Shakespeare in Performance [1 ed.] 9781443865791, 9781443847827

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Shakespeare in Performance

Shakespeare in Performance

Edited by

Eric C. Brown and Estelle Rivier

Shakespeare in Performance, Edited by Eric C. Brown and Estelle Rivier This book first published 2013 Cambridge Scholars Publishing 12 Back Chapman Street, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2XX, UK British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Copyright © 2013 by Eric C. Brown and Estelle Rivier and contributors All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner. ISBN (10): 1-4438-4782-8, ISBN (13): 978-1-4438-4782-7

TABLE OF CONTENTS

List of Illustrations ................................................................................... viii Acknowledgments ...................................................................................... ix Introduction ................................................................................................. x Part I: Historicizing Shakespearean Performance Chapter One ................................................................................................. 2 Isabella’s Silence: Staging Asceticism in Measure for Measure Daniel Salerno Chapter Two .............................................................................................. 24 From Davenant to Duffett: Staging Shakespeare’s The Tempest during the English Restoration Misty Krueger Chapter Three ............................................................................................ 48 Edward Gordon Craig and The Tempest Patrick Le Bœuf Part II: Alternative Spaces Chapter Four .............................................................................................. 70 Ephemeral Echoes and Brash Possibilities: The Liberation of Adapting Shakespeare’s Early Comedies Diana E. Henderson Chapter Five .............................................................................................. 86 Discovering Character through Somatic Awareness: An Actor's Journey Valerie Clayman Pye Chapter Six .............................................................................................. 103 Fitting the Globe into the Ring: Circus in Shakespearean Performance Doyle Ott

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Chapter Seven.......................................................................................... 121 Shakespearean Comedy as a Way of Life: Performance and the Voluntary Sector Michael Dobson Part III: Shakespearean Cinema Chapter Eight ........................................................................................... 138 The Bard Comes to Yellow Sky: Shakespeare’s Tempestuous Western Eric C. Brown Chapter Nine............................................................................................ 155 Reclaiming the Pastoral: Kenneth Branagh's Curious Camera in As You Like It Misty Beck Chapter Ten ............................................................................................. 171 L’homme blanc et l’homme noir: Othello in Les enfants du paradis Douglas Lanier Part IV: Shakespeare without Borders Chapter Eleven ........................................................................................ 182 Traces of Shakespeare’s Tragedies in Africa Benaouda Lebdai Chapter Twelve ....................................................................................... 194 Theater and National Identity: Shakespeare in Hungary, 1790-1990 Martin Andrucki Chapter Thirteen ...................................................................................... 210 Macbeth: The Autopsy of Our Diseased World Estelle Rivier Chapter Fourteen ..................................................................................... 223 Giorgio Strehler’s La Tempesta, from Stage to (Comic) Screen Mariangela Tempera Appendix A ............................................................................................. 235 Edward Gordon Craig’s Notes and Correspondence on The Tempest

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Contributors ............................................................................................. 239 Index ........................................................................................................ 243

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

Fig. 3-1 Edward Gordon Craig, set design for The Tempest Fig. 8-1 Arrow through the skull of an anti-Yorick Fig. 9-1 Gathering in the pastoral woods of Arden Fig. 10-1 Frédérick reads Othello Fig. 10-2 Frédérick and Garance in the Othello performance Fig. 11-1 A mid-1980s Julius Caesar by the Cape Performing Arts Board Fig. 12-1 The National Theater, Budapest Fig. 13-1 Lady Macbeth and Macbeth dressing for the murders

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The editors wish to thank the following for supporting the conferences that led to the publication of this book. At the University of Maine at Farmington, thanks to Daniel Gunn and the Office of the Provost, the University Culture Committee, Jonathan Cohen and the Division of Humanities, Clarissa Thompson and the Division of Inclusive Secondary and Health Education, Robert Lively, Linda Britt, Phil Carlsen (particularly for his performance of an original score for A Midsummer Night’s Dream), Jayne Decker, Stan Spilecki, and the Emery Community Arts Center, and student assistants Melaine Christensen, Shannah Cotton, Noelle Dubay, Courtney Randall, Karina Sprague, and Sara Tarbox. Special thanks to Shari Witham, Debra Kinney, Angela LeClair. We are further thankful for support from the Maine Humanities Council. At the University of Maine at Le Mans, thanks to the Laboratory 3 LAM directing board, Franck Laurent and Benaouda Lebdai, and our secretary Brigitte Bellanger, the managing director of EVE, Julie Bordas, the staff at the Abbey of L’Epau, the Mans-Metropole, the Région Paysde-Loire and Sarthe General Council, and the members of the Organization Committee: Pauline Blanc, Carole Guidicelli, Brigitte Félix, Richard Hillman, Hélène Lecossois, and Isabelle Schwartz-Gastine, and student assistants Maxime Barilleau, Romain Chéron, Stéphanie Fournier, Jean-François Gaulon, Maud Perez, Camille Phelippeau, Amandine Piccot, and Pauline Sutter. We are especially appreciative of all those who presented at the conferences, including those whose papers we were unable to include in the current volume. Their relevance and complexity were of eminent value and they all played a crucial part in the symposiums. Finally, to our families who stand behind us and our little ones who wait patiently for work to be done, we are ever grateful.

INTRODUCTION ERIC C. BROWN AND ESTELLE RIVIER

The study of Shakespeare’s plays in performance has developed considerably over the last decades. Increasing attention has been paid to previously underexamined forms, including Michael Dobson’s judicious look at amateur productions in Shakespeare and Amateur Performance (work Dobson draws on for his essay in the present collection) and Ayanna Thompson’s study of the proliferation of on-line dramatizations in Passing Strange: Shakespeare, Race, and Contemporary America.1 With the daily multiplication of productions across the world, the partnering of schools and universities with professional and amateur companies, the steady popularity of television and film adaptations, and the global audiences for local productions fostered by social media, Shakespeare’s plays have never felt less confined to the page. In the classroom, especially, approaches to Shakespeare have more and more been informed by the theorizing of performance; as James N. Loehlin puts it, performance pedagogy is experiencing a “revitalized presence in the Shakespeare classroom,” enriched by “changing institutional, ideological, and methodological environments.”2 The Folger Shakespeare Library series Shakespeare Set Free is but one source for instructors seeking lesson plans directed fully at performance. Works such as Abigail Rokison’s Shakespearean Verse Speaking offer much needed tools to apprehend the play as a performative entity, and the run of Shakespeare films in the past twenty years has also made a tremendous impact on classroom approaches.3 Students, moreover, can get involved in college weblogs or

1

Dobson, Shakespeare and Amateur Performance: A Cultural History (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2011) and Thompson, Passing Strange: Shakespeare, Race, and Contemporary America (Oxford University Press, 2011). 2 Loehlin, “Teaching through Performance,” in A Companion to Shakespeare and Performance, ed. Barbara Hodgdon and W. B. Worthen (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2005), pp. 627-43, 632. 3 Rokison, Shakespearean Verse Speaking: Text and Theatre Practice (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2009). On the use of films, see for instance Edward L. Rocklin,

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view extracts of plays or take part in virtual and elaborate discussions with artists from all over the world.4 Digital databases such as the University of Victoria’s “Shakespeare in Performance” site provide a repository for such artifacts as “director's notes, images of stage and costume design, performance stills, posters, information about a particular company or festival and the actors involved in Shakespeare performance, [and ] cast and crew listings.”5 Even greater in scope is the British Universities Film and Video Council’s “International Database of Shakespeare on Film, Television, and Radio,” with over seven-thousand records dating back well over a century.6 There is clearly no shortage of material; the real problem is keeping up with it. The fourteen essays included in this collection offer a range of contributions to the topic of Shakespeare and performance. From traditional studies of theatrical history and adaptation to explorations of Shakespeare’s plays in the circus, musical extravaganzas, the cinema, and drama at large, the collection embraces a number of performance spaces, times, and media. Indeed, Shakespeare in Performance includes essays looking not only at sixteenth- and seventeenth-century stagings of the plays in England, but at productions of Shakespeare across time in the United States, France, Italy, Hungary, and Africa. In its approach to the prolific but sometimes peripheral union of Shakespeare and performance, this collection builds on a number of previous studies.7 In particular, we Performance Approaches to Teaching Shakespeare (Urbana, IL: National Council of Teachers of English, 2005). 4 Student-created sites such as “Shakespeare through Technology,” which offers links and suggestions for the integration of technology into the teaching of Shakespeare, are almost infinite in their variety. See http://shakespearethroughtechnology.wikispaces.com/. 5 http://internetshakespeare.uvic.ca/Theater/sip/index.html. 6 http://www.shakespeareinperformance.co.uk/first.html 7 Among the more recent are The Death of the Actor: Shakespeare on Page and Stage by Martin Buzacott (Routledge, 2013); Bridget Escolme’s Shakespeare and the Making of Theatre (Palgrave, 2012); A Companion to Shakespeare and Performance, ed. Hodgdon and Worthen; Shakespeare and the Power of Performance: Stage and Page in the Elizabethan Theatre by Robert Weimann and Douglas Bruster (Cambridge University Press, 2008); Shakespeare, Language and the Stage, ed. Lynette Hunter, Peter Lichtenfels (Arden Shakespeare, 2005); Talking to the Audience/Shakespeare, Performance, Self, by Bridget Escolme (Routledge, 2005); Looking at Shakespeare, A Visual History of Twentieth-Century Performance, by Dennis Kennedy (Cambridge University Press, 2001); and Shakespeare and Modern Theatre: The Performance of Modernity, ed. Michael

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share with such works as Sonia Massai’s World-Wide Shakespeares an interest in giving the floor to the multiple embodiments and voices of Shakespeare’s art and including a wide range of cultural approaches from all kinds of national origins.8 Drawn from two international symposiums that took place at the University of Maine, Le Mans (France) in November, 2011, and the University of Maine at Farmington (USA) in May, 2012, the following essays all take on performative contexts, whether panoramic and historical, filmic or operatic, professional or amateur. The present work is thus occupied with a number of questions generated by the continual iterations of Shakespeare. How can we write and trace what is ephemeral? To what purpose do we maintain the memory of past performances? How does the transmediation of Shakespeare inform the most basic interpretive acts? What motivates Shakespearean theatre across political borders? What kinds of meaning are produced by décor, movement, the actor’s virtuosity, the producer’s choices, or the audience’s response? The various approachesʊcondensed belowʊall aim at conveying the memory of major Shakespeares in performance that their authors have either witnessed or read about. Each essay thus to some degree describes and voices the now unseen. In the first section, “Historicizing Shakespearean Performance,” Daniel Salerno centers his study on Measure for Measure. He explores the way in which ascetic vows were considered before and after the Reformation and considers Isabella’s faithful and unconditional renunciation of a profane existence, focusing especially on the dramatization of her silence at play’s end. Salerno states that “Isabella’s social and sexual subjugation to the Duke in marriage harmonizes with the bringing to heel of the play’s other Bristol and Kathleen McLuskie (Routledge, 2001). The literature extends back well before this, of course, from John Russell Brown’s Shakespeare’s Plays in Performance (London: Edward Arnold, 1966) to William B. Worthen’s Shakespeare and the Authority of Performance (Cambridge University Press, 1997). 8 Massai argues convincingly that “The inclusion of appropriations from familiar localities within the field, such as England and the United States, alongside appropriations from areas which have traditionally been understood as ‘liminal’, ‘peripheral’ and, most crucially, ‘post-colonial’, shows that instability, dissonance and oppositional negotiations over Shakespeare’s work are a common phenomenon throughout the field and not only at its margins” (p. 9). See Worldwide Shakespeares: Local Appropriations in Film and Performance, ed. Sonia Massai (Routledge, 2006).

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outlying elements with the symmetrical construct of state sanctioned marriage, a conclusion reinforced by the generic constraints of comedy.” It is a provocative reading of the ways in which choices of performance— Isabella’s mutable expressions of shock, terror or puzzlement, say—are bound up with the play of history. Misty Krueger takes up Restoration adaptations of The Tempest by William Davenant, John Dryden, and Thomas Duffett. These plays changed Shakespeare’s original play considerably, and as Krueger writes, “the ways in which Restoration playwrights’ appropriations of Shakespearean drama develop caricatures of sex and gender that both exploit late 17th-century conceptions of the body and stage perversions of femininity and masculinity” are essential to understand the purpose of rewriting, even parodying, a Renaissance play only sixty years after its creation. In her thorough study, Krueger traces the implications of such rewritings, explaining for instance that Duffett’s farce staged “a hyperbolic mockery of sexuality that virtually leaves Shakespeare’s play in the dark,” even though, just like Davenant’s and Dryden’s own play, his work “engender[ed] playfulness and mockery as the playwrights [rewrote] the Jacobean romance and pok[ed] fun at Restoration stage practices, women’s bodies, and father-daughter relationships.” A specialist on the works of Edward Gordon Craig, Patrick Le Boeuf looks closely at Craig’s never-to-be-true project of a production of Shakespeare’s Tempest. Ironically, “Craig wished to stage a play he disliked, in which he just saw the matter for an essentially dream-like and metaphysical spectacle.” The article gives ample details about the way the play ʊand more precisely the very first scene (as Craig did not write any comment upon the last three acts)ʊ should have been performed (the rhythm of the lines, the music, the dances that should be added, the scenography, etc.) and is supported by sketches Craig had drawn. “In Craig’s view, staging The Tempest amounts to conferring visibility to the beauties that await us after death,” Patrick Le Boeuf writes, and bearing in mind the innovative ideas the artist had in mind, it is not surprising to read that major twentieth-century stage and film directors such as Peter Brook, Derek Jarman and Peter Greenaway were highly influenced by Craig’s visionary concepts. The article draws a number of fascinating parallels between Craig’s idealized project and some aspects of these higher-profile contemporary versions. The following section, “Alternative Spaces,” begins with Diana Henderson’s study of Shakespearean musical comedy, putting into

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perspective the implications of productions she attended in Boston: Sulayman Al-Bassam’s The Speaker’s Progress, the Actors’ Shakespeare Project’s more traditional version of Twelfth Night, and The Big Life: The Ska Musical, script-written by Paul Sirett. The recent tendency towards “radical presentism” and “textual revisionism,” which the first two projects mentioned are representative of, raises several questions, one of which being “might we usefully attend to such relationships to temporality or immediacy as a second […] variable when analyzing the subgenres of Shakespeare’s comedies in performance, either discrete from or in relationship to the use of the early modern script?” “The essay also questions the marginalization and racial complications of such comic productions as The Big Life, which “defies the UK versus US mode of critique common in discussing Shakespearean musicals.” It also “illustrates the generic adaptability of Shakespeare’s comedies” not only in the West-End but also abroad and with unexpected casts. Valerie Clayman Pye proposes a “practical” (and practicable) reading of Shakespearean drama. She demonstrates how the application of heightened somatic awareness can help to make textual sense of Shakespeare’s verse and “urge[s] the reader to engage practically with [Othello and Twelfth Night, the two Shakespearean plays upon which her paper focuses] and follow along with [her] suggestions; speak them aloud to forge a personal connection” and deepen a thorough understanding of the written text. She provides ample evidence on how we can use and serve Shakespeare’s text the best way through an oral relationship with it. Anatomizing two particular extracts of the plays mentioned above, she aims at highlighting the discrepancies and connections between the typographic “character” and fully actualized “Character.” Pointing out the rhythmic variations of the blank verse and the alliterations/assonances that help underscore the character’s intentions better, she claims that “the voice responds to subtleties and stimulus in ways that marks on the page cannot” because there, each syllable receives the same diacritical mark being either the sweeping [˘ ] or the stress [/]. Giving clues to the would-be actor and reader of Shakespeare, this essay innovatively invites a combination of reading and action. In the association between circus and theatre, Doyle Ott observes that “the blending […] has not always been entirely successful.” In his essay, he offers a comprehensive analysis of the apparently unnatural relationship between Shakespeare’s verse and a pure physical mode of expression. Hippodrama, as the author states, was a kind of primitive form of circus: “[w]hat we now call circus […] is generally considered to have been

