.78 In Webster’s Act 3 Scene 2, the scene which gives us the most intimate insight into the Duchess’s and Antonio’s marital life, it becomes clear that the Duchess’s credentials as the ‘sprawling’st bedfellow’ of Cariola, the maid who refuses to marry, give her yet greater piquancy for Antonio, who ‘like[s] her the better for that’.79 Unlike the Shakespearean comedies that track the separation of female bedfellows as they move towards the heterosexual unions that lead to their ‘happy’ dénouements,80 Webster’s tragedy of female ‘riot’ insists, in this scene, on the compatibility and co-existence of female intimacy and heterosexual desire.81 Cariola, the subordinate who preposterously presided over and authorised her mistress’s marriage ceremony, is a constitutive part of the Duchess’s preposterous sprawling family unit. By placing Cariola on the bed with the Duchess and Antonio, Hotel renders visible and significant the female-female bond that remains unremarkable in the play.

78 80

81

Traub, Renaissance of Lesbianism, p. 164. 79 3.2.13–14. Traub summarises this trajectory thus: ‘In Shakespeare’s and Fletcher’s plays, an originary, prior homoerotic desire is crossed, abandoned, betrayed; correlatively, a desire for men or a marital imperative is produced and inserted into the narrative in order to create a formal, “natural” mechanism of closure’ (Traub, Renaissance of Lesbianism, p. 175). See also Calbi, Approximate Bodies, pp. 25–7.

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The Duchess’s sodomy of Antonio which precedes Cariola’s inclusion in their love play meanwhile gives visual expression to the character’s redefinition of female sexuality as simultaneously dominant and submissive, penetrating and penetrated. Judith Haber draws attention to the Duchess’s reminiscence of her wooing of Antonio in Act 3 Scene 2 and in particular to her assertion ‘I ent’red you into my heart / Before you would vouchsafe to call for the keys.’82 The statement, she points out, ‘contains the ghost sentence, “I entered you”, which reverses the conventional positions of male and female, placing woman on top, as active subject’.83 The preposterous sodomy in Figgis’s second wooing scene thus gives visual expression not only to the Duchess’s topsy-turvy approach to marriage, in which the Church’s sanction is but an ‘echo’ of the private contract overseen by Cariola, but also to the sexual dynamics suggested in Webster’s Act 3 Scene 2. Mutually penetrative heterosexuality and an emphasis on female sexual pleasure is combined with the proto-lesbian intimacy of the Duchess’s feminine ‘circumference’ as a precondition for the Duchess’s fecundity.84 Hotel’s scene of preposterous sex concludes with the camera panning away from the Duchess’s widely spread legs, turning around to reveal Jonathan Danderfine filming the trio on the bed with a ‘Fig-rig’ and behind him Bosola in the doorway observing the scene. The line of vision of Danderfine’s camera, which is focussed on the Duchess’s crotch, emphasised dramatically by the converging lines of her legs that guide the eye, corresponds exactly to that of Bosola, suggesting a precise equivalence between ‘man’s control of women’s sexuality’ in Webster and in Figgis’s own film. If Figgis’s cinema is willing to put transgressive female desire centre stage, this is still a peculiarly ‘androcentric vision’ of female desire, filmed by a man from the point of view of traditional patriarchal control as embodied by Bosola.85 The fetishising gaze of ‘Antonio’s’ Merchant-Ivory take on the Duchess may be ‘fucking shit’, but the alternative, an expression of polymorphous female desire which is monitored, recorded and eventually punished by the voyeuristic gaze of Bosola, is no better.

Preposterous Doppelgängers: fantastic mutuality and self-violation in Artemisia and Hotel Since it is so self-consciously implicated in the very structures it is criticising, Figgis’s Hotel cannot provide a realistic answer to the problem of ‘man’s 82 85

3.2.62–3. 83 Haber, Desire and Dramatic Form, p. 76. Jay, ‘On Slippery Ground’, p. 3.

84

1.1.470.

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9 Zoom: Max Beesley, Saffron Burrows and Mia Maestro in Mike Figgis’s Hotel (2001). Screengrab.

control of women’s sexuality’. Writing about ‘narrative film’, David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson declare: ‘We expect a series of incidents that will be connected in some way. We also probably expect that the problems or conflicts arising in the action will achieve some final state – either they will be resolved or, at least, a new light will be cast on them. A spectator comes prepared to make sense of a narrative film.’86 Hotel’s resolution thwarts these expectations even as it attempts to meet them. The film’s unexpected ‘happy ending’, celebrated in the manner of an early modern comedy with an inclusive feast (that literally incorporates Danderfine as its main dish), hinges on the semi-supernatural figure of the anonymous cannibalistic hotel maid, who Figgis wanted to be ‘very important’ and ‘more exotic, strange, sexual as the film progresses’.87 Valentina Cervi, the actress playing the maid, is known outside Italy principally for her performance of the title role in Agnès Merlet’s Artemisia (1998), a biopic which conspicuously follows Jarman’s method in Caravaggio in constructing the early modern artist’s biography through her paintings. Artemisia emerges as an increasingly prominent intertext for Hotel in the last part of the film. Its subject, the painter Artemisia Gentileschi, has a special place in feminist art history for her survival of a rape by her teacher and her particularly gory portrayals of Judith’s decapitation of Holofernes, which are often interpreted as responses to her rape. Artemisia is insistently preoccupied with the dual issues of sexual violence and the ownership of the artistic gaze. The problem is epitomised by a sequence in which, as Wymer notes, ‘she uses a perspective grid (or velo) to frame the sea and shore whilst simultaneously being framed by it herself’, making it unclear to which degree ‘she achieves real agency and escapes being an object of the gaze of others’.88 86

Bordwell and Thompson, Film Art, p. 74.

87

Figgis, In the Dark, p. 71.

88

Wymer, ‘Audience’.

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Artemisia’s ambivalence about the degree to which the female artist can avoid being the object of the gaze is fully exploited in Hotel, where Cervi’s hotel maid is given two elaborate erotic monologues spoken to the comatose Stoken and filmed with the night vision camera. In the first monologue, she tells him of ‘Marie’, a colleague of hers who is ‘willing to play a role, and this excites some men’.89 The men who sleep with Marie, she says, ‘watch her leave with a sense of philanthropy’.90 Cervi’s hotel maid contrasts this sexual exploitation – masked as philanthropy – of the role-playing woman as object of the gaze with the way she herself has ‘perfected the art of being invisible as a woman. I can walk into a room full of men without exciting the slightest interest.’ Making herself ‘invisible as a woman’ by refusing to act exempts the hotel maid from being trapped by the ‘to-be-looked-at-ness’ Mulvey insists is characteristic of women in ‘normal narrative film’.91 And indeed, although she is the most intriguing and alluring figure in the film and the character whose ‘visual presence’ most conspicuously ‘freeze[s] the flow of action in moments of erotic contemplation’ in a way typical of the exploitative cinematic gaze she objects to, within the filmic narrative, the hotel maid remains unremarked in the upstairs world of the hotel’s public areas, exciting no desire.92 Whereas the maid’s first monologue focusses on the desiring gaze of others, her second monologue is concerned with her own desire. Figgis’s editing places this monologue after the strangulation of the Duchess and her maid Cariola in the film-within-the-film. Using a split screen, Figgis shows us the faces of the two murdered women side by side (united in death) while on the soundtrack Schubert’s ‘Der Doppelgänger’ is intoned, sung by Mia Maestro, the actress playing Cariola, whose dead face we are looking at. Heinrich Heine’s lyrics tell of the speaker’s encounter with his uncanny, pale double, whose face is marked by the pain the speaker felt long ago. The night is quiet, the streets are resting, In this house my loved one used to live, She left the town long ago, But the house still stands on the same spot. There, also, stands a person who is staring upwards And wringing his hands with the power of his pain, I am horrified when I see his face – The moon shows me my own shape.

89 92

My emphasis. 90 My emphasis. 91 Mulvey, Visual and Other Pleasures, pp. 21–2. Mulvey, Visual and Other Pleasures, p. 19.

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You Doppelgänger! You pale fellow! Why do you ape my woe of love, Which used to torture me in this place, So many a night, long ago?93

The lyrics thematically link this moment to the film’s repeated use of the preposterous: the speaker’s past is preposterously confronting his present, aping the pain he thought he had overcome. Doubling the self-recognition prompted by the perfect alignment of the lines of vision of camera and spy at the end of the scene of preposterous sodomy, the film’s intertextual dialogue with Heine’s poem draws attention to the preposterous manner in which Webster’s Duchess of Malfi functions as a hideous mirror held up to film, revealing the extent to which ‘man’s control of women’s sexuality’ continues to govern this ideological apparatus through the direction of the gaze. Der Doppelgänger continues on the soundtrack as the camera, using night vision, moves along a canal covered by a bridge, an image which is dissolved to reveal the hotel maid entering Stoken’s room. The sound bridge linking the modern maid to her early modern predecessor and her mistress makes of her figure the uncanny Doppelgänger of these two victims of the male-controlling gaze. As embodied by the comatose Stoken, that gaze is here disabled. The gaze that dominates in this sequence is that of the hotel maid, highlighted by the use of night vision which turns her eyes into two dots of light. Asking ‘Why is this interesting? Why should my body be interesting to him? Why should any human body be interesting to anyone else?’, the maid slowly removes her shoes, apron and underwear before climbing on top of the impassive Stoken. As she languidly begins to make love to him, she tells him of her seduction of a man who wanted to ‘make love to [her] in a conventional way’ but whom she prevented from doing so by ‘clos[ing] his eyes, as if he had just died’. Artemisia, once more, becomes an important intertext at the point when the hotel maid has assumed a position of control over the man responsible for directing the gaze. At this very moment, she runs the danger of slipping back into being the object of the gaze both for Stoken and for the viewer: as she talks of her desire, what we are shown is her alluring body. The moment re-enacts the sequence in Merlet’s film in which Artemisia, having asked her master/rapist Tassi, who has been at pains to direct her gaze, to pose for her in a supine position, leaves her easel, climbs on top of him and begins to seduce him in a rush of artistic and erotic excitement. As Susan Felleman 93

Heine, ‘Still ist die Nacht’, p. 105. The literal translation is my own – in all published translations I have been able to identify one or the other of the nuances of the poem important to my argument is lost.

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10 Reviving the dead: Rhys Ifans and Valentina Cervi in Mike Figgis’s Hotel (2001). Still by Mike Figgis.

observes, the result is ‘a complete dissolution of boundaries between subject and object, beholder and beheld’ in which the woman artist is turned, ‘again, from the subject of the gaze, and possessor of the pencil, into sexual object and seductress’.94 Similarly, in Hotel, having achieved a position of total control both over the man in her narrative and over Stoken, the maid, reaching her sexual and narrative climax, tells Stoken how she relinquished some of her control over the man and ‘watched him all the time he watched [her]’. At the very moment at which she speaks of the mutually desiring gaze that confounds the boundaries between subject and object, Stoken’s eyes open, his face turns to the camera and he slowly rises into her embrace. Evoking Antonio’s assessment of the Duchess as capable of reviving someone ‘That lay in a dead palsy’ with the sweet look ‘She throws upon a man’, the hotel maid’s desiring gaze and the reciprocity she allows magically raise (and arouse) the film director, a reformed, all-seeing character.95

94 95

Felleman, ‘Dirty Pictures’, 31. 1.1.196–7. On Webster’s sexual pun, see Daileader, Eroticism on the Renaissance Stage, p. 83.

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The maid’s monologues thus lead to a narrative and noticeably heterosexual and normative resolution of a film which works to erase its ‘queerness’: the maid’s polymorphous desires, hinted at in her cannibalism and connection with Claude, are no longer at the forefront here. Focussing the audience’s attention firmly on the problem of the gaze, this ending once more uses The Duchess of Malfi as a point of entry for a reflection about desire and power in the medium of film. Insofar as the resolution seems to hinge on the hotel maid’s heterosexual desiring gaze rendering her acquiescent to her own objectification – a point made self-consciously obvious in her assertion that she ‘violat[ed her]self the way [the man] would have violated [her]’ – that resolution fails to satisfy. It simply doubles the ultimately self-destructive logic whereby cannibals acquiesce to their own consumption: it may point a way out of the impasse created by the colonial/elitist binary opposition of civilised self and abject other, but the price paid is self-annihilation. A similarly circular self-cancellation is also there in the allusion to the Duchess’s ability to revive a man ‘That lay in a dead palsy’, which preposterously sends the viewer back to the beginning of The Duchess of Malfi, proposing that the Duchess’s desiring look, for which she is punished, is the solution to the oppression she is suffering. Mutuality happens at the expense of the woman. Like Merlet’s Artemisia, whose ‘feminist’ project so controversially hinged on translating rape into consensual sex and made the female artist look through her master’s velo (the Renaissance painter’s equivalent to the camera lens), Hotel seems ultimately unable to transcend the structures it attacks. Although Figgis privileges male over female nudity, it is still the female body that remains the erotic object of the gaze, above all in the lesbian scenes that are arguably meant to show a rebellion against such objectification and that lead to a narrative dead-end which cancels out their potential challenge to dominant structures. It is no coincidence that Hotel’s most explicit critique of the cinematic gaze is contained in the words of the hotel maid, the only words in the film to have been scripted by Figgis himself.96 The critique of the director’s controlling male gaze ventriloquises the director’s own words: in Hotel, no female subject, whether the Duchess or the maid, actually achieves sexual or artistic autonomy.

Trespassers: the preposterous aesthetic of Hotel as a contemporary Jacobean film I want to return, at this point, to my contention that, following in Jarman’s footsteps, Figgis’s film is self-consciously employing a contemporary 96

The uncut monologue is reproduced in In the Dark, pp. 184–5.

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Jacobean aesthetic which is intrinsically preposterous, a mode of expression that belongs to the general category of ‘trespassers’. Associated by Puttenham with ‘vicious’ and ‘undecent’ modes of speaking that may signal transgressive desires, and in its alliance with cannibalism’s erasure of boundaries and threat to the symbolic order and the self, that aesthetic, I have suggested, also belongs to the realm of the abject. Figgis’s introduction of the trope of cannibalism enables him to portray cultural consumption and production in a positive light that evokes Montaigne’s vision of the act of literal cannibalism as one of civilised exchange and the act of literary cannibalism as a precondition for the production of new works. That same trope, however, is also what makes it difficult, if not impossible, for his film to escape the accusation of indecency, foulness and abjection. Hotel, while condemning the film industry for the manner in which it polices female desire and artistic expression and is reliant on the transformation of the (desiring) female gaze into an erotic spectacle of heterosexual, bisexual or lesbian desire for the benefit of a male director/viewer, cannot, in the end, fully escape the self-cancelling logic of cannibalism. Figgis’s difficulty is that he is working from within the structures and culture which he is seeking to subvert. Bound within a mode of film creation and projection which is preposterous in that it continually imposes outdated technology on newer media and the conventional narrative mode of montage on Figgis’s preferred use of ‘collage’, and unable, it seems, to transcend the alternatives of fetishistic scopophilia and voyeurism, Figgis’s response is to expose the problems he confronts by adopting a dual strategy of self-reflexivity and self-vilification.97 In view of the self-criticism that is embedded in Hotel, it is no wonder that Figgis strays beyond the ‘tollerable inough’ disorder of the preposterous and embraces modes of presentation which Puttenham condemns as ‘alwayes intollerable and such as cannot be vsed with any decencie, but are euer vndecent’, that is, abject.98 Unlike Shakespeare in Love, to return to that intertext, where the international cast all make an effort to speak in a ‘Shakespearean’, that is, Received Pronunciation, voice, Hotel makes no effort to harmonise even the strongest Italian and Spanish accents, resulting in what Puttenham terms ‘barbarousnesse’. Instead of the linear structure of Madden’s film, Figgis’s split screens juxtaposes different sequences that are not necessarily temporally related (Puttenham’s ‘incongruitie’), and his 97 98

Peter Keough, ‘Leaving Montage: Mike Figgis Breaks Hollywood’s Time Code’, Boston Phoenix, 15 May 2000, http://tinyurl.com/clkxc6a. Puttenham, The Arte of English Poesie, 3:208.

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near-identical repetitions of scenes introduce pleonastic redundancy (Puttenham’s ‘surplusage’). Hotel, as its reviewers insistently complain and Figgis highlights, is ‘An achingly pretentious slab of total nonsense’99 (Puttenham’s ‘fonde affectation’ and ‘extreme darknesse’), and its actors ‘shout and use the F-word as much as possible’ (Puttenham’s ‘vnshamefast or figure of foule speech’).100 Openly disenchanted with the conventional cinema he lambasts, Figgis’s Hotel unearths Webster’s Duchess of Malfi to expose the would-be elite’s and mainstream’s cultural consumption as a form of cannibalism and its efforts to make Renaissance literature more ‘digestible’ as the creation of tasteless fast food, which is not particularly easily digestible, to boot. The ‘Jacobean’, as in the late twentieth-century revivals analysed by Bennett, is coupled with everything Puttenham finds ‘vicious’ and ‘vndecent’ to make it function ‘as a signifier bound to represent psychopathic violence and deviant desires’.101 Contrary to the revivals discussed by Bennett, however, Figgis’s Hotel is not underpinned by latent nostalgia for a ‘gentle’ Shakespeare, nor does he wish to deny the historical specificity of his Jacobean pre-text in the manner of, for example, Baz Luhrmann’s anachronistic Romeo+Juliet (1996). To the cultural heritage which screen Shakespeares from Branagh to Luhrmann and Madden invoke and rely on, Figgis opposes cultural disinheritance: his actors are not familiar with Webster, read the play in three different editions and are nervous about their interpretation of it. Employing the preposterous contemporary Jacobean aesthetic, Figgis makes of Webster not only a contemporary, but a ‘new’ author, an author who is not yet read, whom one would like to interview, whose script may not be satisfactory, but whose text has to be studied attentively. If Hotel is a film ‘about’ how to produce a fast-food McMalfi for a contemporary audience, Figgis’s use of the preposterous contemporary Jacobean aesthetic makes of The Duchess of Malfi a play ‘about’ the making of Hotel, ‘about’ man’s control of transgressive female sexuality in the medium of film. 99 100 101

Review of ‘Hotel’ by the Hollywood Reporter quoted in Figgis, In the Dark, p. 205. Puttenham, The Arte of English Poesie, 3:208–15. Puttenham, The Arte of English Poesie, 3:93; Bennett, Performing Nostalgia, p. 93.

chapter 3

Third Cinema, urban regeneration and heritage Shakespeare in Alex Cox’s Revengers Tragedy

. . . There were all these other books on shelves all around me – big, leather-bound olde bookes from the previous century. So I dragged down this two or three volume collection called The Works of Cyril Tourneur, Gent. and started browsing through it. And in among the poems and rather undistinguished plays was this one called Alex Cox1 REVENGERS TRAGEDY.

Alex Cox’s Revengers Tragedy, first imagined in an Oxford college library in 1976, filmed in Liverpool in summer 2001, edited at the time of the 9/11 attacks and released in 2002, shares many of the concerns of Hotel. Revengers, too, is a film that is ostentatiously self-conscious about its medium and genres, and that employs allusive casting that connects it with a range of contemporary films and styles. The overwhelming concern, in Hotel, with the problem of the objectification of women by the medium of film is recast, in Revengers, into a preoccupation with the oppressions (based on race, gender and class) on which power relies and which the media exploit in their consolidation of such power. With Cox, too, there is a distinct sense that his self-reflexive concern with the medium of film results from earlier professional experiences within the Hollywood studio-based system; as for Figgis, working outside the confines of the studio system gives Cox far greater control over his material and the freedom to use the Jacobean pre-text of The Revenger’s Tragedy as a means to explore the dominant modes of literary adaptation at the end of the twentieth century. Cox, however, brings to his critique of mainstream cinema’s conservative portrayals of the past a more urgent challenge to contemporary British politics than Figgis, bringing him closer to Jarman’s combination of cinematic experiment with political critique. Revengers’s political urgency, which is tangibly rooted in 1980s punk counter-culture, is concentrated on Liverpool as a place in which an imperialist past underpins present decay 1

Alex Cox. ‘Production Information’, RevengersTragedy.com, http://tinyurl.com/com7nnv.

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and regeneration. Revengers, with its disused warehouses in the Liverpool docklands through which disaffected youths roam in search of casual violence, recalls the desolate cityscapes populated by gangs of punks of Jarman’s Jubilee. Meanwhile, Cox’s use of videotape in post-production to create various levels of pixellation and colour saturation appears to be a development, using turn-of-the-millennium technology, of Jarman’s and the New Romantics’ experimental use of Super-8 footage and video in the 1980s.2 In a departure from Cox’s earlier films, Revengers thus shares in Jarman’s ‘aesthetic of visual plenitude’ that distinguished Jarman’s films from the contemporary film avant-garde’s investment in formalism and gritty social realism and that sets Revengers apart from the film I consider here as its Shakespearean twin, Don Boyd’s Lear spin-off My Kingdom (2001).3 There is also more than just a touch of Jarman in Revengers’s radical reconfiguration of Middleton’s text, which involves major deletions (including Vindice’s second disguise), re-attribution of lines, strengthening of female characters, and the addition of bridging passages and occasional colloquial exclamations. Cox feels connected to Jarman in their common struggle against ‘the well-made film’, an endeavour that involves ‘introduc[ing] a Brechtian dimension to increasingly straitjacketed storytelling forms’.4 While Cox does not see himself as Jarman’s straightforward successor, there is a striking similarity between their approaches and their combination of a passion for early modern drama with punk. Since completing his law degree at Oxford and leaving England to study film at UCLA in 1977, Cox has trodden an idiosyncratic path and created films that are so diverse and ‘anarchic’ as to lead Steven Paul Davies to conclude that ‘his films aren’t part of a consistent body of work’.5 Having failed to secure Hollywood funding for Scousers, his 1979 screenplay for a film set in Liverpool, because it was too ‘parochial’ and ‘too special to have broad enough appeal in the American market’, Cox wrote and directed the American punk-cum-science-fiction comedy Repo Man with Universal Studios funding in 1984.6 He won international acclaim with Sid and Nancy (1985) before taking a stand against US intervention in Latin America in Walker (1987). This stridently anti-imperialist film is an 2 4 6

O’Pray, ‘New Romanticism’. 3 Galt, Pretty, p. 78. Alex Cox, ‘This Is Indecent’, Guardian, 19 February 2004. 5 Davies, Alex Cox, pp. 16, 184. Letter from Richard A. Roth at Twentieth Century-Fox Film Corporation to Alex Cox dated 8 June 1978; letter from Robert Lovenheim at River City Productions (LA) to Alex Cox dated 18 July 1978: Alex Cox – Coll. 174 Correspondence Box 1 Fl. 1, NMM.

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important precursor of Revengers in that it represents Cox’s first filmic reflection on the role played by early modern drama in Western culture. The film’s anti-American politics resulted in Cox’s being ‘definitively blacklisted by the American studios’.7 Cox’s antagonistic relationship with Hollywood studios and his subsequent experiences as a ‘film anarchist’ or ‘radical filmmaker’ in Mexico bring to his Revengers Tragedy a broader range of aesthetic and political influences than those animating either Figgis’s Hotel or Jarman’s Edward II.8 Cox’s Revengers Tragedy therefore needs to be understood, on the one hand, as part of this director’s long-standing preoccupation with the medium of film and his movement from Hollywood to Liverpool via years of immersion in Latin American political cinema. On the other hand, it comes out of Cox’s persistent fascination with Jacobean drama and its relationship to present-day film genres and politics. Rather than simply antagonistic to the heritage Shakespeare industry, Cox, who has steered clear of watching many of the most successful Shakespeare films of the 1990s,9 tacitly absorbs some of the stylistic features and generic trends of the more off-beat Shakespeare films and the RSC’s Jacobean revivals, mixing this with acerbic parody of Branagh’s 1996 Hamlet. In this ability to mix admiration with criticism, his film replicates the source, play’s distinctively oxymoronic style, which yokes together opposite attitudes towards its Shakespearean revenge tragedy precursors. Middleton’s delight in syntactical and rhetorical figures of violent compression serves Cox’s endeavour to weld together his progressive views and wistful investment in ‘old’ Labour politics, his loathing of commerce and the need to yield to its dictates, his affection for Liverpool and his dismay at its imperialist past and impoverished present. In Cox’s hands, Middleton is reconfigured as a guerrilla fighter opposing British and US imperialist history and policies, and his play becomes a disillusioned commentary on Tony Blair’s ‘cool Britannia’, with its media-oriented gloss and urban regeneration schemes covering up the ravages of unemployment and inequalities between Britain’s impoverished North and affluent South.10

7 8 9 10

Davies, Alex Cox, p. 104. Cox comments on his blacklisting in an interview with Dennis Lim: ‘Alex Cox, Revolutionary’, Los Angeles Times, 17 February 2008. The epithets are derived from the subtitles of the only two in-depth studies of Cox’s work, the first by Davies and the second by Cox himself (X Films). Alex Cox, message to the author, 2 February 2012. On ‘cool Britannia’, see Chapman, Past and Present, p. 312.

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Shakespeare in Granada: Cox, Third Cinema and the archetype of the revolutionary revenger Walker (1987) represents both the culmination of Cox’s involvement in Hollywood-sponsored filmmaking and a radical point of departure, as his determination to ‘be revolutionary in style, as well as purpose’ suggests.11 Cox used First Cinema funds (Universal Studios’s budget of $5,800,000) to pursue the anti-imperialist goal of local emancipation of Latin America’s Third Cinema, ‘co-opt[ing] Hollywood in a bid to assemble one of the fiercest single cinematic assaults on US foreign policy during the second cold war’.12 Supported by a production and art direction team that was largely composed of Latin Americans,13 Cox absorbed the energies and politics of a cinematic movement that was born out of the momentum generated by the Cuban revolution in 1959 and that spread across Latin America. The broad aim of Third Cinema, a term that has gradually become a more ‘elastic signifier’, was to create ‘a cinema that awakens/ clarifies and strengthens a revolutionary consciousness; a cinema that disturbs, shocks and weakens reactionary ideas; a cinema that is anti-bourgeois at a national level and anti-imperialist at an international level’.14 Such a cinema is defined by its socialist politics and by its refusal to abide by mainstream cinematic practices, using ‘techniques designed to puncture the slick, closed facade [sic] of Hollywood’s classical style of cinematography’.15 Cox’s committed socialist politics and his view of himself as an independent filmmaker and ‘revolutionary fighter, in a prolonged popular war’ that is analogous to the struggle of ‘the Zapatistas . . . against patriarchal systems of control in Mexico’ aligns his aims with those of Third Cinema. At the same time, his passion for American genre films and what Philip Franks terms his ‘obsess[ion] with all things American’, as well as his preference for Mexican art cinema (what Third Cinema practitioners have dubbed ‘Second Cinema’), technically situates him outside this movement.16 11 12

13

14 15 16

Cox, X Films, p. 146. Shaw, ‘Our Man in Managua’, 209. Budget information from IMDB, http://tinyurl.com/6afbue. Cox’s interest in Third Cinema goes back to his time at UCLA, where he and Lorenzo O’Brien set up a Third World Film Festival (Poster for Third World Film Festival, ‘UCLA Alex Cox + Lorenzo O’Brien Screenings’, Envelope: Alex Cox – Coll. Box 4, NMM). The film was produced by Peruvian American Lorenzo O’Brien and Mexican Angel Flores Marini; it was co-edited by Mexican Carlos Puente [Ortega] and the art direction was shared between Peruvian Cecilia Montiel and Mexican Jorge Saìnz; extras were hired locally in Nicaragua. Crofts, ‘Reconceptualizing National Cinema(s)’, p. 857; and Wayne, Political Film, p. 6. Taylor, ‘Third World Cinema’, p. 332. Cox, X Films, pp. 1, 2; and Franks quoted in Davies, Alex Cox, p. 15.

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Cox’s Walker is ostensibly a biopic of the life of American filibuster William Walker, who led a group of mercenaries to Nicaragua in 1855, where he took the position of President and adopted an ever more despotic style of government. Yet the film’s assertion of historical authenticity in the title-sequence tag-line ‘this is a true story’ soon disintegrates in the service of a contemporary Latin American political agenda. By the time a US marine helicopter lands on the city square of Managua to evacuate the remaining American mercenaries while news crews film the military operation and the corpses of Nicaraguans lie on the steps of the cathedral, it is clear that the Reagan administration’s intervention against the socialist Sandinista Government of Nicaragua in the 1980s has airlifted Walker’s nineteenth-century invasion of Nicaragua into the present. The film may start off as an apparent celebration of Walker’s liberal values and support for democracy, but it soon begins to expose the imperialist greed and powerhungriness of its protagonist, who becomes the past embodiment of present oppression. In an improvised performance which Cox decided to integrate into his film, Ed Harris’s Walker, at the climax of the battle, steps into the pulpit of the cathedral converted into a makeshift hospital and addresses the Nicaraguan extras huddled in the nave: You all might think that there will come a day when America will leave Nicaragua alone. Well, I am here to tell you that day will never happen. Because it is our duty to be here. It is our duty to control you people. So no matter what you do – no matter how hard you fight – we’ll be back – time after time – forever.17

The preposterous knowledge Walker exhibits here makes of the film ‘a text in which one history interrogates another’, in which the past critically replays the present in a manner that is remarkably similar to Jarman’s harnessing of Renaissance history for present political purposes.18 Indeed, when Cox came under pressure from Universal ‘to remove the anachronisms that peppered the script, and that were intended to point up the political message of the historical story’, Cox invoked ‘Jarman’s latest work, Caravaggio’ in his defence against the imposition of ‘kitchen-sink naturalism’ on his film.19 Significantly, refractions of Shakespearean performances play a small but important role in Cox’s preposterous Latin American history. Most obviously, as Walker is about to lose his grip on the country he has destroyed, 17 18 19

For an account of the improvisation, see Cox, X Films, p. 160. Sobchak, ‘Surge and Splendor’, p. 318. Alex Cox, ‘This Is Indecent’, Guardian, 19 February 2004.

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Cox introduces an incongruous scene in which Walker watches a performance of Julius Caesar in Granada’s central square while all around him people are dying of cholera and Walker’s friends bear news of looting, disease and war. While the punk bricolage of disparate cultural references and historical periods highlights Walker’s total disconnection from his surroundings and his importation of an alien culture to Central America, it soon becomes obvious that the shallow pretence of democracy in Shakespeare’s tragedy reflects Walker’s off-stage despotism. Muttering Caesar’s lines about Cassius’s dangerously ‘lean and hungry look’,20 Walker asks one of the actors to shoot the brother who has challenged his authority. He then steps onto the stage to declare that he will introduce slavery into Nicaragua in order to solve the country’s problems.21 Cox’s comment that ‘to mix Shakespeare with slavery, cholera and one’s brother’s murder is surely to tempt fate’ rather undersells the moment, which illustrates how Shakespearean protagonists and lines can be harnessed for particularly nefarious causes, wrested out of their theatrical contexts and transposed into a political arena where they motivate and authorise the colonial and racial oppressions the film so stringently critiques.22 Less obviously, Shakespeare is also invoked through Cox’s cinematic style. A reference to Akira Kurosawa’s Ran (1985) – which Cox repeatedly watched while filming Walker – is discernible in the scene in which Walker walks unharmed through a full-blown street battle as everyone around him is shot dead. This scene concludes in a fiendishly complex long take of Walker defiantly playing the piano, arguing with his men and shooting a dissenter that alludes to the Lear character’s surreal survival amid a hail of arrows and bullets in Kurosawa’s film.23 There is a self-reflexive knowingness in the copy, within a pastiche of a Western, of a scene from a film that blends Shakespeare’s King Lear with the Japanese genre of the jidai-geki epic (or Samurai period film) and the Hollywood Western.24 This is a Shakespeare who has been distilled into a transcultural generic archetype that is shared by early modern English drama, Japanese samurai lore and Italian-American Westerns alike.

20 21

22 23 24

Caesar 1.2.195. Surviving screenplays at the NMM (29 October 1986 (63–6), 7 January 1987 (54A–6) and 20 February 1987 (58–60): Alex Cox – Coll. 174 WALKER [1987, Pressman-Incine] Box 2) reveal the growing importance of the Shakespearean material for Cox and his screenwriter, Rudy Wurlitzer. Cox, X Films, p. 158. See Cox quoted in Davies, Alex Cox, p. 92. The single take lasts 1 minute and 24 seconds. Griggs, Screen Adaptations, p. 79.

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Through Kurosawa, Cox thus imports into Walker his ongoing preoccupation with the fundamental kinship between early modern tragedy and the genre of the Western. In Cox’s view, these two ‘tremendously popular art forms’ share an ability to portray unsympathetic heroes; they both flourished ‘in times of ferment’ and were ‘progressive’ in that ‘they presented images of radical social upheaval, of the overthrow of corrupt systems, and of the triumph – in some shape or form, however messy – of justice’.25 The film’s stylistic invocation of the Shakespeare film in a scene that ruptures Hollywood conventions through its surrealism and use of the long take (the plano sequencia Cox uses to defy Hollywood’s formulaic editing style)26 gestures towards an identification of the generic conventions and subversive politics of the Spaghetti Western with early modern tragedy. It is this association of the Western with early modern tragedy, mixed with surrealism and some elements of the Shakespeare film, that becomes a distinguishing feature of Revengers.

From Mexico to Liverpool via Stratford-upon-Avon: local revengers and the global film industry In light of this perceived connection between the Western and early modern tragedy, it is hardly surprising to find that, straight after the screening of Walker at the Havana Film Festival in 1987, Cox travelled home to England where, together with designer Cecilia Montiel, he went to see the RSC’s latest production: The Revenger’s Tragedy, directed by Di Trevis.27 The production was among the first of a number of stagings, in British mainstream theatre, to make liberal use of signifiers derived from British counterculture (especially Jarman’s trademark mixture of punk with high camp) to associate Jacobean tragedies with the ‘decadence’ that had been praised by late nineteenth-century aesthetes and decried by twentieth-century moralist critics.28 Starring Antony Sher ‘with a bright red, semi-punk hairdo’ as Vindice opposite Ian Barritt as ‘the dissipated, be-rouged old Duke’,29 the production portrayed the Duke’s clan as extravagantly camp, reflecting Jonathan Dollimore’s canonisation, in 1984, of the play as a prime exemplar of Jacobean ‘subversive black camp’.30 Played for laughs wherever possible, 25 26 27 28 29

Cox, 10,000 Ways to Die, pp. 320–5. See Cox, X Films, p. 92; and also Cox quoted in Davies, Alex Cox, p. 128. See Cox’s two accounts of the theatre visit in X Films, p. 172 and in Davies, Alex Cox, p. 98. I discuss nineteenth- and twentieth-century critical responses to Jacobean tragedy in Jacobean Drama, pp. 11–22. J. P., ‘The Revenger’s Tragedy’, 87. 30 Dollimore, Radical Tragedy, p. 149.

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and including an elaborate scene in which Vindice used Gloriana’s skull as a puppet, the production also made prominent use of the Swan stage’s trapdoor to facilitate Vindice’s entrances and exits.31 Its stage manager was Gary Davy, who was to do the casting for Cox’s Revengers Tragedy, a film designed by Montiel, twelve years later.32 In Cox’s Revengers, Vindici’s repeated use of Gloriana’s skull as a ventriloquist’s dummy no less than the film’s remarkably theatrical use of trapdoors are obvious refractions of the stage production.33 The film’s several plano sequencias, too, highlight its theatricality by allowing the viewer to choose which group of characters to focus on within Cox’s busy mise-en-scène. In terms of ‘look’, Cox’s indebtedness to the RSC stage production is particularly obvious in the way the punk look associated with Vindice in Trevis’s staging is projected onto the Duke’s camp decadent court to distinguish more sharply between the revenger and his enemies. In Revengers, camp – which in Jarman’s Edward II serves the purpose of stressing the performativity of gender roles and is dissociated from the punk look of Jubilee and The Last of England – is welded together with punk style and transformed into a signifier of the decadence and corruption that needs to be purged from the body politic. Camp – most strikingly in Marc Warren’s outrageous Supervacuo and Eddie Izzard’s Lussurioso, a performance that feeds on Izzard’s reputation as a transvestite stand-up comedian – blurs the sharp delineation of genders on which the starkly patriarchal order of The Revenger’s Tragedy relies. In the figures of Junior, Spurio and Ambitioso, camp is combined with the tattooing and piercing that is a legacy of punk and that, in its mixing of ink and metal with skin, ‘violate[s] the integrity of the body’, subverting the ‘deep-rooted ideal of “the natural”’ that lies at the heart of the “Western body-image”’.34 In their highly visible corrosion of boundaries and out-ofplaceness, as Paul Sweetman has argued, tattoos and piercings alike are akin to what anthropologist Mary Douglas would classify as dirt; these punk signifiers, no less than the effeminate camp of Supervacuo and Lussurioso, thus represent a danger to the social order, a pollution which it is the duty of Christopher Eccleston’s shaven-headed, virile working-class revenger to cleanse. Conspicuously, in an environment where body art seems the norm, neither Vindici nor Andrew Schofield’s Carlo/Hippolito are pierced 31 32 33 34

The Revenger’s Tragedy, dir. Di Trevis, Royal Shakespeare Company, Swan Theatre, Stratford-uponAvon, 1987–8, RSC Archive, Shakespeare Birthplace Trust, Stratford-upon-Avon, video recording. Cox, X Films, p. 249. On the film’s ‘parodic sense of theatricality’, see Wray, ‘Revengers Tragedy’, 547. Sweetman, ‘Only Skin Deep?’, p. 177.

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or tattooed, with the latter’s high visibility vest and the former’s working clothes standing in obvious contrast to the rich and colourful fabrics in which the courtly characters dress, as they did in Trevis’s production. Contrary to Jerome de Groot’s view that ‘Cox’s film is certainly a long way from RSC or Globe versions of early modern drama’,35 the RSC’s The Revenger’s Tragedy, with its dual deployment of camp and punk, provides a direct theatrical model for Revengers that uses the signifiers of British counter-culture for the sort of structured opposition of the outlaw-revenger and the corrupt representatives of the law which Cox admires in Kurosawa’s Shakespeare films and the Western. The production, Cox recalls, . . . stoked my enthusiasm for radical art. On New Year’s Eve, I wrote two quotations in the back of my appointment book: ‘No one has ever prospered or died happily outside the law’ – the words of G. D. Hadfield, US Marine Corps Commanding Officer, to A. C. Sandino [the revolutionary fighter after whom the Sandinista party is named], Nicaragua, 12 July 1927; and Vindici’s line from Revengers, ‘Great men were gods if beggars couldn’t kill ’em!’36

For the next decade, while he put on the back burner the idea he first had as a student to mount a production or film of The Duchess of Malfi, and while he had to look for funding in places other than Hollywood, Cox dedicated himself to exploring the tension between these two sentiments in his Mexico-based films.37 El Patrullero (1991) and Death and the Compass (1992 BBC TV; 1996 feature film), as a result, are films in which Cox’s affinity with Third Cinema politics and styles is infused with the contradictory impulses that animate early modern revenge tragedy. Both films bear traces of Cox’s immersion in Mexican art cinema during this period and are examples of the ‘cross-cultural pollination’ between Mexican film and Hollywood that Cox observes in the work of his Mexican peers.38 Both stay firmly on the Mexican side of the border, however, and go against mainstream film editing practices in their prominent use of plano sequencia shots to portray worlds in which lone revengers take on the forces of the corrupt law. Death and the Compass, in particular, pitches Christopher Eccleston’s gangster revenger against Peter Boyle’s 35 37 38

de Groot, ‘Alex Cox’s Revengers Tragedy’, para. 2. 36 Cox, X Films, p. 172. For information on the proposed production of The Duchess of Malfi, see Davies, Alex Cox, p. 14; and Cox, X Films, p. 108. Cox quoted in Davies, Alex Cox, p. 123. Cox even played a supporting role in the art film La Reina de la Noche (1994) directed by Arturo Ripstein, the director who started his career working with Buñuel and who has the strongest acknowledged influence on Cox’s use of plano sequencia. For Cox’s view on Mexican cinema, see his ‘Roads to the South’.

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obsessive detective, giving Eccleston, an actor known for his ability to convey ‘a whiff of . . . hungry discontent with an unjust status quo’ a first stab at the archetypal role he was to play in Revengers.39 Cox portrays a world in which the forces of authority do not represent a positive alternative to the gangster who seeks to topple them. The film’s revolutionary impulses are expressed through stylistic choices, such as the jump cuts that draw attention to the literal gaps that puncture the attempt by Miguel Sandoval’s inefficient Police Commissioner to give a coherent account of the events we witness in the film. For Cox, the Mexican locations ground the film in a society and culture in which archetypes of criminality and law play out their generic game in a distinctly local key. Cox’s stress on the local in his Mexican films and in Revengers must be understood in the context of his desire to resist the homogenising pressure of an increasingly global film industry led by the six biggest studio producers-distributors, who had, by the 1990s, started to buy up many of the smaller independent film production companies.40 For the British film industry, the pressure exerted by these companies and by the centripetal power of London as the country’s financial and cultural centre, with its Pinewood and Shepperton studios, resulted in many British films being targeted principally at the North American market and in their postproduction taking place in London even if they were shot in the regions. The emphasis on the local, and specifically on local resistance to global cultural homogeneity, gains in strength in two of Cox’s projects that lead up to Revengers. The first is a pop video of ‘Too Real’ for The Levellers, which includes a cameo appearance from Liverpool actor Margi Clarke, the Hannah/Gratiana of Revengers, whose roles in Letter to Brezhnev41 (1985) and the Liverpool-based soap Brookside (1982–2003) made her an iconic representative of the feisty and resilient working-class Liverpudlian woman. The second is Three Businessmen (1998), a feature film scripted and produced by Cox’s partner and close collaborator Tod Davies, with whom he founded Exterminating Angel Production (the name is a nod to Buñuel’s Mexican film of that name). Both projects, crucially, are located in Liverpool and provide an important bridge to Revengers. As Cox himself puts it: 39 40

41

McFarlane, ‘The More Things Change’, p. 278. On the concentration of Hollywood studios’ power in production, exhibition and distribution in the United Kingdom, see, e.g.: Street, British National Cinema, pp. 18–19; and Schatz, ‘Studio System’, p. 31. For an account of the pressures on British regional film industries, see Redfern, ‘Connecting the Regional and the Global’. Dir. Chris Bernard.

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It is this ability of Liverpool to provide an ‘alternative narrative’ that makes it a particularly apt location for filming a play that itself provides an alternative narrative to the dominant power, the ‘“official” storyline’ Revengers associates with mainstream films in general and heritage Shakespeare in particular. Cox’s critique of consumerism and emphasis on the location of Liverpool is especially marked in Three Businessmen, into which Cox injects Third Cinema style and politics. Behind the deceptively simple plot – two businessmen meet in a Liverpool hotel, search for food, lose their way, meet a third businessman and finally get their breakfast – lies an indictment of consumerism and globalisation. The film’s central conceit, that the two businessmen, played by Alex Cox and Miguel Sandoval, never notice that each time they use public transport, they end up in a different location, demands that the viewer be the more attentive to the specificities that distinguish each location even as global brands on advertisement boards and shop windows impose uniformity. The one location that pervades the film is Liverpool: everywhere he goes, Cox’s character symbolically carries a promotional book about Liverpool. The city’s personal meaningfulness to Cox is thus imported into the film; as he points out in the DVD commentary, the film’s first location, the Picton Reading Room and Hornby library, is where Cox used to go as an adolescent. Even though the library is, as Cox admits, ‘a magnificent building’, the shot aims at making it ‘look a bit depressing’ instead of the ‘vibrant, exciting Paris of the North that it really is’.43 It is this particularly Liverpudlian paradox, the city’s propensity towards being either portrayed in the media as ‘depressed’ or hyped, by its PR consultants, as ‘vibrant’ and ‘exciting’, which is central to the city’s image and the way Cox engages with the location in Revengers.

42 43

Cox, X Films, p. 271. Alex Cox, Director’s Commentary, Three Businessmen (dir. Alex Cox, ILC, 2001, DVD).

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‘Liverpool – drive with care’: Vindici, Lear and urban regeneration in Revengers and My Kingdom (2003) Liverpool, and the politics that have shaped it over the past decades, if not centuries, is central to the two early modern tragedies filmed in the city in the summer of 2001: Don Boyd’s adaptation of King Lear as My Kingdom and Cox’s Revengers Tragedy. Although Cox was aware that Boyd, who had produced Jarman’s Tempest in 1979, had directed My Kingdom just a few weeks before the beginning of the Revengers shoot, there is no sense that Boyd’s film directly influenced Cox’s. This makes the similarities between the two films the more startling, suggesting a fascinating congruence between the politics of low-budget ‘New Wave’ Shakespeare and of early modern drama on screen at the start of the twenty-first century. Viewing the two films side by side brings to prominence patterns that are more difficult to discern in each of the films on its own. Both films react against the cinematic big-budget Shakespeares of the 1990s and share an affinity with British films of that decade that focus on the urban gangster and work towards the ‘re-articulation of working-class identity through its relation to national and regional stereotypes and geographical marginalisation’ – that is, with films that use the gangster film as a generic model through which to voice their critique of the state of the nation.44 Shakespeare’s King Lear and Middleton’s The Revenger’s Tragedy become vehicles for incisive critiques of the histories of racial and sexual exploitation which continue to shape the urban landscape of Liverpool. My Kingdom, Courtney Lehmann shows, is a film that ‘performs its own kind of urban renovation project’ against a backdrop of ‘a city that has become synonymous with the spectre of long-term, cataclysmic decline as one of the earliest casualties of the globalization of capital’.45 Upon the death of his wife Mandy (Lynn Redgrave), who is killed in a mugging, the Irish gangster Sandeman (Richard Harris) splits his drug empire between his two elder daughters, one the madam of an upmarket brothel in Liverpool’s renovated Albert Dock, the other the manager of a local football club. The daughters turn on their father and evict him into Liverpool’s urban heath of streets and docklands, where he experiences the effects of organised crime first-hand. It is only when he has lost his cherished grandson Jaime (a cross between Lear’s Fool and Cordelia) that Sandeman is 44 45

Hallam, ‘Film, Class and National Identity’, p. 268. For the ways in which the British gangster film offers ‘a degree of social and political commentary’, see Hill, ‘Allegorising the Nation’, p. 160. Lehmann, ‘Postnostalgic Renaissance’, p. 73.

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reconciled with his youngest daughter Jo (Emma Catherwood) and wreaks his revenge. Jo, the Cordelia figure who wants nothing to do with her father’s business, embodies the city’s struggle to free itself from its criminality and the need to reconcile itself with its violent past: having worked as a prostitute to feed her crack habit, she seeks a route away from the exploitation and ravaging of human bodies, whether through torture, drugs or prostitution. The first timorous steps into the future with which the film concludes are predicated on Sandeman coming to terms with his violent past and with the human misery on which his empire and the regeneration of Liverpool are built. Boyd’s vision of Liverpool remains one of despair at the cycles of violence and revenge that consume its youth. Unlike, say, the pleasures associated with the recognition of well-known vistas of Blenheim Palace afforded in Kenneth Branagh’s Hamlet (1996) or of the nostalgically reconstructed urban squalor of the London of Shakespeare in Love (1999), My Kingdom exploits the detail of the Liverpool location, with shots of the Anglican Cathedral and the lavish interiors of the Sandeman family’s houses that contrast with the urban ‘heath’ of the docks, streets and grubby cafés, to generate a sense of dis-ease and displeasure at the discrepancy between rich and poor, appearance and reality. As one of the film’s revengers says when his victim-to-be appeals to him as ‘a good man’: ‘It’s true, and good men don’t kill. But I feel bad inside.’ Such a recognition of the crass divides between rich and poor, the cyclical and self-cancelling qualities of revenge and of the importance of Liverpool as a city based on racial and sexual exploitation is also central to Cox’s Revengers. Tellingly prefaced by the self-cancelling motto ‘He who seeks revenge should dig two graves’, Cox’s film, too, relies on the conventions of the urban gangster film to portray the Duke’s family. Christopher Eccleston’s Vindici, by contrast, while also associated with hip 1990s British crime cinema (from his role in Shallow Grave (1994)), is recognisably a development of Cox’s Mexican revengers. Like Red Scharlach in Death and the Compass, Eccleston’s Vindici is a trickster figure of popular justice and retribution that owes its existence to Third Cinema’s glorification of the bandit/guerrilla fighter. That cinematic inheritance is combined with an equally strong kinship with the lone revenger of the Spaghetti Western.46 46

On the bandit/guerrilla fighter in Third Cinema, see Wayne, Political Film, p. 3. Revengers’s designer, Cecilia Montiel, achieved fame for the design of the Mexican Desperado (1995) and its US re-make The Mask of Zorro (1998). See Maria Marchesi’s analysis of direct correspondences between Revengers and specific Spaghetti Westerns (Marchesi, ‘The Duke’s Versace Sunglasses’).

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To this heady mix, Cox adds a good dose of the stylisation and surrealism he owes to Kurosawa and Buñuel, giving the film an idiosyncratic style that sharply sets it apart from My Kingdom’s realism and the contemporary Shakespeare film more generally, whether arthouse or mainstream. The premise of Revengers Tragedy, as the opening sequence Cox added to satisfy the investors clarifies, is the obliteration of London due to the impact of a comet that has destroyed the south-east of England and large parts of France. Liverpool, as a consequence, has graduated from the status of Britain’s ‘second city’ to becoming its capital.47 The film, the opening sequence implies, will represent the endgame of the age-old conflict between Britain’s North and South, which is represented by Duke Tourneur’s family of London gangsters who have usurped power in Liverpool. This geographical divide, as Cox points out, shapes his political views and his desire to create films that challenge the ‘dominant culture’: My beliefs are . . . in part down to geography. How can you be from the north of England and also be a Tory? You’d have to be insane! I know that there are right wing people up there but there’s no money. It’s completely poor and backward because all the money is concentrated in the south of England. You have to be rebellious if you’re from the north because we’re at war with the dominant culture. We grew up at war with the dominant culture so it’s natural to remain opposed to the status quo, which, in Britain, is London.48

Cox’s next shot spells out the importance of the location for the viewer. A bus full of bullet holes and corpses swerves towards a burnt-out car before coming to a stop. Inside the bus, a close-up of two death- and gravitydefying clasped hands acts as a thematic marker: the dead white woman on the floor is still holding the hand of the black man on the seat. It is from amongst these corpses that Vindici rises up ‘Like a displaced hero from a spaghetti western’ with a score to settle in Liverpool.49 The battered street sign ‘LIVERPOOL/DRIVE WITH CARE’, which the camera pans over as the driverless bus comes into sight is, at first glance, a wry comment on the diegetic situation; more importantly, however, it alerts the viewer to navigate the location and the precarious racial relations within it with scrupulous attention to local detail. The film assumes in its viewer a familiarity with the geography and history of Liverpool that resists the film’s marketability as an international export. Revengers remains a resolutely local product despite the fact that the 47 49

Cohen, Decline, Renewal and the City, p. 11. 48 Cox quoted in Davies, Alex Cox, p. 11. Minton, ‘The Revenger’s Tragedy in 2002’, p. 134.

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most powerful of the film’s financiers (the British Film Council’s New Cinema Fund, which provided half of the film’s million-pound budget) sought to make the film attractive to American audiences while an additional slice of investment was secured from Cable Hogue, Cox’s Japanese distributor, in return for Japanese rights.50 Cox does not mince his words on the subject of America’s cultural domination: I think the British have a cultural problem because we share the same language as the Americans. We’re inevitably trapped in this dance of death with the Americans and producing films which we think will make them happy. Loutish comedies, gangster films or old Jeeves the butler Merchant Ivory stuff. I hate all that. It’s not about film-making, it’s about producing acceptable pabulum.51

Thoroughly resisting not only American influences but also the pull of London’s established film industry, Revengers was produced by Exterminating Angel Production, together with Margaret Matheson’s Bard Entertainments, which had noticeably specialised in producing independent films depicting tense race relations.52 The screenplay was adapted by Liverpudlian writer Frank Cottrell Boyce, with most actors, extras and crew selected from locals. Even the special effects were entrusted to a Liverpool-based graphics company, with the aim of supporting the development of the city’s fledgling film industry and, thereby, its local economy.53 It is thus part of a much broader attempt, fuelled by the creation of Regional Arts Boards, and supported, after 1995, by film production finance from the National Lottery, to decentralise the British film industry and create local industries in cities like Sheffield, Glasgow and Liverpool.54 As important as the localism in the film’s personnel is Cox’s use of Liverpool locations that encapsulate the contradictions of the city, using, as Lehmann notes, the ‘architectural landmarks to transpose the insurmountable class divisions critiqued by Middleton’s play’.55 Catacombs populated by old women looking after relics and lighting candles in front of images of saints point to the religious divisions within a city that harbours a large proportion of Roman Catholics of Irish descent. Deserted warehouses speak of the urban 50

51 52 53 55

Budget information from Film Council’s Press Release: ‘Film Council’s New Cinema Fund Announces First Projects’, PR Newswire, http://tinyurl.com/cxtoshw. See also Cox, X Films, pp. 272–3. Cox quoted in Davies, Alex Cox, p. 179. Matheson’s best-known film, Antonia’s Line (dir. Marleen Gorris, 1995), is the exception to this rule. Cox, X Films, p. 259. 54 Hallam, ‘Film, Class and National Identity’, pp. 261–5. Lehmann, ‘Performing the “Live”’, p. 203.

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deprivation during the years of Conservative rule under Margaret Thatcher and John Major, when de-industrialisation reduced Liverpool’s employment base by 37 per cent and up to 15 per cent of the city’s properties were derelict or vacant.56 Castiza’s home, which Cottrell Boyce’s screenplay imagines located ‘In the shadow of a rusting, dry-docked SUBMARINE’ in a ‘corrugated metal SHANTY TOWN’ in Birkenhead (an area of significantly greater than average unemployment, deprivation and crime), similarly points towards the extreme economic hardship suffered by working-class Liverpudlians following the closure of many docks and the ghettoisation of the poor.57 The poverty, rich individuality and warmth of her home’s interior décor stands in marked contrast to the impersonal, moneyed spaces inhabited by the Duke and Lussurioso. Meanwhile, Carlo’s poorly furnished room, with its Christian Aid poster and quotation of Archbishop Oscar Romero’s statement ‘Let my death be for the liberation of my people’, identifies Vindici’s family with the politics of resistance of Latin American Marxist liberation theology. In Revengers, the urban heath of Boyd’s My Kingdom becomes a space of human and cultural riches that provides a warm refuge from, and point of resistance to, the tacky wealth and impersonality of the ducal court. The Aintree racecourse on Merseyside, in which Cox stages table football matches and which is one of the film’s recurrent locations, combines a multitude of references. The Royal Box in which the Duke meets his end is, quite fittingly, the box from which the Queen Mother traditionally watched the horse races, importing royal favour into a local sporting competition. Unlike Boyd, Cox was unable to film in an actual football stadium because he had insufficient funds to pay the clubs.58 Both Cox’s substitute Aintree stadium and the football club owned by Sandeman’s daughter in My Kingdom draw on the reputation of Liverpool’s football culture following two high-profile disasters: the crushing of thirty-six Juventus fans escaping from Liverpool supporters in Belgium’s Heysel Stadium in 1985 and the trampling and crushing to death of ninety-six Liverpool football fans in Sheffield’s Hillsborough Stadium in 1989.59 By setting the rape of Antonio’s 56 57

58 59

See: Misselwitz, ‘Liverpool City Profile’, p. 115; and Murden, ‘City of Change and Challenge’, pp. 428–9. Cottrell Boyce, revengers [sic] Tragedy, p. 17. Thanks to Alex Cox for allowing me to cite from the unpublished screenplay. For Birkenhead, see ‘Area Profile: Birkenhead – Housing Market Renewal Area Development Framework’, NewHeartlands, June 2008, http://tinyurl.com/7or3b24, pp. 12–13. Cox, X Films, p. 264. See Murden, ‘City of Change and Challenge’, p. 470. For the official account of the Hillsborough disaster that counters and condemns decades of negative portrayals of Liverpool football fans, see The Report of the Hillsborough Independent Panel (London: The Stationery Office, September 2012), published online at http://hillsborough.independent.gov.uk/repository/report/HIP_report.pdf.

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lady in the tunnels of Aintree, while in the private boxes the men cheer on the table football players, Cox links sexual violence to football, emphasising the equivalence stipulated by Junior between both types of ‘sport’ and the violence they mask (the pun is doubled, in Cottrell Boyce’s script, by Vindici’s suggestion to the Duke that the stadium is a perfect place in which to ‘score’).60 Cox also points towards the connection between football and violence in the early sequence in which Vindici is attacked by local youths: their European designer sportswear bears witness to football trips to the Continent, while their aggression towards ‘cockneys’ references the traditional animosity between local football fans and their London rivals.61 Matching these references to urban poverty and football-related violence are locations that speak of a different Liverpool: the great maritime city of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, with its global trading routes, prestige and wealth based on the ‘triangular’ slave trade that saw merchant ships deliver goods to Africa, where they picked up a cargo of slave labourers whom they shipped to the New World, from where they returned to Liverpool.62 It is this side of Liverpool that Cox emphasised when he first explored the locations for the film with production designers Cecilia Montiel and Diego Sandoval: for him, ‘the great public buildings of the city’ are ‘monuments to the villainous history of a city built on the slave trade’.63 In My Kingdom, this history is invoked in the racial divisions that systematically pitch the Irish Liverpudlian Sandeman family against the black urban poor whose heroin habits it feeds, and in the sexual exploitation of imported prostitutes in the eldest daughter’s brothel: in the Liverpool of 2001, sexual slavery and enslavement to drugs are thriving. The city’s history of racial exploitation is similarly omnipresent in Revengers, where it is repeatedly evoked through its imperial architecture. This is particularly striking in a shot showing Vindici, isolated in a wasteland in the Birkenhead docklands, dwarfed against the massive backdrop of the Liver Building on the opposite side of the river Mersey: a tiny figure on a heath trying to take on a mighty system built on the exploitation of human labour and bodies. It is this history, too, with its hubristic proclamation of its imperial power, modelled on ancient Rome, which Cox references with his shot of Eddie Izzard’s Lussurioso framed by the motto ‘SPQL’ – the Senate and the People of Liverpool – on the door of St George’s Hall.64 These 60 61 62 64

Cottrell Boyce, revengers [sic] Tragedy, p. 62. Murden, ‘City of Change and Challenge’, p. 468. Cohen, Decline, Renewal and the City, p. 11. 63 Cox, X Films, p. 252. See Cox’s comments on the location in ‘Revengers Tragedy’, Alexcox.com, http://tinyurl.com/ 7evwae2.

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11 The Liver Building: Christopher Eccleston in Alex Cox’s Revengers Tragedy (2002). Film still, BFI.

buildings inspire both awe at their grandeur and horror at the reckless greed and exploitation of human labour and bodies that they represent. The contradictions between the past glory of Liverpool and its present dereliction and deprivation are brought together at the moment of Vindici’s triumph, as he and his brother Carlo (the Hippolito of the play) are standing in the cupola of the city’s Town Hall. Sixteen Lord Mayors who were also slave-traders officiated in this building before the abolition of slavery in 1807.65 From the apex of this monument of civic power built on slavery and global trade, the brothers look across to the scaffolded building site where Sir Edwin Lutyens’ Cathedral is being built. Computer-generated imaging creates the ‘greatest building never built’: a gigantic Catholic Cathedral, with a dome bigger than that of St Paul’s in the Vatican, designed by the architect responsible for the construction of the British Viceroy’s Palace in New Delhi.66 The project, significantly, was abandoned in midconstruction when post-war funds could not match a pre-war imperial vision.

65 66

‘Liverpool Town Hall and its History’, Liverpool.gov.uk, http://tinyurl.com/6rh42g6. ‘The Second Cathedral: Lutyens’ Dream’, Metropolitan Cathedral of Christ the King Liverpool, http:// tinyurl.com/7euumx7.

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12 Lutyens’ Cathedral: Andrew Schofield and Christopher Eccleston in Alex Cox’s Revengers Tragedy (2002). Screengrab.

Shrouded in scaffolding that supports a huge banner reading ‘DUKE BUILDS’, the building, in the film’s futuristic setting of 2011, of a landmark of the British Empire, is an emblem of the resurgence of iconic and monumental architecture in the Liverpool of 2001. With its ominous black-winged creatures rising above the building site (the exterminating angels of Cox’s production company? The comet Castiza describes as the ‘sweet angel of revenge’?), the image rings alarm bells in the link it implies between the city’s imperialist and slavery-dependent past and its present architectural ambitions that are predicated on the marginalisation of Liverpool’s poor. The Liverpool that is imagined here as a branded building site is a projection into the next decade of the ambitions of the 1990s, when two huge regeneration grants from the European Union, together with the landslide election of Tony Blair’s ‘New Labour’ Government in 1997, led to a range of prominently branded urban regeneration projects in Liverpool.67 With Scottish Tony Blair, married to Liverpudlian Cherie Booth, at the helm of the London government, the crass power divides between Britain’s North and South that marked Cox’s Liverpool upbringing had begun to shift in highly publicised ways. Blair’s vision was of a fairer, rejuvenated society in which social inequalities would be reduced and the geographical 67

Misselwitz, ‘Liverpool City Profile’, p. 116.

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dominance of London as the power-base of centralised government would be diminished.68 Within months, New Labour, in its attempt to galvanise the country into becoming a modern, dynamic ‘cool Britannia’, had started the process of political devolution for Wales and Scotland and pumped vast sums into the regeneration of areas of urban deprivation.69 The effect was quickly felt in Liverpool, where the city council ‘proved itself almost more “New Labour” than “New Labour” itself’ in its willingness to embrace successive urban regeneration initiatives. By 1999, the country’s first urban regeneration company, Liverpool Vision, had taken charge of the redevelopment of Liverpool city centre, where new night clubs, restaurants, shopping centres and residential apartments led to the gentrification of key areas.70 The prominent advertising slogan ‘Duke’s – a clubbing experience’ in Revengers and the nightclub in which Vindici kills Lussurioso act as reminders of the city’s new reliance on the hospitality and tourist trades that has made it ‘more and more a city of consumption, and often hedonistic consumption, to boot’.71 Yet while scaffolding went up all over the city centre, the discrepancy between the official discourse of optimism (the enthusiastic rebranding of ‘Livercool’ Cox sarcastically evokes in his reference to the ‘vibrant, exciting Paris of the North that [Liverpool] really is’)72 and the increased ghettoisation of the city’s poor became ever more acute.73 Dashing the hopes of the Liverpool Dockers, who went on strike in 1995, New Labour, once in power, did nothing to support them until the strikers caved in to the employers’ enforced redundancies and imposition of new working conditions in 1998, at which point the government sold its share in the Mersey Docks and Harbour Company at a profit. The strike became an early rallying-point for left-wing critics of New Labour. Chumbawamba, the punk band Cox asked to compose the soundtrack for Revengers, took a prominent position among protesters with their performance, at the Brit Awards in 1998, of their hit song ‘Tubthumping’, whose lyrics they had altered to ‘New Labour sold out the dockers / Just like they’ll sell out the rest of us.’ After the performance, lead singer Danbert poured a jug of iced water over Deputy Prime Minister John Prescott, ensuring that their protest 68 69 70 71 72 73

Blair, New Britain, p. xii. For an account of urban regeneration under New Labour, see Jones and Evans, Urban Regeneration in the UK, pp. 4–15. Meegan, ‘Urban Regeneration’, pp. 149–51. Murden, ‘City of Change and Challenge’, p. 479. Alex Cox, Director’s Commentary, Three Businessmen (dir. Alex Cox, ILC, 2001, DVD). Belchem, ‘Celebrating Liverpool’, p. 54.

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would be splashed across the front pages of the newspapers.74 Band member Boff Whalley explains: . . . while in opposition, the party supported the striking Liverpool dockworkers. As soon as they were in power they did an about-face and dropped the dockworkers like a ton of hot bricks. This was just a taste of what was to come, of course, in terms of transforming their attitude towards the working class. Revengers Tragedy being a very Liverpudlian film, Labour’s rejection of traditional values (ie support for working people) seemed both utterly relevant and inescapable.75

Chumbawamba’s soundtrack imports the band’s militant activism, their ‘constant resistance to capitalism’ and their local politics into the film; as Ramona Wray suggests: ‘Band and filmmaker echo the other’s attitude to authority.’76 Cox chose the band specifically because he liked their anarchist politics. Whalley remembers the commissioning process consisting, essentially, of ‘going for a drink, talking about art, film, politics, culture and the bastards who happened to be in power at the time’.77 From Revengers’s location manager Tom Harnick, Cox heard about ‘the damage “regeneration” had done to Liverpool. Growing up, he’d seen whole neighbourhoods – not slums, but vibrant working-class areas – destroyed to create car parks for football pitches and motorway access roads.’78 This perceived targeting of working-class jobs and areas during the early years of New Labour is reflected in the statistics for Liverpool compiled for the Indices of Deprivation in 2000: at a time when ‘£3 billion worth of construction projects [were] planned for retail, office and leisure developments’, Liverpool was still ‘the fifth most deprived local authority in England’.79 There is nothing innocent, then, in Revengers’s portrayal of the Duke’s brand on the building site of an edifice of hubristic proportions: in Cox’s film, branding, urban regeneration and the widening of the gap between the rich and the unemployed poor go hand in hand. The Duke, as Cox readily admits, is ‘more . . . a brand than a person’.80 Although he is a master at co-opting local cultural icons into his brand – banners repeatedly show him in the company of the late Arthur Askey, a Liverpudlian music hall star – it 74 75 76 77 78 79 80

‘Soaked Prescott Rages at Pop Band’, Spunk Library: An Online Anarchist Library and Archive, 1998, http://tinyurl.com/c2gm3l2. Boff Whalley, message to author, 13 March 2012. Thompson, ‘Punk Cinema’, p. 23; and Wray, ‘Revengers Tragedy’, 552. Boff Whalley, message to author, 22 February 2012. See also Cox, X Films, p. 271. Cox, X Films, p. 271. Murden, ‘City of Change and Challenge’, p. 476; and Meegan, ‘Urban Regeneration’, p. 155. Cox, X Films, p. 247.

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is clear that the brand and the power it represents originate from London, the seat of dominant culture. The Duke’s brand identity that is prominently plastered over the walls of Liverpool represents everything that Cox deplored in turn-of-the-millennium politics and culture: the homogeneity of cultural production in a global economy, the apolitical gloss of mainstream cinema, the geopolitical and financial dominance of London at the expense of the North. ‘I’d had it with mainstream films’, Cox writes of the lead-up to filming Revengers, ‘Yet I still wanted to create drama with intense emotion and a sense of politics . . . Do I sound like Vindici? I was Vindici.’81 That sense of Cox’s identification with the revolutionary impulses of Middleton’s protagonist is evident in the director’s cameo appearance within the film as the Duke’s driver. On his website, Cox complains about the oppressive class barriers that have remained unchanged since the seventeenth century and suggests that the anachronisms in the film, like those he inserted into Walker, are there to highlight this continuity between the past and the present: The injustices of the early 17th century are those of the early 21st. Corrupt and powerful forces oppress the poor and the meek. The poor rise up. They are suppressed. And a younger generation of poor, angrier and with access to weapons, rises up to take revenge . . . Just as US foreign policy in Central America was the same in 1856 as in 1986, when we made WALKER. The anachronisms weren’t a stunt: they were an inevitable consequence of the narrative.82

As he puts it in X Films, the Jacobeans’ ‘world riven by aristocratic corruption, wars, and competing religions, along with the shocking rise of new venereal diseases’ is, in fact, ‘a time very like our own’.83 Cox’s appearance as the Duke’s driver in Revengers gives physical expression to the shift in class attitudes and political authority he wants to see: the driver who starts off being obtrusively deferential to his employer, bowing to him as he relieves him of his massive overcoat, ends up sitting at the bottom end of the ducal breakfast table the following morning, drinking beer and wrapped in the Duke’s coat to signal his gleeful usurpation of his master. Yet neither Cox’s cameo as the driver nor his identification with Vindici are entirely without complication. The driver’s triumph is short-lived: when we next encounter him, he is summarily condemned to die for his part in the Duke’s assassination. Meanwhile, Vindici’s position at the apex of a building that symbolises civic pride based on slavery and global trade suggests that, like 81 82

Cox, X Films, pp. 247–8. Alex Cox, ‘Revengers Tragedy’, Alexcox.com, http://tinyurl.com/7evwae2.

83

Cox, X Films, p. 246.

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William Walker, he has been contaminated by the values he set out to oppose and now takes pride in his domination of the city and ability to hand power to Lord Antonio. This lord who, in Middleton’s play, stands for conservative values and traditional righteousness is, in Cox’s film, transformed into a figurehead for a populist opposition movement whose values seem ever more similar to the Duke’s (sexual licence apart). The point is made, in part, by the way in which he, too, develops a brand identity. Antonio has a logo of his own, which features an eye on the top of a pyramid. The logo not only alludes to Vindice’s reference to the ‘eternal eye / That sees through flesh and all’ – and thus sets up Antonio as a figure of God-like impartiality – but, as Lehmann has pointed out, it also more troublingly copies the ‘icon on the back of the US dollar. This apparent collusion between Antonio, the media, and money make it all too clear that his putative “reform” party is likely to settle for a replay . . . of the Duke’s rapacious reign.’84 In Antonio, Cox creates a populist figure whose religious fervour and ostentatious righteousness provide a cover for money-driven thinking and autocratic rule. Antonio’s brand identity is also contingent on the Marian iconography surrounding his beautiful Lady (played by model Sophie Dahl) which, after her death, is mediated through gigantic screens in the city centre on which Antonio’s news channel communicates his political platform. The connection between the highly mediated, and politically manipulated, outpouring of grief at the death of Antonio’s Lady and that of Diana, Princess of Wales, has been much commented on. That the link is deliberate is evident from Cox’s reference to Antonio’s Lady as the ‘People’s Princess’, the term famously coined by Prime Minister Tony Blair in his first public address following Diana’s fatal accident on 31 August 1997.85 The connection this creates between Antonio and the Prime Minister becomes even stronger for viewers aware that Antony Booth, the actor playing Antonio, is Tony Blair’s resolutely left-wing father-in-law. The shouts of ‘Tonio, Tonio, Tonio!’ by Antonio’s supporters that punctuate the film close the gaps between Antonio, Antony and ‘call me Tony’ Blair. If the Duke stands for New Labour’s ambitious urban regeneration schemes, Antonio, it seems, comes to symbolise its populism, media ‘spin-machine’ and its suspected recklessness in the political exploitation of the violent death of a beautiful woman.86 The scene of Vindici’s triumph in the cupola of Liverpool’s Town Hall thus marks the moment of the revenger’s co-option into the power structures he is fighting. It sums up, in an image that is the more striking for its obvious 84 86

1.3.65–6; Lehmann, ‘Performing the “Live”’, p. 210. 85 Cox, X Films, p. 262. On New Labour ‘spin’, see Hindmoor, New Labour at the Centre, p. 15.

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artificiality, one of the fundamental paradoxes that underpin the film. Revengers is possessed of a dystopian nostalgia in which the wished-for return of Liverpool to centre-stage position in the British, if not global, economy is undermined by an insistence on the exploitation and injustices such a position seems inevitably predicated on. Projecting the past into the future leaves Vindici standing nowhere, in a virtual window looking at an imaginary construction site. The computer-generated image presents us with an architectural landscape that, following on from footage of urban squalor in the realist mould, assaults the viewer with its fakeness, invalidating the wished-for ‘successful overthrow of the status quo’ that is both Cox’s and Vindici’s avowed aim.

Gloriana’s skull (I): ‘strange fellows’ and the sub-text of slavery The extreme compression of multiple, and opposed, meanings into a single striking image that we see in the shot of Vindici with Lutyens’ Cathedral is a recurring feature of Cox’s film that has its root in the violent compressions of Middleton’s tragedy. There, time is dramatically telescoped, syntactical ellipses abound and single signifiers punningly have multiple, often contradictory, referents. As Nancy G. Wilds notes, the play’s most characteristic rhetorical patterns ‘deal with the idea of contrast, of verbal and thematic opposites’, to the extent that the ‘entire world of The Revenger’s Tragedy’ may be described as ‘oxymoronic: it is always night at noon; its ruler is a “royal lecher”, a “juiceless luxur” with a “bastard true-begot”; and its inhabitants, corroded by “noble poison”, make “strange fellows” (i.e., unacquainted confederates) and “innocent villains”’.87 Puttenham would have recognised the ‘strange fellows’ of The Revenger’s Tragedy as an example of what his Arte of English Poesie describes as ‘the Crosse-couple, because it takes two contrary words, and tieth them as it were in a paire of couples, and so makes them agree like good fellowes’.88 This ability to unite opposites, making good fellows of strange fellows and innocent villains is crucial to Revengers’s uneasy recognition of Vindici’s and Antonio’s simultaneous virtue and corruption. Most remarkable in its paradoxical ability to reunite multiple, contradictory meanings is the deceptively simple prop of Gloriana’s skull, which dominates the tragedy from its outset. The skull is the play’s central emblematic image, a memento mori that is also a memento vindictae. It can be both passive in its victimisation and active in its ability to tempt and call for revenge.89 It can simultaneously function as a ‘symbol of moral purity’ 87 88

Wilds, ‘Of Rare Fire Compact’, 73. See also Jacobson, ‘Irony, Antithesis, and Paradox’, pp. 44, 59. 1: 173. 89 Sofer, Stage Life of Props, pp. 111–12.

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and as ‘an image of corruption’.90 It can be admired in terms reserved for the love-object of Petrarchan love poetry and reviled for its disgusting decay.91 It can be a generic stage prop of indefinite sex, the cherished relic of Vindici’s murdered bride, and also stand for the cultural nostalgia of the Jacobean subject for England’s Gloriana and the lost glory of the Elizabethan age.92 As Wray argues, in Cox’s film, too, the flashbacks that show us Gloriana on her wedding day evoke a more wholesome (if unreal) ‘Elizabethan’ age that contrasts with the dystopian ‘Jacobean’ future the characters inhabit.93 The association between Gloriana’s skull and the ‘Elizabethan’ is even reinforced in the film by the device of preserving the hair on the skull, which in its red lustre is emblematic of Elizabeth I’s hair. Shockingly, however, this signifier of English royalty and of the celebrated white-andred beauty of the Virgin Queen is matched, in Revengers, by a skull that is black. ‘When life and beauty naturally filled out / These ragged imperfections’ Gloriana may well have been white, but undressed of her flesh, the bare-boned truth of the association between sexual and racial subjection is all too clear: the commodification of her body by the Duke makes of Gloriana the embodiment of slavery.94 Slavery, which had in Cox’s Walker epitomised the ultimate betrayal of his protagonist’s liberal values, and which is only obliquely referenced in his vistas of Liverpool’s monuments to imperialism, becomes an embodied presence in the skull on which all the meanings of the film converge. It is in and through Gloriana’s skull that Cox exposes ‘the myth of racial superiority, and the myth of the inferiority of women’ which he sees as ‘sustain[ing] Western “civilisation”’. In Cox’s analysis: ‘Both the Jacobean theatre and the Italian Western, for all their rebelliousness, take too much pleasure in [these] two dark, reactionary myths.’95 Both genres, he finds, are furthermore defined by their scarcity of ‘good female roles’, and Middleton’s The Revenger’s Tragedy is typical in its portrayal of women who ‘are spiritless, passive, victim types’.96 Conscious of this, Cox’s Revengers, then, is a film that seeks to expose the interlocking racial and sexual oppressions upon which its theatrical and cinematic genres are predicated. The film accepts the premise of Jacobean tragedy and the Western that revenge must be carried out over the body of the victimised woman and/or subaltern subject, that is, the premise which is literalised in 90 92 93 96

Bamford, Sexual Violence, p. 84. 91 Pollard, Drugs and Theater, p. 117. See, e.g.: Mullaney, ‘Mourning and Misogyny’; and Hyland, Re-Membering Gloriana’. Wray, ‘Revengers Tragedy’, 549. 94 1.1.17–18. 95 Cox, 10,000 Ways to Die, p. 324. Cox, X Films, p. 260.

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Boyd’s My Kingdom, in which Sandeman’s wife Mandy has to be murdered, and her black killer tortured to death, in order to motivate the ensuing tragedy. The tragedy of Revengers is similarly predicated on the deaths of Gloriana and Antonio’s Lady. Yet at the same time, the film does all it can – by making blackness visible, linking it to sexual exploitation, and by letting the women absorb the lines of male characters (and even giving Gloriana a voice of her own) – to let them participate in the overthrow of the Duke who embodies their systemic victimisation. The blackness of Gloriana’s skull cements her connection to the other black women in the film: the prostitute we briefly encounter in Lussurioso’s pad and Vindice’s sister Castiza, played by black actors both as a child (Bianca Beyga) and as an adult (Carla Henry) and the only black member of her single-parent family. The choice of a black performer for the role of Castiza brings to the foreground the connection between the exploitation of black and female bodies that is also touched on in My Kingdom’s combination of the drug empire and the brothel and makes the appellation of ‘slave-pander’ Lussurioso uses for Vindice resonate in new ways.97 With Castiza’s black body visible, the disdain Middleton’s Lussurioso has for ‘The dowry of [Castiza’s] blood and of her fortunes, / [that] Are both too mean – good enough to be bad withal’ also acquires racist undertones.98 In the film, these lines are shockingly spoken as Castiza, in the background of Cox’s plano sequencia shot, is helping Antonio’s Lady after her rape, thus emphasising the violence of women’s oppression in this world ruled by ruthless white men whose power is built on modern forms of slavery. The connection between black Gloriana and Castiza is reinforced in the scene of Vindici’s revenge, in which, in a significant addition to Middleton’s script, Castiza plays a prominent part by impersonating Gloriana in a red wig. As the Duke walks towards her, Castiza enters the curtained bed that has been erected in Aintree’s Royal Box. Just as the Duke is about to kiss her, she swaps places with Gloriana’s skull, which is grotesquely joined onto the beheaded body of a large teddy bear lifted from the improvised shrine of Antonio’s Lady. The single signifier of Gloriana’s skull, at this point, becomes a surrogate for the living Gloriana, for Castiza and Antonio’s Lady, who are all three united in avenging the sexual exploitation that has threatened and/or destroyed them. The connection between their revenge and their enslavement is driven home by Vindici, who speaks on behalf of all the revengers in this scene when he tells the Duke that ‘A slavish duke is baser than his slaves.’99 97 98

2.3.35. The expression is cut in the film, but, I argue, remains subliminally present. 1.3.101–2. 99 3.5.160.

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Gloriana’s skull (II): a Middletonian revenger in a Shakespeare-saturated world While Gloriana’s skull, in Revengers, thus comes to stand for interlocking racial and sexual oppressions, it also gestures in the direction of Hamlet’s Yorick. It is not for nothing that the image most frequently used for the publicity of the film – an image that does not actually occur within the film itself – superimposes Vindici holding the skull in an iconic Hamletian pose onto the backdrop of the vastly oversized moon which Revengers associates with the arrival of the comet. The film itself produces scene after scene in which Vindici strikes various poses with the skull – almost as if one purpose of Revengers was to exhaust the entire repertoire of Hamletian gestures until, in a moment of contented skull fatigue, Eccleston puts the cranium to rest on his crotch (a surprisingly apt location in Revengers, where it points to the way in which Vindici instrumentalises his bride’s head to the point of prostitution). Writing about Middleton’s play, Stephen Mullaney has remarked on how it seems to open in the graveyard scene of Hamlet and how the skull thereafter continues to be an uncanny double for Yorick, on which Vindice literalises Hamlet’s instruction to ‘let her paint an inch thick’ by daubing

13 Publicity image: Christopher Eccleston in Alex Cox’s Revengers Tragedy (2002). Photoshop by Alex Cox.

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the mouth with poison and dressing the remains in a seductive gown.100 Middleton takes the implications of Shakespeare’s morphing of the death’s head (Yorick) and his maiden (Ophelia) ‘to its logical conclusion, gendering the skull female so as to unequivocally turn it into the male revenger’s necrophilic object of desire’.101 Many of Middleton’s citations of Hamlet pick up on that play’s obsession with eroticised death and female sexuality, such as Vindice’s test of Castiza, which revisits Hamlet’s and Laertes’s obsession with Ophelia’s chastity. Hamlet’s confrontation with Gertrude is even played out twice: first in Vindice’s test of Gratiana and once more in Lussurioso’s attempt to catch the Duchess in mid-adultery, where the Duke briefly slips into Polonius’s shoes and is surprised behind the arras/bed clothes. Each time, Middleton replays the Shakespearean scene with a witty twist that depends on the viewer’s ability to recall the original and spot the difference. The effect, once more, is not dissimilar to that of paradox and oxymoron in its ability to present us with two divergent meanings that are held in a precarious strange fellowship. On the early modern stage, the effect was probably enhanced even further by what I would call ‘oxymoronic casting’, the casting of an actor whose earlier performance in one role is invoked in his performance of another, contrasting, role. Since The Revenger’s Tragedy was performed by the King’s Men, it is highly likely that Richard Burbage played both Hamlet and Vindice, with the remainder of the King’s Men taking on the other roles according to type-casting conventions, so that ‘He that plays the King’ would have played both Claudius and the Duke, the senior boy actor might have played Gertrude and the Duchess, leaving Ophelia and Castiza to the junior boy actor.102 This is a variation on the type of haunting or ghosting of a performance by its precursors described by Marvin Carlson: ‘The recycled body of an actor . . . will almost inevitably in a new role evoke the ghost or ghosts of previous roles if they have made any impression whatever on the audience, a phenomenon that often colors and indeed may dominate the reception process.’103 The nuance I wish to tease out here is that when the same actor (Burbage) portrays two characters (Hamlet and Vindice) who belong to the same type (the hero-revenger) but act in contrasting ways (indecisive/decisive, ethical/unethical, direct/indirect, etc.), his performance of the second role simultaneously bodies forth the audience’s memory 100

101 102

Mullaney, ‘Mourning and Misogyny’, 160. For discussions of the relationship between Hamlet and The Revenger’s Tragedy, see, especially, Felperin, Shakespearean Representation, pp. 163–70; and Corrigan, ‘Middleton’, 291. Aebischer, Shakespeare’s Violated Bodies, p. 93. McMillin, ‘Acting and Violence’, 285; and Hamlet 2.2.320. 103 Carlson, The Haunted Stage, p. 8.

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of the contrasting first role, thus incorporating the tension between the two in an oxymoronic fashion that recalls the surprisingly good fellowship of the strange fellows in Puttenham’s ‘Crosse-couple’. While Middleton’s play thus absorbs Shakespeare’s Hamlet to a remarkable extent, Cox’s film increases this to the point of saturation. Cox describes The Revenger’s Tragedy as one of the ‘rip-offs, and parodies of the rip-offs’ of Shakespeare’s play and Vindici as Middleton’s ‘anti-Hamlet’, who ‘jumps into the action every time Hamlet delays’.104 Using Cox’s taxonomy, Middleton’s tragedy is the early modern Hamlet rip-off of which Cottrell Boyce’s script is the postmodern parody, adding ‘Shakespearean’ material to an extent that, at times, almost threatens the Middletonian identity of the film. At moments like the reunion of Vindici and Castiza, when Eccleston’s Vindici tells his sister that ‘When last we met you stood not higher / than the altitude of a stack-heeled shoe’, it is almost impossible not to hear Hamlet greeting the boy player with ‘your ladyship is nearer heaven than when I saw you last by the altitude of a chopine’.105 At moments like this, Revengers advertises both its similarity to and difference from Shakespeare’s play. Two scenes of Revengers, in particular, stick out as new variations – without the skull – on the theme of Hamlet’s graveyard scene. The first is Middleton’s Act 3 Scene 4, which Cox, significantly, locates in Hamlet’s graveyard, with Junior’s body lying in state amid the tombstones. Transposed so as to come before the Duke’s murder, the scene enables a conflation of Hamlet’s burial of Ophelia, which is burlesqued by the obvious insincerity of the grief on display, and of Claudius’s prayer. The startling of Ambitioso and Supervacuo by the arrival of Lussurioso with Vindici in tow enables Cottrell Boyce to add some wonderful pastiches of Middleton’s verse (such as ‘Saw you not their guilt, jumping o’er their vizards like maggots on the faces of dead men?’ and ‘There’s no advantage in the killing of a YOUNGER brother’) that are remarkable for the way in which they blend into the text and, in the latter example, have even been cited as a prime example of Middleton’s verse.106 This interlude concluded, the Duke’s sons leave the scene to allow the Duke himself to kneel before his son’s corpse to pray, while Vindici hides between the tombstones. The screenplay reads: 104 105 106

Cox, 10,000 Ways to Die, p. 323. Cottrell Boyce, revengers [sic] Tragedy, p. 22; and 2.2.409–10. Cottrell Boyce, revengers [sic] Tragedy, pp. 55, 56. See the review on Film4.com: ‘Revengers Tragedy’, Film4.com, http://tinyurl.com/chkuuan.

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We realise we are looking at [the kneeling Duke] from the POV of VINDICI. VINDICI (VO): Oh, shall I kill him a’th’ wrong side now? No. Sword, thou wast never a back-biter yet. I’ll pierce him to his face; he shall die looking upon me. [VINDICI coughs. The DUKE turns and notices him. Looks at him strangely.] DUKE: My veins are swell’d with lust VINDICI: This shall unfill ’em: Great men were gods if beggars couldn’t kill ’em. [He pulls his dagger and steps forward to kill the DUKE.107]

Cottrell Boyce thus cuts up Vindici’s soliloquy regarding Lussurioso in Middleton’s Act 2 Scene 2 into a dialogue between Vindici and the Duke that ends with the line Cox wrote in his diary the day after seeing Di Trevis’s RSC production of Revenger’s. Here, it becomes an instantly recognisable comment on Hamlet’s procrastination. As Cox puts it: ‘Hamlet hesitates because his adversary, the King, is praying. Vindici in Revengers sees the Duke praying, and moves immediately for the kill.’108 What is a generic comment on Hamlet in the screenplay becomes, for a viewer immersed in film Shakespeares, a comment on a specific Hamlet in the film thanks to the oxymoronic casting, in the role of the Duke, of the most important Claudius of the 1990s: Derek Jacobi. Jacobi was himself a famous Hamlet (on stage in 1957, 1977, 1979 and in the 1980 BBC video), and his casting as Claudius in Kenneth Branagh’s 1996 Hamlet allowed Branagh to work through his own anxieties of influence in order to establish himself as the Hamlet of his generation.109 Jacobi bodies forth a complicated oxymoronic conjunction of Hamlet/Claudius/Branagh and the Duke, classical Shakespeare and carnivalesque Middleton, unsettling any easy attempt to separate the two playwrights while, at the same time, insisting on their difference through the distinctive – and distinctively unShakespearean – stylised make-up and ponytail he sports as the Duke. Stephen Berkoff, Cox’s initial choice for the Duke, would have rooted the film in a contemporary physical theatre practice with roots in Artaud, Brecht, Grotowski and Lecoq.110 Jacobi, by contrast, imports what Cox, like Jarman, deems the ‘reactionary’ nature of Shakespeare and mainstream 107 109 110

Cottrell Boyce, revengers [sic] Tragedy, p. 57. 108 Cox, X Films, p. 246. On the relationship between Branagh and Jacobi, see: Lehmann, Shakespeare Remains, pp. 182–5; and Pittman, Authorizing Shakespeare, p. 22. Cox, X Films, p. 255.