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created by Philip Astley in 1768 in Britain as a primarily equestrian form of entertainment.” In the nineteenth century, some clowns such as Dan Rice, Joe Pentland and Pete Conklin became popular with Shakespearean scripts. But during the first part of the twentieth century, the combination of circus and Shakespeare’s plays became scarcer. Ott argues that the interest in this combination only re-emerged in the later twentieth century with “experimental performances that sought to rediscover a theatricality that could reinvigorate a theatre that had become overshadowed by film and television,” and with “the development of the ‘new’ circus and propagation of circus techniques.” If circus provides “popular appeal” and “accessibility to the Shakespearean production,” then “Shakespeare’s name, on the other hand, dispels many of the negative low-culture connotations sometimes associated with circus.” Ott finally concludes that “Shakespeare's verse is strong enough […] to support the use of circus, itself a sort of kinesthetic equivalent of poetry,” and that the future should enhance daring productions including both arts and performance. Concluding the section, Michael Dobson begins with the premise that Shakespeare’s comedies are “particularly invested in discovering and celebrating forms of civic harmony.” He then traces the lively history of the ways in which these plays have proved fundamental in the redevelopment of the voluntary sector. He argues in particular that the civic amateur dramatic societies and outdoor troupes established in Britain in the early twentieth century represented conscious attempts to extend the social relations depicted in such plays as As You Like It, A Midsummer Night's Dream and The Merry Wives of Windsor into actual community life. Contra the widespread charges against the theater of promoting and, even more directly, modeling vice and scurrility, Dobson points out that the “contagion of the stage” could enact desire in ways conducive to civic virtue. Dobson settles on two examples, beginning with the Private Theatre of Kilkenny, which flourished in the early nineteenth century, before moving to the Stockport Garrick Society, which began in the early twentieth century and continues today. In Kilkenny, Dobson draws out the sometimes uneasy tensions between the sumptuousness of the Theatrical Society’s aristocratic productions and their ostensible mission to alleviate the suffering of the poor. In contrast, the Garrick Society was founded on the idea of a non-commercial municipal theatre and driven, according to Dobson, by “the restoration of the organic society, the return to an imagined collective artisan life of unalienated labor.” The Society not only put on but lived out the plays, a steady current of lectures and themed parties, organized retreats and pastoral picnics, that seemed to underscore

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at every turn the ways in which Shakespearean drama could contribute to an engaged and improved social reality. In the third section, “Shakespearean Cinema,” Eric Brown reads William Wellman’s Western Yellow Sky (1948) as an adaptation of The Tempest. The insertion of Shakespearean characters or cues in Westerns has an illustrious history—Hamlet’s “To be or not to be” speech is featured in John Ford’s My Darling Clementine, for example—but Yellow Sky draws uniquely on Shakespearean Romance as a dramatic backcloth. Brown illuminates numerous parallels between the play and the film in order to show how Western topoi invite us to go back to the Shakespearean text: for instance, the “salt flats down south” referred to in the movie (mostly set in Death Valley) recall the “thousand furlongs of sea” we find in the play (I.i.65). Other evidence showing the twinning between film and play is detailed through characters such as Constance Mae (Anne Baxter) who appears as a composite of three major roles in The Tempest: Miranda, Ariel and Sycorax. Brown attends not only to the details of the film but to the codes of the genre (drunkenness and duels, honeymoons and serenity), and invites the reader to (re)assess popular appropriations of Shakespeare in the Western. Misty Beck explores the resonance of the pastoral form in Kenneth Branagh’s 2006 film version of As You Like It, where the use of a “curious camera” enables the director to highlight the green world’s containment in the play. Beck questions the postmodernist interest in underlining this “Cassandra” among genres: does the pastoral concern our urban society? “If Edzard can construct a pastoral setting in the wastes of a London slum, does nature or bucolia have anything to do with renovating the spirit or world today?” she asks. Using his “curious camera,” Branagh, whose adaptation is set in Japan with a British touch, suggests how questions about contemporary pastoral, i.e. its location and its language, might be addressed in the medium of film. With point-of-view shots, high angles and crane shots, spirals, bounces and swoons, his energetic camera performs an essential pastoral function: to show oppositions and invite the viewer’s participation and critical judgment. This study scrutinizes the various scenes where the green world’s attributes are involved in the action and the way in which they impact on the protagonists’ dialogues. According to Beck, Branagh’s curious camera “demonstrat[es] a joy in movement as well as curiosity about the movements of others,” and successfully manages to “show the power of the green world, not only to rejuvenate and reconcile the lovers and other exiles, but also to add its magic to the old pastoral forms.”

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Douglas Lanier’s essay on the implications of Othello in Marcel Carné’s Les Enfants du Paradis gracefully outlines the ways Shakespeare’s tale reverberates in the French cinema of the forties. The “resonance, parallels, echoes and analogues of Othello suffuse Les Enfants du paradis, far beyond the few scenes in which the play is specifically referenced,” Lanier writes. Accounting for the various scenes where Othello is either alluded to or staged, he shows how, for instance, jealousy is progressively instilled in the character of Frédérick (Pierre Brasseur), and how the performance of the Moor eventually purges him from this defect. But if Shakespeare’s narrative seems dispersed in the scenario, it is because it is more a “product” than a “source” of Carné’s film. Although Shakespeare’s play is deeply present in Les Enfants du paradis, the art of pantomime nostalgically celebrated by Carné through Baptiste’s bright performance of Pierrot, i.e. “l’homme blanc,” prevails over the art of the legitimate theatre, emblematically referenced as “l’homme noir” (the black man/Othello). The last section, “Shakespeare without Borders,” begins with Benaouda Lebdai’s panoramic approach to Shakespeare in Africa. The essay measures the influenceʊmainly politicalʊthat Shakespeare’s tragedies have had on the evolution of contemporary African society. Shakespeare has been vividly illustrated on this continent over the past decades, often serving as a tool for people to claim their rights or, on the contrary, for dictators to justify their views. “When asked why [African authors] chose and concentrated on Shakespeare’s plays,” Lebdai writes, “the translators’ arguments were telling as they did insist on their need to show that African languages possessed a rich and colorful vocabulary capable of expressing Shakespeare’s subtleties and literary complexities, which African audiences understood and appreciated.” Major works such as King Lear, Hamlet, Macbeth or The Tempest (seen and served as a rather “tragic” form) have been performed in Kiswahili, Juba, Arabic, Kikuyu and Somali (East and North Africa), in Krio, Wolof, Bambara, Yoruba, French or Pidgin English (West Africa), in Zulu, Tswana, Xhosa and Ndebele (South Africa). King Lear was a favorite play for instance as it is an open criticism of corrupt political systems. “When King Lear breaks down under the storm,” Lebdai notes, “it implies that the old feudal order and the old conception of nature can collapse thanks to the new bourgeois conception of [them].” The essay concludes on the assertion that African people appropriated Shakespeare’s repertoire so as to prove their “humanity” and demonstrate their own “universality.” The next trip abroad is offered by Martin Andrucki, whose work entitled “Theater and National Identity: Shakespeare in Hungary, 1790-

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1990” comments upon the various causes that have preserved the Hungarian identity, among which we find Shakespeare’s drama. In the 1950s, his plays in performance became for many Hungarians “important expressions of moral independence in the face of Soviet-inspired autocracy.” It is not surprising if Shakespeare is deeply present in Hungary “at exactly the time when Hungarians were working energetically to preserve their language and their identity,” writes Andrucki. When a national theatre could produce Shakespeare in the national language, it became indeed a symbol of national legitimacy. Before the 1950s, in 1947 ʊprecisely when the Communists began taking powerʊ the reception of Elizabethan plays was politically biased: Richard III for instance “was praised . . . for depicting the triumph of socialism over the Fascist rule.” Eight years later, the play was viewed differently for “Richard III had morphed from Hitler to Stalin”! Thus, Shakespeare was revealed as a weapon that could be used against those currently in power. Andrucki goes on detailing various productions of this play to exemplify the mirror-effect that such a play produced. Many artists of the time saw in Hamlet’s Claudius “a figure not unlike János Kádár who had betrayed to the Russians his close friend and mentor, Imre Nagy, one of the leaders of the revolution.” Likewise, problem plays were frequently staged to criticize the Kádár regime, though implicitly. After the communist regime, more entertaining plays found their way onto the Hungarian stage. But they were also meant to question the political power: The Tempest directed by Alföldi in 1999 raised the following question: “where was the social and economic redemption that was supposed to follow the overthrow of Communism and the installation of a new system of government?” Over the past decades, it seems that Shakespearean productions have nonetheless shifted in Hungary, which leads Andrucki to conclude: “[In] the absence of the Hapsburgs or the Communists, Shakespeare and the theater aren’t what they used to be: the cultural weapons of choice.” Estelle Rivier’s critical analysis of Macbeth proposes a re-composition of the work in process of a French production directed by Pascale Nandillon. With the help of technical devices such as cinematographic encoding, micro casts, interchangeable costumes and use of masks, superimposition of images and historical short-cuts, the myth of Macbeth is retold. Three major aesthetical and performing aspects are taken into account in this study: first, the text conceived as a musical partition and an echo of primitive texts; second, the scenic space, said to be “paranoiac” as it carries out the images of the past, i.e. the memory of former Macbeths (Carmelo Bene, Kurosawa, Orson Welles) together with Francis Bacon’s paintings, images of Haitian carnival and African rituals; finally the choral

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effect since the play’s cast includes only five actors. “Is Macbeth appropriate to highlight the sterility of current politics and its inevitable failure when the body of the State is infected?” asks Rivier, who shows how deeply theatrical practice and textual analysis mutually inform each other. Finally, Mariangela Tempera traces the uneasy link between stage and screen in studying Giorgio Strehler’s Tempesta in both arts. The production by the famous Italian director had a resounding success while resorting to daring technical tricks that Maurizio Nichetti later highlighted in his comic screen version. “By suggesting that Nichetti should dwell on the technical aspects of La tempesta,” writes Tempera, “Strehler allowed the film spectators to share the professionals’ knowledge of what goes on behind the scenes, thus making them, for once, more aware of the artifice of spectacle than a theatre audience.” Her essay offers a thorough account of the various metatheatrical steps that carried these performances of Shakespeare’s Tempest.

PART I: HISTORICIZING SHAKESPEAREAN PERFORMANCE

CHAPTER ONE ISABELLA’S SILENCE: STAGING ASCETICISM IN MEASURE FOR MEASURE DANIEL SALERNO

Measure for Measure ends with one of Shakespeare’s most notorious performative challenges. The final scene presents to the audience a strange mutation of the comedic happy ending required by formula; four soon to be married couples occupy the stage, yet only one, Juliet and Claudio, is the product of mutual desire. Two others—the forced marriages of Lucio to Kate Keep-down and Angelo to Mariana—function as what one critic calls “punishments woven into the penitential investigations of the play,” the logical outcome of a plot that began with the Duke’s program of general moral correction.1 And while these two unions do not satisfy generic expectations for connubial bliss, they may at least be offered up to the audience as acts of justice, comeuppance, though strangely guised, for the bawdy slanderer and the cruel hypocrite. The exact nature of the fourth couple, however, remains opaque. When the Duke proposes to Isabella, a novice nun who has expressed no desire to renounce the ascetic life and, in fact, who has struggled fiercely through the play to preserve her virginity, the strangeness of the moment is only heightened by her response: a silence that, as Sarah Beckwith writes, many modern actors render as “shock or horror.”2 One of the more famous examples of such an interpretation came in a Jonathan Miller directed production in the early 1970s in which Isabella, thoroughly disgusted, wretched off stage.3Almost as striking was a 1994 RSC production that saw Isabella, played by Stella 1 Sarah Beckwith. Shakespeare and the Grammar of Forgiveness (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2011), 57. 2 Ibid. 3 Grace Ioppolo. Introduction to Measure for Measure: A Norton Critical Edition (New York: Norton, 2010), xviii.

Isabella’s Silence: Staging Asceticism in Measure for Measure

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Gonet, meet the Duke’s proposal with a smack to the face (a thoroughly anachronistic bit of insubordination that nevertheless succeeded in establishing an equivalency between the Duke’s proposition and Angelo’s).4 There is, of course, room for other interpretations, Barbara Baines reminds us that many productions opt for Isabella’s “happy compliance” with the Duke’s proposal. Of these we could point to countless examples, perhaps none so well documented as a 1983 RSC production starring Daniel Massey as the Duke and Juliet Stevenson as Isabella. This production not only featured a “little miracle of acceptance” by Stevenson, but prepared the audience for the moment by working in numerous flirtatious and potentially romantic non-verbal exchanges between the Duke and Isabella throughout.5 Ultimately, the interpretive variety we see in such stagings reinforces Philip McGuire’s observation that Isabella’s silence offers directors and actors a stark choice between “"mute, accepting wonder," and “a resistance that wordlessly but effectively drives home" the Duke’s wholly unerotic autocracy.6 The ambiguity is a challenge for scholars as well as actors. Many critics, including Charles Lyons and Amy Lechter-Siegel, have understood Isabella’s silence as a necessary part of the play’s reestablishment of patriarchal order with the Duke’s return: in other words, a necessary prerequisite of a Jacobean happy ending.7 Barbara Baines, meanwhile, sees in Isabella’s silence a resistance analogous to Iago’s in the final scene of Othello; Isabella, Baines writes, “is not silenced but, instead, chooses silence as a form of resistance to the patriarchal authority.”8 Such a perspective itself rebuts another strain of criticism which sees Isabella in

4

Pascale Aebischer, “Silence, Rape, and Politics in Measure for Measure: Close Readings in Theater History,” Shakespeare Bulletin 26.4 (Winter 2008): 19. 5 See Daniel Massey, “The Duke in Measure for Measure,” Players of Shakespeare 2: Further Essays in Shakespearean Performance with the Royal Shakespeare Company, ed. Russell Jackson and Robert Smallwood. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 13-32. 6 Philip C. McGuire, Speechless Dialect: Shakespeare's Open Silences (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), 69. 7 See Charles Lyons, “Silent Women and Shrews: Epicoene and Measure for Measure,” Comparative Drama 23.2 (Summer 1989): 123-40, and Amy LechterSiegel, “Isabella's Silence: The Consolidation of Power in Measure for Measure,” in Reconsidering the Renaissance, edited by Mario A. Di Cesare, (Binghamton, N.Y.: Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 1992), 371-380. 8 Barbara Baines, “Assaying the Power of Chastity in Measure for Measure,” Studies in English Literature 30.2 (1990): 288.

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the plays final moments as a subdued female victim, finally ground down to inarticulate silence by the forces of patriarchal domination.9 But any understanding of Isabella’s silence which views her potential marriage as uniquely significant to the play’s conclusion is incomplete, for the Duke’s proposal is merely one part of an array of normalizing moves that make up the play’s traditional comic conclusion. Isabella’s engagement to the Duke can be understood as carrying a social purpose analogous to the play’s other three marriages, as each, after a fashion, allows sexually dissident characters to reenter the world of lawful social interrelation through marriage. The lecherous Lucio, Kate the whore, Claudio and Juliet the scofflaws, Angelo the rapist, and Mariana the despairing maid each leave behind a previously worn mantle of abnormal or unlawful sexuality to take a place in the symmetrical construct of state sanctioned marriage. Isabella, I assert, is yet another sexual rebel whose instincts must be tamed by matrimony, for as surely as Lucio’s philandering subverts social propriety, so too does the votaress’s celibacy function as a threat to patriarchal authority. Such an assertion perhaps seems strange given the familiar Renaissance reverence for female chastity; as one critic argues, Isabella’s values are “representative, not eccentric,” and reinforce the fetishization of chastity both in the play’s Vienna and Jacobean England.10 But such a claim ignores the fact that, unlike Catholic celibacy, Protestant chastity is meant to function as a prerequisite, rather than a substitution, for marriage. On stage, Isabella’s habit marks her for Shakespeare’s audience as a character to be reformed rather than revered, and this interpretation is consistent with the general place of nuns in literary and popular consciousness of seventeenth-century England. The nun, of course, has a long and varied history as a literary and dramatic figure. To some extent, the way the nun has been depicted in literature has reflected the larger religious and social context of its production. That is to say, depictions of the nun in the Middle Ages tend to be, if not always completely humorless, at least serious about the office and its attendant vows. Depictions from England during and after the reformation are, as we might expect, more scurrilous and more irreverent, and, perhaps just as important, more imaginative: after the 1530s, the 9

See Marcia Riefer, “‘Instruments of Some More Mightier Member’: The Constriction of Female Power in Measure for Measure,” Shakespeare Quarterly 35 (1984):157-169. 10 Baines, 284

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nun’s absence from the religious landscape of England freed (or forced) writers to exercise more creativity in their descriptions, as the real nun was replaced by a wholly imaginative figure with only a tenuous connection to reality. Such broad generalizations about the shifting attitude toward nuns in the post-reformation world are not the least bit surprising. Indeed, they match our expectations. But it is important to understand and acknowledge that these are generalizations. Indeed, despite the orthodoxy of conventual and monastic vows in the Middle Ages, writers seem to have been just as conscious of the practical difficulties and problematic nature of ascetic vows as we are in the secular present. Put briefly, depictions of nuns or female ascetics in pre-Reformation literature do not universally treat the nun as an unquestioned object of reverence, nor do they all look upon the taking of religious vows or the renunciation of the world as a positive. While the religious status of the nun was never seriously questioned in medieval poetry and song, the nun figure is more complex. In one strain of the popular tradition, for instance, nuns are often depicted as tormented by a desire for love and sexual fulfillment: Plangit nonna fletibus Inenarrabilibus, Condolens gemitibus Dicens consocialibus Heu misella! Nihil est deterius Tali vita, Cum enim sim petulans Et lasciva. Pernoctando vigilo Cum non vellem Invenem aplecterer Quam libenter!11 (The nun is weeping indescribable tears. She is crying with groans and saying to her sisters: woe is me! “Nothing is worse than such a life, when I am wanton and amorous.”)