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Shakespearean performance practice into the Middletonian play, a play that he sees as evidence of its author’s ‘balls – mocking dukes, lords and a corrupt, syphilitic court’ and his ‘more modern’ ability to voice ‘credible rebel sentiment’.111 The uneasy sense of déjà vu of Jacobi’s prayer in the graveyard is reinforced by the appearance, earlier in the scene, of Eddie Izzard’s Lussurioso in exaggerated mourning sporting facial hair that gives him a strong physical resemblance to Branagh’s blond prince in deep mourning.112 Izzard’s top hat, high collar and tails spoof the emphasis on period detail in Branagh’s costume drama, sending up the conservative values underpinning Hamlet and insisting, in the outrageous anachronism of the outfit, on the subversive (post)modernity of Cox’s vision. Add to that the fact that Branagh was Cox’s first choice for the role of Vindici (the mind boggles when thinking about the implications of such a choice and about what Branagh’s answer to Cox might have been), and it matters little that Cox did not actually see the film itself: there is an overwhelming sense, in the scene, that Cox is directly taking on the conservative values of the dominant modes of filming Shakespeare in the 1990s of which Branagh and his Hamlet are the representatives of choice.113 Cox makes no secret of the fact that his film demands to be seen in relation to, if not as a part of, the Shakespeare-on-screen corpus: when the New Cinema Fund pushed Cox to use DV technology, Cox did everything he could to be allowed to shoot most of the film on 35mm film. His argument was both aesthetic and strategic: ‘Shakespeare films, whether directed by Branagh, Mel Gibson, or Kurosawa, were shot on film. Thomas Middleton deserved an equally professional and respectful treatment. To shoot Revengers on video was to imply that Middleton was in some way cheaper and less deserving than Shakespeare.’114 Cox here pinpoints the most significant way in which Shakespeare, in contemporary cinema, claims financial and therefore also aesthetic pre-eminence over his contemporaries. As long as Shakespeare adaptations are funded by large studios (Hamlet was a Castle Rock Entertainment production with a $18,000,000 budget – modest in comparison with contemporary Hollywood blockbusters, but gigantic in comparison with Revengers) and 111 112

113 114

Cox, X Films, pp. 245–6. Casting a well-known comedian, such as Eddie Izzard, in a supporting role is also a feature associated with Branagh, who asked Ken Dodd to play Yorick in his Hamlet’s flashbacks and who cast Billy Crystal as the gravedigger in that film. For two outstanding readings of the shadow Branagh’s Hamlet casts over Revengers, see: Lehmann, ‘Performing the “Live”’, pp. 204–5; and Wray, ‘Revengers Tragedy’, 545–50, 555. Cox, X Films, p. 254.

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14 Anachronistic mourning: Christopher Eccleston and Eddie Izzard in Alex Cox’s Revengers Tragedy (2002). Film still, BFI.

adaptations of Marlowe, Middleton, Webster, Jonson and Ford have to scrape their budgets together from private investors and sources like the New Cinema Fund and British television, it will remain impossible for these dramatists to compete with Shakespeare on a level playing field. What Cox’s film does, therefore, is insistently to draw attention to its most ambitious Shakespearean rival, Branagh’s Hamlet, in a manner that stresses both their kinship and the discrepancy in style between large-budget Shakespeare and low-budget Middleton. It is not that Revengers, as a result, looks cheap and nasty: rather, Cox uses the Shakespearean foil to emphasise Middleton’s own competition with Shakespeare and his ability to hold his own against his rival through borrowing, parody and corrosive wit. Cox turns the poor resolution of some of the digital video footage the New Cinema Fund required him to shoot to his advantage, as the deliberate degradation of the images in post-production, which achieves effects similar to those sought by Jarman in his experiments with video, allows him to create an implicit contrast between the ‘realistic’ graininess of the surveillance camera recordings, which appear ‘to lend to the image an aura of authenticity’, and the ‘falseness’ of Branagh’s extreme high resolution in Hamlet, which was shot on 70mm stock.115 115

Brown, ‘Not Flagwaving but Flagdrowning’, p. 414.

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Revengers’s allusions to Branagh’s Hamlet are also mixed in with winks in the direction of Julie Taymor’s 1999 Titus (in the portrayal of Diana Quick’s Duchess and her sons as tattooed and camp reincarnations of Jessica Lange’s Tamora and her rapacious sons) and Geoffrey Sax’s ITV adaptation of Othello in early 2001 (with Eccleston’s characterisation of both Vindici and Jago/Iago as Northern working-class malcontents who address the camera directly – another piece of oxymoronic casting).116 Meanwhile, the cinematic wipes that repeatedly mark transitions between scenes are a nod in the direction of Kurosawa’s Throne of Blood (1957). The result is a punk bricolage of gestures and images that are instantly recognisable as ‘Shakespearean’. The involved mode of viewing this requires of the spectators, who are invited to watch both the performance of Revengers and, at the same time, mentally replay performances of various Shakespeare films that flicker in and out of sight, is typical of the emphasis that the punk cinema of Cox, as that of Figgis in Hotel and Jarman’s incorporation of the Annie Lennox cameo in Edward II, puts on the viewers’ participation in meaning-making. All three contemporary Jacobean films thus resist the passive consumption invited by late twentieth-century mainstream cinema in general, and Branagh’s fin-de-siècle Shakespeare films in particular,117 demanding instead ‘a certain cognitive “performance” on the part of the spectator’.118 That cognitive performance, in Revengers, involves recognising a second significant spin on Hamlet’s graveyard scene. The sequence is set in a bar in which two patrons discuss the death of Antonio’s Lady in terms that replicate the gravediggers’ debate about Ophelia’s death (‘Here lies the water – good. Here stands the man – good. If the man go to this water and drown himself, it is, will he nill he, he goes. Mark you that. But if the water come to him and drown him, he drowns not himself; argal he that is not guilty of his own death shortens not his own life’).119 In Cottrell Boyce’s script, the scene reads as follows: man [drawing on a beer mat, the trajectory of the fatal bullet] Look, that’s where the bullet went in. Back of the head, right. Not at point blank range. She’d have to be a double jointed octopus. She did not top herself. And, and, and, I heard someone say there were two different bullets. 116 117

118

See Wray’s discussion of traces of Eccleston’s Iago/Jago in Revengers (Wray, ‘Revengers Tragedy’, 546). Branagh is famous for providing visual ‘footnotes’ in his films by using explanatory flashbacks and visuals to illustrate difficult passages (e.g. the Player’s speech about Hecuba) or disambiguate points Shakespeare left vague (e.g. Hamlet’s love-making with Ophelia), thus leaving little to the spectator’s imagination. Lessard, ‘Digital Technologies’, p. 103. 119 5.1.14–19.

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man 2 What’re you saying? man I’m saying the Duke’s lot saw her off. man 2 Or Tonio’s? man The noble Lord Antonio’s! man 2 Why not? man Stitch that! [He thumps man 2]. 120

Hamlet’s gravediggers intrude into Revengers here to give the death of Ophelia/Antonio’s Lady a heightened sense of political importance and paranoia. The conspiracy theory about her potential murder strengthens the association between Antonio’s Lady and Gloriana, who has been ‘seen off’ by ‘the Duke’s lot’ in a similar manner. At the same time, it reinforces the indictment of Lord Antonio in the film by suggesting his responsibility for such a convenient tragedy on which to build his political future. Significantly, Cottrell Boyce’s film script and Cox’s credits alike give Middleton’s anonymous Lady a name: Imogen. The name cements the link established by the film, through script and imagery, between Middleton’s victims of sexual assault and harassment and their Shakespearean counterparts Imogen, Ophelia and Lavinia (tellingly, the flashbacks to the wedding show Gloriana’s bleeding mouth). While Jacobi’s Duke seems to stand for the superannuated Shakespeare of the theatrical and cinematic establishment, the female characters who are his victims appear to stand for a different sort of ‘Shakespeare’: for the characters who are denied speech, whose integrity is questioned, whose protestations of innocence are met with disbelief, and whose survival at the end of a play is the exception rather than the rule. It is for such victims of oppression Cox makes Middleton speak. When the black head of Gloriana borrows Imogen’s teddy bear and swaps places with Castiza, the skull, for a fleeting moment, holds together in a strange fellowship its paradoxical identities as the representative of Shakespeare’s violated women and their Middletonian counterparts, as the head of Hamlet’s jester and Vindice’s fiancée, as the relic of a bygone age and an agent of a retribution that will change the future. As all these, and as an embodiment of Liverpool’s history of slavery, the skull’s poisoned kiss exacts its revenge on the mouth(piece) of Shakespearean authority, as Jacobi’s tongue, lips and chin start to disintegrate under the effect of the poison. It is Gloriana’s voice – the voice of the Middletonian revenger seeking retribution for a history of racial and sexual oppression – that has 120

Cottrell Boyce, revengers [sic] Tragedy, pp. 50–1.

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the last word in the film, as her ventriloquised cry of ‘Revenge! Revenge! Revenge!’ reverberates through the sound of gunfire while what remains of the reign of the second Elizabeth is swallowed up by a nuclear explosion.

Coda: a call to arms That explosion, as Cox points out on his website and in X Films, is his solution to his investors’ unwillingness to let him use footage of the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center, which took place as Revengers went into post-production. For Cox, ending the film with the 9/11 attack accompanied by Gloriana’s screams for ‘Revenge! Revenge! Revenge!’ on the soundtrack ‘was timely and appropriate, given that “we” (the Pentagon and NATO) had just embarked on an open-ended war of revenge . . . It was there for a moral purpose, in keeping with the play and with the film.’121 The Middletonian cry was to pierce through the layers of history, making the past speak, once more, directly to the present in an indictment of future neo-imperialist policies, such as the invasion of Iraq (a prominent link on Cox’s Revengers Tragedy website updates the cost of that war second-bysecond and connects to the AntiWar.com protest site).122 Cox’s insistence on publicising the ‘correct’ ending to his film even as he unwillingly complied with his investors’ request invites us to imagine the 9/11 footage even as we see the nuclear explosion and to accept Revengers Tragedy as a fiercely independent British film even as Cox caved in to the pressure to please the US market. It demands that we recognise the strange, preposterous fellowship in which the contemporary Jacobean film functions as a political intervention in the debates surrounding the ‘War on Terror’ proclaimed by President George W. Bush. It also invites us to recognise the ways in which, for Cox, Liverpool is ‘the ghost of New York’, with the cities sharing parallel histories of hubristic construction projects, racial tensions and the capitalist exploitation of the labour of the poor.123 In the final image of the collapse of the Twin Towers, Revengers was meant to conclude with an appalling act of self-cancelling terrorist aggression against the symbols of neo-imperialist oppression that emphasises the strange fellowship between Liverpool and New York, Blair’s New Labour Britain and Bush’s Compassionate Conservative America. With the voice of Gloriana grotesquely screeching her cry for revenge over the nuclear explosion/collapse of the World Trade Center, Cox’s film 121 123

Cox, X Films, p. 269. 122 Alex Cox, ‘Revengers Tragedy’, Alexcox.com, www.alexcox.com/rt/. Cox quoted in Davies, Alex Cox, p. 13.

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concludes with a conflation of early modern and present-day terrorism that is shocking in its disregard for historical differences and its breach of decorum but that is central to Cox’s conception of Middleton as a playwright of revolution, an early modern cultural guerrilla fighter whose tragedy, he emphasises, ‘was first performed around 1606, against a background of rebellion and social unrest’.124 In fact, as Swapan Chakravorty has argued, Middleton’s tragedy may well itself have been a creative response to the Gunpowder plot of 1605, a planned terrorist attack on the Houses of Parliament as a symbol of political power and religious oppression.125 Finishing the film on the image of the 9/11 attacks, then, brings into one last strange fellowship the past and the present in a powerful reminder that religiously motivated terrorism is part of Western cultural heritage. For Cox, early modern rebellions also provide a model for his own guerrilla warfare against the dominant structures of the British film industry at the beginning of the twenty-first century as it tried to negotiate its evermore precarious position in the global marketplace. The challenges facing the industry were outlined quite baldly in the speech on ‘Building a Sustainable UK Film Industry: A Presentation to the UK Film Industry’, delivered by Alan Parker, as Chairman of the British Film Council, on Guy Fawkes Night in 2002. Parker denied the existence of what he termed ‘the “little England” vision of a UK industry comprised of small British film companies delivering parochial British films’.126 Instead, he advocated a ‘radical re-invention’ of the industry that would change the emphasis from subsidising British production to giving tax ‘incentives to distributors – both strong independents and American studios – to invest in and acquire British films’.127 His aim was to ‘encourage greater British involvement in international film production’ and ‘strengthen our traditional links with the American industry’.128 Cox was appalled. For him, the Liverpool film industry and a film like Revengers ‘is exactly the “Little England Cinema” which Alan Parker pretended didn’t exist’.129 Addressing the Independent Film Parliament convened at the Cambridge Film Festival in 2003, Cox reminded his listeners of the Stuart parliament, whose opposition to the dominant power of the king ‘so angered the King, he shut it down. A few months later, the country 124 126 127 128 129

Cox, X Films, p. 246. 125 Chakravorty, Society and Politics, p. 72. Parker, ‘Building a Sustainable UK Film Industry’, p. 8. Parker, ‘Building a Sustainable UK Film Industry’, pp. 2, 10. Parker, ‘Building a Sustainable UK Film Industry’, p. 13. Alex Cox, ‘Complete Text pre-edit: X Films by Alex Cox’, p. 435 (emphasis in original): Alex Cox – Coll. Box 5, NMM.

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embarked upon a revolution, and the King’s head was cut off. I’m going to propose a little decapitation too.’130 The proposed decapitation was metaphorical and involved deposing Alan Parker, under whose chairmanship the Film Council had no remit to represent the United Kingdom’s regions. In his stead, Cox proposed that the parliament should install its very own Lady Protector, Margaret Matheson of Bard Entertainment, the co-producer of Revengers. As Cox proclaimed: ‘What we’re going to do today, I hope, is begin the creation of our own New Model Army: a patriotic army that will fight for the rights of the culturally dispossessed 52 million who live and work in parts of the UK other than London and Los Angeles.’131 The Film Council he imagined in the speech is one which looks not to Hollywood but to Europe for its financial partners and one which vigorously encourages film production in the United Kingdom’s regions, along the lines of what he, Davies and Matheson had attempted in Revengers. The film industry structures for which Cox was thus vigorously lobbying in 2003–4 were structures that would have been supportive of his plans to consolidate the Liverpool film industry, in which he and Tod Davies were embedding themselves in the early part of the decade, and to follow Revengers with more feature film adaptations of early modern drama.132 The project dubbed Jacobeans.net involved collaboration with academic partners, such as the University of Warwick and Manchester University Press, in an effort ‘to bring almost all the unmade stuff to the screen – in a similar vein to those BBC projects to film “all of Shakespeare” but focussing on Tourneur, Middleton, Webster, Kyd[,] Jonson, and Ford’.133 The films were to be directed by Cox himself and other British directors (Cox was planning to approach Ken Russell and Mike Hodges). Cox and Davies got as far as writing screenplays for The Spanish Tragedy (Davies, 2004), Doctor Faustus (Davies, 2005) and The White Devil (Cox, 2006), which increased the size and importance of female roles wherever possible, used metaphors of urban decadence (partying, drugs, alcohol) for their villains and all shared a concern with intrusive and omnipresent media in the shape of CCTV footage, paparazzi, and multiple screens and computer interfaces.

130 132

133

Cox, ‘Call to Arms’, 112. 131 Cox, ‘Call to Arms’, 118. Cox’s personal investment in the city’s film industry at the turn of the millennium went well beyond the filming of Revengers: he and Tod Davies were involved in Toxteth Television, Cox was lobbying for a film festival to be set up in Liverpool, and Cox was teaming up with producer Colin McKeown to set up the Liverpool Film Consortium (Peter Elson, ‘Triumph out of Tragedy’, http://tinyurl.com/d8w7rhl; and McIntyre-Brown, Liverpool, p. 97). Alex Cox, message to author, 11 January 2012.

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Davies’s The Spanish Tragedy, the earliest of these scripts, was the flagship project Cox and Davies used to attract funding. For this purpose, Cox organised a staged reading of scenes from the screenplay at the Soho Theatre on 12 February 2003, for which Gary Davy cast key members of the Revengers cast, adding a few new faces. The result, of which 45 minutes are uploaded onto YouTube as a five-part staged reading, is supported by some additional sound effects and occasional atmospheric black-and-white DV video footage of walking legs, an ominous alleyway and a garden.134 It conveys a sense of the extent to which Cox had, by that point, assembled around himself a group of trusted collaborators with whom he could develop something akin to a repertory approach to early modern drama on screen. Derek Jacobi gives a powerful performance as Hieronimo, with Marc Warren, the decadent Supervacuo of Revengers, matching that performance with a sleazy Lorenzo and Andrew Schofield (Carlo/Hippolito in Revengers) as dignified Castile. Carla Henry is there again as the angrily imperious Bel-Imperia, and Cox himself reads the stage directions with gusto. Once more, Jacobi’s style of delivery aligns him with classical Shakespeare performances and puts him at a distance from the younger members of the cast, whose delivery is more colloquial, reversing the power relations that obtain in Revengers. The most significant newcomer, apart from RSC actors Ray Fearon and Guy Henry, is Heathcote Williams, the only actor to have been involved in the Renaissance films of Jarman, Figgis and Cox, and whose King has the quiet authority he lent his Prospero and Bosola. What is evident from the YouTube reading and from the screenplay itself is that Cox was well on the way towards developing a ‘house style’ that, in its use of anachronisms, mixture of classical and modern performance styles, edgy camera angles, emphasis on the barriers set up by social classes and references to contemporary consumer culture, was going to be in glaring opposition to the project’s acknowledged competitor, the markedly televisual, period-costume BBC Shakespeares of the 1980s. Significantly, however, as the opening scene of The Spanish Tragedy screenplay makes clear, the marked differentiation from the BBC Shakespeares was not going to prevent the films from bouncing off the more recent arthouse Shakespeare adaptations: there are obvious similarities between the figurines of Don Andrea and Don Balthasar fighting on a tabletop battlefield, with ketchup blood and directions such as ‘BOOM! A MISSILE lands and blows TEN 134

‘Spanish Tragedy Part 1’, YouTube, 2 September 2008, www.youtube.com/watch?v=DDuvqnsKXl8. Parts 2–5 are accessible from this link.

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PUPPETS APART’, and the memorable opening scene of Julie Taymor’s Titus.135 Even more than Revengers, The Spanish Tragedy was set to claim a space alongside arthouse Shakespeare on screen. However, with ‘no interest from the Film Council . . . BBC or Channel 4’, the project was eventually abandoned.136 What remain are powerful witnesses to a vision of early modern drama as part of the present-day cultural landscape: a feature film whose cry for revenge makes a forceful claim for the place of early modern drama in contemporary politics and cultural life; three screenplays that map out alternative ways of conceptualising our cultural heritage and that retrieve from the archive plays by Kyd, Marlowe and Webster, setting them up as carnivalesque alternatives to the classical control of Shakespeare; and a digital video recording of a staged reading. In its YouTube format, the recording of The Spanish Tragedy breaks the mould of cinematic exhibition. Its improvised roughness and budget visuals offer a taste of the ways in which new technologies permit independent filmmakers like Cox to continue their guerrilla warfare against the industry structures that control the development, funding and distribution of films and privilege Shakespeare over his contemporaries. As Cox puts it in his manifesto-like introduction to X Films: If you’re a real filmmaker, a film is something that you personally conceive, and then, in partnership with similarly minded colleagues, make yourself. It might be shot on film, or digital video . . . Today, an independent filmmaker is a revolutionary fighter, in a prolonged popular war . . . the battle for an independent, personal art form is already won (thanks to the Mini DV tape and the DVD), lost (thanks to the studios and their admirers), but irrelevant anyway. Irrelevant because the feature film was the original art form of the twentieth century. It can’t be the original art form of the twenty-first as well.137

135 136

Screenplay of The Spanish Tragedy, adapted by Tod Davies, Fourth Draft, © 2004 Exterminating Angel, pp. 2–3. Alex Cox, message to author, 11 January 2012. 137 Cox, X Films, pp. 1–2.

chapter 4

Early modern performance and digital media: remediation and the evolving archival canon

Since Cox released Revengers Tragedy in 2002, no screenplay based on an early modern play by Shakespeare’s contemporaries has successfully secured the financial backing to produce a feature film. The struggle to give Shakespeare’s contemporaries the ‘professional and respectful treatment’ reserved for Shakespeare has, amid the restructuring of the British film industry and the global economic recession, been lost for the time being.1 Yet, as Cox predicted, the guerrilla war has shifted to a new territory, where digital video recordings of early modern drama are steadily gaining ground. On the internet, ‘bad taste’ and ‘offensiveness’, those markers of the carnivalesque that have so often been associated with early modern tragedy, are not policed and a new generation of independent filmmakers are showcasing their work.2 The advent of videosharing sites Vimeo, YouTube and DailyMotion in quick succession between 2004 and 2005 has added powerful new means of distribution to the means of production. Individuals now share their digitised archives, amateurs record and upload their performances, theatre companies create quasi-cinematic online trailers for forthcoming stage productions, and small businesses, working in concert with scholars, are beginning to exploit the market niche for affordable digital video recordings of early modern drama to be used in the classroom. From a position of dearth of early modern drama in performance, in the past decade we have moved to a situation where consumers increasingly have to be active in their choices of which performances to watch, analyse, use in the classroom. In the process we become curators of our own archives of performances and active contributors to the ‘largest contemporary performance archive for the study of production and reception’, as Ayanna Thompson describes YouTube’s holdings of Shakespearean performances.3 1 3

Cox, X Films, p. 254. 2 Fiske, Understanding Popular Culture, p. 81. Thompson, ‘Unmooring the Moor’, 338.

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When applied to YouTube (which I discuss here as the paradigmatic video-sharing site), however, the term ‘performance archive’ is problematic. Assmann’s differentiation between the archive, in which the past is preserved ‘as past’, and the canon, which stages ‘the past as present’,4 is no longer sustainable in the online world: YouTube, to reuse Assmann’s museum metaphor, is a cultural institution in which the visitor is allowed equal access to the storeroom and to the display cabinet, able to curate his or her own exhibition with the help of like-minded visitors. On the video-streaming site, the distinction between archive and canon, past as past and past as present, collapses into the now of the interactive interface. The site thus poses a profound challenge to the historicising drive that is intrinsic to the dominant strands of early modern studies. As I argued in my introduction, the historicist scholarship of the past few decades, which, in Drama, has found a home in original practices experimentation in reconstructed theatres, has had the effect of implicitly differentiating Shakespeare, who is both early modern and ‘our contemporary’, from his historically embedded fellow playwrights, who are relegated to the past. The very technologies on which YouTube relies make such a distinction redundant: as far as the site is concerned, nothing pre-dates the moving image media of the late nineteenth century. That still leaves over one century of performance history that is represented on the site, but here, too, YouTube frustrates the historicising impulse that would confine the performance of early modern drama to the past. On YouTube, the process of ‘remediation’, which Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin described in 2000 as ‘the representation of one medium in another’ is much more complex than that simple definition suggests, since it involves radical changes to the ways in which the remediated performance is contextualised, presented and consumed.5 Neither ‘classic’ nor ‘new’ performances are exempt from YouTube’s decontextualizing effect, as the site offers very little, if any, information about the user-producers who upload material. Instead, YouTube provides its own context of hyperlinked thumbnails of related performances, number of viewers and likes/dislikes, uploader’s description and users’ comments. Even if one were to hunt down individual userproducers and ask them to contextualise their work – as I did when researching several of the films I analyse in this chapter – that information is crucially unavailable to most YouTube users, for whom the films remain part of a context-free, endlessly recontextualised, environment of clips. 4

Assmann, ‘Canon and Archive’, p. 98.

5

Bolter and Grusin, Remediation, p. 45.

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In their resistance to historicisation and their seemingly perpetual availability for the user to ‘pull’ them and make them perform on demand (a crucial difference from the ‘push’ medium of television), performances mediated through the internet quite fundamentally affect the relationship between live performance and the online environment.6 We need to reconsider the way in which we access contemporary performance culture through the internet, how that culture represents itself through and in relation to digital culture, and how live performance contributes to and interacts with the online performance archive that brings historical performances into the interactive now of our computer screens. In 1993, Peggy Phelan famously insisted on the primacy of the ‘live’, proclaiming: Performance’s only life is in the present. Performance cannot be saved, recorded, documented, or otherwise participate in the circulation of representations of representations: once it does so, it becomes something other than performance . . . Performance’s being . . . becomes itself through disappearance.7

By the end of that decade, the ‘incursion of mediatisation into the live event . . . across the entire spectrum of performance genres’ had become so pervasive and powerful that, for Philip Auslander, Phelan’s insistence on the distinctive ontology of liveness had outlived its pertinence.8 In twenty-firstcentury performance culture, the live can no longer be easily extricated from the online environment in which it is embedded. Live performance often co-exists with and is preceded by its own online archival record and can even invite a dialogue with its online remediations. The logic of the internet is beginning to inform even the most emphatically live performances, as I will argue below in relation to Punchdrunk’s site-specific production of The Duchess of Malfi with the English National Opera. As live performance mirrors the digital media, those media reciprocate by modelling themselves on live performance, promising an increasingly interactive mode of viewing and an experience of theatrical liveness that offers to supplant the theatre. Tellingly, Stage on Screen, whose DVDs of theatrical productions I analyse at the end of this chapter, market their DVDs as so successful in ‘recreat[ing] the impression and atmosphere of the stage production’ that consumers will choose to forgo the ‘Actual theatre trips [that] can involve a lot of time, effort and money’.9 Economic factors contribute to the ever-increasing pressure exerted by the digital media on 6 8 9

Caldwell, ‘The Business of New Media’, p. 58. 7 Phelan, Unmarked, p. 146. Auslander, Liveness, p. 7. ‘Theatre Lovers’, Stageonscreen.com, www.stageonscreen.com/theatre-lovers.php.

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the live even as, in a paradox that underpins the phenomenon, the impression of liveness – the trace the live presses onto its mediation and/or the viewer’s apprehension of this trace – remains central to the marketing of performances and justifies their existence. It is not, then, that the mediated supplants the live and makes it redundant and that, as Auslander tentatively predicted, ‘mediatized performance [has] come to be valued over live performance in the culture at large’.10 Rather, the online archive of performances of early modern drama relies quite fundamentally on the immediacy, interaction and serendipity that define theatrical liveness. The interdependence of the digital recording and the live performance in the example of Stage on Screen confirms Auslander’s view that the ‘traditional opposition of the live and the mediatized’ is unproductive in its polarising impulse and debasement of mediation.11 A more productive way of viewing the relationship between live performance of early modern drama and the online archive/canon of performances might be to distinguish the live from the living, stressing the profound affinities between the two modes of transmission of performance and the ability of performances that are digitised and remediated to carry on performing in the present of the online environment even as the live event to which it is related has receded into the past. The gerund of ‘living’ indicates continuation; it also signifies the ability of whatever lives to grow old, be affected by its environment, develop, grow, procreate and die. The live, as Phelan stipulated, may be predicated on its own disappearance; the ‘living’ shares that ontology but is subject to change across time and contexts. Instead of thinking of the digitised performances of early modern drama as immovable exact replicas that freeze and preserve what remains of a play’s performance history, I suggest we think of them as subject to change as they are remediated, recontextualised, re-edited, organised, commented on, deleted. Much of the fascination of online and digital material lies precisely in its instability, its ability to evolve and grow in response to changing environments and pressures, and the threat of its sudden disappearance. In order to combine thinking about the medium and breadth of coverage with an analysis of individual clips and films, this chapter will move through four case studies that approach their subjects from different angles. I start with a consideration of the ways in which early modern drama in cuttingedge performance practice is increasingly hypermediate and intermedial, reaching out beyond the stage to extend the boundaries of the work into the online environment. The chapter moves on to a discussion of the 10

Auslander, Liveness, p. 59.

11

Auslander, Liveness, p. 54.

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remediation of television ‘classics’ on YouTube, using remediated BBC productions of The Duchess of Malfi and Edward II to think through the ‘fragmentation, and temporal leveling [sic]’ of early modern drama on the internet.12 In a section dedicated to microcinema, I turn to the mode of production of these films to think through the economics of filming early modern drama for online distribution and reflect on how such microcinematic ventures directly affect the relationship between producers and users of digital media. The chapter concludes with a focus on the interrelationship between education, scholarship and performance. In this final section, I return to the tension between live theatre and its digital remediation and suggest that it is in these digital humanities projects that we can register a shift in attitude: it is here that the interdependence of the mediated and the live is most obvious, that the living performance of the digital medium is the explicit raison d’être of the live performance which has to belabour its liveness in order to justify its transformation into a digital object. It is through such educationally motivated projects, too, that the canon of early modern drama on screen is extended beyond the core, leading to the core being gradually accepted as mainstream as the margins of the canon expand.

Stage performance and the new media: hypermediality, intermediality, the live and the living in Cheek by Jowl’s ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore and the Punchdrunk/ENO Duchess of Malfi A performance of Cheek by Jowl’s ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore at the Barbican Theatre in London on 27 February 2012. A teenager, wearing headphones and watching something on her laptop, lies on her red double bed. On the rear wall of her room, a multitude of posters are pinned up – the Virgin Mary the odd one out among the film posters for True Blood, Breakfast at Tiffany’s, Gone with the Wind, Doux Oiseau de Jeunesse, The Vampire Diaries. When the lights go down, she puts her headphones and laptop on the bedside table and, in an oddly dated gesture, inserts a CD into her CD player. As the music starts pulsing through the theatre, Lydia Wilson’s Annabella erupts into motion to perform an extraordinarily energetic street dance on her bed. Her long hair, we now see, is shaved off on the left side of her head. With jaggedly graceful movements, her body starts to react to the dancing men in suits and the friar who now surround her. She increasingly concentrates on Giovanni (Orlando James), ambivalently pushing him 12

Shohet, ‘YouTube’, 69.

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away while provocatively thrusting her hips towards him when he tries to grab her. What strikes me is the bizarre detachment of Wilson’s facial expression which, Swinton-like, keeps the character’s thoughts and feelings at a Brechtian distance from the action. When the music abruptly stops, Giovanni and the Friar, on either side of Annabella, begin, literally, to argue over her body. The opening scene of Cheek by Jowl’s 2012 ’Tis Pity locates the tragedy in what Bolter and Grusin would call a ‘hypermediate’ landscape, one offering ‘a heterogeneous space, in which representation is conceived not as a window on to the world, but rather as “windowed” itself – with windows that open on to other representations or other media’.13 The action of ’Tis Pity is played out against the backdrop of the collage of film posters and images from popular culture that require that the production be read in relation to the other media onto which the ‘windows’ in the set design open out like so many hyperlinks to other performances. That is certainly how my companions (I have the luck of watching this performance with a group of gifted readers of early modern drama in performance) read the production. In post-production email exchanges, dance choreographer Kele Baker compares Wilson’s dance to various contemporary dance styles and performances. Meanwhile, Kim Solga writes that ‘clearly Lydia Wilson was channelling Rooney Mara and the like’ – a reference to Mara’s Oscarnominated performance of Lisbeth Salander in the English-language remake of Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (2011).14 Part of the email discussion between Roberta Barker, Kim Solga and Catherine Silverstone revolves around the ways in which the production bounces off the Twilight films that are part of the collage of teen goth film posters on Annabella’s bedroom wall (Roberta Barker’s notion that Soranzo should have been played as a werewolf tickles our post-production imaginations). In the production, Annabella’s dance represents a literal remediation of online music videos she was watching on her laptop into the live space of the theatre. Her character belongs both to the world of the stage and that of the music video, hence ‘intermedial’ according to Robin Nelson’s recognition of how ‘the compound “both-and” . . . characterises contemporary performance culture’.15 Wilson’s Annabella demands to be read in relation to mediated refractions of her ‘identity’: immensely self-aware, often taking a split second before replying to offer her lines, as it were, in inverted commas,

13 15

Bolter and Grusin, Remediation, p. 34. Nelson, ‘Prospective Mapping’, p. 17.

14

Dir. David Fincher.

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the character remains at a critical distance from her performance that enacts the cultural scripts pinned on her wall, shaped by her wardrobe, written onto her body through her hairstyles. A Salander-type youthful rebel in one scene, she is literally dressed up as the Virgin Mary (fairy light halo included) in the next, to reappear as the glowing mother-to-be practising the gestures of maternity with baby clothes as if she had stepped out of a 1950s melodrama, before finding herself following the script of a horror film instead, killed by the stalker who has locked the door of her bedroom. Without directly using digital media (beyond the CD player and laptop) in the production, Cheek by Jowl’s ’Tis Pity, tellingly described in Alexandra Coghlan’s review as a ‘pop-culture remix of a Jacobean classic’,16 is nevertheless a textbook example of the trend in contemporary intermedial performance ‘associated with the blurring of generic boundaries, crossover and hybrid performances, intertextuality, intermediality, hypermediality and a self-conscious reflexivity that displays the devices of performance in performance’.17 As I try to make sense of the production in the days following my theatre visit (I am writing this sentence exactly three weeks after stepping out of the theatre), I surf the web to find reviews. Before I even get to those, my search alerts me to some relevant clips on YouTube. I find five clips: three production trailers which, though advertising different stages in the Cheek by Jowl tour (Cambridge, Oxford, London), essentially reproduce the same official Cheek by Jowl trailer in 1.07, 1.12 and 1.13 minutes respectively; a 4.54-minute documentary for Sydney Festival TV; and a 2.16-minute compilation of ‘Audience Reactions to Cheek by Jowl’s ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore’ posted by Warwick Arts Centre in which young audience members enthuse about the production. In the process of remediation into the digital video trailer, Cheek by Jowl’s uncredited digital video editor has pushed the logic of the hypermedial and intermedial production to its conclusion, remixing a number of very brief clips into a cross between a cinematic trailer, a fan’s mash-up YouTube homage to a film and a music video. Disconcertingly, the trailer’s cinematic montage combines with the non-diegetic musical soundtrack and the conventions of silent film to tell a story that differs in quite significant ways both from Ford’s play and the Cheek by Jowl production. The trailer’s narrative arc, summed up by Solga as ‘innocence lost’, begins with a scene 16 17

Alexandra Coghlan, ‘’Tis Pity She’s a Whore, Barbican Theatre’, The Arts Desk, http://tinyurl.com/ 7ybse4x. Chapple and Kattenbelt, ‘Key Issues’, p. 11.

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heavily coded as nostalgic in its evocation of childhood: to the light-hearted soundtrack of slow foxtrot music (keying mental pictures of graceful dancing in Hollywood musicals), the laughing Annabella and Giovanni play with sock puppets as they do during their first dialogue in the stage production.18 Alternating between shots of Annabella with her brother and with Soranzo, the editing tells the story of a love triangle that starts to sour when Giovanni aggressively pushes Annabella, whose facial expression begins to register her concern, in time to a switch on the soundtrack to ominous violin. The sense of menace intensifies in the subsequent shot of Annabella, in her wedding dress, looking towards Soranzo in apprehension. As the pace of the music on the soundtrack accelerates with a new techno beat, the montage combines various shots of Annabella (which now always expose the shaved side of her head, coding her body as ‘fallen’) before culminating in her sexually provocative dance on her bed.19 The montage now rapidly alternates shots of Annabella dancing with scenes of violence, exuberance and quotations from the French Press that function as cinematic intertitles. The screen goes black over Soranzo kneeling over Annabella and pinning her hands down on her bed like a white Othello. To a viewer unfamiliar with the play and the performance, the ‘plot’ of the trailer thus concludes with the impending murder of Annabella by Soranzo, triggered by Annabella’s discovery of her aggressive sexuality that supplants the child-like fun of her relationship with Giovanni. The online trailer provides what Lisa Kernan, in relation to cinematic trailers, argues is ‘an illusory unity’ that can only be decoded ‘correctly’ with reference to the full production; it is both complete in itself and predicated on the viewer’s awareness of its incompleteness.20 The radical re-visioning and revision of the production offered by the quasi-cinematic trailer is countered by the Sydney Festival TV clip, which returns the production to the theatre via the conventions of documentary television. Refocussing the production on Annabella and Giovanni, the documentary plunges us into the scene leading up to Annabella’s murder. A sound bridge of assistant director Owen Horsley’s voice eases the viewer out of the scene and into the documentary framework into which it is embedded. Horsley and Wilson, whose highly articulate, mature observations set her apart from the distancing diction of her teenage Annabella, function as ‘talking heads’, their comments punctuating and interpreting the scene of Annabella’s murder. Horsley and Wilson repeatedly insist on 18 19

Kim Solga, message to the author, 20 March 2012. Kim Solga, message to the author, 20 March 2012.

20

Kernan, Coming Attractions, p. 38.

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the production’s departure from Ford’s play in representing a tragic heroine who chooses life (her own and her baby’s, which in the production is threatened with abortion by coat hanger) over the death we see her die at the end of the documentary. ‘I think that in this production she’s a character who makes more choices and in fact what happens to her has her fingerprint on it a lot’, Wilson concludes, while Horsley concurs that ‘it’s a play about women making choices’. The documentary thus sets up Wilson’s Annabella as the central protagonist as it remediates a single scene from the stage performance, telling a linear narrative that synecdochically stands in for the production as a whole, even as the selection of that scene works to erase the other narrative axes (Soranzo, the Hippolyta plot, etc.) of the production. What the live production, the Cheek by Jowl trailer and the Sydney documentary thus provide are three distinct versions of the work of Cheek by Jowl’s ’Tis Pity, none of which is entirely self-sufficient, all of which send the viewer either to an online or stage performance that promises to complement its narrative. Cheek by Jowl’s ’Tis Pity is thus moving towards the sort of storytelling across a number of media platforms which was brought into the mainstream by the Wachowski brothers’ The Matrix franchise (1999 to 2003), in which viewers of the film could only access the ‘full’ experience if they combined their viewing of the feature films with the carefully orchestrated releases of online comics, anime and games that bridged the gaps between the three Matrix films.21 We see here a smart and complex approach to marketing theatre across platforms that models itself on current trends in popular culture to offer a more layered experience of the early modern play. With each of the digital paratexts of the production stressing a different plotline, Cheek by Jowl’s ’Tis Pity, like the punk cinema of Jarman, Figgis and Cox, offers the user navigating between onstage and online performances the opportunity to engage in a demanding cognitive performance in which each version of ’Tis Pity is mentally held against the other versions, with the online clips courting contradiction with the stage performance so as to force viewers to choose between various readings of the work. It is up to the viewer to determine whether Wilson’s Annabella really does leave her fingerprint even on her own death and whether something fundamentally true about the play and/or the stage production is suggested by the trailer’s privileging of Soranzo over Giovanni. Cheek by Jowl’s ’Tis Pity, as an expanded work, puts an added 21

Jenkins, Convergence Culture, pp. 95–6.

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emphasis on the spectatorial labour that is always part of the viewing experience of theatre. A side-effect of the online remediations is that they fundamentally destabilise the authority of the live performance and the viewer’s memory of that performance. The digital paratexts of the performance complement it to create a work that, to borrow textual scholar Jerome McGann’s understanding of the literary work as broader than its textual instantiations, is ‘a dynamic event in human experience’.22 As I repeatedly watch the clips, I recall moments of the production I had begun to forget. Other moments that are not included either recede in importance (they were not important enough, after all, to be selected) or become more important in my resistance to the choices made. Watching and re-watching the clips, I note my growing nostalgia for the liveness of theatre, my anxiety at the threat the immediacy of the living online performances pose to my memory of the live.23 The multiple remediations not only change the order of my memories, but also give importance to the seemingly insignificant; as Matthew Reason argues, the ‘archive does not aid memory, but replaces it’.24 Replacing the live, the living pushes it further into the realm of the forgotten even while promising the (illusory) stability and permanence of the archive. This is the paradoxical dynamic that animates the mutually dependent relationship of the live and the living in Cheek by Jowl’s ’Tis Pity: even as the stage production’s hypermediality and Wilson’s intermedial performance body forth a sense of alienation from the liveness of the performance event and gesture towards its extension into the digital platforms, the work’s online extensions send the viewer back to the stage, with nostalgia for impermanence cancelling out the desire for stability. Understanding the relationship between the live and the living as one of continuity, development and change enables an acceptance of the process by which the living re-places the live as organic and productive, part of an ongoing historical process which allows the plays and performances to circulate as part of active cultural memory (Assmann’s canon). The trailer and documentary materials for the Cheek by Jowl ’Tis Pity exemplify a growing trend, among mainstream and fringe theatre 22 23

24

McGann, The Beauty of Inflections, p. 108. Joseph Roach’s notion of ‘surrogation’ as the process whereby ‘culture reproduces and re-creates itself’ may be helpful here: his intuition that the attempted substitution of a cultural artefact or event that is disappearing from memory by a newer replacement provokes anxiety at the discrepancy between the old and the new is productive for thinking about the relationship between the live and the living (Roach, Cities of the Dead, p. 2). Reason, ‘Archive or Memory?’, 85.

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companies alike, to invest in quasi-cinematic online trailers that offer an extended experience of the stage production. Striking, in quite a few of these productions, are the theatrical means through which they articulate the digital culture in which they are situated and into which their digital paratexts quite overtly integrate them. If in 1999, Auslander found that ‘live performance now endeavors to replicate television, video, and film’ in ‘multiple ways’, this is even more true today of the way in which it seeks to replicate their audience’s everyday encounters with the internet.25 The online platform functions as a paratext, an intertext and a supplement to the live performance that involves the viewer in the work of meaningmaking before and, especially, after a performance. Viewers are transformed into contributors whose participation in the production extends well beyond the duration of the live performance, continuing and extending their specific experience through online exchanges with other viewers, whose differing viewpoints help create a fuller picture of the production. A clear case in point is the co-production, by immersive site-specific theatre company Punchdrunk and the English National Opera (ENO), of Torsten Rasch’s opera based on John Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi. Within four hours of the box office opening on 4 June 2010, tickets for the production, which was shrouded in much-publicised secrecy, were sold out. A few days after the show opened, as those lucky enough to have secured a ticket started to flood theatre and opera blogs with their accounts of the ENO’s first immersive opera, a community of viewers emerged online to share their experiences and reconstruct the performance through a form of impromptu crowd-sourcing. As a result, there is now a wealth of information available about the ENO/Punchdrunk Malfi online. In typical Punchdrunk fashion, nine scenes of Webster’s play were performed over three floors of a large disused office building in East London. Audience members were all forced to wear white masks and invited to wander freely through the building; some were handed champagne in quaint china cups while others were given inoculation cards; some witnessed a lot of singing and dancing, others stumbled through the darkened building, tripped over elements of the set (including disused laboratories with urine, blood and hair samples and medical texts about lycanthropy; a scratched and faeces-smeared cell; a circle of television screens; a chapel; a bedroom; a room full of trees made of office wiring; a courtroom; a large space with a catwalk) and felt ‘baffled’, ‘bullied and 25

Auslander, Liveness, p. 24.