Poems such as these remind us that the medieval individual did not necessarily treat all acts of religious devotion with uncritical reverence. Countless other poems and songs like it, in which the nun is depicted as 11

Anonymous lyric, found in Eileen Power, Medieval English Nunneries (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1922), 504-505. Translation mine.

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gay, lovelorn, and seemingly bound to her vows more or less against her will, place their sympathies with the realities of human nature, rather than the exalted ideals of Christian asceticism and hagiography. People knew that nuns had sexual feelings and this did not automatically make them evil or targets for moralization. In fact, as the convents and monasteries were predominantly open only to members of the aristocracy or other privileged classes, it should come as no surprise that we see such skepticism in popular song, where, in fact, the cloister is often envisioned “as a prison and a grave.”12 “Serious” writers such as Chaucer and Lydgate represent, or at least contain, a more aristocratic, more dogmatic literary strain. Although we may think first of the Wife of Bath’s shrewd comment that not every vessel in a great lord’s house is made of gold (in other words, though virginity is superior to marriage, it is not and can not be expected of all), and her old testament exempla of righteous polygamy, Chaucer maintains a healthy religious appreciation for female (particularly female) asceticism. The most famous (and for modern readers, troubling) example of Christian patience and self-denial in the tales is probably Griselda: no nun, certainly, but sufficiently devoted to obedience and patience to evoke conventual discipline. But while The Clerk’s Tale provokes at best ambivalent feelings towards self-sacrifice, elsewhere in the Tales Chaucer is more direct. The Second Nun’s Tale, a story about a female ascetic—St. Cecilia—told by a female ascetic (although one never described in the General Prologue), is one of two hagiographies in the work, and the one that carries the strongest, most uncritical reverence for asceticism. Its prologue begins, as we might expect from a tale told by a nun, with an invocation of the Virgin Mary, who is so pure—the nun calls her “virgin wemmeless” (47), mayden pure” (48), and “flour of holy virgines alle” (29)—that her body itself is a “cloistre” (43).13 The nun goes on to excoriate the sin of idleness and praise the doctrine of works (“feith is deed withouten werkis”) by way of entreating Mary to aid her in her taletelling. The doctrine of works, of course, is the fundamental justification for ascetic practice itself, so in highlighting it, the nun is not simply asking Mary to endorse her industriousness, but paving the theological way, so to 12

Power, 504. Power quotes the following medieval French lyric: “Mariez-vous, les filles / Avec ces bons drilles, / Et n’allez ja, les filles / Pourrir derrier les grilles.” (“Get married, girls, with good men, and don’t go, girls, to rot behind bars,” translation mine.) 13 All excerpts from Chaucer taken from The Riverside Chaucer, 3rd ed., ed. Larry Benson (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1987).

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speak, for the proper appreciation of Cecilia’s renunciations. As for Cecilia herself, the tale goes on to tell us that she wore a hair shirt, renounced sexuality on the night of her wedding, and faced execution with such stout-hearted patience that she was able to preach for three days with her head half-way cut off (the strokes of the axe are called a “penaunce” by the nun, though one that no man should have to endure). The ending of the tale betrays no skepticism, no ambiguity, no room for potentially subversive or unorthodox readings: Seynt Urban, with his dekenes privily The body took and buried it by nighte Among his other seyntes honestely. Her hous the chirch of seynt Cecily yet highte; Seynt Urban hallowed it, as he wel mighte; In which into this day in noble wyse Men do to Crist and to his seint servise. (The Second Nun’s Tale, 547-553)

Like The Parson’s Tale, the Second Nun’s Tale demonstrates the moral and didactic side of Chaucer. It discomfits critics who would see him as subversive, and it supports the notion that in a work as heterogeneous and generically complex as the Canterbury Tales, there need be no mutual exclusivity between healthy (and orthodox) religious skepticism (The Friar’s Tale, The Summoner’s Tale) and serious moral instruction. The sin of idleness and the doctrine of works lead us conveniently to the Renaissance, where, of course, the orthodoxy of the former and the heresy of the latter both were part of the theological justification for rejecting asceticism. Ironically, the second nun’s claims of industriousness highlight the very thing that Lutherans and Calvinists found lacking in religious orders. The sloth of nuns and monks was a traditional part of anti-monastic complaint, as were, in something close to a contradiction, their heretical reliance on good works to achieve salvation. In 1519, Luther had written a tract against asceticism in which he compared Monks, with their adherence to a highly ceremonial life, to Jews, and in which he implored nuns and monks to abandon the ascetic life and reenter the world (Luther’s own wife was a former nun whom he had convinced to abandon the convent). In Lutheran or Calvinist theology, asceticism is seen as a form of idolatry even more odious and presumptuous than the veneration of icons, relics, and saints that typically bore the brunt of protestant disdain, for the renunciant’s self-imposed suffering turns the human body itself into an object of religious wonder. In the Catholic Middle Ages, such self-abnegation was embraced as imitatio Christi—

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achieving spiritual fulfillment by imitating the sufferings of Christ—and was codified as such in a popular fifteenth-century manual for ascetic living by Thomas a Kempis.14 In both Calvinist and Lutheran theology, such presumptions about the possibility of attaining Christ-like grace through ascetic works are rejected in favor of an exclusive focus on scripture and on a belief in the uncontestable sufficiency Christ's redemptive sacrifice: i.e., He suffered so that we need not.15 In a 1523 letter exhorting his sister, a nun in the Katherine Convent of Augsburg, to abandon the monastic life, Lutheran nobleman Bernhart Rem employs this very argument: I would rather be counted as carnal with the open sinners in the temple than be religious with you and those like you. Nevertheless, I wish you for once the correct knowledge of Jesus Christ, that the spirit that brings life would write in your hearts the overflowing good works of Christ, so that you know why he in human nature was fastened to the cross. When you know that, your little human discoveries and trust in your own works, habits, convent, fasting, and such things will soon fall away. It will be looked upon as very serious, for one does not presume to buy God’s grace with spiritual simony. Who has ears to hear, let them hear…Such presumption, that always presumes one is more facile than God and can achieve God’s grace through one’s own work….but I will say nothing about the convents, where many different types of work—all of it self chosen—are practiced with the fine glitter of holiness. And it is worthless straw, whatever one makes of it.16

Rem’s focus on the presumptuousness and quasi-idolatry of ascetic practice is drawn directly from standard anti-Catholic theological arguments about the inefficacy of works and the Judaizing ritualism of Catholic religious traditions. It is an objection based in scripture— 14

See Eric Marchand, “Monastic Imitatio Christi,” Artibus et Historiae 24.47 (2003): 31-50. 15 Of course, the attitudes toward imitatio Christi varied among different stripes of Protestant, with later, more conservative (Anglican) Protestants more likely to be optimistic about man’s Christ-like potential. This ambivalence is illustrated by the 1580 English edition of Kempis’ manual by Thomas Rogers, a Protestant reworking more than a translation, which acknowledges the value in seeing Christ as a model of behavior, but which in two introductory epistles sternly cautions the reader against too rigorous and presumptuous an imitation of Christ’s physical suffering.15 See Elizabeth K. Hudson, “Protestants and the Imitatio Christi: 15801620,” Sixteenth Century Journal 19.4 (Winter, 1988): 541-58. 16 Merry Wisner-Hanks (ed.), Convents Confront the Reformation (Milwaukee: Marquette University Press, 1988), 36-37

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particularly Ephesians 2:8, 9—and one that follows closely Luther’s own writings about monasticism. Calvin is somewhat less radical than Luther in his treatment of monasticism: he allows, for instance, that strict renunciation may be of practical use to those who are “prone to a certain vice,” but he insists that such actions are a matter of personal choice and circumstance, not an “invariable law” or even in and of themselves “holy.”17 He offers dire warnings about excessive fasting and self-denial, calling the belief that such activities bring one closer to God “superstition.”18 About institutional monasticism, Calvin is as harsh as Luther, dismissing pretensions towards monastic perfection as “vain arrogance,” “intolerable trifling,” and “fictitious worship.”19 Beyond the theological issues, the moral reputation of nuns in the popular consciousness declined precipitously in direct proportion to the success of the Reformation. In Elizabethan and Jacobean England, printed accounts of nuns tended to focus on their sexual debauchery, usually in consort with priests, monks, or other male renunciant clergy. Such scandalous material relies not on complex theological arguments, but on the ancient conflict between self-denial and self-indulgence. Some Protestant authors clearly took pleasure in deconstructing the nun’s ascetic mystique by subjecting her to sexual debasement. Francis Dolan’s examination of such material provides valuable insight into the Elizabethan “horizon of expectations” for how nuns should or might behave. As mentioned above, after the dissolution of the monasteries, the representation of nuns in literature became increasingly fictive and fantastic, as English writers lost any sense of the reality of living, practicing nuns. Nuns, Dolan writes, are often ridiculed or scandalized in seventeenth-century popular depictions, shown succumbing to seductions by priests, engaging in homoerotic dalliances with other nuns, or otherwise being led by “Nature” rather than unnatural vows.20 For instance, in the 1590 pamphlet A Subtill Practise (not mentioned specifically by Dolan), a sexually willing and “sweet skind” nun becomes an object of competitive discord between two Friars, eventually resulting in catastrophe.21 In an even more brazen work, an expose of a monastery 17

John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion. 4.13.5-6 Ibid. 19 Ibid. 4.1.11 20 Francis Dolan, “Why Are Nuns Funny?” The Huntington Library Quarterly 70.4 (2007): 510-511. 21 Anon., A Subtill Practiss, Early English Books Online (London: 1590). 18

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for English nuns in Portugal reveals presumably shocking sexual transgressions.22 This trope reached beyond the polemical tract to the stage, as one can see in Ithamore’s needling of Abigail in The Jew of Malta: Ithamore: I pray mistress, will you answer me to one question. Abigail: Well, sirrah, what is’t. Ithamore: A very feeling one. Have not the nuns fine sport with the friars now and then? (3.3.33-35)

These titillating depictions were reassuring, Dolan argues, for they exposed to ridicule the extremes of Catholic asceticism that Protestants viewed as self-indulgent and slothful.23 Valerie Traub, meanwhile, argues that the need for such pornographic debasement of nuns had a socioeconomic basis: marriage and reproduction was at the center of the Protestant social fabric, and biological propagation went hand in hand with financial enrichment and security.24 Thus, for early moderns, Dolan argues, “[a]s a woman who withholds herself from sexual circulation, the nun reinforces the imperative that women surrender to their own exchange.”25 While Dolan does not consider Shakespeare at length, she does briefly give attention to Twelfth Night, particularly Valentine’s description of the love-stricken Olivia as walking “veiled” like a “cloistress.” This figuring of Olivia, along with Viola’s insistence that she not leave “her graces to the grave,” reflect the Renaissance (and modern) belief that a beautiful nun is a “waste” of a gift bestowed by god. But what about plays that deal specifically with the question of female resistance to sexuality? Measure for Measure and The Two Noble Kinsmen are two plays that prominently feature female ascetics. In both plays, these renunciant figures face challenges to their celibacy, but these challenges do not result in debauchment or scandal of the type found in the polemical tradition examined by Dolan. Rather, both plays present a rather ambivalent picture of life as a votaress. Doubtless, in approaching Isabella in Measure for Measure and The Two Noble Kinsmen, it is important to consider that a Protestant audience, while they would not necessarily have thought of 22

Dolan, 517. Dolan, 518. 24 Valerie Traub, The Renaissance of Lesbianism in Early Modern England (Cambridge, 2002), 181. 25 Dolan, 511. 23

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female ascetics as villains, probably found something distasteful in the wasteful spending of female beauty in the confines of the cloister. Indeed, both Shakespeare and his audience would likely have found any comic resolution that did not include the reappropriation of female renunciants back into the worldly and godly Protestant social fold to be incomplete. In dramatizing such an assimilation, the play is thus socially conventional. However, in the process of achieving the cadential harmony, such as it is, of the final act, Measure for Measure takes time to consider how female subjectivity is empowered by an ascetic posture. Ultimately, I will argue that Measure for Measure in some sense takes us back to the old medieval notion of the convent as a prison for the nun, who is at heart a social and sexual being. It is no coincidence that the play links prisons with convents, or that, like The Two Noble Kinsmen, it ends with a soon to be former nun sharing the stage with a freed prisoner. The play does not want us to hate ascetics, but will end by fixing ascetic figures into their proper familial role, even (as consistently negative reactions to the endings of both plays evidence) at the expense of artistic achievement.

II. The comic plot of Measure for Measure is set in motion, fittingly, by an act of renunciation. By trading in his political authority for a Friar’s robe, the Duke ironically fulfills a fantasy entertained by Richard II in the waning moments of his reign: The king shall be contented: must he lose The name of king? o' God's name, let it go: I'll give my jewels for a set of beads, My gorgeous palace for a hermitage, My gay apparel for an almsman's gown, My figured goblets for a dish of wood, My sceptre for a palmer's walking staff, My subjects for a pair of carved saints. (3.3.145-152)26

For Richard, the language of ascetic renunciation is conciliatory, as in the tradition of Boethius and his medieval imitators, or the humanist examples of Erasmus and even Thomas More.27 In the Boethian model, renunciation 26

From The Riverside Shakespeare, 2nd ed., ed. G. Blakemore Evans, et. al. (Boston: Houghton, 1997). 27 Boethius’s The Consolation of Philosophy is, in many respects, the foundational credo of Christian asceticism, and has been modeled or drawn from by many later

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can function in a moment of extreme suffering as a salve against the cruelties of the world, devaluing the physical, accepting the inscrutability of fortune and the divine plan, and preparing the renunciant for the true significance of the ghostly life that is to come. There is certainly something of Boethius in Richard’s turn away from his own kingship: faced with an intolerable political situation, the king wrests agency away from his usurper and, in a moment that reestablishes his own selfdetermination, deposes himself. This willing acceptance of his fall, indeed this active participation in it, echoes the neo-stoic program of Boethius: “if then you are master of yourself, you will be in possession of that which you will never wish to lose.”28 Of course, on its face, the Duke’s “renunciation” in Measure for Measure seems to have little to do with Boethius or Richard’s selfdeposition. While Richard is genuinely facing his own destruction, the Duke adopts the friar’s robe as an act of subterfuge with an explicit political purpose. Moving to the periphery of this quasi-medieval quasiVienna, he becomes, as more than one critic has noted, a manipulator of events on par with Prospero.29 His “renunciation” is thus an embrace and a strengthening of his political authority, rather than a rejection of it. But the Duke’s actual motives for doing this have always troubled critics. N.W. Bawcutt writes in his critical introduction to the play that none of the motives offered by the Duke himself are particularly convincing, even the principal one, “the restoration of firm rule to Vienna after a period of laxity,” which “gradually slips from sight as the play progresses, and does not figure at all in the plays resolution.”30 But looking more closely at what the Duke actually says to Friar Thomas helps us not only to understand his motives, but why an act of ascetic renunciation becomes the perfect vehicle for achieving his goals. I have noted already above the resistential qualities of ascetic renunciation. Consider again Boethius, who wrote the Consolation while languishing in a traitor’s cell on the judgment of the tyrant Theodoric. We find the same strains of defiance in Thomas More’s ascetic prison writings writers, including Chaucer in Troilus and Criseyde, More in his letters from prison, and Erasmus in his de Contemptu Mundi. 28 W.V. Cooper trans., Boethius: The Consolation of Philosophy (New York: Carlton House: 1902), 29. 29 See N.W. Bawcutt ed., Measure for Measure (Oxford: Oxford University Press: 1991), Introduction, 53. 30 Ibid.

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as he faced the ill-favor of a king no less severe. Peter Lake has detailed how Catholic prisoners in Elizabethan and early Stuart England used ascetic vows and ceremonies to turn their prisons into makeshift monasteries, from which they not only endured state oppression with a stern and religious resolution, but actually were empowered to engage in polemical warfare with Protestant authority.31 Indeed, asceticism demands the kind of rigorous mental and physical self-ordering that empowers the individual in the face of external pressures, a quality noted multiple times by Michel Foucault. Foucault categorizes asceticism (along with the classical stoicism) as a “technology of self,” which he defines as those that permit individuals to effect by their own means or with the help of others a certain number of operations on their own bodies and souls, thoughts, conduct, and way of being, so as to transform themselves in order to attain a certain state of happiness, purity, wisdom, perfection or immortality32. The technology of self is distinct from other technologies that govern the way humans interact, including technologies of production, which drive economies, technologies of sign symbols, which allow interpersonal communication, and, most significant for my purposes, technologies of power, “which determine the conduct of individuals and submit them to certain ends or domination.”33 Foucault himself uses the historical examples of Ancient Greek stoics and medieval monks in explaining the function of technologies of self. Monasticism, though it requires absolute subservience to the hierarchy of the monastery that at first blush could be thought of as a technology of power, is built upon technologies of self precisely because the end-result of this subservience is not the disappearance of the self (as in the relationship of a slave to his master), but a complete hermeneutical understanding of it. For the monk, every action must be considered for its propriety within the system of the cloister, and every thought must likewise be examined in the moment of its conception to ensure that it is bent properly towards its religious purpose. No aspect of his behavior goes unobserved or unrecognized, but the observation comes not from some carceral panopticon, but from

31 Peter Lake and Michael Questier, The Antichrist’s Lewd Hat: Protestants, Papists, and Players in Post Reformation England (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002), 208-210. 32 Michel Foucault, “Technologies of the Self,” in Technologies of the Self: A Seminar with Michel Foucault, eds. Luther H. Martin, Huck Gutman, Patrick H. Hutton (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1988), 18. 33 Foucault, 18.

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within: the ideal result is an individual perfectly disciplined not by external authority, but by the complete actualization of the self. What then, do we make of the Duke’s renunciation: can a head of state somehow be engaged in resistance? Can the wielder of the technologies of power gain something from renouncing that power? The Duke’s own words seem to point us in this direction. In the play’s first scene, in which the Duke delegates power to his subordinates, his explanation to Angelo and Escalus is more revealing than Bawcutt claims. Just before his departure, the Duke confesses his anxieties about his relationship with his subjects: I love the people. But do not like to stage me to their eyes. Though it do well, I do not relish well Their loud applause and aves vehement, Nor do I think the man of safe discretion That may affect it.34 (1.1. 69-73)

Here, what is left unsaid by the Duke is as informative as what is said, but let us focus for the moment on the latter. The Duke finds distasteful his place in the public gaze, which he metaphorically renders as the position of an actor before a theater audience.35 Like the player, the Duke’s actions are by definition public and visible, and therefore subject to judgment. Ducal fiats share with stage-play an openness to an audience of reactors: everyone is aware of just who is doing what, and whether they find it good or not. The Duke’s distaste stems from the recognition that in exercising such judgment, the “people” maintain a certain level of authority over him. The audible signals of their pleasure—“applause and aves vehement”— communicate approval, and the act of approval itself implies a power dynamic in which, ironically, the people are sovereign and the Duke subject, for we seek the approval of those in a position to judge us and with the ability, usually, to sanction or reward us.

34

This and all subsequent excerpts from Measure for Measure taken from the Oxford Shakespeare edition, ed. Bawcutt. 35 Massey, a veteran actor who himself was a subject of the public gaze, claims that in performing this scene he was able to “identify very strongly” with the Duke’s problems, including his sense of being “imprisoned…by pageantry.” See Massey, 17.

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Of course, unsaid but vividly present in these lines, even in their focus on hails and hurrahs, is the potential for the opposite reaction: disapproval, scorn, ridicule, and contempt. The Duke’s sensitivity to the judgment of the people, particularly the possibility of negative judgment, is at the heart of his anxiety while in the public gaze. This same anxiety is behind any case of stage fright: the actor’s furious pacing in the wings before his entrance is born of the understanding that he is the audience’s subject, that though his words and actions command their rapt attention, it is they who have the final say over his success or failure. We see this dynamic in the consistently deferent tone of Shakespeare’s prologues, epilogues, and choral addresses, in which audience approval or forgiveness is directly solicited.36 Nor is the Duke the only Shakespearean ruler to feel thus subjected: Henry V laments that the kingship is a “hard condition,” for the king is “subject to the breath of every fool,” and thus consigned to a life of constant anxiety. Henry is, of course, building on a sentiment first expressed by his father in Henry IV Part 2, where beggars in fly-ridden hovels sleep soundly while “uneasy lies the head that wears a crown.” That the Duke feels constricted by his need for approval is made explicit in 1.3, when he further elaborates on his motives with Friar Thomas. The Duke confesses that the discipline that Vienna requires will not be popular given the license he has granted throughout his reign. Delegating the task to Angelo while pulling the strings unseen is a way of displacing negative judgment onto his subordinate: Sith ‘twas my fault to give the people scope, ‘Twould be my tyranny to strike and gall them For what I bid them do; for we bid this be done, When evil deeds have their permissive pass And not the punishment. Therefore, indeed, my father, I have on Angelo imposed the office, Who may in the ambush of my name strike home, And yet my nature never in the fight To do in slander. (1.2.34-43)

The Duke sees the precise Angelo not only as the right man to put to the task of Vienna’s moral correction, but as a convenient lightning rod for the wrath of the people. Again, what the Duke fears is the collective opinion 36

See, for example, the prologue of The Two Noble Kinsmen, which begs the audience’s pardon in the fashion of the captatio benevolencia of classical rhetoric, or Henry V, which asks the audience to overlook the shortcomings of a limited medium.

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of his own subjects; some kings, of course, are venal or sadistic enough not to care what the people think (Tamburlaine, Herod, Caligula and Nero), but the Duke seems to have much invested in a certain idea of himself as a popular and enlightened ruler, what Martha Widmayer describes as an “obsessive concern with [his] reputation.”37 The pressure he feels to maintain that image is relieved in his act of renunciation. Donning the friar’s robe, he is freed from the subjecting gaze of the mob, and unburdened by the weight of his office he can enact his social program with complete impunity. Of course, the Friar’s robe itself is a guise pre-suffused with meaning, and the anti-fraternalism that was popular even during the height of Catholic hegemony in England (see, for instance, Chaucer’s Summoner’s Tale) had long before Shakespeare been adapted (with no great difficulty) for Protestant apologetics. 38 In Bale’s King John, for instance, friars are shown to be comical sneaks who hoard gold and keep nuns as whores, while professing a mask of holiness. They are also enemies of the state, conspiring against the crown in the name of Rome.39 Such a representation adds the danger of political conspiracy and insurrection to the wellestablished medieval complaints about fraternal greed, sloth, and lechery. Beckwith sees Shakespeare’s flirtation with this tradition in Measure for Measure as an ironic inversion of anti-Catholic tropes, for in this instance it is not the actual friar who poses a threat to political power, but the figure of authority himself acting as a “wolf in sheep’s clothing” while conspiring to disguise ducal power as divine grace.40 I agree with Beckwith that Shakespeare’s Duke cannot be viewed as part of the same tradition as the anti-fraternalism of Bale, but her claim that the fusing of Duke and friar can be read as a “thorough-going critique of the inseparability of church and state invested in the person of the monarch” overstates the subversiveness of the character. Taken at face value, the Duke’s temporary re-embodiment as a fraternal ascetic, and with it his cooption of the sacraments of confession and the less formal clerical duty of paternalistic dispenser of advice (a familiar role for Shakespeare’s friars, whether in Romeo and Juliet or Much Ado About Nothing), actually does allow him to 37 Martha Widmayer, “To Sin in Loving Virtue: Angelo of Measure for Measure,” Texas Studies in Literature and Language 49.2 (Summer 2007): 157. 38 For anti-fraternalism in medieval literature, see Penn Szittya, The Anti-Fraternal Tradition in Medieval Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989). 39 See Sarah Beckwith, Social Relation and Symbolic Act in the York Corpus Christi Plays (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), 121-157. 40 Beckwith, Grammar, 76.

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construct an outcome designed to please. What the play seems to suggest through the figure of the Friar/Duke is that fraternal duties work best not as a lifelong commitment, but as one of many functions that fall under the purview of the unitary reformation monarch. The Duke dons the friar’s habit with the implicit promise that it will be taken off again, a promise that signals a similar destiny for Isabella. I have delayed my discussion of Isabella to explicate the Duke’s renunciation as a means of demonstrating how an ascetic posture—even one adopted by a ruler for political purposes—can act as a check against forces of domination or subjugation. I contend that the resistential force of asceticism is even more starkly apparent when examining a true renunciant, in this case one who as both a woman and a political subject is doubly vulnerable to domination. Isabella’s vows imbue her with a kind of stature—and indeed, power—not typically open to women in Elizabethan society. They also allow her, as one editor of the play has noted, to sidestep the prescribed gender roles of wife, widow, mother, and whore repeatedly offered by the play.41 However, the play must ultimately reject the nun’s calling as antithetical to the values of protestant England. As a nun, Isabella, we can surmise, would have engendered contradictory feelings in members of Shakespeare’s audience. Institutional asceticism was a form a Christian worship long since exploded, done in not only by Cromwell’s visitations and Henry VIII’s edicts, but by the theological changes discussed above. The early modern audience had been trained, in fact, to respond negatively to Catholic clergymen of all stripes on the stage by a long parade of scheming bishops, treacherous cardinals, greedy, bumbling friars, and hypocritical monks: and even worse in the pamphlets and polemical tracts.42 However, the characterization of Isabella offers little fodder for the anti-papist. While some readers may quibble with her particular choices or strategies in the play, most would agree with Bawcutt’s estimation of her as “a young woman of exceptional strength and character” placed in a difficult situation who “surely deserves our sympathy.”43 Measure for Measure is a play that, as often noted by critics, 41 See Ivo Kamps and Karen Raber, eds., Measure for Measure: Texts and Contexts (Boston and New York: Bedford/St. Martins, 2004), 196. 42 See Peter Lake, “Anti-Popery: The Structure of a Prejudice,” in Conflict in Early Stuart England: Studies in Religion and Politics, 1603-1642, ed. Richard Cust and Ann Hughes (London, 1989), pp.72-106; and Lake and Questier, The Antichrist’s Lewd Hat. 43 Bawcutt, 56.

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resists easy classifications, and Isabella is no exception. While a typical protestant might not have found admirable her vows of celibacy (and even that claim assumes an audience member with a fairly developed understanding of theology—hardly a certainty), her resistance to Angelo is a defense of her chastity: a distinction that makes all the difference in the world in an Episcopal worldview. She is, thus, not torn between her brother’s life and popish monasticism, but between filial love and a cardinal protestant virtue. Our sympathy for Isabella need not necessarily include sympathy for her religious vows; it is sufficient to say for the present that we are (more or less) on her side. It is clear, then, that Isabella is not born from the polemical tradition of sexualization discussed above and analyzed by Dolan. While she may be misguided from a contemporary perspective, she is not hypocritical, nor is she held up as an object of ridicule, nor subjected to pornographic debasement. While Angelo’s attempted seduction recalls similar seductions of nuns by priests in polemical depictions, there is no sense in the play that the audience should be amused or aroused by the proceedings, nor of course is the audience given the Protestant satisfaction of the nun’s eventual acquiescence. Despite David Stevenson’s claim that “a partial not-liking of Isabella is written into the play,”44 the full brunt of audience outrage seems meant to fall upon Angelo, the Puritan, whose draconian moral regulation and outrageous hypocrisy overwhelm any possible like-minded judgment of Isabella. The ambiguity of her moral position—and the ambivalence she has inspired in audiences and critics— evinces the binary significance of the nun herself in the Early Modern, post reformation imagination. On the one hand, the most polemical Protestant voices going back to Thomas Cromwell, John Bale, and even Calvin, took great pleasure in excoriating the nun for her hypocrisy, her presumption, and her slothfulness. On the other hand, a society that policed and controlled female sexuality as rigorously as early modern England, that placed high value on female chastity, and that saw sexuality as almost exclusively a matter of male agency, would doubtless have responded sympathetically to the sexual “purity” of a figure like Isabella. In some ways, the nun—obedient, chaste, and pious—possesses the qualities of an ideal Renaissance wife. What an early modern comedy demands is not the excoriation, humiliation, or debasement of such a figure, but her gentle submission at last to male sovereignty in marriage. 44 David Stevenson, The Achievement of Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1966), 83.

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Thus, the play seems determined from its outset to bring Isabella back into the light, even as it demonstrates the power and stature of her position. Our introduction to Isabella it Act 1 immediately reminds us of the play’s orthodox protestant context. Having just seen her brother hauled off to prison on the imperative of the state, the audience finds Isabella pronouncing the holy wonder of her own imminent self-imposed enclosure: Isabella: And have you nuns no farther privileges? Francisca: Are these not large enough? Isabella: Yes, truly. I speak not as desiring more, But rather wishing a more strict restraint Upon the sisterhood, the votarists of St. Clare. (2.1.1-5)

These lines make two things clear about Isabella’s relationship to the convent of St. Claire: first, that she has not yet formally taken the monastic vows that will sever her permanently from the world (she addresses the nuns using the second person, not the first person plural); and second, that her ascetic zeal exceeds even what is required by the rules of the convent. Isabella thus stands at a double remove from the other nuns: she is less bound by the demands of renunciation than they, but she is also desirous of an even more thorough spiritual cleansing than they have undergone. This excess partially justifies the long train of critics going back to G. Wilson Knight who have found Isabella unsympathetic for her frigidity.45 The play also seems intentionally, though subtly, to invoke a traditional protestant anti-monastic line of attack by having Isabella refer to her religious vows as “restraint.” Restraint, of course, can be exercised upon oneself or imposed on an individual by external forces. The Foucauldian treatment of asceticism discussed above is built upon considering ascetic restraint as self-imposed: the monk or nun polices his or her own behavior—exercises restraint—and thereby is subjectively empowered. However, in the above passage, the position of the preposition “upon” seems to indicate that Isabella is using restraint in the sense of a means of control wielded by an external actor: the type of discipline Foucault associates not with monasteries, of course, but with prisons. This distinction between self-restraint as a means of empowerment and external restraint as a mechanism of domination is crucial to unpacking the orthodoxy behind what Shakespeare here depicts. The difference between the monastery and the prison—cousins, surely, in the best of cases— 45

G. Wilson Knight, The Wheel of Fire: Interpretations of Shakespearean Tragedy. (London: Methuen, 1949), 93.

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hinges on this distinction. Yet not only the pronoun “upon,” but the word “restraint” itself demands that a connection, rather than a distinction, be drawn between the two institutions. Isabella’s desire for “restraint” is voiced just two scenes after Lucio, watching Claudio hauled off to his cell on Angelo’s orders, asks: “Why, how now, Claudio? Whence comes this restraint?” (1.1.101, emphasis mine). To which Claudio answers: From too much liberty, my Lucio, liberty. As surfeit is the father of much fast, So every scope, by the immoderate use, Turns to restraint. (1.1.102-15)

Here we see Shakespeare playing with the two meanings of “restraint”: Lucio’s question is about external, forcible restraint. Claudio’s answer is clever precisely because it invokes both meanings of the word: feasting, self-indulgence, leads to fasting, a form of self-restraint, just as transgressive immorality—an excess of liberty—leads to forcible restraint by the law. The asceticism of fasting melds seamlessly into the subjugation of imprisonment. The careful reader or the closely attuned auditor may thus, upon Isabella’s utterance of the word “restraint” in 1.4, be immediately thrown back to the scene of Claudio’s arrest and imprisonment. The word “restraint” becomes a kind of verbal heterotopia: a word through which the contrary but related institutions of monastery and prison are not only juxtaposed, but essentially amalgamated. The word ties Isabella’s monastic renunciation to her brother’s imprisonment, and signals to an early modern audience that this comedy must dramatize not only one, but two liberations. At the same time that the play positions Isabella as a prisoner-nun waiting for the gift of liberty-marriage, it cannot avoid demonstrating how profoundly empowering Isabella’s position is. That, historically, many European nuns clung to their lives in the convent long after the tide of reformation swept over them attests not only to the fact that they possessed a sincere devotion to the ascetic life, but that they saw in their post monastic fates an intolerable diminution in status. Unlike former priests and even monks, who could, if so inclined, easily adapt to lives as protestant ministers or Anglican priests, two decidedly unattractive fates typically awaited the “liberated” nun: in the best case, marriage to a former member of the secular clergy now freed from his vows of celibacy;

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in the worst case, the weakness and dependency of old maidhood.46 Either situation—barring marriage to an extremely powerful member of the clergy or, in rare cases, a gentleman of the nobility—represented a kind of subjugation to a nun who had become accustomed to answering to no man, and who was “free” within the confines of the conventual laws from the patriarchal domination that characterized every other facet of postreformation society. This was particularly true for the mothers of rank who had enjoyed positions of authority.47 But regardless of rank, the habit conveyed a kind of status: it elevated a woman above her secular peers by marking her as an extraordinary practitioner of her faith, one who had chosen the celibate ideal over the “concession” of mere chastity. Isabella is merely a novitiate, not by any means a mother, and yet, even within the monastery she seems to be marked by qualities which distinguish her from her fellow nuns, expressing, as discussed above, a desire for renunciation beyond what is expected. She is also beautiful, and it is the convergence of her physical beauty and her statuesque ascetic firmness that makes her so extraordinary to those who look upon her. This sentiment is first expressed by Lucio the bawd, who finds his gutter-mouth scrubbed in the presence of such a striking figure: I would not—though ‘tis my familiar sin With maids to seem the lapwing and to jest, Tongue far from heart—play with all virgins so. I hold you as a thing enskied and sainted By your renouncement, an immortal spirit And to be talked with in sincerity As with a saint. (1.4.31-37)

Performance matters here: the lines, of course, can be played as sarcasm or hyperbole, as Isabella herself interprets them. But Lucio’s brief but strong insistence in response to Isabella’s rebuke points us toward a non-ironic interpretation: Lucio is genuinely impressed by the spiritual gravitas of Isabella’s presence. His description of her as a thing divorced from the material—“enskied” is Shakespeare’s very apt neologism—fits the austerity of her manner and stands out particularly through contrast with the “teeming foison” (43) of Juliet and Claudio’s sexual reproduction.