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bored’.26 One viewer was allowed to touch the head and chest of the Cardinal (Freddie Tong) as he sang in a ‘chilling moment shared by no one else’; several report encountering the naked and bloodied Ferdinand (counter-tenor Andrew Watts) in various stages of lycanthropic delusion.27 For the universally acclaimed finale, audience members were herded into the building’s warehouse, in which the Duchess, amid hundreds of carcasses, was suspended upside-down from the ceiling to have her throat cut.28 By all accounts, the experience of the production was individual, antinarrative (in that the whole opera was played twice throughout the evening, with scenes happening at the same time in different locations), and intrinsically fragmentary. Each viewer, that is, arrived at her/his version of the production through a journey through space and time that involved a combination of serendipity and choice to curate their own ENO/ Punchdrunk Malfi experience. Building on the pre-production hype and the participants’ continuing engagement with the production even after it closed, Punchdrunk and the ENO allowed Clare Lockhart to film The Making of the Duchess of Malfi, a one-hour documentary aired on More4 on 4 December 2010. As secretive about the actual performances as pre-production publicity and as fragmented as the post-production discussions, the documentary does not include material from the production at any length. Instead, it concentrates on the brinkmanship and complex logistics involved in getting the opera ready in time for the opening night. In the documentary, senior producer Colin Nightingale echoes Phelan’s call to consider performance as intrinsically ephemeral and resistant to recording and archiving when he states: ‘if someone starts to try and want to film [the production], then they’re directing their own version of what this experience is, because it’s a live experience, it’s not film’. Punchdrunk artistic director and designer Felix Barrett adds: ‘It’s very difficult to capture unless you’re there, as a lone audience member, by yourself, making your choices, picking the evening that you want to have that night.’ The live experience carries what Bourdieu would term ‘symbolic capital’, whose value is painstakingly preserved by 26

27 28

Igor Toronyi-Lalic, ‘The Duchess of Malfi, ENO, Punchdrunk: An Unmissable New Show but a Mess of an Opera’, The Arts Desk, 14 July 2010, www.theartsdesk.com/opera/duchess-malfieno-punchdrunk; and Anna Picard, ‘The Duchess of Malfi, Great Eastern Quay, London: A Ghost Train for Grown-ups that Sets You Down Feeling Bullied and Bored’, Independent, 18 July 2010. Mark Valencia, ‘The Duchess of Malfi’, What’sOnStage, 14 July 2010, www.whatsonstage.com/ reviews/theatre/london/E8831279104340/The+Duchess+of+Malfi.html. See, e.g.: Toronyi-Lalic and Kieron Quirke, ‘Voyage of Discovery Down in the Docks with The Duchess of Malfi’, London Evening Standard, 14 July 2010; and George Hall, ‘The Duchess of Malfi’, The Stage, 14 July 2010.

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Punchdrunk’s production team and the documentary alike.29 Thus limited in its remediation of the actual production, the documentary was also limited in its availability, as it only stayed online on the 4oD (4 on Demand) site for a few weeks. Yet not long after it went offline, The Making of the Duchess of Malfi reappeared on YouTube, where, cut up into four parts, it has become part of the impressively wide-ranging, haphazard collaboration between strangers and friends united in their desire to preserve and communicate the experience of the ENO/Punchdrunk Malfi for an online community of theatre and opera lovers. The resulting online archive of written testimonies, production photographs and fragmentary performance footage affords the web user greater access to the production than was possible for any single viewer during a live performance (though that sense of access is troubled, at all points, by the online material’s persistent emphasis on the uniqueness of the live). It makes it possible for the web user to curate yet another individual version of the ENO/Punchdrunk Malfi that, in all its failure to be a ‘live experience’ in the terms advocated by Nightingale and Barrett, nevertheless replicates through the medium of the internet the experience of the live spectator curating their own anti-narrative, fragmentary ENO/ Punchdrunk Malfi experience through a combination of serendipity and choice. The live has become the living, which creates new modes of experiencing the live. In Punchdrunk’s immersive staging of the ENO Malfi, that is, the spectator’s physical work of watching, judging, deciding to leave to find a more appealing alternative scene, walking through some rooms where nothing interesting is happening before finding a scene so compelling that many others flock to it and watch it spellbound in a community of viewers, materialises and gives a spatial dimension to the experiences of web users collating and curating their own archives of early modern performances. The mode of viewing invited by the stage production, its very ‘immersive’, emphatically theatrical, ‘sitespecific’ and ‘live’ aesthetic, is intimately connected to the viewers’ everyday habits of web-surfing and immersion in an online environment of multiple choices and interconnected sites: in the Punchdrunk/ENO Malfi, the theatrical and digital begin to converge through its modelling, within the rooms of the disused office block, of a digital environment of multiple windows, individual journeys and fragmented narrative. The very devices Punchdrunk uses to stress the uniqueness of the live experience 29

See Auslander’s comments on symbolic capital (Liveness, p. 58, esp. n. 38).

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are those that push the company’s work towards the logic of the digital medium, with its either/or choices and individual journeys through windowed spaces.

‘TV classics’ on YouTube: fragmentation and anachronicity in the remediation of the BBC’s Duchess of Malfi and Edward II When looking for traces of the Punchdrunk/ENO Malfi on YouTube, one is likely to stumble over the remediation of Eileen Atkins’s performance as the Duchess in the 1972 BBC adaptation of the play, directed by James MacTaggart, produced by Cedric Messina (who went on to produce the BBC/Time-Life Shakespeare series), and filmed at a Jacobean mansion (Chastleton House) in Jacobean costume. Since the film is not currently commercially available and has to be watched either in a physical archive or library setting, its YouTube remediation, cut up into thirteen segments, is attracting a more sizeable audience than the film has had since its first screening on 10 October 1972.30 The uploading of the film and its vastly increased availability in this format, alongside the metadata generated by YouTube, makes it possible to analyse patterns of viewing and ask whether the experience of watching this film on the YouTube interface substantially changes the viewing experience. Have television and computer converged to such an extent as to make medium-specific thinking redundant? Judging from several of the comments left in the months after user ‘Lothriel’ posted the film in 2010, at least part of the YouTube audience for the BBC Malfi is made up of its original audience, who are revisiting and refreshing their personal memories of the film, while ‘ivanzorrorose’, who sees the uploading as ‘a life saver for my exam’, is representative of several new viewers. Striking, when looking at the viewing figures on YouTube, is the evidence it provides of viewers ‘snacking’ on the BBC Duchess and surfeiting on it after several segments, with over 22,000 viewers for Part 1, down to nearly 9,000 for Part 2, evening out for a plateau of over 6,000 for Parts 4, 5 and 6, down to just over 5,000 for Part 10 (the execution of the Duchess and Cariola), a low point of 3,600 for Part 12 and just under 4,000 wanting to see the final segment, having, presumably, in part skipped to it from the Duchess’s death. There is evidence, both in viewers’ comments and in the viewing figures that rise by almost 600 between Parts 7 and 8, of some viewers skipping the first few segments of the film and concentrating 30

See Susanne Greenhalgh (‘The Jacobeans on Television’, 586, n. 2). I am indebted to Greenhalgh for my identification of specific spaces within Chastleton House.

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on Parts 8 and 9 because they are hoping to spot Tim Curry, who rose to cult status thanks to his performance as Dr Frank-N-Furter in The Rocky Horror Picture Show31 (1975) and who plays one of the madmen tormenting the Duchess. Commenting on Part 8, no one picks up on Ferdinand’s alarmingly casual play with the scold’s bridle suspended from the wall of the Duchess’s prison cell, but three viewers betray their frustration at not having been able to see Tim Curry yet. All this implies a very different, markedly more fragmented and nonnarrative viewing experience for the YouTube remediation of the BBC Malfi from that afforded by the film’s television screening. Even while ‘the computer is offered as a new means of gaining access to these older materials, as if the content of the older media could simply be poured into the new one’, it is plainly wrong to believe, in Bolter and Grusin’s terms, that ‘the viewer stands in the same relationship to the content as she would if she were confronting the original medium’.32 In her assessment of the BBC Malfi as a television film, Susanne Greenhalgh comments on the ways in which MacTaggart’s film betrays critical awareness of the ways in which its location relates to the Jacobean play’s politics: Chastleton, in MacTaggart’s hands, becomes ‘a means of bringing social awareness, political analysis, and creative flair’ to his interpretation of the tragedy, with different spaces articulating distinct social dynamics and pressures.33 The opening of the tragedy, for example, is set in Chastleton’s Great Hall, with much of the action revolving around the public space of the banqueting table. The location changes to the East Stairs for Antonio’s private character assassination of the Arragonian brothers for the benefit of Delio: the winding, enclosed staircase which they climb conveys some of the tortuous and secretive journey of Antonio’s impending rise. An edit takes us back to the Great Hall into which the Duchess enters, agrees to employ Bosola, and leaves again for her brothers to exchange words about Bosola. Yet where the TV film seamlessly segues into Bosola’s exchange with Ferdinand, still in the Great Hall, Part 1 of the YouTube version abruptly ends as the Cardinal and his entourage file past Bosola. At this point, the screen presents the viewer with twelve choices, of which continuing with Part 2 is the first. Part 2 begins just before the end of Part 1: for a second time, then, the Cardinal and his entourage file past Bosola before the scene continues. The breaks between segments thus become focus points for the viewer’s attention, either because, as in the transition between Parts 1 and 2, some 31 33

Dir. Jim Sharman. 32 Bolter and Grusin, Remediation, p. 45. Greenhalgh, ‘The Jacobeans on Television’, 576.

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content is duplicated or because a split-second of film has gone missing. The segmentation follows neither a theatrical nor a filmic logic, but follows the imperative of the YouTube format’s limit on the length of clips.34 In Part 2 of the BBC Malfi, the YouTube viewer is fortunate that MacTaggart’s virtuoso long tracking shot (what Cox would call a plano sequencia) of the Duchess’s and her brothers’ emergence from Chastleton and their stately walk away from the house is uninterrupted: this shot, with all its logistical challenges, is crucial to conveying the inability of the Duchess to escape her social imprisonment even outside the confines of her house. On the other hand, the unkindest cut chops in two parts the Duchess’s wooing of Antonio in a private panelled room, and a similarly abrupt cut interrupts Antonio’s jesting with Cariola in the Duchess’s bedroom at the end of Part 5.35 The effect is jolting: ‘cliffhanger’-like in that it suspends the involved viewer in mid-action, thus generating a desire to see the continuation of the scene, but also so disruptive, at that particular moment, as to discourage a viewer with low motivation from continuing once the dynamic of a scene or shot has been ruptured. The dramatic dropoff in the number of viewers between parts might well be due to the latter effect. The distinctly unfilmic cuts between segments introduced by the uploader are compounded by the noticeable degradation of the image between the original video recording and its YouTube remediation. Some of the principal pleasures afforded by the BBC Malfi in its television format are derived from the Jacobean setting, with Chastelton’s dark oak panelling, carved stone mantelpieces, heavy curtains, embroidered furnishings and tapestries, and from the elaborate period costumes. The gowns of the Duchess in particular are extraordinary in the fineness of their lace and the extravagance of her ever-changing ruffs and mantles; in the manner in which her wide skirts literally push her interlocutors, including her brothers, to the margins of the televisual frame, they eloquently speak of her preeminence in the court of Malfi. Antonio’s costumes, too, bear witness to his social rise, with his initially unlaced, sober doublet replaced by a more lavishly cut doublet and costly ruff. Yet the social and political significance of costumes, locations and furnishings is degraded to such a point in the YouTube remediation that they cannot be a primary source of pleasure for the viewer. The same is true of 34 35

The 10-minute limit for YouTube clips was raised to 15 minutes in 2010 and, later that year, lifted altogether for users with a history of complying with the YouTube community guidelines. Webster’s 3.2.

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the nuance of the actors’ physical performance, which is rendered blotchy and indistinct by the low resolution and sometimes visible pixels. Pleasure, instead – at least, for me – is derived from the very fact of being able to experience this film at all, as well as from the much less markedly degraded sound which transmits Atkins’s classically spoken performance of the Duchess in particular with crisp clarity. Partly nostalgic in nature, the peculiar enjoyment afforded by this remediation of the BBC Malfi is also that of the collector who has rediscovered a valued but forgotten object. The viewers of the remediated BBC Malfi on YouTube are creating, recovering and shaping their personal memories and altering the collective cultural memory in a process which, as Lucas Hilderbrand maintains, is inherently dynamic: Culled from users’ personal collections of recordings and productions, the site’s videos and its search engine offer some evidence of what from television’s past now constitutes our cultural memory . . . YouTube allows users to seek out the media texts that have shaped them and that would otherwise be forgotten in ‘objective’ histories. Like memory (cultural or personal), YouTube is dynamic.36

In the case of the BBC Malfi, what its uploading to YouTube facilitates is the reinsertion of the film into the performance history of the play, where it has often been sidelined. In even the most recent performance histories of the tragedy, such as Leah Marcus’s Arden edition, the film is given short shrift or is not mentioned at all. Lothriel’s decision to share his/her personal archive through YouTube makes it possible for future performance histories of Malfi to give greater attention to this production, putting it back where it belongs in the collective British cultural canon of carefully documented performances: as a successor, alongside Judi Dench’s performance for Clifford Williams’s RSC staging in 1971, to Peggy Ashcroft’s Duchess opposite John Gielgud’s Ferdinand in George Rylands’s production in 1945. The BBC Malfi is thus a crucial milestone in the twentieth-century performance history of the play, and its uploading to YouTube arguably constitutes another such milestone. We therefore need to rethink how we conceptualise performance history, to take account both of the initial moment of production and the moment(s) of re-circulation, when DVD releases and YouTube uploadings bring past performances into the present.

36

Hilderbrand, ‘YouTube’, 50.

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While several of the film’s YouTube viewers seek, through their comments, to place the BBC Malfi in the context of the tragedy’s twentiethcentury performance history, the film’s uploading to YouTube markedly unmoors it from its original context as a BBC production in 1972. Instead, it is inserted into a hyperlinked network in which it demands to be read alongside, and through, associated performances of this play and other more distantly related material (an extract of Patroni Griffi’s Addio appears in the sidebar, as does a version of Faustus and several clips from The Duchess,37 the Hollywood biopic of the Duchess of Devonshire). The medium thus works to erase differences, whether in terms of quality, original medium or of geographical origin, and to favour the creation of new hierarchies, based on search terms, viewers’ likes and dislikes and the number of viewers who watch specific clips and choose to migrate from one clip to another. YouTube negates temporal precedence, placing clips from films that belong to different historical moments into the time-defying now of the YouTube interface. The site thus produces ways of reading films that challenge the linear logic of arguments about influence and precedence. A particularly telling example of the effect of the setting of temporally disparate and historically disconnected films side by side on YouTube was created by the 2009 release of the BBC DVD of Ian McKellen’s performance of Edward II for Prospect Theatre in 1969 to 1970. First aired by the BBC on 6 August 1970, after 1977 the TV film dropped out of circulation and collective cultural memory for over thirty years.38 Within two years of the 2009 release of the DVD, an extract from the film and a trailer connected to a site where the whole film can be watched were uploaded to YouTube. With some variation in their order, these clips currently sit there alongside clips from Derek Jarman’s 1991 Edward II. Further down the sidebar are thumbnails connecting the user to a clip of McKellen as the wizard Gandalf in The Lord of the Rings39 and several clips of McKellen’s performance of the title role in the Loncraine Richard III of 1995. Also thumbnailed are extracts from McKellen’s performance as Richard II in the 1969 to 1970 Prospect Theatre companion production to Edward II. This chronological jumble of productions of Edward II amid other McKellen-related clips offered up for comparison prompts the questions that preoccupy me here. How may we read the relationship between McKellen’s and Jarman’s interpretations of Marlowe’s tragedy now that they are displayed side by side, bearing in mind that there is no evidence that Jarman saw, or was even aware of, McKellen’s performance? To what 37

Dir. Saul Dibb, 2008.

38

Forker, ‘Introduction’, p. 108.

39

Dir. Peter Jackson, 2001–3.

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extent does the uploading of McKellen’s performance in 2011, and its juxtaposition with the 1991 Jarman film, change the television film of Edward II taped in 1970? Further, to what extent may the fresh availability and online circulation of the McKellen film affect our reading of Jarman’s Edward II in the light of McKellen’s performances as Shakespeare’s Richard II and Richard III? A film studies approach to the 1970 and 1991 adaptations of Edward II might, in Barbara Klinger’s terms, be synchronic (each film analysed in its own historical context). It might also be diachronic and consider the McKellen performance both in 1970 and at the time of its DVD release in 2009, acknowledging ‘the radical flux of meaning’ in McKellen’s performance ‘brought on by changing social and historical horizons over time’.40 A combination of synchronic and diachronic analyses as suggested by Klinger, however, is rendered insufficient in this case by the frictions caused by the online juxtaposition of the Jarman and McKellen films, combined with the hostile entanglement of McKellen’s biography with Jarman’s. Since Jarman’s death, the publication of his life-writing, Tony Peake’s and Mark Barratt’s biographies as well as McKellen’s political activism have resulted in constant changes to Jarman and McKellen’s ‘biographical legends’; these are changes that have affected the relationship between the respective films of Edward II as remediated on YouTube.41 The films therefore demand a response that is not only synchronic and diachronic, but also anachronic, that is, an approach that recognises the inchoate intersections of mutual influences that render it difficult to read the McKellen Edward II solely as a precursor rather than also a successor to Jarman’s film. The anachronic mode of viewing encouraged by YouTube’s hypermediated, intertextual interface and its chronological levelling allows what follows after to change the meaning of what comes before and creates dialogues between films that defy the laws of chronology. A synchronic history of Toby Robertson and Richard Marquand’s film of McKellen’s performance in 1970 might see that film as the culmination of a series of fringe and amateur performances and emphasise how McKellen departed from his predecessors in, as Robertson recalls, ‘almost sort of parading . . . his homosexuality’, even though the actor had not come out as homosexual at this point.42 His extravagant performance of same-sex desire was part of a larger strategy aimed at distinguishing Marlowe’s king as much as possible from Shakespeare’s Richard II, whom McKellen was 40 42

Klinger, ‘Film History’, 111. 41 Klinger, ‘Film History’, 126. Quoted in Geckle, ‘Tamburlaine’ and ‘Edward II’, p. 96.

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playing in repertory with Edward II. Where YouTube footage of McKellen’s Richard shows him self-possessed and haughty in the deposition scene, his Edward is highly emotional, even petulant and camp. The Edward II costumes, meanwhile, combine 1960s rainbow patterns with medieval styles, enabling a differentiation between Edward’s homosexual faction in skin-tight leggings and the more conservatively attired barons. Against the background of the Stonewall riots in New York in June 1969 and, in the United Kingdom, the decriminalisation of homosexual acts between consenting adults in 1967 and the abolition of theatre censorship in 1968, it was possible for McKellen to welcome James Laurenson’s Gaveston with a kiss on the lips.43 In the BBC film of the production shot by Richard Marquand towards the end of the run in London’s Piccadilly Theatre in 1970, McKellen portrays Marlowe’s king as moving from self-indulgent, exuberant youth to bearded manhood and, eventually, the abjection of a tortured death in the sewers. In language that betrays the attitudes the production was up against, Benedict Nightingale’s 1969 review for the New Statesman described McKellen’s deposed King as ‘a raddled, defeated, pathetic old queer, weakly grappling with his executioner, a parody of his former self’.44 Lightborn’s leggings, worn in the same fashion as those of Edward, Gaveston and Spencer, cue the viewer to consider him a member of the homosexual faction in Edward’s court. The murder, as a result, carries a strong sado-erotic charge, with Robert Eddison’s Lightborn comforting and stroking the wretched king, even kissing Edward on the lips before proceeding with his grim preparation for the murder. If the kiss between Edward and Gaveston at the beginning of the production speaks of the onset of an era in which homosexual desire can be expressed and valued, the murder with which it concludes suggests an affinity between homoeroticism and sadistic violence that disturbs a reading of the production as a progressive portrayal of same-sex desire. When set side by side with Jarman’s Edward II on YouTube, McKellen’s star status, which cannot be disentangled from his sexual politics and belated involvement in the gay rights movement, prompts an anachronic reading of his 1970 performance that differs markedly from the synchronic reading I have outlined. When read in relation to Derek Jarman’s Edward II and the two men’s differing attitudes towards gay rights and the Conservative Government in the United Kingdom in the late 1980s and early 1990s, it becomes ever more difficult to see McKellen’s 1970 film as 43

Fuller, ‘Love or Politics’, 91.

44

Quoted in Geckle, ‘Tamburlaine’ and ‘Edward II’, p. 85.

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the progressive production its 2009 North American DVD attempts to market. Jarman, who had been openly gay since the 1970s, was one of the first artists to have gone public about carrying the HIV virus in 1987 and was openly resentful of other public figures who had remained in the closet during the 1980s. McKellen, by contrast, had only come out about his homosexuality on BBC Radio 3 in 1987 in the context of a debate about Section 28 of the Local Government Act, the homophobic legislation that, as I argued in Chapter 1, prompted Jarman’s work on Edward II between 1986 and 1991.45 McKellen went on to lobby the government on behalf of Stonewall, a moderate gay rights organisation that sought dialogue with all political parties, including the Conservatives. Jarman’s smouldering resentment of McKellen’s position came to a head on 4 January 1991, when, in response to McKellen’s acceptance of a knighthood from the same government that had passed Section 28, Jarman denounced his former friend in an open letter to The Guardian in which he asserted his ‘dismay [at McKellen’s] acceptance of this honour from a government which has stigmatised homosexuality’.46 When McKellen, in an interview, accused Jarman of jealousy and not ‘living in the real world’, Jarman noted in his diary: ‘Peripheral is the way the straight world sees us. It’s a sorry day when “England’s leading gay man” sees the rest of us this way. Maybe Ian has just a gay façade and has a heart as straight as a die.’47 Jarman went on to vent his fury at McKellen in the script for ‘Pansy’, where, as we saw, ‘Sir Thespian Knight’ gives a poetic varnish to the destructive policies of Margaret Reaper’s homophobic government. Michael D. Friedman compellingly argues that McKellen, in turn, used the Loncraine film of 1995 to portray Richard III as a ‘monstrous version’ of Jarman as ‘“the queer activist,” whose refusal to curb his sexual promiscuity despite his AIDS status threatens the health of society’.48 Placed side by side with YouTube and viewed against the background of a conflict whose extent and implications have only become obvious in the past decade, McKellen’s 1970 performance of Edward II for the BBC and Derek Jarman’s feature film of the play in 1991 anachronically remember and respond to each other’s visions of how Marlowe’s play enables an exploration of the sexual politics of the present. The versespeaking that betrays McKellen’s Cambridge training by George Rylands and John Barton enshrines his position as someone who ‘owns’ classical 45 47 48

Barratt, Ian McKellen, p. 139. 46 Barratt, Ian McKellen, p. 149. Jarman, Smiling in Slow Motion, p. 163. Friedman, ‘Horror, Homosexuality, and Homiciphilia’, 575.

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theatre and is at ease within the conservative Establishment. It lends authority to McKellen’s desire, evident from his school visits in 2008, to act as a role model for the modern homosexual who is acceptable to parents, the mainstream press and middle-ground politicians. His portrayal of Edward as camp, self-obsessed and in thrall to his more dominant lover caters to a homophobic stereotype which is plainly differentiated from his personal star image; like his Richard III’s portrayal of ‘the queer activist’, his Edward II is projecting an image of Nightingale’s ‘pathetic old queer’ over whose tortured body McKellen, as a public figure, can rise to promote an image of the modern homosexual celebrity as a benign wizard (with a nod to his fame as Gandalf, which, after all, is only one click away on the YouTube sidebar). Key to this is the sympathetic portrayal, in the film, of Laurenson’s ‘virile’ Gaveston, who acts as a positive foil to McKellen’s unattractive king, and of Diane Fletcher’s Isabella, whose emotional turmoil becomes a convenient point of identification for a straight-identified audience. Seen as an anachronic, posthumous response to McKellen’s appearance as the YouTube neighbour to his own film, Jarman’s choice of workingclass actors Steven Waddington and Andrew Tiernan as Edward and Gaveston contributes to his depiction of the modern homosexual as an everyman figure who is oppressed by the game-hunting Establishment represented by Swinton’s icy Isabella. Whereas the king and his lover speak Marlowe’s verse as prose but enjoy performances of classical music, dance and readings from Dante, Swinton’s verse-speaking is as crisp as are her glamorous outfits: Edward’s queer court can be without pretensions in its appreciation of the arts, while verse-speaking of the kind associated with McKellen and Swinton’s Isabella is combined with a lack of artistic appreciation and, in Swinton’s performance, even of soul. Considered side by side with Diane Fletcher’s sympathetic, warm and distraught queen, Swinton’s performance forbids the viewer to identify with Isabella’s predicament. Jarman’s film presents the lovers as anything but ‘the limp-wristed lisping fags so beloved of the tabloids’, purposefully avoiding the effeminate, submissive stereotype McKellen’s performance buys into.49 Instead, Jarman presents a relationship based on love, the presumption of equality and a political struggle that associates the king with the OutRage! activists in their provocative drag without making them a point of mockery. In Jarman’s final image of Mortimer and Isabella covered in dust and locked in a cage, it is the heterosexual couple who are, to adapt Nightingale’s phrase, portrayed 49

Jarman, Queer Edward II, p. 30.

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as raddled, defeated, pathetic, weak parodies of their former selves, while the very queer boy Edward III, wearing his mother’s accessories, peers down at them with dispassionate curiosity. With its drag queens, nude rugby scrum and camp vampirism, Jarman’s Edward II resists commodification as ‘fit . . . for wholesome family entertainment’, as Swinton acknowledged in 2002, and is unlikely to be screened in schools even today, when Section 28 has been dropped from the Local Government Act and Jarman has achieved canonical status.50 Watched in tandem with Jarman’s film on YouTube, the McKellen film, true to the actor’s mission as an ambassador for gay rights in schools, anachronically answers the queer image of the cross-dressed boy king on top of the caged queen and her lover with a final scene in which Edward III, played as a dignified young man by Myles Reithermann, regretfully but sternly banishes his tearful mother before being ceremonially robed in a royal cloak. With his own hands he then impales young Mortimer’s head on a sword and, having performed this manly business, bends over his father’s cleaned-up body to kiss him on the mouth. The kiss as a signifier of samesex desire is transformed in this gesture into a sign of filial piety; only the young man’s leggings suggest that he, too, may be read as ‘gay’, though in a discreet manner that makes him blend in with the barons. As Jarman’s Edward II queers McKellen’s performance, the YouTube clips of McKellen’s Edward counter Jarman’s film with extracts of the play more suitable for use in educational contexts, where Edward III may operate as an intradiegetic representative of the extradiegetic politics of its star actor. Read in the anachronic fashion facilitated by their juxtaposition on YouTube, neither film holds chronological precedence, while each, in conjunction with the filmic intertexts that surround them, impacts on the meanings the other generates for the YouTube user. As with the fragmentation and degradation of the image I focussed on in my discussion of the BBC Duchess of Malfi, the uploading to YouTube of the ‘classic’ McKellen performance of Edward II has a major impact on how we see that film today. It is not that the juxtaposition of the films makes us lose our sense of chronology altogether; what it does is enable an anachronic approach in which relations of power and influence are redefined by the online context. The YouTube interface creates not only new ways of watching films, but also new ways of conceptualising relationships between films within the ever-expanding online archive. 50

Swinton, ‘No Known Address’, p. 11.

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Early modern drama and the economics of microcinema Remediations of ‘classic’ television and feature films enable users to share their personal archives and the online community of viewers to shape the collective cultural memory by putting performances from different historical moments and cultural backgrounds into dialogue in ways that defy chronology. These older performances compete for the viewer’s attention with a new breed of adaptations, of which Kyle McDonald and Philip Borg’s short digital film Revenge for the Duchess of Malfi (2010) and the feature-length adaptations of The Changeling (2007)51 and The Jew of Malta (2012)52 are representative examples that contrast, in their use of online modes of dissemination, with Peter Huby’s slightly older Malfi-adaptation Quietus (2002). The directors of these films follow Cox’s injunction to independent filmmakers to fight industry structures and produce their own films, capitalising on the affordability of digital media and the ability to distribute their work through online streaming sites. Rob Kenner describes such film as ‘[m]icrocinema, a new way of creating, distributing, and screening movies . . . that is making movie production more accessible, personal, and spontaneous than ever before.’53 Contrary to the microcinematic films praised by Tom O’Regan and Ben Goldsmith as using ‘varieties of technology old and new, often against the grain’ to ‘pose their filmmaking not as Hollywood “wannabes,” but as alternative practitioners opposed to “slick, Hollywood FX films”’,54 however, the films I concentrate on here have no such oppositional artistic and/or political aims. Instead, they are earnest attempts, by independent filmmakers with an often passionate personal investment in early modern drama, to showcase their abilities and find work and funding within the theatre and/or film industry, using the web as their promotional platform. Kyle McDonald and Philip Borg’s Revenge for the Duchess of Malfi is a short film that evolved out of the 2009 staging of the tragedy by Vile Passéist Theatre. The Canadian company’s avowed aim, according to artistic director Dan Bray, is to repossess ironically the Futurist movement’s condemnation of its early modern predecessors as ‘vile’ and ‘passéist’ and to ‘question why so many of the period’s plays remain unproduced and ignored outside academia’ by cultivating a repertoire that ‘omit[s] the Bard’s 51 53 54

Dir. Jay Stern. 52 Dir. Douglas Morse. Rob Kenner, ‘My Hollywood! So You Wanna Be in Pictures? Pick Up Your Tools and Shoot’, Wired 7, 10 October 1999, http://tinyurl.com/cj24rt4. O’Regan and Goldsmith, ‘Emerging Global Ecologies’, p. 96.

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canon and focus[es] exclusively on the works of his colleagues’.55 This counter-Shakespearean polemical edge, however, only implicitly informs this film, if at all. Revenge for the Duchess of Malfi was made, says McDonald, ‘in hopes of securing money for a feature’, for which he has developed a script.56 To showcase his work as a producer, director and actor playing Bosola, McDonald has made it available through several channels, including Facebook, Dailymotion, and submissions to major independent film festivals like Sundance, CFC shorts, VIEnetwork, the Manhattan Short and Super Shorts.57 Although the film, which gives the tragedy ‘a contemporary, North-American Mafioso spin’,58 has not, to date, attracted the desired funding, it is remarkably professional: its sparse, modern visuals and tight editing – the whole film lasts a mere 10 minutes 7 seconds – manage to combine extreme compression of the plot with the sense of leisure that enables an atmosphere of menace to build. In a move which recalls Jarman’s preposterous approach to narrative, Revenge starts with an extreme close-up of the Duchess’s dead blue eye vacantly staring at the viewer while, in voice-over, her echoing call for revenge is mingled with the sound of Bosola’s deep voice growling ‘Revenge, for the Duchess of Malfi’.59 As the camera pans up to show Bosola crouching beside the Duchess and despairingly looking around the empty room, his voice on the soundtrack pronounces the lines that signal his change of intention following the murder: ‘While with vain hopes our faculties we tire, / We seem to sweat in ice and freeze in fire. / What would I do, were this to do again? / I would not change my peace of conscience / For all the wealth of Europe.’60 An overexposed flashback visual superimposing the smiling face of Antonio on the Duchess’s dead eye acts as a transition to the first narrative episode. As played by Shawn Ahmed, a Toronto actor of South Asian origin, it is ethnic group rather than social class that marks Antonio as an objectionable partner for the Duchess in Ferdinand’s eyes, giving the dynamics of the play a vividly contemporary twist in view of the significant South Asian diaspora that has settled in Canada. Establishing the pace of the film, Irena Huljak reprises her stage performance as the coolly confident Duchess. Wrapped in a bath towel that emphasises her vulnerability in the privacy of her home, she is helping herself to orange juice in 55 56 57 58

Dan Bray, ‘Just Another Renaissance: Vile Passéist Theatre of the Obscure’, Charlesbois Post – Canada, 15 October 2011, http://tinyurl.com/d8bdy4f. Kyle McDonald, message to author, 24 March 2011. Kyle McDonald, message to author, 16 May 2011. The film can currently be viewed at ‘Revenge for the Duchess of Malfi’, DailyMotion, http://tinyurl.com/74a752u. Kyle McDonald, message to the author, 7 April 2011. 59 5.5.98. 60 4.2.340–4.

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15 Out of joint: Irena Huljak, Jason Gray and Kyle McDonald in Kyle McDonald and Philip Borg’s Revenge for the Duchess of Malfi (2010). Screengrab.

her designer kitchen when she is surprised by the presence of Ferdinand (Jason Gray). While she answers Ferdinand’s request that she not remarry, another flashback showing her and Antonio in bed economically conflates the tragedy’s wooing scene with Ferdinand’s admonition of his sister (1.2) and his intrusion into her bedroom (3.2). The film transitions via a second shot of Bosola with the dead Duchess to an outdoor street scene, filmed with a hand-held camera, in which Ferdinand hires Bosola (1.2); as in Jarman’s Edward II, the relationship between the executioner and his victim thus takes structural precedence over the erotic relationship whose transgressiveness is punished. A rapid montage next juxtaposes the barefoot Duchess wrapped in a fur coat sitting on the concrete floor of her cell with an extreme close-up of Ferdinand, Bosola opening a door to reveal Antonio’s bloodied corpse (4.1), and flashbacks of the Duchess in bed with Antonio. The frenzied montage, which culminates in a shot of the Duchess sobbing on the floor, gives way to an eerie calm in the pivotal scene at the centre of the film (4.2), in which the camera’s tilted angle rests on the face of the dead Duchess as its anchor, suggesting the out-of-jointness of the world now she is dead. It is from the aftermath of this scene, as Ferdinand, instead of rewarding Bosola, draws a gun on him and is disarmed in a struggle, that the film’s opening shots of Bosola and the dead Duchess are taken. On the soundtrack, the Duchess’s voice calls for revenge before a cut takes us to her death

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scene. Kneeling on the concrete floor in nothing but a white satin slip, the Duchess serenely recounts the parable of the dogfish and the salmon.61 As she turns her head to the camera and, with quiet defiance, says ‘I am Duchess of Malfi still’,62 a plastic noose cuts into her throat. In front of a mirror, Bosola, speaking his own dying words,63 sees the Duchess’s flickering ghost in the mirror while her disembodied voice once more whispers ‘Revenge for the Duchess of Malfi’. The Duchess and Bosola have merged, her voice speaking his line while his actions play out her emblematic mirror scene of Act 3 Scene 2; the implication is that Bosola is now prepared to hunt down Ferdinand for a Mafia-style revenge execution on the Duchess’s behalf. Using the dead Duchess as an anchor, Revenge thus jumps back and forth within the plot of Webster’s Malfi to combine strong visuals with some of the most hauntingly poetic lines of the tragedy. Supremely cinematic in its approach, Revenge mixes Jarman’s preposterous episodic approach to storytelling with the mainstream cinematic conventions of North American Mafia films to position this film project so as to appeal to an independent film market. If this is guerrilla filmmaking, in Cox’s terms (that is, in that it is financially independent and represents an individual vision) this is the work of a pair of guerrilla fighters who would very much like to be allowed to join the current film Establishment. As such, Revenge is close in spirit to the few DIY filmmaking projects for early modern drama that have resulted in full-length feature films. It is the financing and distribution of these films that interests me here, because the filmmakers’ use of the web as a tool for marketing, fund-raising and dissemination affects the relationship between the viewer/user of their films and the producers.64 This is quite obvious from the way in which Jay Stern, the director of The Changeling (2007), engagingly shares his DIYfilmmaking know-how with an online audience in three sequential YouTube clips titled ‘How to make a feature film for $25,000’, on the assumption that his viewers see themselves as potential producers of films who may want to emulate his venture into filmmaking.65 Stern’s missionary zeal is characteristic of many of these filmmakers who are determined to bring their favourite early modern plays back into circulation. Shot on 61 64

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3.5.126–42. 62 4.2.138. 63 5.2.121–2. Geoffrey Way suggests that this ‘explains the conservative nature of the productions, as they’re more likely to get funding if they are familiar and more mainstream in their take on the plays than if they attempted to be transgressive’. Message to author, 20 June 2012. Jay Stern, ‘How to Make a Feature for $25,000’ (Parts 1–3), YouTube, 29 May 2007, http://tinyurl .com/25-000feature.

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location in a country mansion and using makeshift costumes that indicate an indeterminate recent past, Stern’s Changeling combines the roughness of a six-day shoot with the meticulous planning of a nine-month rehearsal period with a cast of dedicated volunteers and more experienced performers, including Wendy Herlich, who gives a nuanced performance as BeatriceJoanna. The result is a film which, while uneven, poses an important challenge to the performance tradition of The Changeling in its portrayal of Beatrice-Joanna and De Flores’s relationship as consensual from the outset, an interpretation that provides an interesting contrast to how that relationship is delineated in the film’s mainstream TV counterpart Compulsion.66 What distinguishes Stern’s film from Peter Huby’s Quietus (2002), an adaptation of The Duchess of Malfi lasting just over one hour, is not only Huby’s decision to set his plot in early seventeenth-century Yorkshire, but also the filmmaker’s attitude to the internet as a mode of distribution and a source of funding. Like McDonald, Stern has cultivated an online presence not just through his YouTube clips, but also through a dedicated website, which includes information about his Changeling.67 While the film cannot be purchased outright, the website’s fundraising page cunningly promises donors who make a fully tax deductible contribution of $30 or more a copy of the finished DVD. As a result, the film is now enjoying modest circulation and its trailer has, to date, been watched by over 115,000 viewers on YouTube – five times more viewers than have watched the first segment of the BBC Malfi, a ‘quality’, well-funded performance with well-known actors, on the site.68 Huby’s Quietus, by contrast, has achieved only very limited circulation in DVD copies and its afterlife depends almost exclusively on word-of-mouth. Premiered at the Drill Hall in Settle, Yorkshire, on 24 August 2002, that is, two years before the impact of online video streaming sites began to be felt, Quietus presents scenes of Malfi that are performed by a group of early modern travelling players, with elements of Webster’s plot additionally refracted in the frame narrative of a young widow driven to suicide by the jealousy and desire of her brother. The film, whose preoccupation with the harsh landscape of the Yorkshire dales and whose melancholy score provide an unexpectedly apt background to Webster’s tragedy, is untraceable through the internet and its survival in cultural memory is almost 66 67 68

See Lehmann, ‘Taking Back the Night’, 597–8 and my next chapter. ‘The Changeling’, Changelingmovie.com, www.changelingmovie.com/. ‘The Changeling, Trailer’, YouTube, http://tinyurl.com/bolfrkb.

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entirely dependent on the lone publicising efforts of Rowland Wymer.69 Resisting the globalising and dehistoricising impulses of the internet, it remains a local product, created by and for a local community for a specific occasion. As is clear from these examples, the image of the microcinema filmmaker as cultural guerrilla fighter opposing Hollywood norms oversimplifies the work of the independent filmmakers dedicated to filming early modern drama using digital technologies. The direction in which such work is heading is best exemplified by Douglas Morse, an independent filmmaker who teaches in the Department of Media Studies and Film at The New School in New York. Morse’s Jew of Malta (2012) builds on the director’s experiences of filming The Merchant of Venice (2009) and The Summoning of Everyman (2008). As the only screen adaptation of Marlowe’s play, Morse’s Jew is expected to attract much higher library sales and viewing figures than can be the case of any equivalent microcinematic film of a Shakespeare play. The balance of power between Shakespeare and Marlowe is thus tipped in favour of Marlowe in a market that is saturated with expensive Shakespeare adaptations, but where a budget adaptation of Marlowe has the advantage of, for the time being, absolute uniqueness. As Morse explains, the technological shift from celluloid to digital video has made a substantial difference to his ability to produce his films on a tight budget: My first feature was shot on film (super-16mm and blown up to 35mm). It looks gorgeous, but I’ve gone digital ever since. Digital is a huge boon to the independent filmmaker as it is cheaper and easier. Now that all delivery is digital, and the digital cameras available and coming out are amazing, film doesn’t make sense anymore.70

The Jew of Malta, which can now be purchased from Morse’s ‘Grandfather Films: independent films for the independent viewer’ website, is the result of a blend of remarkable personal investment (both financial and emotional), a mixture of amateur and professional performers, and online marketing.71 Its core funding came from a Faculty Research Grant of $7,500 at The New School, and was topped up by Morse’s own savings and contributions by friends and family once it became clear that permissions to film on location (New York’s Governors Island) were going to cost twice that amount, not to speak of wages for professional actors paid at the 69 71

Wymer, ‘The Duchess of Malfi on Film’. 70 Douglas Morse, message to author, 18 May 2012. Grandfather Films, http://shop.grandfatherfilms.com/, last accessed 15 May 2012. The DVD retails at $169 – not cheap, and clearly targeted at the dedicated amateur and library markets.

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Screen Actors’ Guild rate. Only some of the funding shortfall for this film, which ended up costing $50,000, could be made up by Morse’s energetic efforts to secure pre-sales via a dedicated website and appeals published on his online newsletter.72 Morse also uploaded password-protected rough cuts of work-in-progress on Vimeo and some other extracts on YouTube and shared these with potential donors and anyone who might be able to assist in the film’s dissemination, using an email list he compiled over time to update interested parties. Even though Morse insists that he is ‘not one of the Indiegogo/ Kickstarter success stories’, his is the sort of filmmaking that quite literally changes the relationship between the user of online media and the producers of content.73 It is in their appeal to viewers to actively support the financing and publicity for their work through modest financial contributions and word-of-mouth recommendations, rather than in their deployment of innovative aesthetics, that filmmakers like Morse, Stern and McDonald are revolutionary and ‘democratic’. In the process, they, with the help of their audiences, are directly changing the corpus of early modern drama on screen by adding more plays and interpretations to the online archive/canon, bringing to the drama a DIY sensibility and a sense of popular momentum that is likely to result in ever more such films being made and disseminated.

Education and the digital medium: Chamber of Demonstrations and Stage on Screen Looking back at his attempts to secure funding for a full-length film of Revenge for the Duchess of Malfi, Kyle McDonald remarks that: ‘The most interest has come from academics (not surprisingly).’74 It is to this scholarly interest in screen performances of early modern drama that I now turn, ending this chapter with a consideration of the interrelationship between education, scholarship and performances of early modern drama in digital media. Demand from scholars and performers alike has led to a veritable explosion of filmed theatre productions that arise from a range of educational contexts and are disseminated through specialist websites or simply 72

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‘The Jew of Malta’, Grandfatherfilms.com, www.jewofmalta.com; the newsletter appears to have gone offline and the Vimeo links have been disabled. A trailer remains at ‘The Jew of Malta Official Trailer’, YouTube, http://tinyurl.com/bnrk33a. Douglas Morse, message to author, 15 May 2012. Kyle McDonald, message to author, 16 May 2012.