46 47

Wiesner-Hanks, 15-16 Wiesner-Hanks, 16-17

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This same power that silences the irrepressible Lucio also heats the “snow broth” that flows in Angelo’s veins. The precisian, who fills his days with “profits of the mind, study, and fast,” certainly sees in Isabella, as many critics have noted, a reflection of his own cherished moral severity, but there is more at work here than mere narcissism. To say that Angelo is merely falling in love with himself, or an image of himself, is to simplify a very complex set of reactions. I agree with Windmayer that Angelo’s attraction to Isabella is first and foremost of a sexual nature, and we may mark the kindling of his lust from the moment that Lucio perceives the onset of his erection.48 Is it touch that causes Angelo to relent? Is it Isabella’s rhetoric? Or do beauty, speech, and the unassailable nature of her physical person combine to entice Angelo? I have already discussed above how the nun was a uniquely titillating figure in seventeenth-century popular genres, in which sexualizing nuns becomes a way of demystifying them, robbing them of their threateningly Catholic power by subjecting them to normal human impulses. Those critics that point out that Angelo is enticed by Isabella’s chaste and moral nature do not go far enough. Angelo, very precisely and specifically, wants to rape a nun, a fact made clear in his explicitly monastic language: “Having waste ground enough, Shall we desire to raze the sanctuary and pitch our evils there?” (2.3, 177-179). Given that England in the 17th century was still pockmarked by the ruins of the great religious houses shuttered by Henry VIII, the image of a razed sanctuary cannot be dismissed as a generalized metaphor of the sacred defiled. By figuring his lust for Isabella as a need to urinate on the grounds of a former convent or monastery, Angelo is expressing the same need to debase and demystify that we find in the more scurrilous material discussed by Dolan. For all the doubling language in the play (“cunning enemy, to catch a saint, with saints dost bait thy hook”), a religiously sensitive reading of Angelo’s attempted seduction of Isabella must see it not as a meeting of mirror images of righteousness, but as a contest between two marginal (at best) figures in Jacobean society: a godly Puritan and a Catholic nun. Isabella’s fate in Measure for Measure, however, is not to be exposed as ascetic fraud, any more than it is Angelo’s fate to be severely punished; the generic conventions of comedy call for a gentler rehabilitation of social schismatics. Like Angelo, Isabella must be “reappropriated” in a way that is consistent not only with comedic harmony, but with official Elizabethan policies of inclusiveness. Many critics have been bothered by 48

Widmayer, 67.

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the Duke’s leniency in dealing with Angelo, particularly feminist critics who find anything short of execution for the Puritan to be an intolerable lapse of justice. Such dissatisfaction is justified, of course, when the play is viewed through the prism of gender relations, or simply when our modern attitudes about the heinousness of rape are applied to our reading of the play. However, placing the pardon in the context of early seventeenth-century religious conflict might perhaps lead us to a different understanding of the play’s ending. The Elizabethan Settlement of 1559, and later the Hampton Court Conference called by James I, promoted a view of English Protestantism that was nominally, if not always in practice, inclusive, expressing general tolerance towards Protestant sectarians, including at least moderate Puritans. While Angelo’s radically ascetic nature is shown to mask a hypocritical libidinousness, the solution is not to expel him from Viennese society, but to “reform” him by firmly and properly affixing him to a connubial partner; to, in essence, bring him into the fold of correct familio-social interrelations. “Look that you love your wife,” the Duke orders Angelo, for “her worth” is worth his life: what is required for pardon is for Angelo to dispense with his presumptions toward frosty perfection, so redolent of a works-based morality, and embrace the Protestant ideal of procreative marriage. For Isabella, the play must rush to perform a similar reappropriation. The Duke’s proposal beckons the votaress back into the world of familial and sexual responsibility that she had renounced by entering the convent. Without giving her a chance to respond, the play ends with the Duke reaching for, and perhaps taking (depending on staging) her hand. As her touch once inflamed the gross passions of Angelo, so now does the Duke’s touch signal a re-subjugation of this female ascetic by the correctness of protestant patriarchy. This coupling of “friar” and nun, hearkening back as it does to the tropes of anti-Catholic satire, serves here a grander purpose as part of a staged tableau of the Jacobean absolutist social order. Isabella’s silence, engendering uncertainty in readers and directors for centuries, is, in fact, the strongest assertion of her assent possible. The convent and the habit have no place in the Elizabethan happy ending, built as the genre is upon marital bliss. Shakespeare leaves Isabella silent because her only possible response—enthusiastic acceptance—would be as artistically unsatisfying as it is generically and socially necessary.

CHAPTER TWO FROM DAVENANT TO DUFFETT: STAGING SHAKESPEARE’S THE TEMPEST DURING THE ENGLISH RESTORATION MISTY KRUEGER

During the English Restoration a handful of Tempest adaptations graced the stage. In 1667 William Davenant and John Dryden first staged The Tempest, or The Enchanted Island, a play that would continue to be a favorite in London well into the 18th century. In 1674 the Duke’s Company modified Davenant and Dryden’s comedy and produced an operatic adaptation of their Tempest.1 In the same year Thomas Duffett’s farce, The Mock-Tempest; or The Enchanted Castle, satirized Davenant and Dryden’s play. Further, 1674 saw the publication of a mock-poem by an unknown author who pokes fun at Davenant and Dryden’s Tempest. The legacy of William Shakespeare’s The Tempest undergoes trials and perhaps some errors as the plot of the original early 17th-century play first shifts from a politically-minded romance to a Restoration sex comedy about a matchmaking father, some silly fools, drunken sailors, and finally to a burlesque about bawds, a pimp, and Bridewell prison. Ultimately these changes draw our attention to the ways in which Restoration playwrights’ appropriations of Shakespearean drama develop caricatures of sex and gender that both exploit late 17th-century conceptions of the 1 For centuries Thomas Shadwell was credited with adding songs and overseeing the addition of new scenery to the play, therein privileging him as the author of another Restoration adaptation of The Tempest; yet, in the last century critics have questioned Shadwell’s authorship. See essays by D. M. Walmsey, G. Thorn-Drury, and Charles E. Ward for an early 20th-century discussion of this problem. Regardless of the legitimate title of author or mere operatic enhancer, Shadwell likely contributed, alongside composer, Matthew Locke, to the Restoration Tempest. For more information on this discussion, see James A. Winn’s work as an example.

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body and stage perversions of femininity and masculinity. In the end, we find that the Restoration Tempests distort the innocence of Shakespeare’s singular female character, Miranda, in order to capitalize both on contemporary attitudes about libertine sexuality in the late 1660s through the mid-1670s, and the titillating presence of actresses on the English stage in late 17th-century London.

*** Shakespeare’s works entered the repertory of Restoration theatre when Charles II’s edict to reopen the theaters gave exclusive patents to two producers who received “old stock” plays that were staged before 1642 when the London theaters were forced to close. Some scholars argue that in 1661 Thomas Killigrew, the manager of the King’s Company, received the “better” stock of Shakespearean plays, and further suggest that William Davenant, manager of the Duke of York’s Company, was allotted what Gary Taylor calls the “second string plays” (15), which included Hamlet, Twelfth Night, Macbeth, and The Tempest. Davenant was by far the most creative and successful innovator of Shakespearean adaptations in the Restoration. His mechanical scenery enhanced the visual appeal of drama, and he mixed spoken dialogue with songs to form early Restoration “semi-operas” (Taylor 19). Davenant’s adaptations also capitalized on the novelty of actresses performing on the English stage. Audiences of Twelfth Night, for instance, enjoyed the trick of the actress playing a breeches part, wherein she revealed the curvature of her rear and exposed her legs. Restoration theatergoers would have to wait until the end of the 1660s for the tour de force that combined all of these elements—namely in William Davenant and John Dryden’s 1667 The Tempest; or The Enchanted Island. On November 7, 1667, the Duke’s Company staged the first adaptation of Shakespeare’s The Tempest, but much of the original play had been stripped away to make room for a more modern comedy. According to John Dryden’s 1669 preface to the play, first printed in 1670, Davenant and Dryden co-authored the new play. Although we cannot verify how much of the Restoration comedy was imagined by Davenant and/or composed by Dryden, Dryden’s preface attributes much of the adaptation to Davenant’s wit and his “judicious” (3) corrections of the junior

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playwright’s writing. 2 Unlike Dryden’s Essay of Dramatic Poesy and his future prefaces, which read as confident manifestos that authenticate his emendations of Shakespeare’s language and plot, the 1669 preface aims to justify the new alterations to an old play and introduce Restoration audiences to Dryden as the newest adaptor—a “Neander”—of Shakespearean dramas.3 In the preface, Dryden thanks Davenant for directing him to “admire” the “Poet for whom he [Davenant] had particularly a high veneration” (3): Shakespeare, Davenant’s supposed godfather. Dryden finishes the preface by saying: I am satisfi’d I could never have receiv’d so much honour in being thought the Author of any Poem how excellent soever, as I shall from the joining my imperfections with the merit and name of Shakespear and Sir William Davenant. (5)

The preface painstakingly bridges the gap between Shakespeare and Davenant, therein honoring the recently deceased Davenant, who died in 1668. It is important to keep in mind how playwrights in the first two decades of the Restoration handled Shakespeare’s name. Shakespeare was not yet venerated as “The Bard,” an appellation that would develop in the 18th century proper. Thus, it is useful to consider how Dryden valorizes Shakespeare’s reputation in the preface and in the play’s prologue. The preface explains how the Restoration Tempest came into being contra another sea-related adaptation of John Fletcher’s work, and Dryden places Shakespeare’s opus on a pedestal, it seems, in order to set up an attack on a rival play, an adaptation of Fletcher’s Sea-Voyage, which was staged five weeks before the opening of the Restoration The Tempest. Dryden’s defense of Shakespeare, then, functions to support the source for his own play rather than to merely complement Shakespeare’s. Dryden writes: Those who have seen his [Fletcher’s] Sea-Voyage, may easily discern that it was a Copy of Shakespear’s Tempest: the Storm, the desart Island, and 2

In this quotation and in subsequent passages, I am citing page numbers and line numbers from the California edition of Dryden’s Works, edited by Maximillian Novak. 3 Here I refer to the character of Neander who represents Dryden in the Essay, first printed in 1668. Neander is the voice of the playwright that proposes a theory of Restoration drama: one that defends Shakespeare and Ben Jonson, addresses the Aristotelian unities, and discusses rhyme.

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the Woman who had never seen a Man, are all sufficient testimonies of it. (3)

Scholars such as Brian Corman have argued that Fletcher’s comedies, rather than Shakespeare’s, were more suitable sources for Restoration comedic drama because of shifting theatrical tastes; here we might find that Dryden felt the need to muster support for his and Davenant’s decision to stage a Shakespearean play in the form of comedy, rather than a Fletcherian one. Dryden likely labels Fletcher’s original a copy of Shakespeare’s in order to make a parallel: The Storm (the adaptation) appears as a mere copy of The Enchanted Island. This sentiment is reinforced later in the play’s prologue in lines 15-19: The Storm which vanish’d on the Neighb’ring shore, Was taught by Shakespear’s Tempest first to roar. That innocence and beauty which did smile In Fletcher, grew on this Enchanted Isle. But Shakespear’s Magick could not copy’d be, Within that Circle none durst walk but he.

Ultimately, the preface provides the grounds for Davenant and Dryden’s liberal additions to Shakespeare’s play; after all, the adaptors had to find a way to make the old play their own and to please new audiences. Restoration playwrights viewed Shakespeare’s plays as skeletons that needed fleshing out in order to be made fit for Restoration audiences’ tastes.4 We see evidence of this change in Dryden’s preface when he claims that Davenant “soon found that somewhat might be added to the Design of Shakespear” (4)—that is, the proliferation of female characters and sexual intrigue. Dryden indicates that Davenant design’d the Counterpart to Shakespear’s Plot, namely that of a Man who had never seen a Woman; that by this means those two Characters of Innocence and Love might the more illustrate and commend each other. (4)

Indeed the Davenant-Dryden Tempest populates an enchanted island with a handful of characters, including a sister for Miranda, a lover for Ariel, a sister for Caliban, and a young man, Hippolito, the rightful Duke of Mantua, who has been sequestered on Prospero’s island and has never seen a woman. The addition of Hippolito, Dryden argues, gives the play a sense of balance; according to Dryden, Davenant estimated that 4

Paulina Kewes, Jean I. Marsden, and Michael Dobson, among others, have argued this point.

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Shakespeare’s Miranda deserved a counterpart who also had not seen the opposite sex before. However, instead of emending the plot to suggest that Ferdinand had never seen a woman (which is too improbable) Davenant mediates the plot by adding Hippolito. The playwrights also decided to add a lover for Hippolito: Dorinda, Miranda’s new sister. The additional characters create a complicated love triangle, or a square, as Hippolito falls in lust, or love, with both Dorinda and Miranda and decides fight in a deadly duel with Ferdinand in order to steal Miranda from him. Dryden and Davenant’s added characters greatly change Shakespeare’s original plot. Instead of focusing solely on a design in which a father pairs his only daughter with a king’s son in order to ensure political security, Davenant and Dryden’s Prospero intends to marry off a second daughter, as well, to the sequestered duke in order to create perfect marital matches for all of his daughters. In doing so Davenant and Dryden slightly skew Shakespeare’s matchmaking. While both matches set things right politically—tying all loose ends—the characters spend the bulk of the comedy mocking any semblance of love in order to reinforce Restoration attitudes about youthful ignorance, effeminacy, and hyper-sexuality. The playwrights further complicate the original play’s presentation of sex, sexuality, and gender by giving Caliban a new sister, the sexually-perverse Sycorax, who happens to share the same name as her mother and also seems to share an incestuous bed with her brother.5 By enhancing Caliban’s original claim to the island in Shakespeare’s play, the new playwrights capitalize on, and manipulate, claims to monarchical right in the Restoration as they marry off Trincalo to Caliban’s sister so that the sailor can have “legitimate” rule over the island. Of particular interest here is the way in which Davenant and Dryden, both royalists, ironically parrot inherited monarchy by attempting to marry off the sailors to a female monster who will bastardize the island-nation with unsuitable heirs (as did Charles II during the Restoration). 5

More characters are added to the play, and Dryden explains the addition of “comical” sailors. In Davenant and Dryden’s comedy, Trincalo and Stephano are sailors who have cronies. The playwrights give the pair an audience on the island with the addition of mariners Mustacho and Ventoso, alongside a less dangerous Caliban. Ultimately, Davenant and Dryden displace the political implications of Gonzalo’s speech about a utopian commonwealth with the utterly ridiculous jockeying for power that occurs between the sailors, who begin a new civil war after they believe that one or more of the sailors will rule over this new home in the absence of any real royalty. For a full analysis of the sailors, see work by Michael Dobson (Making of the National Poet), Katharine Eisaman Maus, and Nancy Klein Maguire.

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While the changes to Shakespeare’s play have perplexed and frustrated readers centuries later who believed that the Restoration Tempest bastardized Shakespeare’s plot, John Bishop in his essay, “Authority in the Restoration Tempest,” reminds us that in the Restoration “the most popular elements of the play, in fact, were precisely those the adapters had invented: The Tempest was not to be performed in any version resembling Shakespeare’s until 1746” (54-55). The modified play had a long initial run (a minimum of seven performances to start) and troupes reprised the play throughout the Restoration because audiences enjoyed the additions. As a testament to the play’s early popularity, repeat theatergoer Samuel Pepys, who attended the play eight times between 1667 and 1669, praised in his November 7, 1667, Diary entry the pleasurable songs, particularly those sung by women, and the “innocent” business of the play (847). The prologue, included in the 1670 edition, provides another clue as to what truly interested Pepys. While this theatrical artifact pays duty to “old Shakespear’s honour’d dust” in line 3, it also reveals a remarkable detail about The Enchanted Island’s staging. We learn exactly what enchanted playgoers, Pepys included: the breeches parts. In its offering of insufficient actors as an excuse for the multiplication of breeches parts, the prologue explains in lines 29-30 that the Duke’s Company was “forced t’employ / One of our Women to present a Boy”; and in lines 31-32 the prologue goes on to claim that this “transformation” in acting “exceed[s] all the Magick in the Play.” The tongue-in-cheek apology playfully adds that audiences should not expect a revelation of the female in disguise at the end of the play, as most comedies do, for the actress playing Hippolito, and the one playing Ariel for that matter, performed the male parts throughout the comedy. The final six lines of the prologue state: Let none expect in the last Act to find, Her Sex transform’d from man to Woman-kind. Whate’er she was before the Play began, All you shall see of her is perfect man. Or if your fancy will be further led, To find her Woman, it must be abed.

Rather than asking an audience to put the actress’s body and sexuality aside, the prologue draws attention to these aspects. The Duke’s Company banks on the fact that audiences will enjoy watching a female play the part of a sexually inexperienced male character, Hippolito—and perhaps that audience members might even find themselves later in the actress’s dressing room or bed. Conceivably, King Charles II did; for Sandra Clark

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claims that the playwrights designed the part of Hippolito for Mary Davis, the king’s future mistress, even though Maximillian Novak and George Guffey suggest that Davis might have played the part of Ariel and Jane Long the part of Hippolito (Clark 281-2, Novak and Guffey 320). 6 In addition to the cross-dressed parts of Ariel and Hippolito, Davenant might have also devised another “sex” trick: the potential male casting of Caliban’s sister, Sycorax, would further highlight the production’s genderbending. Susan Iwanisziw’s essay, “The Shameful Allure of Sycorax,” suggests that a male actor likely played the part of Sycorax in order to physically show the island native’s monstrosity, which would add to the theatrical joke that is at the heart of the Duke’s Company’s casting. A reading of the preface and the play, however, does not provide clear answers to some thought-provoking questions about this staging and audience members’ reception. Did the playwrights intend to write a male part for a female actress, or did the staging happen to complement the idea? Did late 17th-century audiences view Hippolito as a womanish man or the actress as a manly woman? Were the dramatists staging what Barbara Murray has described as a kind of “lesbian” scene between the naïve woman-who-had-never-seen-a-man, Dorinda, and the man-who-had never seen-a-woman, Hippolito? Are there homosexual implications in the scenes where Caliban prostitutes Sycorax (likely played by a man) to the sailors, and when Trincalo laments that he will have to bed this hideous creature? Whatever the case, the gender-bending, or gender-blending, in the Davenant-Dryden adaptation of The Tempest mocks gender standards and the latent sexuality associated with actresses and foreign women in the Restoration.7 Elizabeth Murray’s phrase, “gender hybridism,”8 proves to be useful for analyzing the effects of Davenant and Dryden’s casting of characters who were likely meant to be seen as male-female, and masculine-feminine, hybrids. Like Shakespeare’s boy actors playing female parts, these Restoration characters signify a type of theatrical hybridity that comically deconstructs and then destabilizes sex and gender paradigms, but with a focus in the late 17th century on the physical 6

Novak and Guffey explain in their critical apparatus to The Tempest that Mary Davis (and later Mrs. Gosnell) played Ariel and that Jane Long probably played the part of Hippolito. They base this claim on the fact that Long had played breeches parts (320). 7 A number of studies take up the study of Restoration actresses and public views of their sexuality. Of note, see Elizabeth Howe’s The First English Actresses. 8 I draw upon this term as Barbara Murray cites it in “Transgressing Nature’s Laws” (31).

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attractiveness and availability of female bodies on stage. In appropriating Homi K. Bhabha’s post-colonial conception of hybridity and M.M. Bakhtin’s literary theory of hybridization, we might find that the Duke’s Company’s staging ruse signifies a new practice, or language, of sex-andgender in the Restoration theaters: It is a mixture of two social languages within the limits of a single utterance, an encounter, within the arena of an utterance, between two different linguistic consciousnesses, separated from one another by an epoch, by social differentiation, or by some other factor. (Bakhtin 358)

The cross-sex casting and gender-blending in the Restoration Tempest, then, comically complicates the “mixture” of sex and gender in a “single utterance”—that is in the words of the actress, or actor, and in the site of the cross-dressed body. We might even refer to such a semblance as what Elizabeth Harvey calls “transvestite ventriloquism,” wherein one sex authors the voice of another (16). Ultimately, we find that Davenant and Dryden’s “island” is not simply enchanted because of sorcery, but because of the magic of gender and sexual transformation on stage. As Jean I. Marsden has argued, Restoration adaptations, or appropriations, of Shakespeare’s dramas show a “direct influence of changes in the world outside the theater” (The Reimagined Text 16). Often these changes pertain to monarchical and factional politics, wherein the plays offer a “repoliticization” of earlier dramas to comment on contemporary political crises, such as inherited monarchy (16). At other times, the alterations pertain to changes in the world inside the theater. These “representations of gender,” as Marsden states, “provide a paradigm”: “the portrayal of women shows the ways in which Shakespeare’s works were altered in order to survive in a theater which had adapted to a changed social climate” (16). This social climate, we know, calls for same-sex acting of characters. As theater-manager Killigrew states in his 1662 grant, “women’s parts” from earlier plays “therein have byn acted by men in the habit of women, at which some have taken offence, [and] for the preventing of these abuses for the future” women will play female parts (London Stage, Part I xxiv). Killigrew adds: All woemen’s part…may be performed by woemen soe long as their recreacones, which by reason of the abuses aforesaid were scandalous and offensive, may by such reformation be esteemed not onely harmless delight, but also useful and instructive. (van Lennep xxiv).

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Given Killigrew’s claims, and the Restoration mandate that overturned boy actors’ playing of female parts, we might expect thereafter that female parts would be played by women and male parts played by men. Some five years later, nonetheless, the Duke’s Company overturns the mandate as the Restoration Tempest shows at least two women playing male parts and possibly one man playing a female part. The Duke’s theater-manager Davenant surely had a hand in this manipulation of same-sex parts. The Tempest, in my mind, comes to represent from the start—before an actor or actress steps foot on stage in character—a parody of the profession. In this instance, the stage physically represents an enchanted space that reveals the magic of the sexualized, female body by removing the petticoats and showing the curves of a woman’s legs, hips, and buttocks. It would be difficult for an audience member to fully subscribe to viewing a male character, such as Hippolito, as masculine, or even a man for that matter, because of the casting; and that problem precisely contributes to the humor of the play’s dialogue. When an ignorant Hippolito (played by a female) ironically says in one of his earliest lines, “Women! I never heard of them before” (II.iv.32), one can imagine the hilarious impact of these words spoken in a Restoration theater. Likewise, lines such as, “I was told a Woman was my Enemy” (II.v.45) also read as ironic, as a woman ventriloquizes these words. Barbara Murray reads the situation similarly when she states in “Transgressing Nature’s Laws”: “A woman cannot really play a man’s part; she may mimic masculine autonomy, but her femaleness cedes it” (32). If we agree with Murray, it seems that our Hippolito is truly a Hippolita. Restoration audiences would have recognized something curious in Hippolito’s name in the first place. The Tempest’s Hippolito is both male-female by character-actress, but the name reads as a copy of Fletcher’s female character, Hippolita, in The SeaVoyage. Ironically, the name closely resembles one from a play that Dryden claimed was a mere copy of Shakespeare’s. In the end, we cannot overlook lines that reinforce the stage convention. For instance, when Prospero asks Miranda to tell him what she thinks of Hippolito, she remarks of the beau: “As of the gayest thing I ever saw, so fine that it appear’d more fit to be belov’d than fear’d, and seem’d so near my kind, that I did think I might have call’d it Sister” (III.i.15-17). In addition to questioning how the playwrights created breeches parts, we must consider how theatrical companies inverted the early 17th-century stage’s serious practice of boy acting to capitalize on the vulgar humor associated with male cross-dressing. What are we to do with the possibility that the Restoration Sycorax was played by a man? The actor’s maleness would certainly affect any presentation of femininity, and as I

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will discuss later, it is very difficult to associate femininity with such an outrageous character. If the Duke’s Company lacked enough men to play male parts, on the surface it makes little sense why a man would play Sycorax’s part, rather than Hippolito’s or Ariel’s. In coupling the play’s performance of male characters by actresses and a “gargantuan” female character by an actor, we can read the situation as such: the performance of Sycorax by a man, perhaps James Taswell, adds to the play’s caricature of same-sex play-acting (Iwanszisw 10). These two examples speak to issues of performativity by capitalizing on “prohibition and taboo,” to quote Judith Butler (Bodies 95). In thinking about these characters, we might return to the basic premises from Butler’s Gender Trouble and Bodies That Matter. We find in these theatrical performances a questioning of essentialism and the very notion what is natural. We are forced to examine ontology and the idea of a core gender. We even have to consider the performance of stylized gender acts, and the violation of the sexed body by way of anatomy and the sexualized body by way of caricature. This gender-bending/gender-blending practice in the DavenantDryden Tempest signifies a breakdown of the “ritualized production” of gender. This practice even comes to symbolize a kind of “intersexed”9 representation on stage as Hippolito and Sycorax as examples are neither singularly male, nor female—but both. These figures are in danger of becoming what Julia Kristeva calls “the abject”—a space where meaning could collapse entirely. One could argue that the drama satirizes paradigms of sexual innocence and aggression, for the play calls our attention to a parody of sexuality—both on the parts of actresses and characters. The island embodies a strange feminine space; in the case of Prospero’s daughters it represents a state of nature as a state of childish innocence. The scenes with Miranda and her sister, Dorinda, best exemplify a lampoon on sexual ignorance. Davenant and Dryden take Shakespeare’s Miranda, whose name we know indicates that she is worthy of admiration and wonder, and turn her into an immature girl who wonders where babies come from and questions if men are human. While Shakespeare’s Miranda is unacquainted with Europeans and any world beyond the island, Davenant and Dryden’s Miranda and her sister are ignorant on all accounts, especially those related to the female body. Dorinda mistakes the nobles’ wrecked ship for a sea creature, and Miranda characterizes the ship as a 9

Here I quote a term used repeatedly by Butler in her work, Undoing Gender.

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female body that contains creatures inside of its belly—in other words, men. Davenant and Dryden mock the birds-and-the-bees by having the “unlearned virgins”10 explain that their godlike father has taught them that “Women were made for [man]” (I.ii.320)—even though they had yet to meet one. The play could take up a serious conversation about creationism or patriarchy, but the girls’ dialogue quickly sputters into pure nonsense as Dorinda asks her wiser sister if women were made to be man’s food. She worries, “What, that he [man] should eat us Sister?” (I.ii.321), and Davenant and Dryden extend the joke as Miranda and Dorinda hypothesize that in this distorted Paradise women sprout from the ground instead of growing in a woman’s womb, and one cannot help but laugh when the sisters declare that if they look carefully, they might find more women planted, and budding, all over the island. In this strange patriarchy no mothers exist at all, unless we count Mother Earth. The play jests about labor—read here as pregnancy—when Prospero talks to Dorinda about the ways in which men hurt women. She tells her father that if she finds a man she will treat him like pet and “stroak [him] and make [him] gentle” (II.iv.109) so that he will not hurt her, but Prospero warns his daughters not to trust men, or to get near them for that matter, for fear of feeling “a pain full nine Months” (II.iv.112). Of course, the girls have no idea what this means, for they believe that children bloom like Cabbage Patch Kids spontaneously growing in an imaginary garden. While in Act III, scene 1 of Shakespeare’s 1610 Tempest, Ferdinand speaks to Miranda about painful labor, noting, “There be some sports are painful, and their labour / Delight in them sets off” (III.i.1-2), Davenant and Dryden address the pain of labor in sexual terms as they appropriate Ferdinand’s ideas about “labours pleasures” (III.i.7). The following example clarifies this point as Miranda defies her father by promising to see a man and retorts to Dorinda, “I had rather be in pain nine Months, as my Father threatn’d, than lose my longing” (II.iv.140-41). Here we must remember the sexual reputations, or longings, attributed to Restoration actresses, some of whom bore children to royalty. These lines and many others are good for a few laughs, and they not only speak to Prospero’s anxiety about sexuality, which is heightened in the Restoration Tempest, but also to what Katherine Eisaman Maus calls the “magic of sexual attraction” (78). Rather than portraying virgins as virtuous young women, Davenant and Dryden characterize Dorinda and 10 This phrase refers to the title of a chapter from Antonia Fraser’s The Weaker Vessel.

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Miranda as naïve children intent on exploring their curiosities; perhaps, that is what makes their desire to know the Other (man) so threatening to the patriarchal order painstakingly established by Prospero on this island. These young girls represent fears about women’s potential sexuality and impending fertility, a problem identified in Restoration literature.11 As such, Dorinda and Miranda’s sexual innocence signifies one end of a sexual spectrum; with each passing conversation, Davenant and Dryden manipulate Prospero’s control over his daughter’s sexuality and therein amplify the tension between fathers and what Laura Rosenthal refers to as young women’s amatory “subjectivity and objectification” (206). As is the case, young girls are inexperienced in the ways of the world, but as their father fears, virgins eventually receive a sexual education. Scholars and theorists have long understood that early modern fathers viewed their daughter’s sexuality as a commodity that represents male honor and symbolizes transactions between men; the young girl’s sexuality becomes what Luce Irigaray and Gayle Rubin would refer to as an object bandied between men and even a traffic in women. Davenant and Dryden’s dialogue between Prospero and his daughters, between the daughters solus, and between the daughters and their lovers make this point absolutely clear while at the same time offering a mockery of the serious situation. While the play’s “enchanted island” subtitle refers to sorcery, it also epitomizes Restoration audiences’ fascination with female sexuality. Davenant and Dryden’s “enchanted” island focuses on the delight of showing and talking about women’s bodies as opposed to highlighting the use of supernatural magic abounding in Shakespeare’s play. After all, in the Restoration Tempest, magic, or enchantment, comes to signify a social discourse about women’s bodies. Prospero describes women as having the power of “enchantment,” and he criticizes this power as “dangerous.” He warns Hippolito that men should stay away from women because these “dangerous enemies of men call’d women” (II.iv.31) are Fatally beauteous, and have killing Eyes, Their voices charm beyond the Nightingales, They are all enchantment, those who once behold ‘em. (II.iv.46-48)

Ultimately, in his words, men “Are made their slaves for ever” (II.iv.49). Ironically, the play situates women as both purely ignorant organisms, as 11 Pat Gill and Margaret Doody have discussed these latent fears as they relate to women’s sexuality and cunningness, and to gender and authorship, respectively.