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uploaded onto YouTube.75 Academic demand has also driven more formally scholarly digital projects, such as Joanne Tompkins’s use of the Ortelia software to recreate a virtual performance of Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus in a digital reconstruction of the Rose Theatre.76 Here, however, I want to concentrate on two educational projects that have resulted in the production of DVDs supported by websites with additional material: Martin White’s Chamber of Demonstrations (2009), and Stage on Screen’s production of DVDs of Doctor Faustus (2009), The Duchess of Malfi (2010) and Volpone (2010). The appearance of these very different educational DVDs speaks of the increasing perception that there is a market gap that can be filled by Shakespeare’s contemporaries, both as texts and films. It also speaks of the new ways in which the contemporaries are framed for consumption on the small screen when the viewer is assumed to be a learner using the DVD alongside a website to access a variety of materials, with texts and performances available alongside one another. The idea that performances of early modern plays – especially plays that are rarely performed even in the theatre – should somehow be recorded and made available for teaching is nothing new, of course: quite a few of the mid-twentieth-century television broadcasts of early modern drama condense often-taught plays like Doctor Faustus and Volpone into the duration of a school lesson, specifically with an audience of schoolchildren in mind and often prefacing these films with contextual material.77 In later decades, the Open University began to commission rarely performed plays for its students, and, in 1981, commissioned a video recording of Women Beware Women that was rebroadcast in subsequent years.78 In March 1993, Barrie Rutter, the artistic director of the Northern Broadsides theatre company, on the occasion of a scholarly conference on ‘Court and Society in Jacobean England’, worked with North American scholars and performers to produce a VHS and DVD of Oberon: The Faery Prince, A Masque of Prince Henries, 75

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Two prominent examples are Edward’s Boys, the company of grammar school boys from Stratfordupon-Avon led by English teacher Perry Mills, who have gained a sizeable academic following for their productions of plays written for early modern boys’ companies and who sell DVDs through their website (see my filmography in Appendix 2), and Willing Suspension Productions, Boston University’s graduate student theatre company whose last five productions of early modern plays have been uploaded on YouTube. A demonstration of the 3D model of the Rose can be found at ‘Recreation of the Rose Theatre, London’, Ortelia.com, http://tinyurl.com/7nqxqd2. Joanne Tompkins demonstrated how this may be used to stage a performance at a presentation at the World Shakespeare Congress, Prague, July 2011. Surviving broadcasts are listed in the filmography in Appendix 2. Broadcast information from ‘Women Beware Women – Film Productions’, Elizabethan and Jacobean Drama, Warwick.ac.uk, http://tinyurl.com/cx8le5z.

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1611 at Case Western Reserve University. Although a great deal of academic labour has obviously gone into this production, which aims at conveying what musicologist Ross W. Duffin, in his introduction to the film, calls ‘the spirit and effect of the original masque’, there is a tongue-in-cheek knowingness about the shortcomings of the reconstruction which disarms criticism and adds to the fun of seeing how one of the Satyrs, during a somewhat too vigorous dance, loses his prosthetic phallus. At the end of the recording, Stephen Orgel enthuses about the ‘absolutely wonderful’ performance, which he describes as ‘exciting, and colourful, and thoughtful . . . and . . . as close to authentic as you can be in 1993 without a million dollars to spend’. Oberon’s carefree experiment in dramatic reconstruction for academic discussion and classroom use offers a telling contrast with Martin White’s 2009 DVD Chamber of Demonstrations: Reconstructing the Jacobean Indoor Playhouse. White’s DVD and Oberon are separated partly by the amount of research into original performance practices that has taken place since the opening of the reconstructed Globe Theatre in 1996, ushering in a decade of intense collaboration between scholars and practitioners in that space and in the reconstructed Blackfriars in Staunton, Virginia, as well as in the reconstructed Jacobean indoor theatre at the University of Bristol, where Chamber of Demonstrations was filmed. Oberon’s joyful embrace of anachronism and blatant use of cheap approximations of expensive period costumes (especially in the gold fabric that stands in for the armoured breastplate of Jones’s design for Prince Henry’s costume) makes way, in Chamber, for attention to minute details of hair, make-up and costume. Where in Oberon scholars talk about research, Chamber presents itself as research; the documentarystyle performed essays and conversations with scholars work hard at conveying a sense of thought in progress, just as the performances of scenes are presented as constituting a scholarly argument. This speaks volumes about the professional and financial investment that has gone into bringing scholarship and performance practice together since the 1990s. Just as significantly, Oberon and Chamber are also set apart by the technological advances in digital media and the official push by the United Kingdom’s funding councils towards creating a digital knowledge economy and encouraging scholars to work with private companies to create new forms of disseminating knowledge and generate maximum impact on society, culture and the economy. Vital Arts and Humanities Research Council funding has supported both the Richard Brome Online

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project, with its clips of staged readings of individual scenes,79 and a cluster of projects on Practice as Research in Performance (PARIP) – including Chamber – between 2001 and 2006. This funding has made it possible for Martin White, Professor of Theatre at the University of Bristol, to collaborate with Ignition Films, a Bristol-based film production company, on creating an interactive DVD, accompanied by a website that promises to provide updates on the research underpinning the DVD.80 DVD and website are complementary, in that the DVD relies on research published online, while the website, from which DVDs can be ordered, gives the user access to tasters of the DVD content. Together, DVD and website combine scholarly descriptions of early modern theatre designs with presentations by scholars and practitioners working at Shakespeare’s Globe and, crucially, performances of seven scenes. These performances are filmed from four different angles, corresponding to four distinct audience positions (the back of the theatre, the stalls, the balcony on the side of the stage and the perspective of a stage-sitter), using high definition digital video cameras that can work with the extreme lighting conditions imposed by White’s experiments with tallow and wax candles. The interactive feature of the DVD allows the viewer to switch from one angle to another in order to see how the same scene can appear quite different when viewed from these vantage points. Instead of the continuous, linear and leisurely experience afforded by Rutter’s Oberon, with a full-length performance of an early modern play or masque framed by commentary, Chamber of Demonstrations thus offers a fragmented experience that carries the discontinuity of performance in online media across into the DVD, putting the user in charge of organising the material and creating an individual journey through it. The DVD does not even gesture in the direction of the full plays, offering the excerpts as self-sufficient in their ability to make the required point. Tellingly, Chamber of Demonstrations, packaged as it is in a cardboard hard cover the height of a book and slimness of a pamphlet, presents itself as an academic publication rather than a film. The reproduction on its cover of the seventeenth-century drawing of an indoor theatre strongly privileges theatre historical research over performance, going against the grain of the DVD as a medium for performance. Chamber thus pushes to an extreme W. B. Worthen’s contention, regarding Shakespeare on DVD or ‘Shakespeare 3.0’, that: 79 80

Richard Brome Online, http://tinyurl.com/7h2ovoo. ‘The Chamber of Demonstrations. Reconstructing the Jacobean Indoor Playhouse’, www.bristol.ac.uk/drama/jacobean/iportal1.html.

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Working across two platforms and integrating written argument with physical presentation, academic debate and performed argument, Chamber of Demonstrations embodies the convergence, in the present-day life of early modern drama, of stage, screen and text. Its overall aim is patently not the transmission of a performance or even of a discrete set of performances, but rather the presentation, through text and practice, of an argument in a scholarly debate, using the most commonly used tool of the present-day scholar: the personal computer. White’s argument is that the artificial light prevalent in Jacobean indoor theatres lacked brilliance, but allowed performers to use subtle differences in the level of lighting to great effect.82 The rationale for the selection of scenes is, on the face of it, guided by the desire to illustrate this thesis. Thus, for instance, the ‘dead hand’ scene from The Duchess of Malfi 83 exemplifies the contrast between the darkness of the scene’s first half and brightening of the stage once the Duchess has called for a light, while the murder of Bergetto in ’Tis Pity84 demonstrates how lanterns may have been used. Other scenes are chosen for their use of the upper level, of a concealed space or of stage location. Typical of the scenes’ ability to combine information with entertainment is Alonzo’s murder in The Changeling,85 which is both sombre and hilarious, enabling a superb demonstration of the to-and-fro between the two stage entrances that allows De Flores to conceal his weapon and have it at hand when the unsuspecting Alonzo, facing the audience, has the bad idea to admire the fortifications of Vermandero’s castle. The scenes used by White to illustrate his point are thus taken from a selection of Jacobean and Caroline plays scripted with indoor theatres in mind, including Ford’s rarely performed Love’s Sacrifice and Massinger’s equally obscure The Guardian. No playwright is mentioned on the DVD’s 81 82

83

Worthen, Drama, p. 7. There remain questions about whether White is right in allowing no daylight at all in to penetrate his Jacobean indoor theatre to alleviate some of the gloom in the room. I am grateful to Alan Dessen for sharing his thoughts (Alan Dessen, messages to author, 18 and 21 May 2012). Act 4 Scene 1. 84 Act 3 Scene 7. 85 Act 3 Scene 1.

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menu, in fact: the user must select between scenes from plays she/he may never have heard of, without author or date of composition/publication to guide the choice. Without entering into an explicit polemic about the need to flesh out the canon of early modern plays in performance and look at more than the usual suspects, White’s selection of scenes implicitly advocates just such a need. Additionally, through his selection of non-Shakespearean texts, White’s DVD associates both research on original practices and the indoor theatres of the Jacobean period with Shakespeare’s contemporaries, almost pointedly leaving Shakespeare where he is in love and adored by mainstream cinema-goers: in the outdoor Globe Theatre, in the presence of Judi Dench’s benevolent Queen Elizabeth, and with the distinctly unscholarly use of a young woman in the role of Romeo. The implicit message of the DVD is that the scholarly investment into original practices performance research is best applied to plays by Shakespeare’s contemporaries, leaving Shakespeare’s plays to be played with in more trivial, if rather better-lit, ways by bigscreen blockbusters. Chamber of Demonstrations in this way constitutes a unique articulation, on the small screen, of the scholarly divide between the marked tendency towards historicism in the study of Shakespeare’s contemporaries and the acceptance of ‘presentist’ approaches in the study of Shakespeare I noted in my introduction; in this, it stands in lone opposition to the collapse of such distinctions which characterises video-sharing sites like YouTube. In Chamber, the implicit divide between present Shakespeare and his historical contemporaries goes hand in hand with the DVD’s presentation as ‘bookish’ and its privileging of star researchers over star performers. White’s DVD works hard to root the plays it showcases firmly in the past, with the various documentary-style sections on make-up and costuming that are contained in the ‘Backstage’ section of the DVD putting a further barrier between the viewer and the performances by insisting on the material differences between present-day theatre practice and the early modern stage. Seeing a performer being made-up (with the guidance of early modern cosmetics expert Farah Karim-Cooper) and dressed (by Jenny Tiramani, director of theatre design at Shakespeare’s Globe) is, of course, highly effective in conveying the sheer cumbersomeness of early modern dress and the peculiar red-and-white beauty described in Petrarchan poetry. It also ensures, however, that the plays represented on the DVD will be trapped by the trappings of period in a way that Shakespeare’s plays are patently not. In that sense, Chamber articulates a profoundly conservative view of early modern drama in the strictest sense of that adjective: the plays are

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historically embedded in the Jacobean period and its material culture in a way that prevents them from re-entering the present-day performance context. At the same time, however, such conservatism is undercut in several ways, and not least by the fact that the performer Tiramani and KarimCooper work their period magic on is a woman, not a boy – an awareness registered when Tiramani mentions how similar the process would have been for a man preparing for a cross-dressed performance. In a project that is so deeply concerned with the reconstruction of early modern performance practices, choosing to illustrate period make-up and costume on a woman seems a peculiar choice, especially since a male actor was available to play the Duchess of Malfi in one scene. Chamber thus courts contradiction: while the historical gulf separating present-day performance from early modern practice is stressed, that gulf is bridged by the woman performer who, in a cross-dressing manoeuvre even more complex than that of Viola de Lesseps performing Romeo in Shakespeare in Love, stands in for the early modern boy actor performing a woman’s role, erasing the fundamental historical discontinuity in the performance of gendered identities in the process. The tendency of Chamber towards self-contradiction is also obvious from its section on ‘History and Reconstruction’, which confronts head-on what is perhaps the greatest problem faced by White’s project: the very real possibility that the Wickham Theatre may not be a reconstruction of a Jacobean theatre after all, since the Worcester College drawings it is based on may date from the 1660s rather than the 1630s. This possibility is not swept under the carpet; rather, the contradiction is embraced through White’s inclusion of a detailed discussion of the drawings with Gordon Higgott, whose research is also hyperlinked on the website. Meanwhile, in an interview, White allows Andrew Gurr to voice his criticism of reconstructions of the theatre sketched in the Worcester College drawings that change the drawings’ curved benches to a straight, stage-facing seating arrangement – that is, the sort of seating used in the Wickham Theatre and represented by one of White’s four camera angles onto the stage. These incongruities, in combination with the markedly postmodern approach the DVD as a whole displays in its sampling of plays, juxtaposition of scholarship and practice, interactivity and empowerment of the user, make of Chamber of Demonstrations a work that paradoxically reconciles a view of early modern drama as deeply embedded within early modern material culture and practices with a view of the drama as effortlessly compatible with present-day performance culture (the use of women actors) and as participating in the latest developments in digital humanities and

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practice-based research. While ostentatiously framed as stage performances and explicitly linked to the original practices research that characterised the decade following the opening of Shakespeare’s Globe, the stagings recorded on Chamber were conceptualised specifically not just for film, but for interactive film at that. If the message is at least in part conveyed by the medium, then Chamber speaks not merely of the importance of the early modern theatrical context to our understanding of early modern drama, but, perhaps even more forcefully, of the ways in which the digital media allow scholars and practitioners to create new environments in which early modern drama can be performed and viewed. Chamber’s concerted attempt to integrate its published DVD with its website and create a digital product that, across its two platforms, brings together stage performance, research and writing makes it into an expanded production that resembles the multi-platform production of Cheek by Jowl’s ’Tis Pity. That expansion of a ‘production’ beyond the stage and into various digital media is also central to the strategy adopted by Stage on Screen, a commercial production company based in London which seeks to fill the gap, in the educational market, for affordable DVD recordings of non-Shakespearean playtexts taught in UK secondary schools. Nestling between the BBC/Time-Life Shakespeare films that have now become available on DVD and have re-entered libraries in that form, Opus Arte’s recordings of productions at Shakespeare’s Globe and the ‘live’ experience offered by Globe on Screen and the National Theatre and Donmar Warehouse’s broadcasting of live productions, including Shakespeare, to provincial arts cinemas in the United Kingdom and worldwide, the Stage on Screen DVDs promise to satisfy the demand for non-Shakespearean drama in performance by providing a distinctive blend of ‘liveness’ and archivability that feeds off the popularity of theatrical Shakespeares in digital form. The choice of the DVD as Stage on Screen’s principal platform is telling in that it packages the films in a way that strongly signals the bookishness Worthen described as characteristic of ‘Shakespeare 3.0’, creating a product which belongs as much on a shelf, as part of a private or library-based performance archive, as it belongs in the DVD-slot of a computer or television set. The very neutrality of their packaging speaks of the DVDs’ identity as part of a series of collectible items which may be bought as a set. What distinguishes Stage on Screen from all the other producers of digital video recordings of early modern drama I have discussed in this chapter is that while the customers targeted by the company are predominantly teachers, pupils and their parents, with some additional sales going to the over-50-year-olds with a personal investment in the wider theatrical canon,

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theirs is a business that is driven by the market and the founding members’ ‘backgrounds in film and television, education and publishing’, rather than by an individual’s artistic ambition or scholarly research.86 The core of Stage on Screen’s operations, therefore, is financial and logistical: the company raises the funds necessary to commission productions of specific plays from investors (in the region of £150,000 per production), organises the recording of the production, runs the Stage on Screen website and markets the DVDs. The aim is to achieve a position where the income generated by the steady sales of DVDs (currently on average about 100 to 150 DVDs per month for each title) is large enough to sustain the company and fund future productions. The artistic and educational components of the Stage on Screen productions, meanwhile, are farmed out to specialist providers and advisors. The website’s ‘Green Room’ thus contains not only supplementary information concerned directly with the productions, such as downloads of the playtexts edited for production and galleries of costume designs, production photographs and video clips, but also a wealth of contextual teaching resources squarely aimed at UK secondary school pupils. These materials are provided by Tom Barnes, Head of English Faculty at Portland Place School, one of London’s most select private schools. Barnes’s motto, when compiling the teaching tools, was: ‘I know what I would want from a website and have tried to include it.’87 The emphasis, accordingly, falls on historical and literary context, source study and close reading, encouraging ways of reading the plays that are in tune with the requirements of the British National Curriculum. Additionally, with a view to extending the DVDs’ appeal for the Higher Education market, and supported by the Arts and Humanities Research Council grant that has funded the research for this book, I worked with the company in 2011 to 2012 to advise Stage on Screen on the needs of Higher Education institutions. In my role as the company’s Higher Education Consultant, I suggested adjustments to the website, drew up lists of plays that are widely taught in universities but are not available as recordings, advised on the commissioning of plays and supplied information about research trends and interests, professional associations, conferences, and other theatres and companies attempting to do similar work. Possibly the most important insight I gained from my involvement with Stage on Screen is that while ‘first and foremost [the company] ensure[s] that the production 86 87

Rees, ‘Stage on Screen’, 8. Tom Barnes, ‘Study Aids for Stage on Screen Set Text Plays’, Stageonscreen.com, http://tinyurl.com/ 7o86rru.

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itself works – hence the live audience, A grade cast and theatrical run’, the creation of high-quality productions crucially hinges on the company’s intense and unrelenting focus on investment, marketing, packaging and finding ways to expand the range of its product.88 Such a lack of operational emphasis on the productions themselves, of course, is only possible because the artistic component is entrusted to a very safe pair of hands and based in an established theatrical venue that adds to the kudos of the productions. Thus, in 2009 and 2010, the company rented the Greenwich Theatre in South-East London, a well-known off-West End venue, and hired Elizabeth Freestone, a young director with an impressive track-record of working with the RSC, Shakespeare’s Globe and the National Theatre. The producers granted Freestone artistic licence to work with a cast of established professional actors on two stage productions per season that were performed in repertory. They decided to combine Doctor Faustus with The School for Scandal in 2009 and in 2010, they coupled Volpone with The Duchess of Malfi, ensuring that in each season, a comedy would be accompanied by a tragedy whose cast size and specification would be a good match and that could be performed using the same set design (with minor variations). Stage on Screen’s DVD recordings of the stage productions were possible thanks to specially drawn-up contracts for the performers, which also specified that all cast members would talk about their work in interviews included in the ‘teaching pack’ version of the DVD. A live performance was filmed at the end of each run by Outside Broadcast director Chris Cowey, using the same techniques used for the live transmission of the BBC’s Top of the Pops, on which he worked between 1997 and 2003. Early on in the production process, Cowey had met with Freestone and the set designer and had also attended an earlier performance so as to know where to position the cameras. During the performance that was filmed for DVD, he communicated directly with his five cameramen via their headsets as he produced a live edit of the performance, while microphones located on actors and around the set generated ‘the multiple audio tracks needed to create the 5.1 surround sound on the finished DVD’.89 More markedly even than the mise-en-scène, sound and camera work that Laurie Osborne notes ‘prove particularly crucial in displaying/registering “liveness” in filmed stage performances’ like the BBC’s Edward II, the on-the-spot editing of the Stage on Screen DVDs marks them out as part of a particularly televisual mode of liveness, making them benefit from what Philip Auslander calls the 88

Phil Rees, message to author, 7 June 2012.

89

Rees, ‘Stage on Screen’, 9.

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‘ideologically engrained sense of television as a live medium’ which, since the inception of television, has been key to the medium’s attempts ‘to recreate the theatrical experience for the home viewer through televisual discourse and, thus, to replace live performance’.90 For Stage on Screen’s producer, Phil Rees, the result is a ‘simulacrum’ of liveness that makes the highly prized liveness of the theatrical event accessible for those audience members who, for practical reasons, cannot attend the performance that is remediated.91 In post-production, Freestone helped polish Cowey’s live edit, ensuring that the final cut would include elements of the production he might have missed, such as a mute character’s reaction to another character’s speech, or a significant entrance or exit. The DVDs were then packaged into two distinct products: one a simple DVD of the performance with optional subtitles, divided into Act and Scene segments for easy navigation; the other the teaching pack containing the same DVD plus a DVD providing an uninterrupted master shot of the production filmed from the back of the theatre, with interviews with performers, designers, stage managers and Freestone herself as an additional teaching resource on a separate ‘extras DVD’. The teaching pack thus allows its user, who is conceptualised as a teacher or learner, to view the production either in its edited version or its master shot, to switch between DVDs, add subtitles to enable closer attention to the playtext as a text, and gain additional knowledge about the making of the production from the supplementary interviews. The logic of the teaching pack mirrors the logic informing DVDs of feature films like Hotel, with its wealth of ‘extras’ that are essential to the experience of the work: it is not, in Tryon’s terms, ‘a very specific experience of film culture in general’ that is sold here, but a very specific experience of twenty-first-century performance culture, with access to backstage information that fosters a ‘discourse of connoisseurship’ no less than do the special features and ‘Web Shorts’ on the Hotel DVD.92 Flying in the face of Phelan’s insistence on the intrinsic ephemerality of live performance and her statement that the ‘document of a performance . . . is only a spur to memory’, the Stage on Screen DVDs seek to use digital video to capture live performance for the archive (or rather, for the library shelf) in a way that masks the process of remediation at the very same time as that process is insistently foregrounded.93 90 91 93

Auslander, Liveness, pp. 13, 19; and Osborne, ‘Speculations’, 54. Phil Rees, message to the author, 12 October 2012. 92 Tryon, Reinventing Cinema, pp. 11, 18. Phelan, Unmarked, p. 146.

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The opening sequence that precedes each film makes that point very clearly: a rapid montage of London tourist spots culminates in shots of Greenwich and the outside of the Greenwich Theatre, from which a cut takes us to a view of the stage from the stalls. The sequence roots the production in a very specific theatrical culture and promises, as a blurb on the website proclaims, access to ‘expert UK theatre productions using professional actors and directors, which are filmed in such a way as to recreate the impression and atmosphere of the stage production’.94 The product sold to an international audience is resolutely local (making it into the type of ‘glocal’ product characteristic of the digital age), and what starts as a film with its cinematic montage technique ends up in the stalls of a theatre. Once the performance begins, however, the theatricality of the stalls view of the entire set rapidly makes way for the televisuality of Cowey’s live Top of the Pops-style editing technique. A comparison between the Stage on Screen Faustus of 2009 and the BBC for Schools Faustus of 1958 is telling here: whereas in the 1958 film, the BBC went out of its way to find cinematic ways of presenting the play, with special effects used to have Mephistophilis appear and disappear, to transform a crucifix into the face of Lucifer and enable Faustus to watch a panorama of Rome scroll across his window, the 2009 Faustus is determinedly theatrical with its round wooden set (including a walkway through the stalls) and its refusal to deploy any digital effects in the staging. At the same time, from the start, the cuts between cameras that enable us to watch the Chorus in close-up and from various sides and distances forcefully remind the viewer of the pleasures of television and its ability to focus on the face of a performer, even as Beatrice Curnew’s voice projection and expansive style of delivery mark her performance as theatrical. This produces a very different type of intermediality from the one I noted in Cheek by Jowl’s ’Tis Pity: here, the digital video recording explicitly remediates the experience of being in the theatre while using techniques derived from live television; additionally, it offers the user the type of interactive viewing experience associated with the internet. Where the extension of the Cheek by Jowl experience into the online environment introduces a sense of instability (as various performances contradict each other’s narrative arcs), the effect of being able to choose between watching the edited DVD and the master shot is to reinforce a sense of stability, since it is the same performance that is recorded in both, effectively reducing the 94

‘Theatre Lovers’, Stageonscreen.com, www.stageonscreen.com/theatre-lovers.php.

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experience of ‘the Stage on Screen Faustus’ to a single remediated performance that supplants the live experience for the DVD’s user.95 In the Stage on Screen production, the media of stage, live television and the computer converge paradoxically, perhaps, but also without major complication. The need for recognising medium-specificity which I argued for in my reading of the BBC Malfi’s remediation on YouTube is denied by Stage on Screen’s advocacy of equivalence between stage and screen. While Cheek by Jowl and Punchdrunk see their online activities as extensions of their productions that stress the primacy of the live over the immediate/the living which threatens to replace it in cultural memory, Stage on Screen’s strategy is to emphasise the remediation’s ability to supplant the performance for those not able to access it in the theatre, to let the ‘liveness’ of televisual editing take the place of the ‘liveness’ of the theatre, and stress the inconvenience of the actual experience of theatre-going. As one of its tag-lines proclaims: ‘Stage plays on DVD in the comfort of your own home – more convenient, less expensive’.

Conclusion: from marginal to mainstream Stage on Screen’s DVDs are representative of the paradoxical dynamics that underpin screen versions of early modern drama in the digital age. Packaged like books and following their organisational logic, the DVDs not only claim equal status with the playtexts themselves by presenting themselves as ‘the play’ on our shelves, but also to replace the live performance which they remediate. Yet they can only do so and be marketable as a living product by paradoxically conveying an impression of liveness that harnesses the signifiers of the live from stage performance and televisual editing techniques. The living depends on the live. Yet, crucially, without the remediation of the live into the living digital format, the live would not be funded and would no longer exist. Quite literally, the very raison d’être of the live performance, in the case of Stage on Screen, is its digital remediation, which ontologically takes priority over the live.96 95

96

While the edited DVD does contain some shots of the matinee performance filmed, as a back-up, on the day of the evening performance (a ‘copy text’ for the edit), the two performances cannot be distinguished from the performance on the master shot – if only because the carefully engineered soundtrack on both the edited DVD and the master shot is identical. Stage on Screen’s investment in post-production sound mixing and editing is thus paradoxically geared towards creating the illusion of a transparent remediation of a single stage performance. See also Auslander’s argument that ‘historically, the live is actually an effect of mediatisation, not the other way around’ (Liveness, p. 51).

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To Phelan’s insistence on the ephemerality of performance, the online and digital remediations of performances of early modern drama oppose not permanence as much as continuation. Performance not only remains through the physical body of the performer that, in Rebecca Schneider’s view, ‘becomes a kind of archive and host to a collective memory’; it goes on living in their online remediations that secure for them a place in cultural memory where they can be in the archive and the canon all at once.97 The online media’s ability to facilitate living is crucial in the case of early modern drama because it enables the present repertoire to include plays and performances that had been declared dead, that had been relegated to Assmann’s archive. On the internet, the archive is a living canon of plays and performances that contest the discourses of oblivion, neglect and historicisation that always threaten to relegate early modern drama and its performance to the past. In the online world, these plays are no longer relegated to the lower rungs of a hierarchy always already dominated by Shakespeare. For independent filmmakers creating their own microcinematic adaptations, a rarely performed play by Marlowe might well trump a more generously funded screen adaptation of a Shakespeare play, while on YouTube, conventional hierarchies have to make way for the site’s own organising principles. The corpus of early modern drama on screen, this chapter has also shown, is consolidating, in that its core is strengthened by the proliferation of performances of the same plays; at the same time, it is expanding thanks to the efforts of independent filmmakers, scholars, educators and students to use the new media to disseminate their work. The emergence of this double dynamic – the strengthening of the core corpus and concomitant stretching of the margins – is a recent and continuing phenomenon that is in itself worthy of sustained attention, as are the strong connections that tie the growing number of performances of early modern drama that can be accessed online to live theatre and to education and scholarship. As discourses in media and film studies tend to suggest that developments in microcinema are oriented towards an innovative and radical use of digital technologies that challenge Hollywood conventions, an analysis of early modern drama in the digital media reveals a picture that is much more conservative, in that films of early modern drama are primarily concerned with bringing a wider range of plays and interpretations to a larger audience, with digital technologies facilitating production and distribution rather than bringing an intrinsic challenge to dominant cinematic and televisual 97

Schneider, ‘Performance Remains’, 103.

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practices. The priority of viewers and filmmakers alike is creating access to ever more productions of early modern plays, using low-budget methods, either through the sharing of private archives or the creation of new material, to fill the gaps in the collective cultural memory. As these gaps are gradually filled, at least some of these plays begin to lose their marginal status and become part of mainstream culture, ready to be redeployed alongside Shakespeare in mainstream media, where they, too, can now attract sizeable audiences.

chapter 5

Bend it like Nagra: mainstreaming The Changeling in Sarah Harding’s Compulsion

The ITV drama Compulsion, an adaptation of Middleton and Rowley’s The Changeling (1622) directed by Sarah Harding and based on a script by Joshua St Johnston, was screened at 9pm on Monday 4 May 2009, the last night of the May Bank Holiday weekend. Watched by 4.7 million UK viewers that night,1 it was released on DVD under the Channel 4 label the same year and quickly made available in its entirety on YouTube, where it enjoyed a wide viewership before it was taken off the site for copyright infringement. Compulsion’s mainstream popular appeal demands that we think about the extent to which the medium of television, with its commercial imperative, is able to accommodate the emancipatory disruption of the contemporary Jacobean film. Can the oppositionality of Jacobean drama survive in the ratings-driven medium of television? What remains of the early modern when the text is forfeited along with the period? What is the relationship between Shakespeare and Jacobean tragedy in mainstream entertainment? Initially entitled The Changeling, the screenplay was renamed Compulsion by ITV. The Press Pack billed this ‘single drama’ as ‘Loosely based on the Jacobean tragedy The Changeling’ and cited ITV Controller of Drama Commissioning Sally Haynes as saying: ‘This is a modern and innovative take on a piece of classic literature, transposed to a wealthy and glamorous world.’2 By the time of the DVD release, however, all reference to The Changeling was gone. Literary adaptation, however prized and recognised a genre in TV drama, was not, in the end, seen as the film’s selling point for its mass audience. Instead, what was emphasised in the film’s marketing was the casting of Ray Winstone as Don Flowers/De Flores, the working-class chauffeur working for a wealthy British Asian industrialist, and of ER and Bend it 1 2

John Plunkett, ‘TV Ratings: Compulsion Catches 4.7m’, 5 May 2009, http://tinyurl.com/cmmckn. Compulsion Press Pack, 12 January 2001, http://tinyurl.com/c8fnenz.

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16 Publicity still: Ray Winstone and Parminder Nagra in Sarah Harding’s Compulsion (2009). Courtesy of Size 9 Productions.

Like Beckham star Parminder Nagra as Anjika Indrani/Beatrice-Joanna, his employer’s glamorous, Cambridge-educated daughter. Anjika, who is in love with white fellow-student Alex, resists her father’s attempts to marry her to Hardik, the son of his British Asian business partner, and enlists Flowers to help her disqualify Hardik as a groom – with deadly consequences. With its emphasis on present-day social structures and dilemmas, Compulsion presents itself as a ‘serious drama’ with good production values, a star cast and a commitment to entertainment combined with social engagement; it is a mainstream, middlebrow product in the Reithian tradition of public service broadcasting.3 My concern, in this chapter, is to explore the web of associations that enabled Middleton and Rowley’s play to be transformed into a successful

3

See John Caughie on ‘serious drama’ (Television Drama, esp. pp. 3–7). For the Reithian tradition, see Cardwell, ‘Literature on the Small Screen’, p. 187.

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television drama at the end of a decade in which Shakespeare experienced a significant revival on television. The film, I suggest, is the product of a conjunction of practical and commercial considerations that led to the choice of the material as a suitable vehicle for Ray Winstone and of the director as someone who could be trusted with popular TV drama (Harding had directed episodes of Queer as Folk and Poirot). Compulsion is an indicator of how much the excess, transgression and irreverence of the Jacobean, by the end of the decade, has been almost unnoticeably absorbed into the mainstream. The glossy surface of Compulsion and the ease with which it inserts itself into mainstream television drama programming appear to be at the opposite extreme of the spectrum from the anxiously experimental, self-reflexive and self-abusive ‘preposterous’ aesthetic of contemporary Jacobean film. Behind its smooth appearance, however, I will argue that Compulsion hides some of the same concerns that animate the counter-Shakespearean films of Cox, Figgis and Jarman. Compulsion’s intertextual connections to other films betray its awareness of needing to situate the Jacobean adaptation in a market saturated with high-quality Shakespeare offerings. Through the use of the figure of ‘hypallage’, the rhetorical sleight-of-hand George Puttenham relates to the type of perversion and disorder generated by the ‘preposterous’, both the television drama and its source play, I will argue, negotiate a relationship to Shakespeare that stresses continuity but that can also signal a disturbance in meaning with ethical ramifications.4 The Changeling’s pervasive blurring of ethical and class boundaries enables the television drama to explore the threat posed by hybrid identities in a twentyfirst-century Britain that is experiencing what Sanjay Sharma calls ‘a crisis of multiculturalism’.5 Exploiting the ‘Asian chic’ of Bollywood and internationally successful British Asian comedies of manners with a Shakespearean twist, Compulsion focusses its anxieties about integrationist multiculturalism and the threat posed by ‘home grown terrorists’ on the body of Parminder Nagra’s hybrid British Asian character Anjika.6 While ostensibly seeking the assimilation of the alien Jacobean text into mainstream programming and of the alien British Asian body into white British culture, Compulsion exposes the faultlines of race relations in post-9/11 Britain. The script’s erasure of virtuous womanhood in the shape of Rowley’s Isabella – the hospital plot is

4 6

3: 143–4. 5 Sharma, ‘Teaching British South Asian Cinema’, 30. Kalra, ‘Between Emasculation and Hypermasculinity’, 116.

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omitted in its entirety7 – and its sleight-of-hand substitution of melodramatic survival for the tragic death of Beatrice-Joanna are symptomatic of Compulsion’s implication in the unhappy coalition of the profession of liberal multicultural policies and the reality of racial profiling at the end of the decade. The source text’s obsession with the fickleness of women’s desires, their dangerous propensity to deviance and violence and the threat they pose to the purity of the aristocratic body is transformed, in Compulsion, into racialised anxieties focussed on the unruly desires Anjika’s hybrid subject prompts and embodies.

Puttenham (1): hypallage in The Changeling and Compulsion Although it appears to abandon Middleton’s words altogether and alters the ending of the play, Compulsion remains intricately connected to its source text. The Changeling structures the Anjika-Flowers plot and is additionally referenced through stage business, such as Anjika’s angry refusal to take back the glove Flowers has touched, and through analogue situations, such as the querying of Anjika’s mobile phone record which replaces the virginity test. There are also prominent close echoes of specific lines that return to The Changeling’s pivotal Act 3 Scene 3; thus, for example, De Flores’s ‘Look but into your conscience . . . you’ll find me there your equal’ becomes Flowers’s ‘You think you’re better than me? You ain’t no more. We’re the same now.’8 Even Anjika’s name is a deliberate adaptation of BeatriceJoanna’s, for, while ‘Beatrice’ means ‘blessed’, ‘Anjika, which [Joshua St Johnston] pulled off the internet . . . means something like “blessing”.’9 It is in Compulsion’s courting of ambiguities and its exposure of ethical and political dilemmas under the cover of slickness and elegance, however, that the play is most closely connected to The Changeling and its reliance on the rhetorical figure that governs its insalubrious exchanges. In an article that deserves greater attention, Ann Pasternak Slater draws our attention to the deep structural and rhetorical indebtedness of Middleton and Rowley’s Changeling to the rhetorical figure of hypallage.10 Once more, Puttenham’s Arte of English Poesie functions as an intriguing and reliable guide to the alarming effects of an apparently innocuous rhetorical figure. Listed under ‘auricular figures working by exchange’, Puttenham describes hypallage as 7

8 10

Critical consensus follows Pauline Wiggin’s suggestion, following studies by Fleay and Dyce, that Rowley was responsible for the opening and the end of the play and the subplot. Compulsion neatly removes Rowley’s input and leaves us with a Middletonian plotline. 9 3.3.132–3. Joshua St Johnston, personal interview, 25 January 2011. See also the discussion of this figure by Sugimura, ‘Changelings and The Changeling’.

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related to the preposterous in its ability to pervert meanings by exchanging the proper places of two terms. Hypallage, a ‘very prety’ ‘sort of exchange’, works not by . . . changing one word for another, by . . . the places, as the [Preposterous] but changing their true construction and application, whereby the sence is quite peruerted and made very absurd: as he that should say, for tell me troth and lie not, lie me troth and tell not. For come dine with me and stay not, come stay with me and dine not.

Significantly, the nickname Puttenham gives this figure is ‘the changeling’: The Greekes call this figure [Hipallage] and the Latins Submutatio, we in our vulgar may call him the [under-change] but I had rather haue him called the [Changeling] . . . specially for our Ladies and pretie mistresses in Court, for whose learning I write, because it is a terme . . . alluding to the opinion of Nurses, who are wont to say, that the Fayries vse to steale the fairest children out of their cradles, and put other ill fauoured in their places, which they called changelings, or Elfs: so, if ye mark, doeth our Poet, or maker play with his wordes, vsing a wrong construction for a right, and an absurd for a sensible, by manner of exchange.11

The best-known use of hypallage is in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, a comedy whose disorder centres on a ‘changeling boy’. Upon awakening, Bottom marvels: ‘The eye of man hath not heard, the ear of man hath not seen, man’s hand is not able to taste, his tongue to conceive, nor his heart to report what my dream was.’12 The experience of the multiple exchanges that have reversed the play’s hierarchies is aptly translated into a series of hypallages that express Bottom’s confusion and the play’s perverse exchanges and absurdities. As a tragedy known for its ‘central motif of inversions’, which leads to a ‘dismantling [of] the principle of hierarchy’, The Changeling depends on hypallage even more than does the Shakespearean comedy which it, in many ways, rewrites.13 In The Changeling, hypallage provokes differing degrees of disturbance of meaning. It is this that distinguishes the figure’s effects from those of the preposterous: both figures have the ability to subvert the natural order, upset hierarchies, uncouple sets of terms and disturb relationships. But where the reversal of hierarchical relations in the preposterous is visibly transgressive, earning it its place in Puttenham’s list 11 13

3: 143–4. 12 4.1.204–7. Burnett, Masters and Servants, p. 104; and Malcolmson, ‘As Tame as the Ladies’, pp. 144, 158. Annabel Patterson notes that the word ‘change’ occurs nineteen times in the play – an indication of the importance of (ex)changes and inversions (‘The Changeling’, p. 1635).

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of ‘figures Auricular working by disorder’, hypallage, as a ‘very prety’ figure that works ‘by exchange’, can operate a switch between terms that are equal, creating no visible disorder. The distinction, then, allows me to pinpoint both the underlying relationship between Compulsion and the contemporary Jacobean films that rely on the preposterous as their governing trope, and their fundamental difference: a film like Mike Figgis’s preposterous Hotel asserts its transgressiveness both through its form and its content and refuses integration in the mainstream, while Compulsion seeks to disguise its disorder under the veil of prettiness and achieves a much more convincing accommodation in popular entertainment even as it troubles the mainstream. What is striking, when looking at Middleton and Rowley’s Changeling, is the extent to which the play itself explores the whole spectrum of disturbances that may be created by its governing figure. A discreet hypallagic substitution that does not affect meaning at all can be found in Act 3 Scene 2, at the very centre of the tragedy, in one of the hospital scenes that appears dedicated to testing the degrees of absurdity that may be produced by hypallage. Lollio, who is assessing his madness, asks Antonio what five times six is. Antonio answers with a hypallage that is neatly packaged into a chiasmus: ‘Five times six, is six times five.’14 So far so good: the substitution produces mathematical sense. Asked, however, ‘How many is one hundred and seven?’, the answer ‘One hundred and seven, is seven hundred and one, cousin’ produces a perverted result that earns Antonio the designation of ‘fool’.15 This is the sort of threat to meaning that Puttenham describes as ‘using a wrong construction for a right, and an absurd for a sensible’. Later in the same scene, hypallage is explored yet further when Lollio exactly quotes Antonio’s seductive speech to Isabella as he attempts to force himself on her:16 from being a substitution of words that threatens meaning, hypallage has moved, almost imperceptibly, to a far more perverted substitution of Lollio’s body for Antonio’s. No longer a ‘very prety’ figure, Lollio’s attempt to grab – if not rape – Isabella while substituting himself for her suitor is a threat to the sexual and social order of the hospital that mirrors the confounding of the sexual and social order of the castle in De Flores’s rape of Beatrice-Joanna. As used in The Changeling, then, hypallage is a figure that has the potential to be both ‘prety’ and suitable for an audience of ladies and to bring in a total subversion of order. In The Changeling, hypallage can involve the literal substitution of characters who are ‘out of [their] place’ and who ‘change condition’ in the 14

3.2.154.

15

3.2.155–8.

16

3.2.216–28.

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manner of the ill-favoured elves swapped for fair children in Puttenham’s explanation.17 Antonio is even described in the dramatis personae of the 1653 quarto as ‘the changeling’, presumably because he has taken the place of a madman. Other character substitutions include the exchange of Diaphanta for Beatrice-Joanna in the bed trick; Beatrice-Joanna, who stands in for her deceased twin; Alsemero, who slots into the position of bridegroom vacated by Alonzo; De Flores, who takes the bridegroom’s place on the wedding night; and Lollio, whom Alibius asks to ‘supply [his] place’.18 Alibius’s very name, signifying ‘he who is elsewhere’, epitomises the play’s obsession with staging perverse physical exchanges. Compulsion, similarly, includes a whole series of hypallagic substitutions that highlight not only the film’s indebtedness to its source’s deployment of the figure, but that are also used to stress the moral slipperiness of the film’s universe. Already the cover of the DVD points to the power of substitution in its alignment of the name ‘Parminder Nagra’ with the face of Ray Winstone and Ray Winstone’s name with Nagra’s face: the chiastic arrangement signposts the transgressive exchanges and inversions that also characterise the film’s editing and its dialogue. A chiastic exchange is operative when, in quick succession, we see Flowers soliciting an Asian prostitute his daughter’s age and Mr Indrani visiting an equally young blonde woman for a half-hour tryst. Later, hypallagic editing unsettlingly intercuts shots of Flowers and Anjika having sex at the back of the car with Mr Indrani doing business deals at the back of the same car, making the connection between the two activities all too obvious. Hypallages also punctuate the film’s dialogue. When Alex’s accusation ‘You’re just afraid your father will cut you off’ is countered by Anjika’s chiastic ‘No, I just can’t cut off my family’, causality is inverted to striking effect. More powerfully, hypallages in the dialogue can point to a perverse exchange of identities: Alex’s ‘I know I love you and I think you love me’ is still ringing in our ears when Flowers readies himself to be killed by Anjika. In his simple statement of ‘I love you. You love me’, Flowers takes Alex’s place, thus confounding Anjika’s attempt at separating love from lust, Alex from Flowers. Flowers’s hypallagic redeployment of Alex’s line precipitates the ethical mess of the film’s climactic scene of violence, in which rape becomes indistinguishable from seduction, murder from suicide and Flowers himself becomes a victim of the hypallage that reinstates Alex in his stead. 17

1.1.131; 4.3.128.

18

1.2.48.