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testified by the daughter’s conversation, and seductive creatures, as evidenced by Prospero’s and Hippolito’s discourse on women. Ignorance breeds sexual curiosity, and sexual curiosity leads to sexual domination. After all, Hippolito configures female latent, underdeveloped sexuality as something serpentine. He wonders if females “suck the poyson of the Earth,” and then compares them to “gaudy colour’d Serpents” (II.v.3-4). Ironically, women represent sexual vacuity, or “nothing” as Ros Ballaster claims in her work on the Earl of Rochester, and “surfeit,” to use Ballaster’s term to describe male views of excessive female sexuality in the Restoration. The Restoration Tempest takes up both ideas as it comically distorts serious concerns about the body, sexuality, and gender. We find this problem humorously parodied in dialogue, and physical staged in Hippolito’s part, wherein the playwrights situate Hippolito as a “cross-fertilization”: that is, “between a male character of extraordinary sexual restraint and a female character of extraordinary sexual appetite” (277), as Candy Schille argues in her study of the threats to order found in the play. Whether it appears in caricatures of female naivety or scenes addressing Hippolito’s sexual libertinism (a perversion of masculine libertinism because it is portrayed by a woman), the adaptation forces audiences and readers to re-examine female sexuality in Restoration culture. Whereas Shakespeare’s plays broach the ideology of “men in women’s clothing,” to refer to the title of Laura Levine’s seminal work on early modern anti-theatricality, Davenant and Dryden’s play further problematizes the issue with their creation of a new Sycorax—a character that is female in sex, but masculine in action and even masculinized by the cross-dressed acting. The playwrights openly address a monstrous kind of sexuality in their depiction of Sycorax. Like her Jacobean mother, the Restoration Sycorax represents the opposite spectrum of womankind: the gross, sexually aggressive monster. However, in considering that a man might have acted this part, the descriptions of this character direct audiences to perceive this figure as foreign and, in Kristevan terms, abject. She is large in stature, ugly, and sexually experienced; the play suggests that she engages in sexual activity with her brother. When Caliban introduces his sister to his new god, Trincalo, the drunken sailor who hopes to lay claim to the island, the drunkard oxymoronically calls her “monstrous fair” and indicates that he will “geld [the] Monster” (III.iii.67)—a pert reference to the male actor’s genitalia. The Restoration Sycorax also figures as dangerous because she imagines becoming a widow before she becomes a bride. She tells her brother, “I shall have all his fine things when I’m a Widow” (III.iii.31). No naïve virgin, Sycorax boasts that she

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will show Trincalo how to impregnate her; in a perversion of Shakespeare’s Caliban, who wants to rape Miranda and thereby populate the island with little Calibans, the Restoration Sycorax claims to her lover, “I’le shew thee how: thou shalt get me twenty Sycoraxes; and I’le get thee twenty Calibans” (III.iii.41-42). In speaking as if she were a nymph from a pastoral poem, Sycorax paints Trincalo a picture of sexual enterprise: “we will tumble in cool Plashes, and the soft Fens, / Where we will make us Pillows of Flags and Bull-rushes” (III.iii.45-46). This prospect makes the sailor nervous, for he advises Caliban: “Ev’ry thing in its season, Brother Monster; but you must counsel her; fair Maids must not be too forward” (III.iii.49-50). Clearly, Sycorax symbolizes the opposite of her female counterparts in Davenant and Dryden’s play. Her phallic “forward” sexuality frightens the men because she wields great linguistic and bodily power. Whereas Prospero micromanages his daughters’ encounters with Hippolito so that they will not lose their maidenheads, Caliban prostitutes his sister as a way to capitalize on her profligate sexuality. As Trincalo warns Caliban to counsel the “fair Maid” for her sexual aggression, we understand that he fears engaging in sexual intercourse with this “lawful inheritix” of the island because she is a “moon-worshipping, monstrous, sexually unconstrained, ignorant, linguistically-inept, and ugly” figure, to quote Susan Iwanisziw (11). Whereas the characterization of Dorinda and Miranda points to the problems associated with young women’s ignorance of budding sexuality, the characterization of Sycorax suggests a polarized fear of hypersexual women, and Iwanisziw reminds us to read this threat as one that places these anxieties in the body of a sexualized Other—the foreigner: a “comic-grotesque, African-Indian woman” (10). Foreign or not in heritage, her statements about what it means to be a wife reinforce cuckoldry anxieties rampant in Restoration sex comedies. When introduced to Stephano and the others she asks Trincalo, “May I not marry that other King and his two subjects, to help you anights?” (III.iv.154-55), and his immediate lament is, “who would not be a Cuckold?” (III.iv.159). Obviously, Dryden and Davenant extort the very idea of the hypersexual woman as monstrous. Beyond the dialogue, the casting of a male in the role only serves to reinforce everything that is wrong with Sycorax. She is an abjection, an aberration, of femininity because of her rampant libido; as far as a cross-dressed staging is concerned, she is frightening as well because the anatomical parts under her dress are male. If the playwrights complicate Hippolito’s sexuality by casting him as a female who cannot penetrate another female character, the inter-sexed Sycorax represents a distortion of femininity and sexuality because she might have the anatomical tool with which to sodomize other men. The inverse of

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Hippolito, she signifies the dangers of “men in women’s clothing,” thereby linking the dangers to anti-theatricalists fears in the earlier part of the century. As Hippolito and Sycorax are staged in the Davenant-Dryden Tempest, they “undo” gender, and their performances spotlight the doubledanger of libertine sexuality. *** From women who have not seen “men” to “women” who are ready to bed multiple men, Davenant and Dryden’s “enchanted island” is certainly a place where females represent portable commodities, much like their real-life counterparts in Restoration society (within and outside of the playhouse). Prospero manipulates his daughter’s conceptions of biological sex in order to control their desires for the opposite sex; Caliban sets out to populate the island with Sycoraxes, and gain political power, when he prostitutes his sister to the sailors. Thomas Duffett’s Mock-Tempest, or, The Enchanted Castle satirizes both plot points and the idea of female relatives as “moveable goods,” to quote Margaret Cavendish’s description of daughters in her Sociable Letters. Clearly, Duffett satirizes the Restoration Tempest—not the Shakespearean one. Hazelton Spencer, writing in the late 1920s, argues that Duffett “exercised his talent for throwing dirt at Shakespeare” (95), but a comparison of Duffett’s MockTempest with the Restoration Tempest shows that Duffett aimed his mudslinging at his contemporary competition. After the Duke’s Company staged a larger, more spectacular operatic version of the Tempest in 1674, the rival theatre staged a counter-production in November that parodies the most ridiculous elements of the Restoration Tempest, including the former play’s portrayal of female sexuality.12 While scholars do not know much about Duffett’s life, as Ronald Eugene DiLorenzo has noted, we know that his small corpus of plays include burlesques of two of the most successful Restoration plays—The Empress of Morocco and The Tempest—and that he worked with the King’s Company to woo audiences away from Dorset Garden. Like Davenant and Dryden’s Tempest, which the Duke’s Company (possibly at the hands of Shadwell) emended by adding 12 For more information about the King’s Company’s staging of the play, see Ronald Eugene DiLorenzo’s introduction to the play in Three Burlesque Plays of Thomas Duffett, and two articles, one by Marianne Szlyk and the other by Samuel L. Macey. Note that Szlyk addresses the farce as a “theatrical abrasive” against the Duke’s musical Tempest, but that she argues that Duffett satirizes Shakespeare and does not qualify as an adaptation. Macey, on the other hand, speaks of the play as a crude adaptation of Shakespeare.

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additional musical scenes, Duffett’s adaptation provides fertile ground for a humorous exploration of Restoration attitudes about sexual inexperience and profligacy, and women and wantonness. And like the former play’s prologue, Duffett’s introduction speaks to theatrical conventions, both in mocking the idea of a formal prologue and in asking the audience to focus on the actress’ sexualized body. The scopophilic introduction, acted by Joseph Haines and Betty Mackarel, specularizes Betty.13 Haines says in lines 17-19: Think of thy high calling Betty, now th’art here, They gaze and wish, but cannot reach thy Sphere, Though ev’ry one could squeeze thy Orange there.14

Haines implies that Betty was once a theatre orange-wench (prostitute), but that she has a “higher” calling now: actress. Haines connects her newfound career to that of a whore’s by offering to “spend five Guinnyes” (28) on her. In the prologue Haines states that men should not worry if they get more than they purchased from such a wench: after introducing the bewitching nature of “female sprights”—alluding to Ariel—he comforts the audience with a sexual joke: “It does not vex me to be Clapp’d by her: / Gad she was handsome, though the sport is dear” (2324). The introduction and prologue provide a caricature of the status of actress as whore, in addition to the trouble of women’s virtuous reputations. Haines concludes: “Virtue! Virtue, vainly art thou sought” (22). While Duffett and the King’s Company do not employ the genderbending tactics in this casting, the introduction and prologue draw attention to the “public dimension” of the actress’s body: she is “constituted as a social phenomenon in the public sphere” and her body “is and is not [hers]” (Butler Undoing 21). The introduction highlights the problem of autonomy, and the first act of the play relates this concern specifically to prostitutes’ “sexual autonomy” (Butler Undoing 21). Act I transforms the opening space of the Tempest’s ship into to a bordello, and the tempest that unsettled the characters in previous plays devolves into a noisy maelstrom of greedy customers (the former plays’ nobleman) who storm their favorite bawd’s bastille looking for free 13 Unfortunately, no cast list accompanies the play. Joe Haines and Betty Mackarel likely played key roles in the play, but we cannot say which ones. 14 In this quotation and the passages to follow, I cite from Duffett’s play as it is included in Three Burlesque Plays of Thomas Duffett, edited by Ronald Eugene DiLorenzo.

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“goods” (I.i.180) and repeatedly crying, “whore, a whore.” The bawd’s defense can be linked to the 1668 “Bawdy House Riots” against Charles II’s Whitehall—here signified as a brothel (Szlyk 33). Like Davenant and Dryden, Duffett adds a host of sexualized characters to the former’s cast with the express intent of evoking laughter. We have “Innocent and ignorant Hectorio, a Pimp”; Stephania, a “Baud”; Beantosser, Moustrappa, and Drinkallup, “Wenches”; and a modified Prospero, who is now “Headkeeper of the Enchanted Castle”—Bridewell prison. Like Davenant and Dryden’s adaptation of Shakespeare’s play, Duffett’s farce connects enchantment to a woman’s body, but the burlesque changes its locale from an enchanted island to an enchanted castle—Bridewell prison, the workhouse prison for whores. If we equate actresses with whores, the theater figuratively becomes bordello and then prison. Duffett’s play clearly amplifies the negative perceptions of female sexuality present in Davenant and Dryden’s earlier comedy-now-turnedopera in 1674. The parody materializes in the new material and characters he adds, which virtually evince a new play altogether. Rather than using Davenant and Dryden’s Sycorax to represent aggressive sexuality; Duffett introduces the wenches’ low plot to accomplish that task. In a sense they become the “comic-grotesque” figures of the play. These whores, like actresses, epitomize female aggression, for they are “industrious Females” who “live well by bidding Gentlemen welcome” (III.i.44-45). Stephania, the mother-bawd who narrates her life story to her “daughters” (I.i.210) as Prospero does to his, explains in prison the vulgar ways in which she made her money in the past. Her girls, younger versions of herself, also tell stories of their past sexual crimes—including dressing up in a man’s clothing to secretly have sex with another woman’s husband right under her nose. The play mocks the prostitutes’ vocation and even gives Stephania the accolade of “Justice of Whorum” (III.i. 222) in order to mock a figurative space in which women reject virtue and honor, and embrace and capitalize on dissolute sexuality. The farce ridicules female libertine sexuality and women’s means of production for generating revenue: the body. Clearly the noblemen at the start of the play cannot accept Stephania’s business as a legitimate transaction; they want their sexual goods for free. Like the sailors in the previous manifestations of the Tempest, these women are fools for thinking that they can have any real power in a patriarchal marketplace. The whores become the victims of their own sexual freedom, as their failure to win the war against their clients lands them all in prison.

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Duffett also stages perverse female sexuality in his manipulation of Dorinda and Miranda. Duffett mocks any semblance of aristocratic honor, respect, and civility that might have been present in the Davenant-Dryden Tempest. The Mock-Tempest provides a terrifying lesson about the noble honor associated with controlling female sexuality: gentile girls have the potential to become whores, even at the hands of their fathers. The farce indicates that fathers sell their daughters to the highest bidders. For instance, Miranda and Dorinda express how fathers “provide” daughters with “Gallants […] to lye with” them “for profit” (II.i.36-37, 39). As such, the play criticizes the mere idea of civility. Prospero’s daughters repeatedly talk about their sexual futures as lying with men in a “Civil way” (II.i.23), even after they would be married. This joke about civility has as much to do with constancy as it does with the girl’s understanding of the act of intercourse. Duffett’s parody of the Restoration Tempest offers an inversion of the former’s scene wherein the daughters wonder for what women were made. Here Duffett plants a sexual joke when Miranda argues that men were made for women to cuckold them. Miranda says, “Why that’s a thing like a man (for ought I know) with a great pair of Hornes upon his head, and my father said ‘twas made for Women” (II.i.18-20), and audiences should laugh at the fact that while the girls do not understand exactly what a husband or cuckold is yet, each knows that she will make her husband one. As Michael Dobson points out, Duffett’s daughters are not ignorant of men as they are in Davenant and Dryden’s version; rather, they are ignorant of husbands (Making of the National Poet 58). In many respects, Duffett’s Dorinda and Miranda are as naïve as their previous iterations; however, in burlesque form Duffett certainly mocks this naïveté. As DiLorenzo reminds us, burlesque “derives from the shock of straight-forward debasement” (xii). Accordingly, The Mock-Tempest openly undermines The Tempest while demeaning women’s sexuality. We should recall how Davenant and Dryden’s daughters misunderstand pregnancy and the birthing process and recognize that the same uncertainty occurs in Duffett’s play, but understand that Duffett provides a cruder interpretation of female genitalia as Dorinda says, in a childish scene of bodily show-and-tell: “It’s hole’s hereabout, whereof looky’ my Father said that it should get me with Child” (IV.ii.8-9). Miranda retorts: “get you with Child, what’s that?” (IV.ii.10). These girls have an intuitive understanding of sexuality, but not of its consequences, namely, childbearing—precisely the problem that both plays bring to the fore. Like Dorinda, who pledges in Dryden’s play that she is not afraid of the pain of nine months, Duffett’s girl states that if Prospero “should send a hundred

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[men] to get [her] with Child in a civil way” she “wouldn’t be afraid” (IV.ii.14-15). Obviously, Duffett finds a way to extend the charade first introduced in the Davenant-Dryden Tempest. Later in the play Dorinda tells the naïve Hypolito that he must “get [her] with Child” (IV.ii.16) and explains that she doesn’t know what that means, but that she “think[s] you must dig it out of the Parsly-bed” (IV.ii.18-19). Duffett clearly pokes fun at the former work’s reference to children growing out of the ground, yet he also treats the irresponsibility of reckless female sexuality, showing that young girls simply do not realize the penalties of their sexual actions although they know of sexual intercourse. After all, Miranda asks Dorinda if she is “breeding Teeth” (IV.ii.3), and Dorinda jokes that if she were of that age, then the king (Charles II) would know her (as he does the actresses, such as Mary Davis, that grace the stage). Unlike the former sisters, Duffett’s girls engage in semi-sexual encounters in the play, extending the farcical language of the Mock-Tempest. For instance, Miranda and Quakero (aka Ferdinand) talk about the latter feeling her “Paps” and “bubbies” (V.ii.41, 43), but the girls obviously do not equate sexuality with honor—which fathers clearly do. Prospero, after all, warns Miranda not to lose her honor but can only frame it in a childish fashion. He tells her that her honor is in her elbow, and when Quakero later offers to caress her elbow she cries out that she has lost her honor. For the most part, Duffett’s farce stages a hyperbolic mockery of sexuality that virtually leaves Shakespeare’s play in the dark and surpasses the sexual innuendoes we find in the Restoration Tempest. For example, The Mock-Tempest subversively presents the young girls’ silly games as a possible segue to prostitutes’ filth. In a scene of childish play-acting the girls call each other names such as “spiteful pissabed Slut” (IV.ii.78) and “hussey” (IV.ii.83), showing that their language devolves into the smut that the wenches in the play uttered earlier in Bridewell prison. In theory, the satire shows that the girls are primed to become whores in deed and thought. Nevertheless, by watching the girls’ verbal role-playing game wherein they try on the identities of school mistress, citizen’s wife, playgoer, and finally, prostitute, we understand that the joke must come to an end if the girls can save themselves from the prostitutes’ fate. After Dorinda says to her sister, “You should let me lye with you in a Civil way” and “then another should lye with you, and another, so at last you should be catch’d in a Baudy-house with your husbands under Prentice looky’, and so be brought to Bridewell as Mrs. Tweedlebum was,” Miranda says, “no, Sister, I won’t play so” (IV.ii.49-55). If there is any hope for women in this play, it might be in this moment. The brilliance of the farce lies in its comical handling of serious problems, and the

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possibility that these two girls, raised by Bridewell’s keeper, will eventually become “guests” in Bridewell is a serious problem indeed. The Mock-Tempest by no means aims to empower women; it merely satirizes social attitudes about female sexuality. Women are dangerous as whores and naïve virgins, experienced harlots and ignorant adolescents; and men must beware of both ends of this spectrum and of their own desires for both figures. Duffett’s play ultimately personifies a Lacanian problem, for these two types of female characters, performed by live female bodies, represent the objects of men’s desires; as such they signify “the Lacanian Gaze, the realization that behind [men’s] desire is nothing but [their] lack” (Felluga). The play not only mocks female sexuality, then, but also a kind of feminine-masculine hybrid power over men—in both the prostitutes’ commerce and the young girls’ sexual proliferation. In the end, the young women’s surfeit could lead to men’s lack, but the play ultimately resolves this tension as Prospero’s last edict explains that the audience should focus on pleasure: “Now to wipe out the remembrance of all past sorrow, I’le show you the pleasures of my enchanted Castle” (V.ii.254-55). As Marianne Szlyk implies, we should understand, and appreciate, this enchanted castle as a metaphor for contemporary London, a place where mistresses and actresses have great capacity to rule over men and their castles. *** On the whole, the Restoration Tempests by Davenant and Dryden, and Duffett, engender playfulness and mockery as the playwrights rewrite the Jacobean romance and poke fun at Restoration stage practices, women’s bodies, and father-daughter relationships. Although Shakespeare’s romance includes anxieties about daughters, sexuality, and marriage, the Davenant-Dryden Tempest and Duffett’s Mock-Tempest address these concerns in a way that Shakespeare could not: Restoration playwrights could tap into the frank discourse about women’s sexuality that pervaded the theatrical scene, and they had actresses’ bodies at their disposal. Rather than carefully editing Shakespeare’s plot, in darkly comical forms the Restoration Tempests cater to men’s scopophilic desires while at the same time feeding paranoia about women’s sexuality. The late 17thcentury Tempests—one, an adaptation of Shakespeare’s play; the other, more appropriately called an adaptation of Davenant and Dryden’s work— recall Shakespeare’s original, but the added subplots and characters show that that the stuff that Shakespeare’s dreams were made on found new homes in the Restoration settings, one of which is a whore-house. It appears that in order for Shakespearean romantic plots to be made fit for

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Restoration comedies, the playwrights Davenant, Dryden, and Duffett had to find a lowbrow way to modify the former work’s high-minded ideals. The results are not only captivating and hilarious, but also instructive of the ways in which Restoration adaptations of Shakespeare’s work appealed to contemporary audiences’ simultaneous desires for actresses and fears of female sexuality.