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In The Changeling, as in Compulsion, hypallagic substitutions also affect the characters’ emotions. Taking its cue from Alsemero’s observation that ‘There’s scarce a thing but is both lov’d and loath’d’,19 the emotional form of hypallage sees loathing transformed into love in what amounts to an uncomfortably concrete replay of Juliet’s abstract ‘My only love sprung from my only hate.’20 By the end of The Changeling, Beatrice-Joanna’s propensity for ‘giddy turning’21 has indeed exchanged her disgust and hatred for De Flores for seemingly inexplicable sexual attraction and even ‘love’.22 Her hypallagic ‘his face loathes one’ (for ‘one loathes his face’) is absurd, yet it also demonstrates Beatrice-Joanna’s perverse propensity for refusing responsibility even for her loathing. When, by the end of the play, we hear her protest to Alsemero that ‘your love has made me / A cruel murd’ress’, the sleight-of-hand that makes Alsemero’s love of her, instead of her love for him, responsible for her crime is barely noticeable, yet it fundamentally challenges the easy attribution of guilt on which the play ostensibly closes.23 Compulsion, too, ends with a hypallagic statement which profoundly troubles the attribution of guilt: when Anjika explains to the police how she killed Flowers (in a significant variation on the plot of The Changeling), her impossibly neat explanation to the police ‘I’ve been raped. And I think I’ve killed the rapist’ is not entirely untrue, while being blatantly false. Hypallages are part of the deep structure of the film and the source text to such an extent that in a statement such as this, it is no longer possible to make crisp ethical distinctions: as in Jarman’s Edward II, opposites can be true – to deeply unsettling effect. Culminating in BeatriceJoanna’s famous assertion of indistinction, when she asks her father to ‘Let the common sewer take [her blood] from distinction’, The Changeling’s exchanges work towards a blurring of differences that affects everything, from class to gender and ethics.24 It is this ethical disturbance caused by the play’s hypallages that Pasternak Slater concentrates on. For her, Puttenham’s primary example of the substitution of ‘lie me truth and tell not’ for ‘tell me truth and lie not’ ‘epitomizes the moral muddle at the heart of The Changeling’.25 In the play’s moral hypallages, ‘vice and virtue exchange places, so that vices are committed in the name of virtue, and virtues themselves become vicious’.26 What is remarkable in The Changeling’s moral hypallages is how the terms associated with virtue, even when degraded, are not entirely stripped of their original qualities: even though ‘all moral positives are prostituted to 19 25

1.1.120. 20 Rom. 1.5.135. 21 1.1.149. 22 5.1.48. 23 5.3.65–6. 24 5.3.153. Pasternak Slater, ‘Hypallage’, 430. 26 Pasternak Slater, ‘Hypallage’, 431.

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abhorrent ends . . . the play’s supreme irony lies in the fact that they do not entirely lose their positive force’.27 De Flores’s ‘service’ to Beatrice-Joanna, which starts off within the register of courtly love, is never entirely devoid of these associations even once it is debased into murder and a servicing of lust – a point that is made even more strikingly in Compulsion, which concludes with Flowers’s extraordinary self-sacrifice for Anjika’s benefit, which Sarah Harding describes as ‘his final act of service to her’.28 Nor is Beatrice-Joanna’s ‘refulgent virtue of my love’ entirely debased in her protestations of ‘spotless virtue’ at the end of the play: both assertions of virtue, placed as they are before and after Beatrice-Joanna’s fall, carry associations of moral and sexual integrity and of the virile virtú that makes her take charge of her fate.29 The transgression of gender boundaries that allows her to confound the female virtue of chastity with masculine virtú is made explicit in her wish that ‘creation . . . Had formed me man!’30 – a wish that recasts the exclamation ‘O God that I were a man!’ of Much Ado’s Beatrice into the tragic mould of The Changeling.31 It is this confusion of moral categories which Pasternak Slater argues gives The Changeling its ‘unforgettable intensity’.32 The Shakespearean parallels I have outlined, which are complemented by multiple echoes that relate Beatrice-Joanna to Desdemona and make of ‘honest’ De Flores the Iago to Alsemero’s Othello, play a crucial role in the involvement of the audience, for the full force of the ethical disturbance of The Changeling is felt only if the viewer’s mind participates in the work of hypallagic substitution. The play’s insistent exchange of the grimy reality of its concrete world for the idealistic fancies of Shakespeare’s protagonists presupposes spectators who are thoroughly familiar with the Shakespearean canon and willing to read The Changeling in relation to that canon. This implies a willingness to recognise both the continuity and the disruption between the plays of Shakespeare and that of Middleton and Rowley. The hypallagic mode of viewing results in a fusion of The Changeling’s characters with Shakespeare’s in the viewer’s mind, as Beatrice-Joanna becomes Titania, Juliet, Beatrice and Desdemona all rolled into a single hybrid figure that stands for the corruption of Shakespearean ideals – or rather, for the corruption that is already inherent in these ideals.33 27 28

29 33

Pasternak Slater, ‘Hypallage’, 431. Harding, ‘Compulsion’, 609. On the ambivalence of the word ‘service’, along with a whole range of key words (honour, honesty, blood, act, deed, employment and performance), see Ricks, ‘Moral and Poetic Structure’. 3.3.17; 5.3.43. 30 2.2.107–8. 31 4.1.303. 32 Pasternak Slater, ‘Hypallage’, 432. I focus on Shakespeare as the dominant influence here, although Webster’s Duchess of Malfi is also a prominent intertext. See Neill, ‘Introduction’, p. xiii.

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Licensed for performance in 1622, The Changeling, as Gordon McMullan observes, was written after the genres of tragedy, revenge tragedy, romantic comedy and city comedy had been thoroughly developed on the early modern stage. Drawing on all of these genres, The Changeling was conceived at a time when ‘the tragic form has become sufficiently hybrid as to confront its own validity as a genre’, to the extent that ‘the distinctions required to differentiate the good from the bad (and the ugly) seem to have been mis(or dis-)placed, along with the stereotypical identities such as “revenger” or “malcontent”’.34 The play uses its position at the end of a tradition of dramatic writing to present us with an unsettling (con)fusion of genres and ethics that relies on the audience’s ability to compare its hybridity with the more ethically and generically clear-cut plays that precede it. The Changeling, then, operates in a way that is strikingly similar to the manner in which Middleton’s Revenger’s Tragedy feeds off its dramatic predecessors to present a troubled and troubling variation on established dramatic – (pre)dominantly Shakespearean – tradition. Cox’s Revengers, I argued in Chapter 3, built on Middleton’s self-awareness by situating itself as a futuristic parodic response to the heritage Shakespeare films of Kenneth Branagh. Fascinatingly, Compulsion, though seemingly quite remote from Cox’s punk contemporary Jacobean film, also displays a marked sense of self-awareness about its position at the end of an established Shakespearedominated tradition of filmmaking. In the case of Compulsion, however, that tradition is not the heritage Shakespeare of the 1990s, but the British Asian Shakespeare-inflected films, on the big screen and on television, that flourished amid the growing awareness, following the 9/11 attack on the World Trade Center, that the multicultural make-up of British society was not entirely harmonious. Instead of Kenneth Branagh, Compulsion uses Parminder Nagra as the embodiment of a tradition that undergoes a hypallagic shift that is as momentous as it is discreet.

British politics and hybrid ‘girl power’: from Bend it Like Beckham (2002) to Second Generation (2003) A considerable number of Compulsion’s viewers will have been attracted to the film by their knowledge of Nagra’s starring roles in Bend it Like Beckham and Second Generation and her portrayal of Dr Neela Rasgotra in ER, the hospital soap opera that consolidated her international TV fame.35 It is this type of ‘actor-recognition to create audience expectation’ and attract 34

McMullan, ‘The Changeling’, p. 232.

35

Jacobs, ‘ER’, p. 35.

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viewers, rather than prior knowledge of Middleton and Rowley’s The Changeling – or even a loose acquaintance with non-Shakespearean Jacobean drama – that the film relied on as its principal interpretative framework.36 As Compulsion’s screenwriter, Joshua St Johnston, explained: ‘Shakespeare is a brand itself and Middleton isn’t . . . If you know your Jacobean tragedy you’ll get a lot out of it, and if you don’t, then, you know, it needs to work for the large majority of the audience who actually don’t care how it’s inspired.’37 More important than knowledge of ‘your Jacobean tragedy’ is the audience’s acquaintance with Parminder Nagra’s Shakespeare-inflected star persona in the light of twenty-first-century British politics and the British Asian Shakespeare film. It is this that enables the viewer of Compulsion to apprehend the full force of Compulsion’s hypallagic substitution of a Middletonian murky moral universe for the more clear-cut ethics associated with Shakespeare, and of the angry, violent Middletonian heroine Anjika for her wholesome Shakespearean precursors. In the ITV1 Press Pack, St Johnston neatly describes the nub of Compulsion’s plot as consisting of ‘a first and second generation clash in a wealthy India[n] family in London’.38 Described thus, Compulsion is straightforwardly identifiable as belonging to a group of films that focus on the lives of young, second-generation South Asian immigrants to the United Kingdom, whose experiences of growing up in Britain are portrayed as having led to a radical cultural shift that puts them in opposition to their first-generation immigrant parents. These films – Bollywood fantasies no less than British Asian dramas and Shakespeare adaptations – along with ‘professional and political opinion and popular imagination all tend to construct Asian youth predominantly as the object of “culture clash”’.39 Films and public discourses portray young British Asians as experiencing stress, identity crises and conflict as a result of tensions between their hybrid/Western outlook and their parents’ South Asian cultural values.40 Viewed as a flashpoint in which the binary opposition between East and West becomes starkly visible, the scenario of the arranged, forced or forbidden marriage as cultural and generational conflict precludes ‘the possibility of cultural interaction and fusion’ at a time when, as Avtar Brah points out, policy-makers were stepping up their advocacy of the need for a new form of ‘integrationist multiculturalism’. Instead of 36 38 40

Morse, ‘Twice-told, Re-tooled’, p. 205. 37 St Johnston, personal interview, 25 January 2011. Compulsion Press Pack, p. 5. 39 Brah, ‘The “Asian” in Britain’, p. 52. For a critique of the ‘culture clash’ theory as occluding complex differences between social classes, geographical regions, religions, genders and castes, see Alexander, ‘The Problem of South Asian Popular Culture’.

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celebrating cultural diversity (the dominant model in the 1990s), the post-9/11 form of multiculturalism is increasingly focussed on ‘a demand for racialized minorities to integrate into the nation’.41 Citizenship, Sanjay Sharma explains, is increasingly ‘re-constructed vis-à-vis a newfound, shared set of British cultural values’.42 Accordingly, arranged marriage films of the decade ask their implied viewers to take sides against the first-generation immigrants, who are considered threateningly resistant to assimilation. Media reports of ‘honour killings’ between 2007 and 2008, the year Compulsion was filmed, emphasised the pervasiveness of arranged and forced marriages in British Asian communities and focussed anxieties on the Muslim community.43 An explicit connection between marriage practices and Muslim extremism was, for example, made in March 2007 by Nazir Afzal, the Crown Prosecution Service’s director for West London. Afzal asserted that ‘foreign Islamic terror groups had been identified as the driving force behind one murder and another threat to kill’ and spoke of ‘the link between extremist Islamic organisations and honour violence’.44 This type of news coverage aligned the (mostly young, female) victims of forced marriages and honour crimes with Western, liberal, democratic values and portrayed their fathers and husbands as regressively patriarchal so as to signal potential links to Muslim extremism and the terrorist threat. It is no wonder, therefore, that even when they carefully avoid any references to British racial politics and featured none of the dreaded ‘rioting, deprived, under-educated Muslim males’ Virinder Kalra identifies as the principal source of ‘moral panic’ since 9/11, arranged marriage plots tap into deep-seated anxieties connecting South Asian marriage practices with the terrorist threat to Western democracies.45 Located in this tense political climate, the British Asian films of the first decade of the millennium both emphasise their kinship with and differentiate themselves from the Hindi-language films popularly identified as ‘Bollywood’. Since the 1990s, Bollywood films, with their staple arranged marriage plots, have progressively oriented themselves towards diasporic markets and have begun to peddle ‘fantasies and representations 41 43

44 45

Brah, ‘The “Asian” in Britain’, p. 31. 42 Sharma, ‘Teaching British South Asian Cinema’, 31. See, e.g. the following newspaper reports: Brian Brady, ‘A Question of Honour: Police Say 17,000 Women Are Victims Every Year’, Independent.co.uk, 10 February 2008, http://tinyurl.com/3av5n3; Jonathan Wynne-Jones, ‘Study Alleges “Honour Killings Conspiracy”’, Telegraph.co.uk, 3 February 2008, http://tinyurl.com/d2llx2m; and Anon, ‘Judge Warns on Britain’s Forced Marriage Toll’, Telegraph.co.uk, 24 January 2008, http://tinyurl.com/czdrahg. Anon, ‘Extremists “are encouraging violence against Muslim women”’, Daily Mail.co.uk, 26 March 2007, http://tinyurl.com/ctc42q8. Kalra, ‘Between Emasculation and Hypermasculinity’, 113, 114, 116.

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of middle-class Indian lifestyles through which tensions of tradition and modernity are played out’.46 Often, these plots involve one or more nonresident Indian characters and can even, as in the paradigmatic 1995 hit Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge,47 be set in a British Asian family environment.48 In this typical Bollywood articulation, the arranged marriage plot motif may well focus apprehensions regarding Westernisation (in Dilwale, the bride’s father prevents his daughter from enjoying Western music and going to university) and generational conflict. While it may result in the ultimate victory of the forces of love and Western modernity, it crucially remains circumscribed by a respect for family values, patriarchal authority and South Asian culture. In 2002, with Bend it Like Beckham, Gurinder Chadha managed to combine her love for Bollywood with an essentially British Asian take on the arranged marriage plot – to phenomenal national and worldwide success.49 The film crucially made of Parminder Nagra, who plays footballcrazy Sikh girl ‘Jess’, the new face of British Asian girlhood – Chadha explicitly referred to the film as ‘a girl power movie’.50 Beckham succeeds in creating a popular celebration of British Asian girlhood as thoroughly Western in aspiration, with Jess willing to embark on an interracial romance with her Irish football coach (Jonathan Rhys Meyers), and linked, through friendship and outlook, to white British teenager Jules (Keira Knightley). The film’s resolution, which sees Jess’s father (played by Bollywood star Anupam Kher) endorse her choice of a career in football and play cricket with her boyfriend, is a celebration of ‘the hybrid nature of contemporary British national identity’.51 In 1999, East Is East52 had provoked widespread criticism and outrage when it portrayed the humiliation of the British Asian patriarch by his Westernised family.53 Chadha’s festive ending manages to avoid such offensive humiliation by espousing the strategy of its conservative Bollywood counterpart: it is because Jess subordinates her passion and values to the imperatives of family (by attending her sister’s wedding instead of playing an important match) that her father decides to support her aspirations. The final game of cricket in Beckham becomes a metaphor for mutual respect between the Irish lover and the British Asian father, who 46 47 49 50 51 53

Dudrah, Bollywood, p. 63. See also Geraghty, ‘Jane Austen Meets Gurinder Chadha’, esp. p. 164. Dir. Adytia Chopra, 1995. 48 Ganti, Bollywood, p. 40. On the Bollywood influence on Chadha’s style and her emphasis on a ‘strong gendered position’, see Korte and Sternberg, ‘Asian British Cinema’, esp. p. 391. Quoted in Korte and Sternberg, Bidding for the Mainstream?, p. 164. Geraghty, ‘Jane Austen Meets Gurinder Chadha’, 164. 52 Dir. Damien O’Donnell. See: Aftab, ‘Brown: The New Black!’, pp. 94–5; Korte and Sternberg, ‘Asian British Cinema’, p. 390; and Sharma, ‘Teaching British South Asian Cinema’, p. 26.

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play as equals on the multicultural turf of twenty-first-century Hounslow.54 For once, a film was able to create an ‘imagined community’ and sense of nationhood that was not ‘at the expense of representing the diversity of British society’.55 No wonder that Chadha’s celebration of integrationist multiculturalism won itself powerful political endorsement by then Prime Minister Tony Blair, who loved the film ‘because this is my Britain’.56 Beckham was quickly co-opted not only by the political establishment, but also by ‘Shakespeare’. In Beckham’s Film Education notes, Mike Kirkup called attention to its ‘Shakespearean confusions over identity and sexuality’; soon thereafter, ready-written essays comparing and contrasting Romeo and Juliet and Beckham became available for purchase on the internet.57 When Jeremy Wooding decided to direct the low-budget Bollywood Queen (2002), a feature film he described as a ‘Romeo and Juliet-style star-crossedlovers musical set in East London’ that ‘look[s] at what it’s like to live in multicultural London’, he heavily leaned on the success of Beckham in his marketing.58 In Bollywood Queen, Shakespeare is adapted along Beckham lines in order to serve the celebration of hybrid British identities, absorbing the cultural force of Bollywood to explore the tensions of a multicultural society and finish on a happy note. While Bollywood Queen sank almost without a trace, it was the first of what Susanne Greenhalgh and Robert Shaughnessy have identified as a significant sub-genre of multicultural Shakespeare productions on British television which coincided with the explosion of Bollywood-inspired events on the British cultural scene.59 The interest in all things South Asian, which included opera, department store displays as well as plays, culminated in Channel 4’s ‘Indian Summer’ season of 2003, which included broadcasts of Twelfth Night60 and Second Generation,61 two Shakespeare adaptations using British Asian settings and starring Parminder Nagra. Meanwhile, at the BBC, executive producer Laura Mackie commissioned a British Asian rewriting of Chaucer’s The Seaman’s Tale as part four of the channel’s sixpart Canterbury Tales mini-series; it is her enjoyment of that programme that led her to commission Compulsion when she moved to ITV.62 54 55 56 57 58 59 62

On the significance of the final scene as ‘a highly selective, even utopian view of Blair’s Britain’, see Ashby, ‘Postfeminism in the British Frame’, 130–1. Street, British National Cinema, p. 1. Quoted in Ashby, ‘Postfeminism in the British Frame’, 130. Mike Kurkup, ‘Bend it Like Beckham. Dir. Gurinder Chadha, UK/Germany 2002, Certificate 12A’, FilmEducation.org, 2003, http://tinyurl.com/chpqa9e. Jeremy Wooding, interview, Bollywood Queen (Redbus Home Entertainment Ltd, 2004, DVD). See also Harvie, ‘Bollywood in Britain’. 60 Dir. Tim Supple. 61 Dir. Jon Sen. St Johnston, personal interview, 25 January 2011. The episode was titled The Sea Captain’s Tale.

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Together, these television dramas made Shakespeare (and, to a lesser extent, Chaucer) significant ingredients in what Andrew Higson saw as an emergent strand of ‘post-national’ filmmaking that ‘constitute[s] a powerful critique of traditional ideas of Britishness and consensual images of the nation’.63 Most importantly, Twelfth Night and Second Generation entrenched Nagra’s status as the life-affirming, morally sound, Shakespearean icon of British Asian hybridity. Second Generation, a two-part drama described on the DVD’s jacket as ‘Part KING LEAR, part passionate romance’, is Compulsion’s most important televisual intertext. With a distinct flavour of Nahum Tate in its development of a love plot between Nagra’s character Heera/Cordelia and the Edgar character Sam (Christopher Simpson), Second Generation uses Shakespeare’s King Lear as a prism through which to approach the central cliché of forbidden unions. Hindu Heera Sharma, having broken off her relationship with Muslim Sam Khan because of parental interference, is now engaged to white music journalist Jack (Danny Dyer), which justifies her exclusion from the Asian community. The dominant narrative is that of the Westernised and sexually liberated Heera’s reconnection with her Indian roots, which culminates not only in her reconciliation with her father, but also in her (now paternally sanctioned) union with Sam and their return to Calcutta to start a new life, secure in their hybrid British and Indian identities. This Heera-centred ‘main’ plot is intertwined with a narrative of the generation of hybrid products for the British market: British Asian music and food as signifiers of cultural hybridity. Part one of the drama opens on scenes that intercut Heera’s return to her ailing father’s bedside with scenes of Sam recording the performance of new Asian musical talent Uzi (Sonell Dadral), whose music blends Asian cadences with rap, and shots of vast quantities of Indian ready-meals being produced at the Sharma factory.64 Part two ends by celebrating a cultural integration so successful that it need no longer be confined to British soil. Significantly, Heera follows the lead of Beckham’s Jess and her Bollywood cousins in making the fulfilment of her romantic and professional ambitions contingent on paternal approval and a respect for Indian customs. The sexual transgressions which exclude Heera from her British Asian community in part one are what allows her to emerge, in part two, as a heroine of international hybridity – or, in Sen’s 63 64

Higson, ‘Instability of the National’, pp. 37, 38. The soundtrack for Second Generation was composed by British Asian underground music talent Nitin Sawney, who also composed the soundtrack for Supple’s Twelfth Night.

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words, of ‘global citizenship’ – as a positive identity.65 With its Indian conclusion, Second Generation celebrates a hybrid identity in which the final stress falls on the ‘British Asian’.

From ‘British Asian’ to ‘British Asian’: Compulsion Compulsion’s kinship with the British Asian Shakespeare film and, in particular, with Second Generation is obvious, and not only because Sarah Harding, once she had cast Nagra for the role of Anjika, watched segments of Second Generation.66 On Nagra’s fan website, Compulsion was announced as her ‘first British TV movie since Second Generation in 2003’, a film that ‘has echoes of that earlier production’.67 Nagra’s own awareness of the similarity between Compulsion and the films that created her star persona is evident from her initial rejection of the script because of its resemblance to the material she’d become identified with: ‘when I read the script I went, here we go, arranged marriage, don’t want to do that again’. If she agreed to play Anjika in the end, it was because the role offered her an opportunity to counter her type-casting: realising that the story was ‘really dark’ and that ‘There’s no redeeming quality in Anjika at all’, what Nagra seized on was the chance ‘to play someone . . . not nice!’68 The hypallagic logic characteristic of the source play and its adaptation here invests Nagra’s performance of Anjika as one that allows her to substitute the ‘someone . . . not nice!’ for the idealised heroines of her earlier films. It is Heera/Cordelia of Second Generation who most insistently haunts Nagra’s performance of Anjika. Both women start as headstrong Britisheducated women who rebel against their domineering first-generation immigrant fathers. But where the idealised Shakespearean heroine manages to combine her transgressive passions with heroic integrity, Compulsion’s Middletonian heroine is, as Flowers remarks, ‘a slave to [her] own passion’. Where Heera merely crosses the external boundaries of class, race and religion, Anjika also transgresses the internal boundaries of repulsion, inhibition and moral scruples, enabling her to participate in prostitution and, eventually, murder. As the film progresses, we witness a gradual exchange of Anjika for Heera in which similar actions by the two heroines 65 66 67 68

Rashmee Z. Ahmed, ‘Homeward Bound’, interview with Jon Sen, Times of India.com, 19 September 2003, http://tinyurl.com/9355ole. Sarah Harding, personal interview, 27 March 2011. ‘May 1st 2009: Compulsion’, Parmindernagraonline.com, http://tinyurl.com/8ls4884. ‘May 1st 2009: Compulsion’, Parmindernagraonline.com, http://tinyurl.com/8ls4884.

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begin to mean very different things. Disturbingly, this transition is never complete: as embodied by Nagra, Anjika never entirely sheds her association with ‘girl power’ hybridity; instead, the hypallagic substitution of Anjika for Heera results in a blurring of identities, making her represent both a positive figure of multicultural hybridity and the threat of the ‘home grown terrorist’.69 That sense of substitution with a difference, of the exchange of an illfavoured changeling for the fair child, also characterises the exchange of the world of the Indrani family for that of the Sharmas. Both families are fraught with the stereotypical generational rifts that centre on sexual choices and on attitudes towards the children’s hybrid identities. In both families, the daughters stand up for both Western and Eastern values and customs, with Anjika even defending arranged marriages against Alex’s incomprehension of this custom. Yet this defence of her heritage comes with a significant difference: where Second Generation, with its immersion in the Asian underground music scene and its plot strand concerned with the production of Asian food for the British market, is at pains to portray the British Asian community as contributing to British culture in positive ways, making hybrid identities and commodities an object of celebration, Compulsion remains markedly ambivalent in its portrayal of British Asian society and its values. Anjika’s own observation that her arranged marriage to Hardik, who is in the boutique hotel business, is, for her father, ‘a way to get out of the tobacco business before people wake up to the fact he’s been giving mouth cancer to teenagers in India’, sharply pinpoints the nefarious origin of her father’s wealth. In fact, Alex’s joking question about whether one of the wall panels in the Indrani mansion might ‘swing back to reveal your father’s secret war room for world domination’ combines a sense of the family’s wealth with one of reverse colonialist threat, as the immigrant is suspected of planning to take over the world with his toxic products. The play’s obsession with the inversion of hierarchical relations takes on a postcolonialist tint as the film places former colonial subjects in positions of power over their erstwhile masters, a dynamic that adds spice to Flowers’s desire to ‘screw the boss’s daughter’. Ray Winstone’s screen persona is crucial to understanding this dynamic: type-cast in Hollywood as ‘a little fat geezer from the East End’, Winstone brings to the role a ‘British bulldog quality’.70 ‘Having Ray as a servant to a wealthy British Asian family’, St Johnston explains, creates ‘a 69 70

Kalra, ‘Between Emasculation and Hypermasculinity’, 116. ‘44 Inch Chest – Ray Winstone Interview’, indielondon.co.uk, http://tinyurl.com/bwlemxd.

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tension . . . I never needed to write any tension into his character, because it was there in the casting.’71 De Flores’s inversion of social classes in his relationship with Beatrice-Joanna thus morphs into an inversion that affects both class and race; the sexual mastery Flowers asserts over ‘the boss’s daughter’ is also a racial (re-)mastery. Flowers’s willingness to supply drugs for Jaiman and help Anjika to marry Alex, as much as his unsavoury fascination with women of South Asian origin, amounts to a symbolic attempt at recolonising the former colonial subjects who now threaten ‘world domination’. Far from being the innocent analogue for early modern customs imagined by St Johnston, then, the British Asian setting of Compulsion portrays a menacing world of vice and toxicity hidden beneath the veneer of wealth and sophistication.72 Fascinatingly, the only reference to Shakespeare in the film reveals the extent to which the take-over of the ‘world’ has already taken place in cultural terms: when Flowers reassures Anjika by saying ‘What’s done is done’, Anjika replies: ‘That’s Shakespeare.’ ‘Is it?’ asks Flowers, betraying his ignorance of this icon of Britishness.73 It is Cambridgeeducated Anjika who can spot the correspondence between the criminality of the Macbeths and the murder she and Flowers have committed; it is she who makes us see the connection between her Middletonian world and that of Shakespeare. Shakespeare belongs to British Asian culture in a way he no longer does to the British bulldog. Because Compulsion transposes not a neutral view of early modern life, but a highly biased, jingoistic view of Spanish Catholicism from the point of view of Jacobean Protestants at the time of the marriage negotiations for Prince Charles and the Spanish Infanta, the television drama absorbs the early modern apprehensions about the Catholic threat to English national identity and projects them onto British Asian society.74 In the process, early modern apprehension of the corruption, lust and hypocrisy of the Spanish are translated into twentyfirst-century anxieties focussed on British Asian communities. Seen in this light, Alex’s joke about Mr Indrani’s threatened world domination reveals an alarming undercurrent of the ‘moral panic’ about Asian immigration and 71 72 73 74

St Johnston, personal interview, 25 January 2011. St Johnston, personal interview, 25 January 2011. For a discussion of this moment and the allusion to Hamlet omitted in the final cut, see Harding, ‘Compulsion’, p. 613. For an exploration of this context, see Malcolmson, ‘As Tame as the Ladies’, pp. 142–3. See also Annabel Patterson, who explains how ‘The Changeling permitted its original audiences to intuit a connection between Spanish/Catholic interests, crimes of violence, and sexuality out of control’ (Patterson, ‘The Changeling’, p. 1635).

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the terrorist threat that is disavowed by the surface portrayal of a highly Westernised, Hindu family of secular British Asian youth. No wonder, therefore, that Compulsion’s arranged marriage plot carries a strong political charge. Compulsion, on the face of it, appeals to the same liberal Western instincts as do Beckham and Second Generation. The scene in which Mr Indrani first proposes the arranged marriage to Anjika invites the viewer to recoil with Anjika as Mr Indrani asks her whether she has ‘disgraced’ herself with an unsanctioned relationship and tells her that if she, unlike her brother, may not choose her own partner, that is ‘Because you are our daughter!’ Hardik, whom Mr Indrani describes as a perfect match because ‘he’s our caste, very good education, decent boy’, is, as Anjika recognises, ‘a much better match for [her father’s] business than he is for [her]’. The arranged marriage is threatening because it represents the oppression of this sexually liberated young woman and because it heralds an extension of Mr Indrani’s toxic business on British soil while keeping white British and Asian British communities neatly separate. The alternative, however, the love match between Anjika and Alex, is ultimately even more menacing. Instead of the promise of a positive hybridity as in Second Generation, it represents a co-opting of the naïve Alex into the nefarious world of the Indranis – it is an even more insidious way for Mr Indrani to expand his business empire as he provides the start-up finance for Alex’s development of an environmentally friendly device that scrubs the carbon out of boilers. In a hypallagic exchange that creates a significant ethical disturbance, Alex seamlessly takes the place of Hardik. The substitution is signalled by the repetition of Hardik’s ‘We’re so delighted that your father’s interested in the hotel business. It’s a really exciting time, potentially. Your father sees that’ by Alex, who explains Mr Indrani’s decision to support him with ‘It’s a good business idea. Your father sees that.’ The drama’s final, paternally subsidised union between the profoundly tainted Anjika and Alex, instead of vindicating girl-power hybridity, represents a Godfather-style co-opting of Alex to whitewash and diversify the toxic Indrani business. In Compulsion’s final moments, as the happy couple climb into the Indrani Rolls-Royce, the soundtrack’s movement from Western violin and piano to Asian drum beats before morphing into the film’s fusion theme tune suggests the meshing of British and South Asian cultures. Achieved over the dead bodies of both Hardik/South Asian tradition and Flowers/working-class Britain, Anjika and Alex’s interracial marriage and hybrid identities are not a cause of celebration, but of ‘moral panic’. By the end of Compulsion, the ethical certainties of Second Generation have been thoroughly perverted.

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Compulsion, in fact, is a changeling within the genre of British Asian literary adaptation on television because, apart from the actors, none of the key figures involved – from scriptwriter to producer and director – had a personal investment in telling a British Asian narrative. By contrast, for someone like Gurinder Chadha, every project arises from a desire ‘to record my history, my community’s history’.75 If British Asian film were to be defined narrowly as ‘involving screenwriters and/or directors of the South Asian Diaspora in Britain’, then the film would not even qualify as belonging to the genre at all.76 Online discussion forums, blogs and journals certainly registered an awareness of the ethical disturbance caused by Compulsion’s infiltration of the British Asian film genre. Alicia Izharuddin’s complaint, on 18 May 2009, was representative of a larger discomfort: ‘when diversity is presented on British TV, what’s served up for a wider, mostly White audience are actually tired stereotypes of overbearing family members, arranged marriages, and the ever recurring theme of honour and shame’.77 In Compulsion, the British Asian point of view of Beckham and Second Generation has been supplanted by a British Asian viewpoint that expresses profound unease about South Asian immigration and the terrorist threat to Western values.

Puttenham (2): deflowering and the changeling bride Puttenham’s ‘changeling’ figure, then, consistently works to blur ethical distinctions and question the value of hybrid identities in the film. But there is another sense in which Puttenham’s understanding of the term ‘changeling’ inflects Compulsion. In his Arte of English Poesie, the term conspicuously recurs amid a description of the ancient rituals associated with the deflowering of a virgin bride.78 Puttenham’s account of epithalamic rites resonates uncomfortably both with the media’s ethical concerns surrounding arranged marriages and with the hypallagic conversion of loathing into love and rape into seduction in The Changeling. Outside the doors of the couple’s bedroom, the wedding party and musicians produce ‘very loude and shrill’ songs

75 76 77 78

Quoted in Korte and Sternberg, Bidding for the Mainstream?, p. 250. Korte and Sternberg, ‘Asian British Cinema’, p. 387. Alicia Izharuddin, ‘Compulsion’, Elevateddifference.com, 18 May 2009, http://tinyurl.com/ 9y8cl4q. 1: 40–3.

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to the intent there might no noise be h[e]ard out of the bed chamber by the skreeking & outcry of the young damosell feeling the first forces of her stiffe & rigorous yong man, she being as all virgins tender & weake . . . This was as I said to diminish the noise of the laughing lamenting spouse. The tenour of that part of the song was to congratulate the first acquaintance and meeting of the young couple, allowing of their parents good discretions in making the match, then afterward to sound cheerfully to the onset and first encounters of that amorous battaile . . .79

There is an unsettling discrepancy here between the self-congratulatory celebrations of the parents and the sounds of the bride’s distress which the music is designed to drown out. Equally unsettling is the discrepancy between Puttenham’s stated aim, earlier in the chapter, not to offend ‘chaste and honourable eares . . . with licentious speech’ and his near-pornographic account of the sexual encounter between the tender, inexpert damsel and her stiff, rigorous young man. The festivities conclude in the morning, when by liklyhood all tournes were sufficiently serued . . . & that the bride must within few hours arise and apparel her selfe, no more as a virgine, but as a wife, and . . . must by order come forth . . . very demurely and stately to be sene and acknowledged of her parents and kinsfolkes whether she were the same woman or a changeling, or dead or aliue, or maimed by any accident nocturnall.80

Once more, Puttenham’s description blurs the boundaries between seduction and violent rape. This ambiguity is constantly stressed by Puttenham’s formulations that attempt to reconcile the social sanction of the marriage with the violence of the wedding night in the manner of the oxymoronic ‘Crosse-couple’:81 the spouse is ‘laughing lamenting’ and sex is described as an ‘amorous battaile’ and ‘friendly conflictes’ – terms that are designed to transform loathing into love in a way that speaks to Beatrice-Joanna’s emotional transformation in the course of The Changeling. Puttenham describes the experience of sexual intercourse – the ‘turns being served’, which are so closely echoed in Beatrice-Joanna’s determination to ‘serve [her] turn upon [De Flores]’ – as fundamentally transformative.82 As Dale Randall has noted, the passage produces a meaning of the term ‘changeling’ as ‘a woman who has had sexual intercourse’.83 For Judith Haber, Puttenham’s account not only ‘suggest[s] the possibility of some sort of bed-trick or substitution’, but ‘impl[ies] that sexual experience . . . creates an extreme alteration in the bride, potentially destroying her or 79

1: 41.

80

1: 42, my emphasis.

81

1: 173.

82

2.2.68.

83

Randall, ‘Some Observations’, p. 350.

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“substituting” for her ideal virginal self a radically discontinuous personality (which, nevertheless, inhabits a body that appears identical)’.84 Signalled in Beatrice-Joanna’s line ‘This fellow has undone me endlessly’,85 the experience of sexual intercourse in The Changeling, as in Puttenham, results in no less than ‘a radical unstitching of identity’.86 Although Compulsion does not portray Anjika as a virgin, the drama very explicitly develops the link between sexual intercourse, the loss of identity and Anjika’s transformation into a ‘changeling’. It is not Anjika’s involvement in Hardik’s murder, but her intercourse with Flowers that prompts a transformation so profound that Mrs Indrani, in a key scene St Johnston dedicated to the theme of Anjika’s transformation into a ‘changeling’, complains: ‘It’s like you haven’t been like my Anjika at all! So impatient, so cross, so unhappy. It’s like a stranger’s moved in.’ Alex, too, remarks on how ‘recently everything’s been changing’. But it is Anjika herself whose post-coital musings home in on the cause of her transformation: anjika What have you done to me? flowers [laughs] anjika There’s so much fuss about losing your virginity. You think it’s going to change you, turn you into an adult. It’s just a samskara. flowers Huh? anjika An empty ritual. This . . . this has changed me. flowers You make it sound like it’s not a good thing. anjika We’ve killed someone. And I don’t even feel guilty about it. Not really. I just want to get away with it. No, I was never like this. It’s you who made me like this.

This conversation pointedly identifies the sexual relationship between Anjika and Flowers as the rite of passage and transition from girlhood to womanhood that the loss of virginity no longer signifies in twenty-firstcentury Western society (samskaras are not ‘empty rituals’, but Hindu rites of passage that include the rite of marriage).87 Sexual intercourse that crosses boundaries of race, age and class is the cause of Anjika’s transition from child-like innocence to amoral adulthood. It is following this conversation that Anjika, for the first time, refuses to let Flowers open the door of the car for her: the experience of sex has brought about the levelling of hierarchical relations she emphatically rejected before, when Flowers had insisted that they were ‘the same now’.

84 87

Haber, ‘Erotic Logic’, 83–4. 85 4.1.1. Pandit, Explore Hinduism, pp. 125–32.

86

Neill, Issues of Death, p. 190.

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17 Rape: Parminder Nagra in Sarah Harding’s Compulsion (2009). Screengrab.

The transformation Anjika describes here is rendered visually in the earlier scene of her first night with Flowers. Rendering visible the hypallagic exchange of loathing for love, the scene perversely mixes the filmic conventions for the portrayal of rape with the visual language of seduction. Rigid with repulsion and fear, Anjika lets Flowers inhale the scent of her hair (‘She smells all amber!’ exclaims De Flores in the play88) and put his hand inside her blouse. The camera’s focus on Anjika’s tearful face in extreme close-up does not permit this to be read as consensual sex – yet her sudden tilt of her head backwards to accommodate Flowers’s hand on her throat, as an Asian-inflected cadence begins on the soundtrack, suggests an unexpected yielding to his seduction. A sharp cut, accompanied by a change in the soundtrack to a pensive Western piano tune, takes us to Anjika’s upsidedown face on the pillow. The central scene of intercourse is thus omitted in a way reminiscent of Puttenham’s activation of his reader’s pornographic imagination: it is the viewer who has to imagine the sight that is suppressed. Anjika opens her eyes as the camera revolves to put her face right side up – a ‘giddy turning’ of the image that symbolises the transformation of the young girl into the mature ‘changeling’ woman.89 Anjika gets up and leaves. The next shot of Anjika in the shower references the obsessive scrubbing that is a staple of 88

2.2.82.

89

1.1.149.

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18 ‘Giddy turning’: Parminder Nagra in Sarah Harding’s Compulsion (2009). Screengrab.

rape narratives on screen. Yet the continuing mellow piano music on the soundtrack, combined with Anjika’s pensive expression and the sensual movement with which she pushes back her hair work against the interpretation of the moment as the aftermath of a rape.90 Instead, the combination of visual signifiers of trauma and sensuality represents the moment of Anjika’s own assessment, the morning after her sexual initiation, of ‘whether she [is] the same woman or a changeling, or dead or aliue, or maimed by any accident nocturnall’. With hardly any dialogue to support it and omitting the central act of sex, the sequence registers the hypallagic exchanges of love and loathing, experience and innocence that make of Anjika Compulsion’s changeling. The ethical confusion we witness in this sequence, as what the playtext represents as a rape is transformed into seduction and lust,91 is pushed to a further level in the climactic scene in which Anjika tries to stage her rape by Flowers in order to be able to kill him and is then, in a final hypallage, forced by Flowers to kill him as he rapes her, having just admitted his love for her. In effacing the difference between rape and seduction, revenge and sacrifice, suicide and murder, hate and love, the climactic scene of Compulsion

90 91

See Sarah Harding’s account of filming the scene (‘Compulsion’, 611). See Roberta Barker and David Nicols’s discussion of stagings that transform the playtext’s rape into seduction (‘Does Beatrice Joanna Have a Subtext?’).

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represents the culmination of the hypallagic logic that results in perversion and absurdity.

‘Combining the familiar with the fresh’: a counter-Shakespearean changeling in mainstream TV programming Emerging from the ethical mess of this scene, a radiant Anjika, wearing the wristband Flowers gave her as the ‘token’ of their unsavoury union, steps out of her parents’ mansion and is congratulated by her parents, kinfolk and friends who admire the bride.92 Nobody notices the changeling in their midst. The ‘changeling’ logic of exchange with a difference in Middleton and Rowley’s play and St Johnston’s drama results in a celebration of an interracial marriage and hybrid identity that leaves a bitter aftertaste: speaking to the ‘moral panic’ of race relations towards the end of the decade, the terrorist threat does not come from outside but is (quite literally) embraced by a multicultural society that has moved from separatism to integration. For viewers who have spotted the allusion, in Anjika’s fumble for the knife under her pillow, to Sharon Stone’s seductive serial killer reaching for her ice pick in Basic Instinct,93 and who have noticed the circularity that returns Anjika to the back seat of the Indrani Rolls-Royce, now driven by a younger white chauffeur, it is clear that the ill-favoured changeling who has taken the place of the girl-power icon of hybridity will strike again. Embodied by Nagra, whose association with ER brings to the drama some of the openendedness of soap opera, the ending of Compulsion heralds the beginning of its next instalment.94 The picture of wedded bliss Compulsion concludes with might not be Middletonian, but it is ‘Jacobean’ in a way that returns me to the discussion of Compulsion’s place among adaptations of early modern drama. For the scene of the staged rape leading to the emancipation of the heroine is a conflation of Leonard Digges’s 1621–2 version of the tale (in which, as Sarah Harding knew, the Beatrice-Joanna figure kills her rapist) and of the classic Hollywood noir film Sweet Smell of Success.95 Set in the murky, rumourobsessed world of 1950s New York journalism and starring Tony Curtis and Burt Lancaster opposite Susan Harrison, the film portrays a powerful gossip columnist’s plot, with the help of a disreputable press agent, to destroy his 92 94 95

5.3.175. 93 Dir. Paul Verhoeven, 1992. For the interrelatedness of ‘the unresolved narrative structure of soaps’ and television drama, see Nelson, TV Drama in Transition, p. 23. Dir. Alexander Mackendrick, 1957. Harding, ‘Compulsion’, p. 610.

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sister’s unsanctioned relationship with an up-and-coming jazz musician. Although neither Ernest Lehman’s screenplay nor the film credits in any way acknowledge the connection between Sweet Smell and Webster’s Duchess of Malfi, the parallels are pervasive enough for Steve Mathews, one of Compulsion’s producers, to have lent St Johnston his copy of the film as a model of how an early modern plot may be transposed into a modern context.96 St Johnston was impressed with the mood of the film, which he found ‘very dark . . . much darker than what we could do for ITV’.97 Strikingly, Sweet Smell revises Webster’s tragic ending and concludes with the Duchess character staging her rape by the Bosola character, leading to the latter being beaten by her brother/Ferdinand and eventually hauled off to prison while she walks out into what we are meant to read as an independent, happier life in which she can marry her lover. In the ending of Compulsion there is more than a faint echo of Sweet Smell, with its heroine’s maturation from timid subordination to assertive and violent self-determination, leaving the viewer in some doubt about whether she is to be admired or feared in her vengeful emancipation. Even if, through Sweet Smell of Success, Webster’s Duchess plays an unexpected role in shaping Compulsion’s ending, it would be wrong to conclude that Joshua St Johnston or Sarah Harding saw themselves as part of a larger tradition of filmmakers intent on bringing Jacobean drama to a popular audience. Instead, the idea for the adaptation emerged from the coincidence of St Johnston’s role as the scriptwriter for Size 9 Productions (the company in which he, with Ray Winstone and Winstone’s agent Michael Wiggs, are partners) and a fortuitous visit to the theatre. St Johnston remembers: I had just seen a production of Othello . . . and was reading the text of Othello . . . [whose foreword] referred to The Changeling . . . And it was a play that I hadn’t seen since I was about 15, when I saw a production at the National Theatre . . . and I remembered it and I thought: ‘What a brilliant story!’ and: ‘actually, what a great dynamic there is in that story!’ and: ‘Wouldn’t that work well being updated to the present day, with . . . a role for Ray in the De Flores character.’98

In a series of surprising exchanges that lead from the performance of Othello to a reading of that play and from thence to the memory of watching The 96

97 98

Mathews is not alone in recognising the connection: it has been noted in various blogs and reviews, including Michael Billington’s review of the musical based on the film: ‘Sweet Smell of Success – Review’, Guardian.co.uk, 6 November 2011, http://tinyurl.com/8zkds3n. St Johnston, personal interview, 25 January 2011. St Johnston, personal interview, 25 January 2011.

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Changeling and the idea for the television drama, St Johnston associates his drama with the representation of racial tensions in present-day stagings of Shakespeare and Middleton. Significantly, racial politics were absolutely central to the 1988 National Theatre production recalled by St Johnston, since Richard Eyre had, controversially, cast black actor George Harris as De Flores opposite Miranda Richardson’s Beatrice-Joanna. As Roberta Barker and David Nicol remark, in Eyre’s production, Beatrice-Joanna’s ‘transgressions of class and patriarchy were superseded by her transgression of racial boundaries’.99 Compulsion borrows the racial dynamics that underpinned Eyre’s The Changeling and Shakespeare’s Othello, only to invert them through the perversion-generating exchange of one term for another, of British Asian Anjika for white aristocratic Desdemona and Beatrice-Joanna and of white working-class Flowers for black De Flores, black Othello and white Iago. Crucially, it sends us back to Shakespeare and the way ‘the utopian ideal of Shakespeare as a paradigm for intercultural performance and understanding’ that Greenhalgh and Shaughnessy had identified in the British Asian Shakespeare films is questioned by the film’s use of Middleton/Rowley as a means of probing intercultural tensions and misunderstanding.100 The relationship between Compulsion, the 1988 Changeling and Othello urges us to acknowledge the fundamental kinship between Shakespeare and Middleton/Rowley and to ask troubling questions about why Compulsion’s inversion of the racial and gender dynamics between Othello and Desdemona should seem so perverse. Why should viewers balk at the sexual spell a white, middle-aged, working-class man has cast over the beautiful young British Asian girl when they are happy to accept Desdemona’s infatuation with a black former slave who has descended into the ‘vale of years’?101 Yet, if Compulsion compels us to question our acceptance of Shakespeare as normative, it does so in a manner that is remarkably discreet: as I have argued, the only reference to Shakespeare in the film serves the dual purpose of showing the differential ownership of cultural capital between Anjika and Flowers and of pointing to Macbeth as the Shakespearean pre-text for the portrayal of a murderous couple haunted by the memory of the man they have killed. The overriding force of the reference emphasises continuity 99 100 101

Barker and Nicols, ‘Does Beatrice Joanna Have a Subtext?’, p. 3.18. See also Michael Scott’s account of the production (The Changeling, p. 62). Greenhalgh and Shaughnessy, ‘Our Shakespeares’, p. 104. Oth. 3.3.270. See the online discussion ‘Compulsion with Parminder Nagra on ITV1’, Unrealitytv.co.uk, 3 May 2009, http://tinyurl.com/8rxb3xx.

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between Shakespeare and Middleton/Rowley, just as the overriding emphasis of the drama as a whole is on continuity and its smooth integration in ITV drama programming. As repeatedly became very clear in our interview, St Johnston’s principal concern, when conceptualising the adaptation, was ensuring that Compulsion would ‘feel as though it belonged on ITV’.102 Seamless integration is also the keynote in ITV1’s own narrative of its programming for 2009, which contextualises the film in relation to literary adaptation as part of the channel’s remit as a public service broadcaster. ITV1’s review of its programming states: Building on the success of the Austen season in 2007 we introduced a number of new literary adaptations to diversify the range of our drama output . . . Compulsion, adapted from Jacobean tragedy The Changeling was also shown in 2009 and starred Ray Winstone, Parminder Nagra and a strong multi-cultural cast.103

Compulsion was thus explicitly part of ITV1’s broader effort ‘to diversify its drama portfolio’ and ‘introduce more contemporary and modern drama alongside the established popular series – combining the familiar with the fresh’.104 At the same time, it was also part of ITV1’s commitment to ‘reflect[ing] the ethnic diversity of the British population’.105 Compulsion could thus be presented as yet another TV drama that contributed to the ‘mainstreaming of the black and Asian experience in Britain’, continuing the work started by Channel 4’s commissioning of British Asian films in the 1990s and achieving a double integration of British Asian experience and Jacobean drama in mainstream TV programming.106 This integration was highlighted at the time of Compulsion’s first screening, when a feature in the Telegraph went out of its way to state how ‘Compulsion fits well into [its] TV context.’107 The point was driven home by one of the advertisements screened during the programme’s commercial breaks: alongside ads for London Pride beer, Vauxhall sports cars and AXA home insurance sat an advertisement for NatWest bank’s Manchester branch, featuring two attractive young British Asian women advising their middle-class white British customers in the comfort of their own homes. If Caughie is right in suggesting that space in ‘serious’ 102 103 104 106 107

St Johnston, personal interview, 25 January 2011. ‘ITV1 2009 Review; 2010 Statement of Programme Policy’, p. 10, ITV.com, http://tinyurl.com/ 35v9es4. ‘ITV1 2009 Review’, p. 9. 105 ‘ITV1 2009 Review’, p. 15. Korte and Sternberg, Bidding for the Mainstream?, p. 203. Serena Davies, ‘Interview: Ray Winstone and Parminder Nagra on Compulsion’, Telegraph.co.uk, 28 April 2009, http://tinyurl.com/cwlp779.

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television drama ‘is the point of contact to a reality outside the narrative’ and that it ‘leads out . . . to a social which exists independently of the story and is taken to be real in a way that makes the fiction matter’, then the NatWest advertisement was a particularly obvious way of mediating between the fictional world of Compulsion and the ‘real’ world of middleclass banking practices that lent the drama ‘its social significance – its “seriousness”’.108 On 4 May 2009, Compulsion drew on the continuity between The Changeling’s domestic tragedy, the ‘characteristic domesticity of the TV drama setting’, the domestic interiors featured in the NatWest advertisement and the viewer’s own home to make itself at home in more than one-fifth of the living rooms of the nation’s licence fee-payers as a serious representation of real-life integrationist multiculturalism.109 There is something just a little too glib in the tidy overlap between the narratives of continuity provided by Joshua St Johnston, ITV1 and prescreening press coverage, however. As true and yet inaccurate as Anjika’s ‘I’ve been raped. And I think I’ve killed the rapist’, these narratives obscure the profound disturbance caused by the attempt to mainstream The Changeling and use its politically biased plot to represent British Asian experience in the twenty-first century. In relation to Shakespeare on television in the twenty-first century, too, Compulsion, despite its mainstream appeal and emphasis on continuity, is a barely identifiable changeling, familiar but with a sense of freshness that does not quite fit mainstream television drama. In a key scene that stands out in its singularity, Compulsion integrates some of the disruptiveness of the preposterous contemporary Jacobean aesthetic into its mainstream narrative. The film keeps returning to the motif of entrapment, as Anjika is grounded by her father, locked into the paternal Rolls-Royce and described as being in a ‘gilded cage’. Yet, in a moment in the drama that is literally arresting, in that it unexpectedly introduces a moment of stasis into the otherwise snappy pace of the film, there is one fantasy of escape that stands out as vivid, viable and shared. Driving off after a night together in his tiny terraced house, Flowers says to Anjika: ‘I wish we could go away somewhere. There’s this place out by Dungeness I used to go to. There’s not much to do there except walk along the beach and look at the birds.’ ‘It sounds nice’, she replies, for a fleeting

108 109

Caughie, Television Drama, pp. 135–6. Nelson, TV Drama in Transition, p. 20. For a reflection of the generic affinities between Middleton and Rowley’s domestic tragedy, realist drama and television drama, see Neill, ‘Introduction’, p. vii.

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moment partaking in his working-class dream of escape from London to the empty caravans near the Dungeness nuclear power station. So utterly incongruous with her upbringing and aspirations is this moment that it sticks out as a signpost pointing away from the constraints of the world portrayed in Compulsion. The freedom Flowers associates with Dungeness is that of the living memorial to Derek Jarman: the windswept artist’s garden in the inhospitable shingle Keith Collins spent all day weeding as I sat at Jarman’s desk reading his Shooting Script for Edward II in June 2012. For Jarman, Prospect Cottage was intimately connected to his work on Edward II: both the diary Modern Nature and Queer Edward II interlace narratives of gardening and beekeeping in Dungeness with the development of the film which Jarman describes as ‘increasingly Jacobean, sexy, and violent’ in the same paragraph in which he speaks of ‘the flowers at Prospect Cottage’.110 Incorporated into Compulsion, then, is the fantasy of an escape from normativity and oppressive social and cultural codes that connects Compulsion’s transgressive protagonists to Derek Jarman’s contemporary Jacobean film. For Sarah Harding, Dungeness had an ‘end of the road’ quality and the connection to Jarman was ‘something I thought about especially as I’d worked with Jarman’s DOP [Director of Photography], Peter Middleton (Jubilee, The Tempest) on Lewis’.111 While at the furthest remove from Derek Jarman’s attack on establishment values and mainstream culture, Compulsion also harbours deep within it a dream of escape that takes its inspiration from Jarman: in ITV’s Compulsion, a Jacobean changeling has infiltrated the mainstream. 110 111

Jarman, Modern Nature, p. 293. Sarah Harding, personal interview, 24 May 2011. See also Harding, ‘Compulsion’, 613.

conclusion

Anonymous: early modern dramatists on twenty-first-century screens

In 2011, the first feature film to be filmed entirely using the ARRI Alexa high-definition digital video camera – a camera that was touted, in the industry, as ‘the final nail in film cinematography’s coffin’ – was released.1 If Lev Manovich is right in dividing digital film aesthetics into films that are considered ‘as a sequence of big-budget special effects, which may take years to craft during post-production stage’ and films that ‘[give] up all effects in favour of “authenticity” and “immediacy”, achieved with the help of inexpensive digital video equipment’, then Roland Emmerich’s $30 million Columbia Pictures film Anonymous clearly belongs to the former end of the spectrum, while the digital films of Cox, Figgis and their microcinematic heirs are at its opposite end.2 Yet all of these filmmakers share the pioneering spirit of adventurers in an uncharted digital landscape full of unexpected challenges and beauty, combined with a profound ambivalence towards Shakespeare’s pre-eminent status as enshrined by late twentiethcentury cinema. In Anonymous, this ambivalence is made obvious by the way Ben Jonson, Christopher Marlowe, Thomas Dekker and Thomas Nashe are drafted into a plot that was meant to put the final nail in the coffin of William Shakespeare. Played by Rafe Spall, Anonymous’s Shakespeare is an illiterate buffoon whom we first encounter as Carlo Buffone in Jonson’s Every Man in His Humour, a play in which we know the historical Shakespeare performed as a member of the Lord Chamberlain’s Men. What we don’t know, but what the film suggests with apparent seriousness, is that the plays to which 1

2

Alan Brandon, ‘Will the ARRI Alexa Finally Kill Film?’, Gizmag.com, 17 March 2010, http:// tinyurl.com/3ornvca. See also cinematographer Anna Foerster’s comment that she and director Roland Emmerich concluded, from their experience with the Arri Alexa, that there is ‘no turning back to film now!’: ‘Anonymous: Alexa’s First Feature Film’, Arri News, http://tinyurl.com/9rrl3ec. Manovich, ‘Old Media as New Media’, pp. 210–11.

217

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Screening Early Modern Drama

Shakespeare lends his name were written by Edward de Vere, the Earl of Oxford. To make this case, Anonymous throws together every ‘Jacobean’ plot element in the book – court intrigue, multiple incest, murder, execution – adding a dose of clichés about the Elizabethan period (Elizabeth in sexual thrall to her courtiers, overexcited groundlings in the theatre), to give life to the ultimate conservative historical fantasy: that the playwright was of royal blood and the Queen’s lover and that imperatives of state secrecy and social class prevented him from acknowledging or publishing his works. The interest of Anonymous lies not in its unconvincing historical plot, but rather in how the film symptomatically reflects the dynamics that have shaped the screen representation of early modern drama since the start of the Kenneth Branagh era. The film, that is, is not unlike Revengers Tragedy in being addressed to various constituencies at once: the popular audience of Emmerich’s disaster films, the crossover audience of post-heritage films like Shekhar Kapur’s Elizabeth films (1998, 2007), and the viewers who share a specialist knowledge of Shakespearean and early modern drama in presentday performance. While this last group of viewers is the least likely to appreciate the main thrust of the film, it is for our benefit and enjoyment that Anonymous opens with Derek Jacobi, wearing a coat and scarf that instantly recall his present-day costume as the Chorus of Henry V, stepping out of a taxi-cab and hurrying into the backstage area of a theatre, where he rushes through backstage corridors and onto the stage. The sequence ostentatiously cites the iconic opening to Branagh’s Henry V, in which Jacobi’s Chorus, bridging the past and the present, theatre and film, spoke the lines that, more than any other in the Shakespearean canon, convey the playwright himself imploring his audience to use their imagination to transcend the technical limits of his medium. Like Revengers, Anonymous thus triggers a layered viewing experience in which the scene on the screen is mentally juxtaposed with – and ironised by – the theatrical and cinematic moments it compulsively cites. Standing in the spotlight and addressing the audience of a lush proscenium theatre, Jacobi surprises us by speaking lines that are not by Shakespeare, but about Shakespeare, written by Ben Jonson in his prefatory poem for Shakespeare’s First Folio: Soul of the age! The applause! Delight! The wonder of our stage! Our SHAKESPEARE rise!3 3

Jonson, ‘To the Memory of My Beloved’, lines 17–19.

Conclusion

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The change, in the last line, from Jonson’s ‘My SHAKESPEARE’ to ‘Our SHAKESPEARE’ in John Orloff’s screenplay signals a shift in tone, as Jacobi musingly continues: Our Shakespeare. For he is all of ours, is he not? The most performed playwright of all time, the author of 37 plays, 154 sonnets and several narrative poems that are collectively known as the most ultimate expressions of humanity and the English language. And yet – and yet, not a single manuscript of any kind has ever been found written in Shakespeare’s own hand.

As Jacobi’s speech progresses and Jonson’s praise of the ‘Sweet Swan of Avon’ makes way for a potted biography of Shakespeare designed to show the impossibility of this son of an illiterate glove-maker ever rising to intellectual distinction, the story of how Shakespeare ‘became an actor and eventually a playwright’ is flushed out by the rain that starts to fall onto Jacobi from the rotating spray lowered from the theatre’s heavens. The rain, thunder and lightning, and Jacobi’s wary look up to gauge the extent of the downpour, are precise gestural and auditory citations of Jacobi’s intrusion into the carefully reconstructed medieval world of Henry V following the execution of Bardolph, where he looks up at the hanged man’s legs in the rain, hunches his shoulders and starts to speak the Chorus to Act 4. In Anonymous, however, Jacobi has been provided with an umbrella that protects him from the Shakespearean rain, enabling him to conclude, as the camera zooms in on him and effects a transition from theatre to cinema, from the present-day stage to the Elizabethan street: ‘Our Shakespeare is a cipher, a ghost. So: let me offer you a different story, a darker story, of quills and swords, of power and betrayal, of a stage conquered and a throne lost.’

19 Prologue: Derek Jacobi in Roland Emmerich’s Anonymous (2011). Screengrab.

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Screening Early Modern Drama

The story that follows is not simply different from that of Shakespeare-asplaywright, but also from that of Shakespeare-on-screen as mediated by Branagh: Jacobi lends his authority to a retelling of Shakespeare’s life and claim to the authorship of the plays that is simultaneously a rethinking of Shakespeare’s cinematic life in the preceding decades. His casting as the Prologue in Anonymous is as mischievous as his casting as the Duke in Alex Cox’s Revengers Tragedy had been: in both films, Jacobi’s earlier performances in key Shakespearean roles under Kenneth Branagh’s direction haunt his performances of roles that challenge the centrality of the Shakespeare canon and, in Anonymous, of the very identity of Shakespeare as a playwright. That Jacobi should initiate such a challenge by using Jonson’s panegyric lines, lifted out of a poem in which Jonson goes on to set Shakespeare above Chaucer, Spenser, Beaumont, Lily, Kyd and Marlowe, just adds to the mischief. Where, in Revengers Tragedy, Jacobi’s evocation of his earlier performance oxymoronically yokes together Hamlet/Claudius/ Branagh and Middleton’s Duke, in Anonymous, his appearance as the Prologue bodies forth an even more complicated conjunction of opposite cultural forces: Shakespeare vs. Jonson and Middleton, Branagh vs. Cox and Emmerich, classical theatre vs. digital cinema, period drama vs. postmodern ‘historical’ fantasy. Jacobi’s performance as Anonymous’s Prologue is only the first in a series of casting and directorial decisions in the film that invoke a range of contemporary theatrical and cinematic approaches to performing Shakespeare. It is certainly no coincidence that, within the film, the role of the Chorus of Shakespeare’s Henry V is given to Mark Rylance, founding Artistic Director of Shakespeare’s Globe between 1995 and 2005 and, in that capacity, possibly the single most influential figure in bringing to the attention of a popular audience the plays of Shakespeare’s contemporaries and original practices research into early modern theatre practice. The man who opened his reconstructed Globe Theatre in London with a stirring performance as Henry V here treads the boards of the reconstructed Rose Theatre in Babelsberg, Berlin’s film studio, in what comes close to being a parody of his own performances at the Globe. At the Globe, Rylance had very markedly reacted against Branagh’s cinematic period authenticity and love of horses and mud with a staging that insisted on theatrical authenticity, performing with an all-male company of actors who wore Jenni Tiramani’s painstakingly hand-stitched reconstructions of period costumes on a bare stage. Rylance’s performance in the role of Henry had become controversial for his ability to rouse present-day ‘groundlings’ into shouting abuse at the French in response to Henry’s speeches to his troops,

Conclusion

221

demonstrating thereby the theatre building’s predisposition towards encouraging active audience responses and an interactive dynamic.4 In Anonymous, the bare boards and daytime performances of Shakespeare’s Globe have gone; instead, the Babelsberg Rose sports an elaborately painted set representing a fortress, perilously lit with torches and candle footlights, creating exactly the sort of anachronistic set Rylance sought to root out in his original practices work. Having grotesquely mimicked the action of the horses the Chorus enjoins his groundlings to ‘see’, Rylance kneels on the edge of the stage and reaches out to the outstretched arms of his audience in a spoofing of his engagement of the audience at the Globe. As he does so, extradiegetic orchestral music starts to well up, using chords that evoke those that Patrick Doyle so memorably wrote to underline Henry’s rousing speeches in Branagh’s film. The soundtrack thus keys the transition from Rylance’s Chorus to the performance of the play itself by the Lord Chamberlain’s Men, with a central performance of Henry’s St Crispin’s Day speech by Globe veteran Alex Hassell that mimicks Branagh’s own performance of that speech very closely indeed, both in costume and intonation.5 The Henry V play-within-the-film thus allows Anonymous to articulate its debt to the two most powerful ‘new’ modes of reviving Shakespeare in the last twenty years, invoking Branagh’s cinematic ‘heritage Shakespeare’ and Rylance’s theatrical original practices Shakespeare, while deflating both through its parodic citations and, symbolically, the torching of the reconstructed Rose Theatre which kick-starts the plot.

20 The Babelsberg Rose: Mark Rylance in Roland Emmerich’s Anonymous (2011). Screengrab. 4 5

Paul Taylor, ‘Theatre: Henry V/The Winter’s Tale, the Globe, London’, The Independent, 9 June 1997, http://tinyurl.com/bkm3ao3. The ‘Rose’ actors of Anonymous were recruited from experienced Globe actors. I am grateful to Farah Karim-Cooper for this information.

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Screening Early Modern Drama

This is what makes the casting of Rhys Ifans as the Earl of Oxford and the figurehead for Emmerich’s revisionary view of ‘Shakespeare’s’ role in presentday film culture so intriguing. Ifans rose to international fame thanks to his portrayal of Hugh Grant’s disreputable lodger Spike in Notting Hill (1999) and played another significant supporting role in Elizabeth: The Golden Age (2007). When Emmerich asked Ifans to play Oxford, he thus entrusted the role, and ‘Shakespeare’s’ plays, to someone who had contributed some spice/Spike to the construction of idealised, upper-class versions of Englishness for the turn-ofthe-millennium viewer. More subversively, however, he also gave this key role to the actor who, in Mike Figgis’s Hotel, had played the edgy director of the most anti-heritage Duchess of Malfi imaginable, going against the rose-tinted mode of presenting Englishness in Notting Hill. The lead role of Anonymous, a film that revisits and revises English literary heritage and how that heritage is presented in the cinema, is played by the director of a radically dissident Malfi. With that in mind, it is less surprising to find that Ifans modelled his performance on a cross between Karl Lagerfeld and David Bowie, situating his version of the playwright on the borderline between transgressive innovation and the mainstream. Ifans’s Oxford, then, bodies forth a profoundly contradictory attitude to cultural heritage and its cinematic representation: one that draws on mainstream cinematic glorifications of upper-class Englishness at the same time as it undermines that glorification with his dissident heritage credentials and biographical persona as a ‘working-class hero, left-winger’ Welshman known for his passionate defence of his language and culture against the dominant English.6 Ultimately, it is his dissident heritage persona which wins out in his performance of an upper-class playwright who is so enervated and fatigued as to become exhausting to watch, while his theatrical rivals, including Spall’s Shakespeare and Sebastian Armesto’s Jonson, steal the show with their histrionic energy. In Anonymous, the painstaking effort to reconstruct an authentic-looking Elizabethan London through sets, costumes and CGI technology is obvious, producing, as Ifans sees it, ‘an Elizabethan England that we’ve never seen before’.7 The result, however, is not so much the desired ‘look . . . based on paintings and Vermeer’,8 but rather a film whose period is visibly digitally engineered, giving it the feel of an artificially created 6

7 8

‘“I put Lady Gaga to shame” – Rhys Ifans on his Latest David Bowie-Inspired Acting Role’, WalesOnline.co.uk, 28 October 2011, http://tinyurl.com/5snl3mp. For a high-profile airing of his political views about the Welsh language, see Mariella Frostrup’s interview with Ifans in ‘Rhys’s Pieces’, Observer, 1 September 2002, http://tinyurl.com/bne7yfm. ‘Rhys Ifans Interview – Anonymous’, YouTube, 8 November 2011, http://tinyurl.com/9gotjoo. ‘Anonymous: Alexa’s First Feature Film’, Arri News, http://tinyurl.com/9rrl3ec.

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apocalyptic world that made Emmerich famous: Independence Day (1996), Godzilla (1998), The Day After Tomorrow (2004) and 2012 (2009). The digital medium designed to give the film a feel of authenticity in its use of low-level lighting and ability to generate period backdrops also brands the film as a fantasy – a fantasy geared towards disinheriting Shakespeare and dismantling 400 years’ worth of reception history during which we have not realised that the gap between Shakespeare and his contemporaries should not exist because ‘Shakespeare’ is a contemporary, rather than the man from Stratford. The ennobling of the playwright, paradoxically, results in a levelling: instead of being able to read his works as ‘not of an age, but for all time’, as Jonson’s panegyric would have it, the plot of Anonymous suggests that Shakespeare’s plays are deeply rooted in his historical moment, giving voice to intimate personal and political struggles from which they may not be extricated. That levelling, however, need not result in a devaluing of Shakespeare. To the contrary, Joely Richardson insists on the DVD’s Special Feature in terms that invoke both Assmann’s discussion of canonical ‘sacred texts’ and Artaud’s assault on the sanctity of such texts, ‘the sort of irony in all of this is that at the end of the day it’s still a celebration of Shakespeare, because we’re still all obsessed with him, the works, the characters; they are sacred texts’.9 It is its juxtaposition of such paradoxical impulses that makes of Anonymous a telling articulation of the dynamics that shape twenty-firstcentury films of early modern drama. Shakespeare’s works, the film makes clear, continue to be central to English literary heritage. That centrality is simultaneously acknowledged and contested in the film’s incorporation of Derek Jacobi’s and Mark Rylance’s cameo performances. Anonymous uses these cameos to level the cultural playing field and bring Shakespeare into a more productive dialogue with his contemporaries by treating him as a contemporary. Within twenty-first-century cinema, that trend towards a levelling of Shakespeare and his contemporaries, allowing all early modern drama to enter the present-day political arena and avoid the trappings of period characteristic of heritage cinema, is evident from the appearance of films like Kristian Levring’s The King Is Alive (2000), Don Boyd’s My Kingdom (2001) and, on television, Geoffrey Sax’s Othello (2001), that is, films that use digital technologies and narrative techniques that bring them close to the Webster and Middleton adaptations with which they are in dialogue: Mike Figgis’s Hotel and Alex Cox’s Revengers. A 9

Joely Richardson, interview, ‘Who is the Real William Shakespeare?’. Anonymous, dir. Roland Emmerich (Sony Home Entertainment, 2012, DVD).

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similarly level playing field is also obvious in the way that ITV Drama’s Compulsion is seemingly comfortably integrated into twenty-first-century popular television programming, feeding off and building on fashionable British Asian adaptations of Shakespeare. While it is still the case that independent filmmakers struggle to find funding for projects involving early modern drama, there has been a marked decrease in large-budget mainstream Shakespeare films. This is matched by an increase in the production of small-budget independent Shakespeare films, like Tom Magill’s Mickey B, a Macbeth adaptation filmed in a Northern Irish prison (2007, released 2010), or Harry Lennix’s all-black Henry IV (2012), whose political approach to filming Shakespeare is akin to the marked political engagement of contemporary Jacobean films. Regardless of Anonymous’s critical failure and dubious claims to historical veracity, its medium and subject matter, then, reflect a crucial shift in early twenty-first-century screen adaptations of early modern drama. This shift makes it ever more unproductive to distinguish between mainstream Shakespeare and his more marginal contemporaries and to view them as opposed cultural forces. While Anonymous still celebrates Shakespeare’s plays and seeks to appeal to mainstream audiences, in a very significant way, Emmerich’s film also signals how other twenty-first-century filmmakers have begun to think, and move, beyond Shakespeare.

appendix 1

Chronological list of surviving film adaptations

1926 1941 1957 1958 1959 1964 1965 1965 1966 1966 1967 1967 1969 1970 1971 1972 1973 1976 1978 1980 1981 1982 1988 1991 1993 1993 1994 1998 2001 2001 2002 2002 2003 2007

Faust Volpone, ou l’amour de l’or Sweet Smell of Success (Malfi) The Tragical History of Doctor Faustus Volpone A Question of Happiness # 1 (Malfi) Women Beware Women The Changeling A Deadly Affair (Edward II, extracts) Syskonbädd 1782 (’Tis Pity) The Honey Pot (Volpone) Doctor Faustus Capricci (Arden of Faversham) Edward II Addio, fratello crudele (’Tis Pity) The Duchess of Malfi The Changeling Noroît (The Revenger’s Tragedy) Volpone ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore Women Beware Women Privileged (Malfi, extracts) Il Volpone Edward II Changeling Oberon, The Faery Prince Lekce Faust Middleton’s Changeling Hotel (Malfi) Volpone Quietus (Malfi) Revengers Tragedy Volpone The Changeling

225

F. W. Murnau Maurice Tourneur Alexander Mackendrick Ronald Eyre Donald Wolfit Claude Watham Gordon Flemyng Derek Bennett Sidney Lumet Vilgot Sjöman Joseph L. Mankiewicz Nevill Coghill and Richard Burton Carmelo Bene Toby Robertson and Richard Marquand Giuseppe Patroni Griffi James MacTaggart Anthony Page Jacques Rivette Jean Meyer Roland Joffé Nick Levinson Michael Hoffman Maurizio Ponzi Derek Jarman Simon Curtis Barrie Rutter Jan Švankmajer Marcus Thompson Mike Figgis Francis Perrin Peter Huby Alex Cox Frédéric Auburtin Jay Stern

226 2008 2008 2009 2009 2009 2009 2009 2010 2010 2010 2010 2010 2011 2012 2012 2012 2012

Appendix 1 Antonio & Mellida The Dutch Courtesan A Mad World, My Masters Endymion (Extracts) Sappho and Phao (Extracts) Compulsion (Changeling) Doctor Faustus A Chaste Maid in Cheapside Mother Bombie (Extracts) Volpone The Duchess of Malfi Revenge for the Duchess of Malfi Antonio’s Revenge Westward Ho! A Mad World, My Masters The Jew of Malta Doctor Faustus

Matthew Edwards Perry Mills Perry Mills Perry Mills James Wallace Sarah Harding Elizabeth Freestone Perry Mills Perry Mills Elizabeth Freestone Elizabeth Freestone Kyle McDonald and Philip Borg Perry Mills Perry Mills Michael Cordner Douglas Morse Matthew Dunster

appendix 2

Annotated filmography: early modern drama on screen, 1926–2012

This list includes all feature films and shorts with online distribution I was able to source and view before August 2012. It excludes theatrical trailers, staged readings and filmed theatre productions that are not available on DVD. Further amateur filmed theatre productions can be found on YouTube, where, among others, Boston University’s Willing Suspension Productions have uploaded recordings of A Mad World, My Masters (2008), Dutch Courtesan (2009), Changeling (2010), Bartholomew Fair (2011) and A King and No King (2012). The list is organised alphabetically by name of play; for each play, films are listed in chronological order.

Abbreviations FT – filmed theatre; FF – feature film; MD – modern dress; P – period costume; FA – free adaptation (no early modern dialogue); BW – black and white

227

Title

Date

Antonio and Mellida 2008 Boys’ Companies Present Marston: The History of Antonio & Mellida

Antonio’s Revenge Antonio’s Revenge

2011

Country

Distributor

Director

Cast

Access

Notes

UK

–

Matthew Edwards

Laurence Davidson, Dominic Sivyer, James Bentley, Joe Kidson, Jack Batchelor

Edward’s Boys DVD www.edwardsboys.org

P FT. Performed by Dulwich College boys; live recording by Gavin Birkett of Acts 1 and 2 at Globe Education Centre. Declamatory performance style; very young Mellida (Kidson), older, taller, Antonio (Sivyer). Paired with Edward’s Boys performance of Dutch Courtesan. Carol Rutter chairs concluding discussion.

UK

–

Perry Mills

Dominik Kurzeja, George Matts, Jeremy Franklin, Oscar Lawrence, George Hodson, Joshua Danks-Smith, Ted Clarke, Harry Bowen, Alex Lucas

Edward’s Boys DVD www.edwardsboys.org

FT. Live recording by Gavin Birkett, performed by Edward’s Boys; very dark lighting conditions because of candlelit blackfloored traverse stage. Cross-dressing in age and gender. Combines original practices and

Title

Date

Country

Distributor

Director

Cast

Access

Notes modern staging conventions.

Arden of Faversham Capricci 1969 (Caprices)

The Changeling Blood and Thunder: The Changeling

1965

It.

UK

–

Carmelo Bene

Carmelo Bene, Tonino Caputo, Ornella Ferrari, Giovanni Davoli, Franco Gulà

YouTube http:// tinyurl.com/c2e33rk

Library of Congress, Granada/ITV Derek Bennett Kika Markham, Global Derek Godfrey, Nerys Washington DC and BFI Mediatheque Entertainment Hughes, Patrick Troughton

MD FF. Streamlines Arden to AliceArden-MosbieFranklin-killers. Arden plot, with young Alice (Ferrari) and octogenarian Arden (Davoli) and Mosbie (Gulà) is mixed with plot line from Prévost’s Manon Lescaut and Barthes’s Mythologies; selfreflexive avant-garde film with operatic soundtrack. P BW. TV film in studio set; programmed alongside Women Beware Women. Three parts. Cuts hospital subplot. In 3.3, shading of DF’s face contrasts with BJ’s whiteness, alluding to Welles’s Othello; also Wellesstyle shots of scenes through barred windows.

Title

Date

Country

Distributor

Director

Cast

Access

Notes

The Changeling

1973

UK

BBC

Anthony Page

Helen Mirren, Stanley Baker, Brian Cox, Alan Webb, Frances Tomelty, Susan Penhaligon

BBC Helen Mirren Box Set DVD

The Changeling

1993

UK

BBC2

Simon Curtis

Elizabeth McGovern, Bob Hoskins, Hugh Grant, Maynard Eziashi, Adie Allen, Leslie Phillips

BFI

P TV film. Retains some of the hospital plot that frames the play with mad laughter. Adds baroque dream sequence. Voiceovers give access to the inner lives of Beatrice-Joanna (Mirren) and De Flores (Baker). P TV film. Play adapted by Michael Hastings, cuts hospital plot. Caroline fashions; voice-overs give access to De Flores’s (Hoskins) and Beatrice-Joanna’s (McGovern) thoughts; De Flores has only direct addresses to the camera. Radical transformation of Beatrice-Joanna from dignified noblewoman to made-up courtesan.

Title

Date

Country

Distributor

Director

Cast

Access

Notes

Middleton’s Changeling

1998

UK

United Independent Pictures

Marcus Thompson

Amanda Ray-King, Ian Dury, Colm ÓMaonlaí, Billy Connolly, Guy Williams, Richard Mayes, Vivian Stanshall, John Cooper-Clarke

Cinema Club DVD

The Changeling

2007

USA

–

Jay Stern

Wendy Herlich, Clyde Baldo, Chris Brady, Bruce Meakem, Mary Micari

www. changelingmovie.com/

Compulsion

2009

UK

ITV1

FF. Set in Alicante. Anachronistic costumes designed by Elizabeth Emanuel; early modern text with modern interjections. Includes truncated hospital subplot. Focus on sexual violence; prominent casting of countercultural figures. FF. Vaguely set in nineteenth-century North American country mansion. Cuts hospital plot; adds scenes involving young girl as a reflection of Beatrice-Joanna’s innocent self. Beatrice-Joanna passionately embraces her affair with De Flores. MD FA. TV drama transposing plot to British Asian family. British Asian Anjika, in love with white Alex, enlists her

Sarah Harding Parminder Nagra, Ray Winstone, Sargon Yelda, Ben Aldridge, Vincent Ebrahim

Channel 4 DVD

Title

Date

Country

Distributor

Director

Cast

Access

Notes father’s chauffeur Flowers to rid her of arranged marriage fiancé Hardik. Results in framing and then murder of Hardik and Anjika killing Flowers before marrying Alex.

A Chaste Maid in Cheapside A Chaste Maid in 2010 Cheapside

Doctor Faustus Faust – Eine deutsche Volkssage Released in English as Faust – A German Folk Tale

1926

UK

–

Ger.

UFA

Perry Mills

Jack Fielding, Jonny Clowes, George Matts, Oliver Hayes, Dan Singleton, Jeremy Franklin, Harry Davies, James Wilkinson, Jamie Huyton

Edward’s Boys DVD www.edwardsboys.org

MD FT. Live recording by Gavin Birkett. Performed in thrust stage formation by Edward’s Boys, with music. Strong crossdressed performances by experienced boy players. Very funny gossip scene. Followed by discussion with boys.

F. W. Murnau Gösta Eckman, Emil Transit Film Eurekavideo P FF BW. Silent film with titles by DVD (Masters of Cinema Jannings, Camilla Gerhart series) Horn, Frida Richard, Hauptmann. Script William Dieterle, Eric by Hans Kyser Barclay combines Goethe’s

Title

Date

Country

Distributor

Director

Cast

Access

The Tragical History of Doctor Faustus

1958

UK

BBC Schools

Ronald Eyre

William Squire, James Maxwell, Richard Bebb, Alex Scott, Felicity Young

BFI

Doctor Faustus

1967

UK

Columbia

Richard Burton and Nevill Coghill

Richard Burton, Elizabeth Taylor, Andreas Teuber

Sony Pictures DVD

Notes Faust with German folklore and Marlowe. Model of German Impressionist cinema during Weimar period, pitched against American studio productions; stylised set and superb special effects to create Gothic horror atmosphere. BW P TV film, text edited to 31 minutes by Ronald Eyre. Man in suit and tie (Bebb) introduces the film against backdrop of early modern woodcut, his lines become those of the Chorus. Striking special effects, including morphing of crucifix into Lucifer, appearance of Helen in a mirror, panoramic view of Rome. P FF. Based on Oxford University Dramatic Society

Title

Date

Country

Distributor

Director

Cast

Access

Lekce Faust (A Faust lesson); English release as Faust

1994

CZ

Athanor/ Heart of Europe/ Lumen Films/ BBC Bristol

Jan Švankmajer

Petr Cepek, Jan Kraus, Vladimir Kudla

ICA Projects Video

Doctor Faustus

2009

UK

Stage on Screen

Elizabeth Freestone (stage), Chris Cowie (Outside Broadcast)

Gareth Kennerley, Tim Treolar, Joanna Christie, Jonathan Battersby, Samuel Collings

Stage on Screen DVD

Notes production 1966. Mixture of amateur and professional cast; partly filmed in Italy. Includes extracts from Tamburlaine in 7 Deadly Sins pageant and inflated presence of Taylor’s Helen. MD FF mixing traditional Czech puppetry, animation and live actors. Set in post-communist Prague. Combines Faust legends and Marlowe, Gounod, Grabbe and Goethe texts. FT. Very lightly cut text. Live recording of Greenwich Theatre production which played in repertory with The School for Scandal. Set in late nineteenth century with anachronistic touches.

Title

Date

Country

Distributor

Director

Cast

Access

Notes

2011 (released 2012)

UK

Opus Arte / Globe Theatre on Screen

Matthew Dunster

Paul Hinton, Arthur Darvill, Felix Scott, Nigel Cooke, Sarita Piotrowski

Opus Arte DVD

FT P. Based on 1604 text. Live recording of production at Shakespeare’s Globe; combines modern dance elements, spectacular special stage effects (including puppetry and magic) and an extended thrust stage with what the Globe dubs ‘Renaissance costumes and staging’.

The Duchess of Malfi Sweet Smell of 1957 Success

USA

United Artists

Alexander Mackendrick

Burt Lancaster, Tony Curtis, Susan Harrison, Martin Milner

MGM DVD

1964

UK

Granada

Claude Whatham

Richard Johnson, Patrick Wymark,

BFI

MD FA BW FF. Malfi unacknowledged but informs film noir plot. Based on Ernest Lehman’s novella. Powerful gossip columnist in NY (Lancaster) prevents his sister (Hayward) from seeing a jazz musician; press agent takes Bosolatype role (Curtis). FA TV film; screenplay by

Doctor Faustus

A Question of Happiness # 1: ‘A

Title

Date

Country

Distributor

Director

Question about Hell.’

Cast

Access

Clifton Jones, Caroline Mortimer, Mona Chin, Mike Pratt

The Duchess of Malfi

1972

UK

BBC

James MacTaggart

Eileen Atkins, Michael Bryant, Charles Kay, Gary Bond, Sheila Ballantine

BFI

Privileged

1982

UK

Oxford Film Foundation, Oxford Film Company

Michael Hoffmann

Robert Woolley, Diana Katis, Hughie [sic] Grant, Victoria Studd, Simon Shackleton, Imogen Stubbs

BFI

Notes Kingsley Amis. Set in West Indies, 1960s. White Angela (Mortimer) wants to marry her black chauffeur (Jones); her racist landowner brothers (Johnson, Wymark) have the chauffeur killed. Bar owner Lopez (Pratt) kills her and then avenges her death. P TV film recorded in Chastleton House. Meticulous Jacobean period detail. Dungeon scene includes scold’s bridle on wall. MD FF, FA with play-within-the-film of Malfi. Frame plot of Oxford student drama production of Malfi, with Bosola performer (Woolley) obsessed with the

Title

Date

Country

Distributor

Director

Cast

Access

Hotel

2001

UK, It.

Moonstone Entertainment

Mike Figgis

In Malfi: Saffron Burrows, Mark Strong, Heathcote Williams, Max Beesley; also: Rhys Ifans, Valentina Cervi, David Schwimmer, Julian Sands

MGM DVD

Quietus

2002

UK

–

Peter Huby

Claire Beresford, David Pearce, John Midgely, Ernst Fischer

[director’s DVD]

Notes role of Ferdinand and with the Duchess performer (Katis). Includes several scenes of Malfi rehearsals and performance. MD FA FF. Frame plot of crew filming ‘McMalfi’ Dogme 95-style adaptation in Venetian Hotel run by cannibalistic staff. Refraction of Duchess in a number of female characters. Adaptation of Malfi by Heathcote Williams, who also plays Bosola. P FF. Set in Yorkshire. Includes play-within-the-film of Malfi performed by travelling players. Refractions of Malfi in frame narrative of widow persecuted by brother, ends in her suicide and his murder by other brother.

Title

Date

Country

Distributor

Director

Cast

Access

Notes

Revenge for the Duchess of Malfi

2010

Can.

–

Kyle McDonald and Philip Borg

Irene Huljak, Kyle McDonald, Jason Gray, Shawn Ahmed

Dailymotion

The Duchess of Malfi

2010

UK

Stage on Screen

Elizabeth Freestone (stage), Chris Cowie (Outside Broadcast)

Aislín McGuckin, Tim Treolar, Mark Hadfield, Tim Steed, Edmund Kingsley

Stage on Screen DVD

MD short, based on 2009 Vile Passéist Theatre production. Mafia-style concept, focus on DuchessFerdinand-Bosola, with flashbacks to Antonio. Episodic structure with five scenes. FT. Sets play in 1930s Italy. Live recording of Greenwich Theatre production which played in repertory with Volpone. DVD also forms the basis of Open University ‘A230 English Literature Duchess of Malfi’ DVD with additional rehearsal material.

UK

–

Perry Mills

Oliver Hayes, Owen Hibberd, Matt Cameron, Harry

Edward’s Boys DVD www.edwardsboys.org

The Dutch Courtesan 2008 Boys’ Companies Present Marston: The Dutch Courtesan

P FT. Performed by Edward’s Boys; live recording of play up to 3.1 at Globe

Title

Date

Country

Distributor

Director

Cast

Access

Davies, Jonathan Clowes

Notes Education Centre. Set in eclectic jazz era, convincing cross-dressed performances, superbly seductive Franceschina (Davies) and meek Beatrice (Clowes). Paired on DVD with Dulwich College boys’ performance of Antonio and Mellida; discussion chair: Carol Rutter.

Edward II Deadly Affair

1966

UK

Columbia

Sidney Lumet

Simone Signoret, Maximilian Schell, James Mason. For EII: David Warner, Timothy West, Michael Bryant

Sony Pictures DVD

Edward II

1970

UK

BBC

Toby Robertson

Ian McKellen, James Laurenson, Diane Fletcher, Paul Hardwick, Timothy West

BBC Video DVD

Cold war thriller based on John Le Carré novel; climax takes place during performance of Edward II by RSC cast; extracts from several scenes. P FT film of 1969 Prospect Theatre production; was performed in repertory with McKellen in Richard II. Features first kiss between two men on British TV.

Title

Date

Country

Distributor

Director

Cast

Access

Notes

Edward II

1991

UK

Universal

Derek Jarman

Steven Waddington, Andrew Tiernan, Tilda Swinton, Nigel Terry, Kevin Collins

Second Sight DVD

MD FF. Costume design: Sandy Powell. Episodic structure, anachronisms, focus on sexual politics. Multiple endings, with assassination recast as a dream.

Endymion Endymion

2009

UK

–

Perry Mills

James Wilkinson, George Protheroe, Will Lindsay, Elliot Tawney, Tom Ormsby

Edward’s Boys DVD www.edwardsboys.org

FT MD live recording of excerpts from Acts 1, 2, 3 and 5, performed by Edward’s Boys. Presentation: Leah Scragg. On DVD with scenes from Sappho and Phao performed by Read Not Dead.

The Jew of Malta The Jew of Malta

2012

USA

Grandfather Films

Douglas Morse

Grandfather Films http:// FF indefinite period Seth Duerr, Derek with eclectic Smith, Ben Steinfeld, shop.grandfatherfilms.com costumes. Location Kate Heaney, shoot on Governors Elizabeth Ruelas Island, NY; Machiavel stands on Blackfriars

Title

Date

Country

Distributor

Director

Cast

Access

Notes (Staunton) stage. Inspired by Duerr’s performance of Barabas (2009).

A Mad World, My Masters A Mad World, My 2009 Masters

A Mad World, My Masters!

Mother Bombie Mother Bombie

UK

–

Perry Mills

Oliver Hayes, Jack Fielding, Jamie Huyton, Tom Sharp, Alex Mills

Edward’s Boys DVD www.edwardsboys.org

2012

UK

–

Mike Cordner

Ryan Lane, Chris White, Rebecca Darmody, Ellie McAlpine, Will Edwards, Luke de Belder

www. dutchcourtesan.co.uk

2010

UK

–

Perry Mills

Jamie Hall, Alastair Campbell, Dan Wilkinson, Jerome Marcel, Finlay Hatch, George Hodson, James Williams, Glenn Johnson

Edward’s Boys DVD www.edwardsboys.org

MD FT live recording of performance on a ‘black box’ stage. Includes musical interludes performed by the boys. MD FT live recording of performance at the University of York by Theatre, Film and Television students. Professional standard performances. P FT live performance filmed at Globe Education. Introduction: Patrick Spottiswoode; presentation: Leah Scragg. Extracts from Acts 1.3, 2.3, 4.2 performed and sung

Title

Date

Country

Distributor

Director

Cast

Access

Notes by Edward’s Boys, in costume with prosthetic beards and wigs; followed by discussion with boys.

Oberon Oberon: The Faery Prince

1993

The Revenger’s Tragedy 1976 Noroît (une vengeance) (Northwesterly wind – a revenge)

USA

–

Fr.

Sunchild Productions

Barrie Rutter Ken Pierce, Catherine Newman, Mark (stage), Ken Duer, Paula Pierce (dance), Bartkowicz, Janet David Youngdahl Douglass (music)

Jacques Rivette

Bernadette Lafont, Geraldine Chaplin, Babette Lamy, Kika Markham

University of Toronto library video [director’s DVD]

P FT. Live recording using music by Ferrabosco and Johnson, early modern dance steps and approximating Inigo Jones costume designs. Introduction: Ross W. Duffin; includes discussions with masque scholars. Afterword: Tom Bishop.

Sunchild Productions DVD

MD FF FA with extracts from Revenger’s part of the frame narrative of Morag’s revenge for her brother’s murder and the play-withinthe-film of Vindice’s

Title

Revengers Tragedy

Sappho and Phao Role and Rule: History and Power on Stage: Sappho and Phao

Date

Country

Distributor

Director

Cast

Access

2002

UK

Pathé Film

Alex Cox

Christopher Eccleston, Eddie Izzard, Derek Jacobi, Diana Quick, Carla Henry

Tartan DVD

2009

UK

–

James Wallace

Tom Frankland, Phillipa Peak, Martin Hodgson, Zoë Waites, Frances Marshall, Emma Pallant

Edward’s Boys DVD www.edwardsboys.org

Notes murder of the Duke, performed in English. MD FF. Screenplay by Frank Cottrell Boyce streamlines disguise plot, omits Piero disguise and increases women’s roles. Set in postapocalyptic Liverpool in 2011; soundtrack by Chumbawamba; anachronisms and multiple allusions to Branagh’s Hamlet. FT. Imaginatively staged reading (including skateboarding Phao (Frankland)) of excerpts from each act performed by Globe Education’s Read Not Dead actors. Presentation: Leah Scragg. On DVD with scenes from Endymion performed by Edward’s Boys.

Title

Date

’Tis Pity She’s a Whore 1966 Syskonbädd 1782 (Brothersisterbed 1782); English release as My Sister My Love

Country Swed.

Distributor

Director

Cast

1971

It.

Clesi Cinematografica

Giuseppe Patroni Griffi

’Tis Pity She’s a Whore

1980

UK

BBC2

Roland Joffé

Sandrew Metronome DVD

Notes

P FF FA. Transposition to Sweden in 1782; plot of brother-sister incest; climax in shooting of sister by brother’s jealous girlfriend, sister’s baby is delivered by a peasant woman who also has a child by incest. New Star DVD P FF FA. Paraphrase Charlotte Rampling, of play; focus on Oliver Tobias, Fabio quartet of SoranzoTesti, Antonio Falsi, AnnabellaRik Battaglia GiovanniBonaventura. Anachronistic symbolist design; cut of Hippolyta plot and banditti. Annabella’s murder is consensual. Bloody climax with massacre at banquet; Giovanni is beheaded. Cherie Lunghi, Queen Mary, University of P TV adaptation set Kenneth Cranham, London Video in Chastleton House

FilmhusVilgot Sjöman Bibi Andersson, Per Ateljeerna AB Oscarsson, Jarl Kulle, Kjerstin Dellert, Sonya Hedenbratt, Gunnar Björnstrand

Addio, fratello crudele (Goodbye, cruel brother); English release as ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore

Access

Title

Date

Country

Distributor

Director

Cast

Access

in the nineteenth century. Atmosphere of secrecy and surveillance. Retains Hippolyta plot, adapts BergettoPhilotis plot, omits Richardetto and bandits. Includes reading of Donne’s ‘The Good Morrow’. Annabella’s murder is consensual; Florio and Soranzo survive.

Anthony Bate, Tim Pigott-Smith, Alison Fiske

Volpone Volpone, ou l’amour de l’or (Volpone, or the love of gold)

Volpone

1941

Fr.

Vidéo Collection France

1959

UK

BBC

Maurice Tourneur

Harry Baur, Louis Jouvet, Charles Dullin, Marion Dorian, Fernand Ledoux

Donald Wolfit Donald Wolfit, John Wynyard, Esmond Knight, Carl Bernard, Erik Chilly, Jane Griffiths

Notes

Les Trésors du Cinéma VHS

BFI

FF P BW. Adaptation of Stefan Zweig’s Volpone by Jules Romain. Includes opening sequence which brings Mosca (Jouvet) and Volpone (Baur) together. P TV adaptation based on Wolfit’s stage performances of Volpone between 1939 and 1953;

Title

Date

Country

The Honey Pot

1967

USA

Volpone

1978

Fr.

Il Volpone (The fox)

1988

It.

Distributor

Director

Cast

Access

Notes

features his trademark comic stage business and focusses whole production on Wolfit. Long set piece of Volpone as mountebank; Lady Would-Be is cut. FA FF based on United Artists Joseph Rex Harrison, Susan Hollywood Classics/20C Fox DVD Frederick Knott’s L. Mankiewicz Hayward, Maggie play Mr. Fox of Smith, Cliff Venice (1959), which Robertson, Capucine adapts Thomas Edie Adams Stirling’s Jonsonbased novel The Evil of the Day (1955). Volpone appears as a play-within-the-film and structures the film’s plot. AB Video DVD FT P. Adaptation of AB Video and Jean Meyer Jean Le Poulain, Jean Stefan Zweig’s TFI Video Meyer, Francis Volpone by Jules Huster, Geneviève Romain. Comédie Fontanel Française style; removes Would-Be plot. Cecchi Gori Mario Ponzi Paolo Villaggio, Cecchi Gori Group DVD MD FA FF. Enrico Montesano, Removes Would-Be Enrico Maria Salerno, strand and

Title

Date

Country

Distributor

Director

Cast

Access

Renzo Montagnani, Athina Cenci, Alessandro Haber

Volpone, ou le renard (Volpone, or the fox)

2001

Fr.

Copat

Francis Perrin

Bernard Haller, Francis Perrin, Michel Bonnet, Eva Di Battista, Auguste Bruneau, Thibaut Lorin

Copat DVD

Volpone

2003

Fr.

TF1

Frédéric Auburtin

Gérard Depardieu, Daniel Prévost, Gérard Jugnot, Inès Sastre, Jean-François Stévenin

Warner Brothers DVD

Notes transposes plot to Italian town, where Mosca (Montesano) is hired by Volpone (Villaggio) and learns to outdo his master, who profits from the greed of his potential heirs and their wives. P FT. Jean Collette and Toni Cecchinato adapting Jonson; includes Lady Would-Be played by crossdressed Lorin. Mixes ‘Elizabethan’ conventions with Comédie Française style. Ends with Volpone feigning a fit to escape justice and asking to be Mosca’s servant. P FA FF. EricEmmanuel Schmitt adapting Jonson; omits Would-Be plot; extends beginning to include meeting of Volpone (Depardieu) and

Title

Date

Country

Distributor

Director

Cast

Access

Volpone

2010

UK

Stage on Screen

Elizabeth Freestone (stage), Chris Cowey (Outside Broadcast)

Richard Bremmer, Mark Hadfield, Tim Treolar, Maxwell Hutcheon, Tim Steed, Aislín McGuckin

Stage on Screen DVD

Westward Ho! Westward Ho!

2012

UK

–

Perry Mills

Dominick Kurjeza, Calum Mitchell, Alex Lucas, George Matts, Harry Lesser, Jack Fenwick, George Hodson, Henry Hodson, Finlay Hatch, Jeremy Franklin, James Williams

Edward’s Boys DVD www.edwardsboys.org

Notes Mosca (Prévost); ends with flight of Volpone, Mosca and Celia. FT. Very lightly cut text (159 minutes), sets play in 1930s Italy. Live recording of Greenwich Theatre production which played in repertory with The Duchess of Malfi. Includes entire subplot and Nano/ Androgyno/ Castrone. MD FT live recording, performed and sung with great energy and fun by Edward’s Boys, using minimal set in front of backdrop of Visscher engraving of London. Strong cross-dressed performances by a group of experienced boy actors.

Title

Date

Women Beware Women 1965 Blood and Thunder: Women Beware Women

Women Beware Women by Thomas Middleton: An Insight into SeventeenthCentury Society

1981

Country

Distributor

Director

Cast

Access

Notes

UK

Granada

Gordon Flemyng

Gene Anderson, Diana Rigg, Clifford Evans, Michael Barrington, Karin Fernald, Laurence Payne

BFI (very worn tape)

UK

BBC/Open University

Nick Levinson

Margery Withers, Stuart Organ, Giselle Wolf, Ian Frost, Rosemary McHale, Bernard Lloyd, Peter Powell

Open University Video; NFT

BW P. Three-part TV film shot in studio; programmed alongside The Changeling. Strong performance of Bianca’s (Rigg) mixture of hysteria and composure following rape; maturation into resolute dignity at end. Masque has risible moments. P. Video for Open University course ‘A203 SeventeenthCentury England’; discussion of the play and its period by Arnold Kettle and Christopher Hill. Minimal set and props, but lavish period costume and attempt to film the masque in full.

Monica Dolan, Hattie, Morahan, Jamie Glober,

www.chamberofdemon strations.com

Miscellaneous collections of scenes/films with ‘Jacobean’ inspiration Chamber of 2009 UK Ignition Films Martin White, Demonstrations: / University of with Terry Reconstructing the Bristol Flaxton

P FT. Extracts filmed in reconstructed Jacobean indoor

Title

Date

Country

Distributor

Director

Jacobean Indoor Playhouse

Elizabethan Boy Players: The Thisby Project: Playing the Woman’s Part on Shakespeare’s Stage

Cast

Access

Michael Matus, Michael Brown

2005

UK

–

Perry Mills

Oliver Hayes, Jack Fielding, Ben Darlington, James ‘Chippy’ Butt, Tom Adams, Alex Simon, Alex Seys

Edward’s Boys DVD www.edwardsboys.org

Notes theatre (Wickham Theatre, University of Bristol) using candle lighting. Four camera angles onto scenes from Malfi, ’Tis Pity, The Guardian, The Changeling, Love’s Sacrifice. With scholarly discussion of early modern indoor playhouses and playing conditions. MD with rehearsal skirts. FT demonstration workshop by Edward’s Boys in their school. Introduction: Carol Rutter. Scenes from several Shakespeare plays and Epicoene (1.1, 4.4), giving allboy performances of singing ingle and collegiates.

Title

Date

Country

Distributor

Director

Cast

Access

Notes

The House of Yes

1997

USA

Miramax

Mark Waters

Parker Posey, Josh Hamilton, Tori Spelling, Freddie Prinze Jr, Genevieve Bujold

Buena Vista DVD

The Cook, the Thief, His Wife and Her Lover

1989

UK

–

Peter Greenaway

Helen Mirren, Michael Gambon, Richard Bohringer, Alan Howard, Tim Roth, Ian Dury

Universal DVD

MD FF FA. Based on play by Wendy MacLeod inspired by ’Tis Pity and Jacobean city comedy. Comedy in which the brother introduces his fiancée to the sister with whom he has an incestuous relationship and who thinks she is Jackie Kennedy. FF MD. Based on screenplay by Greenaway inspired by Ford’s ’Tis Pity and generic ‘Jacobean’ transgressiveness. Revenge plot involves adultery and cannibalism.

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Index

9/11, 104, 138–9, 189, 196, 198 abjection, 69, 70, 72, 83, 85, 101–3 Afzal, Nazir, 198 Ahmed, Shawn, 167 AHRC (Arts and Humanities Research Council), 174, 180 AIDS, 21, 36, 37, 38, 41, 60, 62, 163 anachronic viewing, 7, 161–5 anon. 12 Arden of Faversham, 12, 15–17 antithesis, 50, 52–3 Archibald, Dawn, 32 archive, 9–10, 11, 142, 143–4, 145, 152, 155, 159, 166, 172, 179, 182, 185–6 Armesto, Sebastian, 222 Artaud, Antonin, 12, 13, 16, 18, 19, 22, 52, 133, 223 Arthur, Paul, 89 Ashcroft, Peggy, 159 Assmann, Aleida, 9, 62, 143–4, 152, 185, 223 Atkins, Eileen, 156, 159 Auslander, Philip, 145, 146, 153, 181 Baker, Kele, 148 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 10, 72 Barker, Roberta, 4, 54, 57, 58, 148, 213 Barnes, Tom, 180 Barratt, Mark, 161 Barrett, Felix, 154, 155 The Duchess of Malfi, 153–6 Barritt, Ian, 110 Barthes, Roland, 16, 17, 74 Bartolovich, Crystal, 73 Barton, John, 163 Bataille, Georges, 72 BBC (British Broadcasting Corporation), 142, 147, 156–65, 181, 183, 200 BBC/Time-Life Shakespeare, 140, 141, 156, 179 Doctor Faustus. See Eyre, Ronald: Doctor Faustus Duchess of Malfi. See MacTaggart James: The Duchess of Malfi

Edward II. See Robertson, Toby and Richard Marquand: Edward II Beesley, Max, 94 Belsey, Catherine, 85, 86 Bene, Carmelo Capricci, 15–17, 74 Bennett, Susan, 4, 5, 43, 103 Beristain, Gabriel, 27, 32 Berkoff, Stephen, 133 Bernard, Chris Letter to Brezhnev, 113 Birkett, Jack, 23, 25 Blair, Tony, 106, 122–3, 126, 138, 200 Bohringer, Richard, 73 Bollywood, 189, 197, 198–9, 200, 201 Bolter, David Jay, 144, 148, 157 Booth, Antony, 126 Bordwell, David, 97 Borg, Philip and Kyle McDonald Revenge for the Duchess of Malfi, 166–9 Bourdieu, Pierre, 154 Boyd, Don Derek Jarman, The Tempest, 25, 115 My Kingdom, 105, 115, 119, 120, 129, 223 Bradbrook, Muriel, 50 Brah, Avtar, 197 Branagh, Kenneth, 103, 134, 136, 196, 218, 220 Hamlet, 1, 5, 8, 106, 116, 133–6 Henry V, 1, 5, 47, 218, 219, 221 Much Ado About Nothing, 5 Bray, Dan, 166 Brecht, Bertolt, 12–13, 16, 21, 54, 105, 133, 148 British Asian, 187, 197, 204, 215 and association with terrorism, 198, 203, 204, 206, 211 and immigration, 197, 203, 204, 206 British Asian film, 189, 197–202, 206 and arranged marriage scenario, 197–200, 202, 203, 205 and generation clash, 197, 198, 203 and Shakespeare, 196, 197, 200–2, 213, 215, 224

267

268

Index

British Film Council, 118, 139, 140, 142 British film industry, 6, 21, 23–5, 29–30, 41, 66–7, 83–4, 91–3, 96, 102, 113, 115, 117–18, 138, 139–40, 142, 143 British national identity, 5, 23, 198, 199, 200, 201, 203, 204, 222 Buñuel, Luis, 72, 113, 117 Burbage, Richard, 131 Burnett, Mark Thornton, 191 Burns, Bonnie, 93 Burrows, Saffron, 78–9, 94 Bush, George W., 138 Butler, Ken, 30, 49, 51 Callow, Simon, 49 camp, 60, 110, 111, 164, 165 cannibalism, 66, 68, 79–7, 83, 93, 94, 97, 101, 102 canon, 9–10, 11, 62, 143–4, 147, 152, 159, 172, 185–6, 223 Carlson, Marvin, 6, 131 Cartelli, Thomas, 5, 11, 49, 53 Ceroli, Mario, 14 Cervi, Valentina, 79, 97 Chadha, Gurinder, 206 Bend it Like Beckham, 188, 196, 199–200, 201, 205, 206 Channel 4, 29, 142, 187, 200 Chaucer, William The Seaman’s Tale, 200 Cheek by Jowl, 184 ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore, 147–53, 179, 183 Chopra, Adytia Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge, 199 Chumbawamba, 123–4 Clarke, Margi, 113 class. See social class cognitive performance. See interactivity Collins, Keith, 44, 47, 52, 63, 216 contemporary Jacobean, 4–6, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 19, 20, 21, 43, 66, 67, 73, 83–4, 85, 89, 103, 104, 106, 136, 187, 189, 192, 196, 211, 215, 216, 218 Cordner, Michael, 12 Cottrell Boyce, Frank, 118, 119, 132, 136, 137 Cowey, Chris, 182 Cox, Alex, 11, 25, 104–42, 189, 217, 220 Death and the Compass, 112, 113, 116 ‘Doctor Faustus’, 140 El Patrullero, 112 Exterminating Angel Production, 113, 118, 122 Jacobeans.net, 140–2 on Derek Jarman, 20, 63, 105, 108 Repo Man, 105 Revengers Tragedy, 3, 104–5, 114, 116–39, 196, 218, 220, 223

‘Scousers’, 105 Sid and Nancy, 105 ‘The Spanish Tragedy’, 140, 141–2 ‘The White Devil’, 140 Three Businessmen, 113–14 ‘Too Real’ (The Levellers), 113 Walker, 105, 128 Crowl, Samuel, 5 Curnew, Beatrice, 183 Curry, Tim, 157 Curtis, Tony, 211 da Vinci, Leonardo, 22, 31, 32 Dahl, Sophie, 126 Davies, Steven Paul, 105, 106 Davies, Tod, 113, 140 ‘Doctor Faustus’, 140 ‘The Spanish Tragedy’, 140, 141–2 Davy, Gary, 111, 141 de Groot, Jerome, 112 Degli-Esposti, Cristina, 10 Dekker, Thomas, 217 Demme, Jonathan The Silence of the Lambs, 68, 75, 76 Dench, Judi, 88, 159, 177 Diana, Princess of Wales, 126 Dibb, Saul The Duchess, 160 digital humanities, 147, 172–9 digital media, 3, 10, 11, 77, 85–7, 102, 127, 134, 135, 141, 142, 143–86, 217–24. See also internet distribution, 142, 143, 147, 166, 167, 169–72, 185 Dogme 66, 80 Dollimore, Jonathan, 30, 110 Donnellan, Declan ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore, 147–53, 179 Douglas, Mary, 111 Doyle, Patrick, 221 Duffin, Ross W., 174 DVD. See digital media Dyer, Danny, 201 Eccleston, Christopher, 111, 112, 116, 130, 132, 136 Eddison, Robert, 162 Edward’s Boys, 12 Eisenstein, Sergei, 22 Emmerich, Roland, 220 2012, 223 Anonymous, 217–24 Godzilla, 223 Independence Day, 223 The Day After Tomorrow, 223 ENO with Punchdrunk The Duchess of Malfi, 145, 153–6 ER (television series), 187, 196, 211

Index ethics, 189, 190, 194–5, 196, 197, 206, 210–11 European avant-garde, 12–19, 20, 22 expanded film, 7, 60–5, 68, 86–7 expanded work, 7, 152, 179 Eyre, Richard Othello (NT), 212–13 Eyre, Ronald Doctor Faustus, 12, 183 Fearon, Ray, 141 feminism, 31, 49, 56–60, 63, 101 Figgis, Mike, 11, 25, 76–69, 189, 217 Hotel, 3, 76–69, 78, 104, 106, 136, 141, 182, 192, 222, 223 Leaving Las Vegas, 77 Miss Julie, 31, 78, 86 Stormy Monday, 77 The People Show, 77, 78 Timecode, 77–8 Fincher, David Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, 148 Fisher-Turner, Simon, 37, 44 Fletcher, Diane, 164 Ford, John, 140 Love’s Sacrifice, 176 ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore, 13–15, 72, 73, 147–53, 176 Foucault, Michel, 30, 49 Freestone, Elizabeth Doctor Faustus, 181–2, 183 The Duchess of Malfi, 181–2 Volpone, 181–2 French New Wave, 17–19 Friedman, Michael D., 163 Galt, Rosalind, 45, 105 Gambon, Michael, 73 Gaultier, Jean-Paul, 72 gender construction of, 21, 31–5, 54–60, 111 Genet, Jean, 22, 45, 72 Gentileschi, Artemisia, 97–8 Gibson, Mel, 134 Goldberg, Jonathan, 46, 84 Graber, Jody, 53 Grant Ferguson, Ailsa, 11 Gray, Jason, 168 Greenaway, Peter, 2–3, 11, 71–5, 82, 84 Prospero’s Books, 72 The Cook, the Thief, His Wife and Her Lover, 2, 5, 66, 68, 71, 77, 78, 84, 85 Greenhalgh, Susanne, 157, 200, 213 grotesque, 14, 23, 26, 31, 45, 72 Grusin, Richard, 144, 148, 157 Gunpowder plot, 139 Gurr, Andrew, 178

269

Haber, Judith, 96, 207 Harding, Sarah, 195, 202, 211, 216 Compulsion, 3, 8, 170, 187–97, 202–16, 224 Lewis, 216 Poirot, 189 Queer as Folk, 189 Harnick, Tom, 124 Harris, Ed, 108 Harris, George, 213 Harris, Richard, 115 Harris, Thomas, 75 Harrison, Susan, 211 Hassell, Alex, 221 Hayek, Salma, 88 Haynes, Sally, 187 Hebdige, Dick, 23 Heine, Heinrich, 98–9 Henry, Carla, 129, 141 Henry, Guy, 141 heritage, 2, 5, 8, 22, 25, 29, 45, 67, 69, 77, 78, 79, 83, 88, 94, 103, 118, 139, 142, 220, 222, 223 dissident heritage, 6, 8, 9, 45, 88–9, 103, 222 Herlich, Wendy, 170 heterosexuality, 15, 29, 31, 47–9, 54, 84, 94, 96, 101, 164 Higgott, Gordon, 178 Higson, Andrew, 5, 201 Hilderbrand, Lucas, 159 Hobbs, Christopher, 27, 28, 36, 37, 45, 46 Hodgdon, Barbara, 16 Hodges, Mike, 140 Hollywood, 2, 5, 32, 55, 66–7, 77, 78, 83–4, 91–3, 96, 102, 104, 105, 106, 108, 110, 112, 113, 134, 140, 171, 185, 203, 217 homosexuality, 15, 29, 30–1, 32, 37, 38, 40, 47–9, 54, 84, 94, 161–5. See also lesbianism honour killings, 198 Hopkins, Anthony, 68, 75 Horsley, Owen, 150 Howard, Alan, 73 Huby, Peter Quietus, 166, 170–1 Huljak, Irena, 167 hybridity, 189, 190, 196, 197, 199, 200, 201–2, 203, 205, 206, 211 hypallage, 189, 190–6, 197, 202, 203, 205, 206, 209, 210, 213 hypermediality, 146, 148, 149, 152 Ifans, Rhys, 88, 94, 222 Ignition Films, 175 immersive theatre, 153–4

270

Index

imperialism, 104, 106, 107, 138 anti-imperialism, 104–10, 138–9 interactivity, 77, 86, 136, 143, 145, 146, 151, 152, 153, 154, 155, 175, 179, 183, 195, 209 intermediality, 146, 148–9, 152, 183 internet, 7, 10, 11, 143, 145, 147, 153, 155, 170, 171, 183, 185, 190, 200 intertextuality, 10, 20, 60–3, 65, 68, 86, 153, 173, 189 ITV (Independent Television), 8, 187, 200, 214–15, 224 Ivory, James, 94, 96, 118 A Room with a View, 79 Izzard, Eddie, 111, 120, 134 Jackson, Peter The Lord of the Rings, 160 Jacobean, 2, 4. See contemporary Jacobean Jacobi, Derek, 133–4, 137, 141, 218–20, 223 James, Orlando, 147 Jarman, Derek, 1, 11, 13, 20–65, 72, 135, 161, 167, 169, 189, 216 ‘28’, 21, 38–40, 46, 52–3, 61–2, 64, 68 and Marlowe, 21, 41, 42–3, 45, 47 and Shakespeare, 21, 22, 38, 41, 42–3, 45, 47 autobiography, 21, 29, 62 Caravaggio, 3, 4, 20, 21, 36, 37, 40, 45, 46, 54, 56, 60, 97 Dungeness, 1, 3, 63, 215–16 Edward II, 1, 5, 14, 20, 21, 31, 35, 44–64, 68, 84, 86, 106, 111, 136, 160–1, 168, 194, 216 Shooting Script, 1, 44, 51, 58, 64, 216 home videos, 37, 38, 61, 62 Jubilee, 20, 23, 26, 36, 39, 40, 67, 105, 111, 216 legacy, 2–4, 20, 63, 67–8, 84, 104–5, 108, 110 ‘Pansy’, 21, 38, 64–5, 163 ‘Sod ’Em’, 21, 38, 40–2, 46, 51, 52–3, 61–2, 64, 68 The Angelic Conversation, 20, 37, 68 The Last of England, 21, 31, 35, 38, 39, 40, 54, 56, 59, 61, 68, 111 ‘The Smile on the Mona Lisa’, 32 The Tempest, 20, 26, 31–2, 36, 45, 67, 89, 141, 216 War Requiem, 47 Wittgenstein, 31 Jeanneret, Michel, 70, 71 Jones, Inigo, 174 Oberon, 173–4, 175 Jonson, Ben, 140, 217, 218–19, 220, 222, 223 Every Man in His Humour, 217 Oberon, 173–4, 175 Volpone, 12, 22, 173 Jordan, Neil Interview with the Vampire, 31 The Crying Game, 31

Kapur, Shekhar Elizabeth, 218 Elizabeth: The Golden Age, 218, 222 Karim-Cooper, Farah, 177, 178 Kernan, Lisa, 150 Kher, Anupam, 199 Klinger, Barbara, 161 Knightley, Keira, 199 Kozintsev, Grigori, 22 Kristeva, Julia, 10, 68, 69, 72 Kurosawa, Akira, 112, 117, 134 Ran, 109 Throne of Blood, 136 Kyd, Thomas, 140, 142 The Spanish Tragedy, 140 Lancaster, Burt, 211 Lange, Jessica, 136 Lanier, Douglas, 77 Latin American cinema, 106. See also Third Cinema Laurenson, James, 162, 164 Lecter, Hannibal, 75–6, 79, 80, 82 Lehman, Ernest, 212 Lehmann, Courtney, 12, 115, 118, 126 Leigh, Spencer, 37 Lennix, Harry Henry IV, 224 Lennox, Annie, 60–3, 65, 68, 136 lesbianism, 66, 93–6, 101 Levinson, Nick Women Beware Women, 173 Levring, Kristian The King Is Alive, 223 liveness, 7, 145–6, 147, 151, 152, 153, 179, 181–5 living, 146, 147, 152, 153, 155, 184–5 Liverpool, 104, 105, 106, 113–27, 138, 139, 140 deprivation, 115–16, 118–19, 122, 124 dockers’ strike, 123–4 football, 115, 119–20 imperialism, 105, 120–2, 125 regeneration, 105, 115, 116, 124 Roman Catholicism, 118, 119 slave trade, 120–2, 125, 137 Lockhart, Clare The Making of the Duchess of Malfi, 154–5 Loncraine, Richard Richard III, 160, 163 Luhrmann, Baz Romeo + Juliet, 103 Lutyens, Edwin, 121, 127 MacCabe, Colin, 29, 51, 57 Mackay, James, 37

Index Mackendrick, Alexander Sweet Smell of Success, 211–12 Mackie, Laura, 200 MacTaggart, James, 156, 157, 158 The Duchess of Malfi, 147, 156–60, 170, 184 Madden, John Shakespeare in Love, 88, 102, 103, 116, 177, 178 Maestro, Mia, 88, 98 Magill, Tom Mickey B, 224 mainstream, 4, 5, 7, 10, 11, 21, 36, 62, 67, 68, 77, 85, 104, 117, 125, 136, 147, 169, 186, 187, 188, 189, 192, 214, 215, 216, 222, 224 Major, John, 119 Malcolmson, Cristina, 191 Malkovich, John, 79 Mankiewicz, Joseph L. The Honey Pot, 12 Manovich, Lev, 217 Marchi, Dudley, 70, 71 Marcus, Leah, 159 Marlowe, Christopher, 38, 142, 217 Doctor Faustus, 12, 21, 140, 160, 173, 183 Edward II, 1, 2, 21, 38, 44–64, 65, 160–5 The Jew of Malta, 21, 171–2 Marquand, Richard and Toby Robertson Edward II, 147, 160–5, 181 Massinger, Philip The Guardian, 176 Mastroianni, Chiara, 88, 93 Matheson, Margaret, 118, 140 Bard Entertainments, 118 Mathews, Steve, 212 McDonald, Kyle, 172 McDonald, Kyle and Philip Borg Revenge for the Duchess of Malfi, 166–9, 172 McGann, Jerome, 152 McKay, John The Sea Captain’s Tale, 200 McKellen, Ian, 42, 64, 160–5 McMullan, Gordon, 196 Merchant, Ismail, 94, 96, 118 Merlet, Agnès Artemisia, 97–8, 99–100, 101 Messina, Cedric, 156 Meyers, Jonathan Rhys, 199 Michelangelo, 22 microcinema, 3, 11, 147, 166–72, 185, 217 Middleton, Peter, 216 Middleton, Thomas, 139, 140, 197, 220, 223 and Shakespeare, 131, 135, 195–6, 197, 202, 204, 213–14, 215 The Revenger’s Tragedy, 17–19, 73, 104–5, 110–33, 196 Women Beware Women, 173

271

Middleton, Thomas and William Rowley The Changeling, 3, 169–70, 176, 187–97, 204 Mirren, Helen, 73 misogyny, 67, 68, 79, 81, 90, 91–101, 104, 128, 137, 190 Montaigne, Michel de, 8, 68, 69–71, 77, 82, 83, 102 Montiel, Cecilia, 110, 111, 120 Morse, Douglas, 171–2 The Jew of Malta, 166, 171–2 The Merchant of Venice, 171 The Summoning of Everyman, 171 Mullan, Paul, 78 Mullaney, Stephen, 130 multiculturalism, 189, 190, 196, 200, 203, 211, 214 integrationist multiculturalism, 189, 197, 200, 211 Mulvey, Laura, 30, 33–4, 54, 59, 91, 92, 98 Murnau, F. W., 22 Faust, 12 Murphy, Gerard Edward II (RSC), 55 Muti, Ornella, 88 Nagra, Parminder, 188, 193, 196, 197, 199–200, 201–2, 211, 214 Nashe, Thomas, 217 National Theatre, 4, 179, 181, 212–13 NT Live, 179 Nelson, Robin, 148 New Cinema Fund, 118, 134, 135 New Romantics, 105 Nicol, David, 213 Nightingale, Colin, 154, 155 nostalgia, 5, 6, 23, 25, 38, 63, 67, 69, 116, 127, 128, 150, 152, 159 O’Donnell, Damien East Is East, 199 Olivier, Laurence Henry V, 22, 44 Open University Women Beware Women, 173 O’Pray, Michael, 48 Opus Arte, 179 Orgel, Stephen, 174 original practices, 144, 174–9, 220, 221 Orloff, John, 219 Osborne, Laurie, 181, 182 oxymoron, 106, 127, 131, 133, 137, 207 oxymoronic casting, 131–2, 133–4, 136, 220 PARIP (Practice as Research in Performance), 175 Parker, Alan, 139, 140 Parker, Patricia, 84

272

Index

Pasolini, Pier Paolo, 22, 72 Pasternak Slater, Ann, 190, 194–5 patriarchy, 79, 81, 92, 96, 107, 111, 128, 190, 198, 199, 202, 213 Patroni Griffi, Giuseppe Addio, fratello crudele, 14–15, 22, 160 Il Mare, 22 Peake, Tony, 161 period drama. See heritage Pettit, Tom, 51 Phelan, Peggy, 145, 146, 154, 182, 185 political activism, 20, 21, 30, 31, 35, 38, 42–3, 62, 104–10, 123–4, 125, 161–5 pornography, 66, 67, 207, 209 Porter, Cole, 60, 62 postcolonialism, 203 Potter, Sally Orlando, 31 Powell, Sandy, 21, 31, 33, 36, 37, 45, 54–5 preposterous, 7, 8, 21, 46–7, 48, 54, 57, 68, 84–8, 89, 93, 94–6, 101, 108, 138, 167, 169, 189, 191, 192, 215 Prescott, John, 123 Prévost, L’Abbé Manon Lescaut, 16, 17 Punchdrunk, 184 Punchdrunk with ENO The Duchess of Malfi, 145, 153–6 punk, 2, 20, 22–5, 37, 40, 46, 67, 78, 104–5, 110, 111, 123, 136, 196 Puttenham, George, 8, 84, 87, 101, 127, 132, 189, 190–1, 192, 206–8, 209 queer, 15, 20, 21, 30–1, 35, 36, 41, 43, 47–9, 51, 55, 60–3, 67, 68, 72, 85, 101, 165 Quick, Diana, 136 race, 104, 115, 116, 117, 118, 120–2, 125, 128–30, 189, 190, 198, 202, 204, 211, 213. See also British Asian film, hybridity, multiculturalism Randall, Dale, 207 rape, 97, 101, 119, 129, 137, 192, 194, 207, 209, 210–11, 212, 215 Rasch, Torsten, 153 Reagan, Ronald, 108 Reason, Matthew, 152 Rees, A. L., 2, 3 Rees, Phil, 180, 181, 182 Reithermann, Myles, 165 remediation, 7, 144, 146, 147, 148, 152, 155, 156–60, 182, 184 Reynolds, Burt, 87–8 Richard Brome Online, 174 Richardson, Joely, 223

Richardson, Miranda, 213 Rivette, Jacques Noroît, 17–19 Robertson, Toby, 161 Robertson, Toby and Richard Marquand Edward II, 147, 160–5, 181 Rose Theatre in Babelsberg, 221 virtual, 173 Rowe, Katherine, 5, 11 Rowley, William, 189 Rowley, William and Thomas Middleton The Changeling, 3, 169–70, 176, 187–97, 202–16 RSC (Royal Shakespeare Company), 34, 55, 88, 106, 110–33, 141, 181 Russell, Ken, 140 Rutter, Barrie Oberon, 173–4, 175 Rylance, Mark, 220–1, 223 Rylands, George, 163 The Duchess of Malfi, 159 Sade, Marquis de, 72 Sandoval, Miguel, 113, 114 Sands, Julian, 79 Sax, Geoffrey Othello, 136, 223 Schneider, Rebecca, 185 Schofield, Andrew, 111, 141 Schubert, Franz, 98–9 Schwimmer, David, 83, 88 scopophilia, 33–4, 36, 68, 81, 91–3, 96, 99–101, 102 Scott, Ridley Hannibal, 68, 75, 79 Sen, Jon Second Generation, 196, 200, 201–2, 205, 206 sexual oppression, 13, 14, 21, 36, 38–9, 40–1, 43, 47–8, 57, 67, 71, 85, 90, 91–101, 102, 103, 104, 115, 116, 120, 128–30, 137, 162, 190, 198, 201, 202, 203, 205, 216 sexual transgression, 13, 14, 15, 19, 20, 21, 22, 30, 35, 38, 43, 45, 46, 47–8, 54, 63, 72, 78, 79, 80, 84, 91–101, 102, 150, 192, 201, 205 Shakespeare, William, 22, 72, 74, 85, 108–9, 110, 137, 141, 142, 167, 171, 186, 189, 195, 197, 200, 204, 213, 215 A Midsummer Night’s Dream, 191, 195 and British national identity, 204 and heritage industry, 4–5, 9, 67, 88–9, 91, 103, 106, 114, 115, 133–6, 177, 196, 218, 220, 221, 223–4 BBC/Time-Life Shakespeare, 140, 141, 156, 179

Index brand identity, 4, 197 Cymbeline, 137 Hamlet, 34, 35, 54, 56, 59, 74, 130–5, 136–7 Henry IV, 224 in Anonymous, 217–24 in British Asian film, 196, 197, 200–2, 213, 215, 224 Julius Caesar, 108–9 King Lear, 105, 109, 115, 201–2, 223 Macbeth, 204, 213, 224 Much Ado About Nothing, 195 ‘New Wave’ Shakespeare, 11, 115, 224 Othello, 136, 150, 195, 212–13, 223 Richard II, 160 Richard III, 160, 163 Romeo and Juliet, 194, 195, 200 Shakespeare studies, 6, 8, 144, 177 Timon of Athens, 22 Titus Andronicus, 73, 76, 89, 136, 137 Twelfth Night, 200 Shakespeare’s Globe, 4, 112, 174, 175, 177, 179, 181, 221 Globe on Screen, 179 Sharma, Sanjay, 189, 198 Sharman, Jim The Rocky Horror Picture Show, 157 Shaughnessy, Robert, 200, 213 Sher, Antony, 88, 110 Silverstone, Catherine, 40, 148 Simpson, Christopher, 201 Sinfield, Alan, 30, 37 site-specific theatre, 153–4 Size 9 Productions, 212 Sjöman, Vilgot Syskonbädd 1782, 13–14, 22, 46 social class, 13–14, 45, 104, 112, 115, 122, 124, 136, 138, 141, 164, 188, 189, 192, 194, 202, 203, 204, 205, 208, 213, 218, 222 Solga, Kim, 4, 148, 149 Sonnabend, Yolanda, 26 Spaghetti Western, 109, 110, 116, 117, 128 Spall, Rafe, 217, 222 St Johnston, Joshua, 187, 190, 197, 203, 204, 208, 211, 212–13, 214 Stage on Screen, 12, 145–6, 179–84 Doctor Faustus, 173, 183 ‘Green Room’, 180 The Duchess of Malfi, 173 Volpone, 173 Stam, Robert, 10 Stanislavski, Konstantin, 16 Stern, Jay, 172 The Changeling, 166, 169–70 Still, Melly The Revenger’s Tragedy, 4

273

Stone, Sharon, 211 Street, Sarah, 6, 200 Strong, Mark, 78 Supple, Tim Twelfth Night, 200, 201 Sweetman, Paul, 111 Swinton, Tilda, 2, 14, 21, 31, 32–5, 36, 37, 38, 44, 49–50, 54–60, 68, 148, 164, 165 Tate, Nahum King Lear, 201 Taylor, Gary The Collected Works of Thomas Middleton, 3 Taylor, Greg, 47 Taymor, Julie Titus, 68, 76, 136, 142 television, 2, 8, 11, 24, 29, 135, 136, 141, 145, 150, 154, 156–62, 170, 179, 180, 183–4, 186, 187–9, 196, 197, 208–6, 223. See also BBC (British Broadcasting Corporation), Channel 4, ITV (Independent Television) Terry, Nigel, 28, 37, 44 Thatcher, Margaret, 36, 38, 44, 71, 119 Third Cinema, 107, 112–14, 116 Thompson, Ayanna, 143 Thompson, Kristin, 97 Thompson, Marcus Middleton’s Changeling, 3 Tiernan, Andrew, 45, 48, 164 Tiramani, Jenny, 177, 178 Tompkins, Joanne Doctor Faustus (virtual), 173 Tourneur, Cyril, 104, 140 The Revenger’s Tragedy. See Middleton, Thomas: The Revenger’s Tragedy Traub, Valerie, 95 Trevis, Di The Revenger’s Tragedy (RSC), 110–33 Tryon, Chuck, 87, 182 Verhoeven, Paul Basic Instinct, 211 video-sharing, 143, 167. See YouTube Vile Passéist Theatre, 166 Visconti, Luchino, 22, 28 ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore, 13, 22 Wachowski, Lana and Andy The Matrix, 151 Waddington, Steven, 47, 53, 164 Warner, Michael, 48 Warren, Marc, 111, 141

274

Index

Webster, John, 140, 142, 223 The Duchess of Malfi, 66, 69, 80, 103, 133, 147, 153–60, 166–9, 170–1, 176, 178, 211–12, 222 The White Devil, 140 Welch, Elisabeth, 26 Whalley, Boff, 124 White, Martin Chamber of Demonstrations, 173, 174–9 Wiggs, Michael, 212 Wilds, Nancy G., 127 Willcox, Toyah, 23, 25, 31–2 Williams, Clifford The Duchess of Malfi (RSC), 159 Williams, Heathcote, 25, 67, 80, 82, 88, 90, 141 Wilson, Ian, 45 Wilson, Lydia, 147, 148–9, 150–1 Winstone, Ray, 187, 189, 193, 203–4, 212, 214

Wolfit, Donald Volpone, 12 Wooding, Jeremy Bollywood Queen, 200 World Trade Center attack. See 9/11 World Wide Web. See internet Worthen, W. B., 175–6, 179 Wray, Ramona, 124, 128 Wymer, Rowland, 6, 51, 66, 97, 171 YouTube, 11, 141–2, 143–5, 147, 149–53, 155, 156–60, 169, 170, 172, 173, 177, 184, 185, 187 decontextualising effect, 144, 160–5 degradation of image, 158–9 fragmentation, 147, 155, 156–8, 175 interface, 144, 156, 160, 161, 165