Works Cited Bakhtin, M. M. The Dialogic Imagination. Austin: U of Texas P, 1982. Print. Beaumont, Francis, and John Fletcher. The Sea Voyage. The Dramatic Works in the Beaumont and Fletcher Canon. Vol. 9. Ed. Fredson Bowers. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1994. 10-78. Print. Bhabha, Homi K. The Location of Culture. New York: Routledge, 1994. Print. Bishop, John. “'The Ordinary Course of Nature': Authority in the Restoration Tempest.” Restoration and 18th Century Theatre Research 13.1 (Sum. 1998): 54-69. Print. Butler, Judith. Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex. New York: Routledge, 1993. Print. —. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York: Routledge, 1990. Print. —. Undoing Gender. New York: Routledge, 2004. Print. Cavendish, Margaret, Duchess of Newcastle. Sociable Letters, Written by the Thrice Noble, Illustrious, and Excellent Princess, the Lady Marchioness of Newcastle. London: Printed by William Wilson, 1664. Web. 12 Nov. 2011. Clark, Sandra. “Shakespeare and Other Adaptations.” A Companion to Restoration Drama. Ed. Susan J. Owen. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2001. 274-290. Print. The Comical Dream, or, The Tempest: A Mock Poem. Representing the Humours of Some Sea-sick Passengers Their Feav’rish Valour, and Their Anguish Fears: With the True Description of a False Sea-Fight. London: Printed by H. Bruges, 1674. Early English Books Online. Web. 12 Nov. 2011. Corman, Brian. “Comedy.” The Cambridge Companion to English Restoration Theatre. Ed. Deborah Payne Fisk. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2000. 52-69. Print. DiLorenzo, Ronald Eugene, ed. “Introduction.” Three Burlesque Plays of Thomas Duffett. Iowa City: U of Iowa P, 1972. xi-xxix. Print.

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Dobson, Michael. “Adaptations and Revivals.” The Cambridge Companion to English Restoration Theatre. Ed. Deborah Payne Fisk. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2000. 40-51. Print. —. The Making of the National Poet: Shakespeare, Adaptation and Authorship, 1660-1769. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1995. Print. Doody, Margaret. “Gender, Literature, and Gendering Literature in the Restoration.” The Cambridge Companion to English Literature: 16501740. Ed. Steven N. Zwicker. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1998. 5881. Print. Dryden, John. Essay of Dramatic Poesy. 1668. Dryden: Poems and Prose. Ed. Douglas Grant. New York: Penguin, 1971. 147-225. Print. —. The Tempest, or The Enchanted Island. 1670. The Works of John Dryden Vol. 10. Ed. Maximillian Novak and George Guffey. Berkeley: U of California P, 1970. 1-103. Print. Duffett, Thomas. Mock-Tempest, or, The Enchanted Castle. 1675. Three Burlesque Plays of Thomas Duffett. Ed. Ronald Eugene DiLorenzo. Iowa City: U of Iowa P, 1972. 53-145. Print. Felluga, Dino. “Modules on Lacan: On the Gaze.” Introductory Guide to Critical Theory. Purdue 31 Jan. 2011. U. Web. 12 Nov. 2011. Fraser, Antonia. The Weaker Vessel. New York: Random House, 1984. Print. Gill, Pat. “Gender, Sexuality, and Marriage.” The Cambridge Companion to English Restoration Theatre. Ed. Deborah Payne Fisk. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2000. 198-208. Print. Harvey, Elizabeth D. Ventriloquized Voices: Feminist Theory and English Renaissance Texts. New York: Routledge, 1992. Print. Howe, Elizabeth. The First English Actresses: Women and Drama, 16601700. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1992. Print. Irigaray, Luce. “When the Goods Get Together.” New French Feminisms. Ed. Elaine Marks and Isabelle de Courtivron. New York: Schocken Books, 1980. 107-10. Print. Iwanszisw, Susan. “The Shameful Allure of Sycorax and Wowski: Dramatic Precursors of Sartje, the Hottentot Venus.” Restoration and 18th-Century Theatre Research 16.2 (Win. 2001): 3-23. Print. Kewes, Paulina. Authorship and Appropriation: Writing for the Stage in England, 1660-1710. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1998. Print. Kristeva, Julia. Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection. Trans. Leon S. Roudiez. New York: Columbia UP, 1982. Print. Levine, Laura. Men in Women's Clothing: Anti-theatricality and Effeminization, 1579-1642. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1994.

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Locke, Matthew. The English Opera, or, The Vocal Musick in Psyche with the Instrumental therein Intermix'd: to which is Adjoyned the Instrumental Musick in The Tempest. London: Printed by T. Ratcliff, and N. Thompson, 1675. Early English Books Online. Web. 12 Nov. 2011. Macey, Samuel. “Duffett’s Mock Tempest and the Assimilation of Shakespeare During the Restoration & Eighteenth Century.” Restoration and 18th-Century Theatre Research 7.1 (1968): 44-52. Print. Maguire, Nancy Klein. Regicide and Restoration: English Tragicomedy, 1660-1671. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1992. Print. Marsden, Jean I. The Appropriation of Shakespeare: Post-Renaissance Reconstructions of the Works and the Myth. New York: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1991. Print. —. The Reimagined Text: Shakespeare, Adaptation, & Eighteenth-Century Literary Theory. Lexington: UP of Kentucky, 1995. Print. Maus, Katherine Eisaman. “Arcadia Lost: Politics and Revision in The Tempest.” Critical Essays on John Dryden. Ed. James Anderson Winn. New York: Prentice Hall, 1997. 73-88. Print. Murray, Barbara A. “‘Transgressing Nature’s Law’: Representations of Women and the Adapted Version of The Tempest, 1667." Literature and History 12.1 (Spring 2003): 19-40. Print. Novak, Maximillian, and George Guffey, ed. “Commentary: The Tempest.” The Works of John Dryden. Vol. 10. Berkeley: U of California P, 1970. 319-343. Print. Pepys, Samuel. The Shorter Pepys. Ed. Robert Latham. Berkeley: U of California P, 1985. Print. Rubin, Gayle. “Traffic in Women.” The Second Wave: A Reader in Feminist Theory. Ed. Linda Nicholson. New York: Routledge, 1997. 27-62. Print. Shakespeare, William. Songs and Masques in The Tempest. London: s.n., 1674?. Early English Books Online. Web. 12 Nov. 2011. —. The Tempest. 1623. The Norton Shakespeare: Based on the Oxford Edition. Ed. Stephen Greenblatt, Walter Cohen, Jean E. Howard, and Katharine Eisaman Maus. New York: W.W. Norton, 1997. 3055-3107. Print. Spencer, Hazelton. Shakespeare Improved: The Restoration Versions in Quarto and on the Stage. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1927. Print. Szlyk, Marianne. “Applying a Theatrical Abrasive: Staging Thomas Duffett’s The Mock-Tempest at the King’s Company's 'Plain Built

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House'.” Sun Yat-sen Journal of Humanities 21 (Win. 2005): 21-45. Print. Taylor, Gary. Reinventing Shakespeare. London: Hogarth, 1990. Print. Thorn-Drury, G. “Shadwell and the Operatic Tempest.” Review of English Studies 3.10 (Apr. 1927): 204-208. Print. van Lennep, William, ed. The London Stage, 1660-1800, A Calendar of Plays, Entertainments & Afterpieces, Together with Casts, BoxReceipts and Contemporary Comment Compiled from the Playbills, Newspapers and Theatrical Diaries for the Period, Part 1: 1660-1700. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1965. Print. Walmsley, D.M. “Shadwell and the Operatic Tempest.” Review of English Studies 2.8 (Oct. 1926): 463-466. Print. —. “Shadwell and the Operatic Tempest.” Review of English Studies 3.12 (Oct. 1927): 451-453. Print. Ward, Charles E. “The Tempest: A Restoration Opera Problem.” ELH 13.2 (June 1946): 119-130. Print. Winn, James. “Theatrical Culture 2: Theatre and Music.” The Cambridge Companion to English Literature: 1650-1740. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1998. 104-119. Print.

CHAPTER THREE EDWARD GORDON CRAIG AND THE TEMPEST PATRICK LE BŒUF

Over a very long period of his life–at least from 1900 to 1957–the English stage director and theoretician Edward Gordon Craig (1872-1966) felt now and again a need to think about ways of staging Shakespeare’s last play, The Tempest, even though he had no prospect for an actual production.1 This is a scarcely known fact, for three reasons. First, Craig never published in his lifetime any reproduction of the designs he drew for The Tempest.2 Second, Craig’s biographers did not mention that project— not even Craig himself in his partial autobiography published in 1957, Index to the Story of My Days—or they merely alluded to some designs made by Craig in 1905, allegedly “at the suggestion” of Max Reinhardt (1873-1943). 3 Thirdly, theatre historians who studied Craig’s work were mainly interested in his few productions that were actually performed before an audience. However, Craig’s ideas about the play deserve to be examined, were it only because a topic to which he returned throughout 1

The earliest known evidence is an annotation made by Craig in 1900 on his “Note-Book T.” For a transcript, see Edward Craig, Gordon Craig: the Story of His Life (New York: Limelight Editions, 1985), p. 133. 2 However, he intended to do so on two occasions: firstly in 1913, in Towards a New Theatre, then in June 1942, when Joseph Gregor (1888-1960), head of the Nationalbibliothek’s Theatersammlung in Vienna, proposed to devote a volume of the Monumenta scenica series to Craig—which ultimately did not happen. 3 As a matter of fact, a letter from Craig to Count Harry Kessler (1868-1937), in September 1904, shows that it was Craig himself who mentioned The Tempest as a possible collaboration with Reinhardt. See L. M. Newman’s edition of The Correspondence of Edward Gordon Craig and Count Harry Kessler, 1903-1937 (Leeds: W.S. Maney & Son, 1995), p. 26. See also L.M. Newman, “Reinhardt and Craig?” Max Reinhardt: the Oxford Symposium (Oxford: Oxford Polytechnic, 1986, p. 6-15), p. 7. On 20 December 1905, Craig wrote to Count Kessler that it was better to give up the whole project, as “I think The Tempest is a little beyond the present possibilities” (Newman, Correspondence, p. 59).

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his career was necessarily significant in his eyes. Besides, some of the solutions he envisaged were realized–by others, of course–only in the second half of the 20th century, and might still be deemed daring today, which shows once again how much ahead of his time he stood. As a preliminary caveat, it should be noted that it is not possible to “reconstruct” in a consistent way what “Craig’s Tempest” might have looked like. In 1939, he collected all his scattered staging notes, most of which are dated 1922, in a single document,4 and he made additions to this document until 1956. These notes do not cover the entire play (e.g., Craig devoted more thinking to the opening scene than the last two acts), and they bear testimony to how his thought changed over time: sometimes, Craig did not choose between several different ways to treat a single passage. As a consequence, this work in progress with no definite version does not lend itself to the same kind of synthesis as Craig’s actual productions.

Ambivalent Feelings As a matter of fact, Craig’s interest in The Tempest is a paradox in itself. He kept repeating he loathed the play, and judged it in the harshest terms. As a young actor, in the years 1890-7, when he could have played “Florizel in The Winter’s Tale or Ferdinand in The Tempest, or the forest lovers in A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” he “had no liking” for such roles: “I was neither drawn towards them at all, nor did I comprehend what the plays were about. They seemed too vague, mystic, bodyless.”5 In 1922, he was convinced that this is an old play rewritten by Shakespeare […] it is a play by a young man–very young–taken by Shakespeare who […] comes across this and likes–rather likes–the boldness of the youth in taking fairy people, spirits, and magic for his stage.6

He also thought that Shakespeare’s associate Richard Burbage (15681619) had taken part in the rewriting, and was responsible for all the 4

Manuscript EGC Ms B 18 in the Edward Gordon Craig Collection of the Performing Arts Department (département des Arts du spectacle, ASP) of the Bibliothèque nationale de France (BnF). 5 Edward Gordon Craig, Woodcuts and Some Words (Boston: Small, Maynard & Company, 1925), p. 12. 6 EGC Ms B 18, p. 9r.

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passages he deemed too grossly spectacular: “Burbage is here pandering to the pit.”7 Why did Craig devote such efforts to a play he loathed so much, even though nobody asked him to stage it? Indeed, he admitted that it was not without some beauty, but more importantly, he regarded it as a wonderful challenge to stage directors, if they were bold enough to create a show entirely based on dream and unrealness. In the 1950s, Craig wrote on the cover of his manuscript the three words that sum up how he then viewed the play: “Sleep–Dream–Intoxication.” Craig found another challenge in the warning expressed by Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Coleridge opined that the play may lose its spiritual value once it is put on a stage, because [i]t addresses itself entirely to the imaginative faculty; and although the illusion may be assisted by the effect on the senses of the complicated scenery and decorations of modern times, yet this sort of assistance is dangerous.8

Craig “replied” to Coleridge: Yes, but you should tell us how to deal with act I, scene 1 for example – for after all we have only our eyes and ears to help us when in a theatre.9

This confrontation with Coleridge’s challenge constitutes the hidden meaning of Craig’s article “On The Tempest,” published in The Mask in April 1924 and incorporated in 1925 in his collection of essays entitled Books and Theatres, which it concludes. Externally, this article reads like a comment on a sentence in which Lytton Strachey criticized “the dreary puns and interminable conspiracies of Alonso, and Gonzalo, and Sebastian, and Antonio, and Adrian, and Francisco, and other shipwrecked noblemen.” This quotation is taken from Strachey’s “Shakespeare’s Final Period,” published in The Independent Review in August 1904. But Craig 7

EGC Ms B 18, p. 34v. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Coleridge’s Essays and Lectures on Shakespeare and Some Other Old Poets and Dramatists (London: J. M. Dent; New York: E. P. Dutton, undated–Craig purchased his copy in 1915), p. 66. 9 Undated annotation by Craig on his copy of A New Variorum Edition of Shakespeare: The Tempest, ed. Horace Howard Furness (Philadelphia-London: J. B. Lippincott, 1920), p. 9, where the quotation from Coleridge is reproduced. BnF, ASP, 4-EGC-942(7). 8

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found it more probably in the reprint of the article as part of Strachey’s Books and Characters published in 1922.10 Additionally, it is quite possible that Craig’s title Books and Theatres deliberately echoes Strachey’s title Books and Characters. Coleridge’s name is never explicitly mentioned in Craig’s article, in which it is suggested that the first scene of Act 2, deemed “dreary” and “interminable” by Strachey, could be “quickened” by some “inventive yet reverential stage-manager” who would set the action, not on the ground of an ordinary island, but of a sunken island. He fancies that coral grows between blocks of marble of an ancient city, “the sun pours through the pale blue green water,” and when “these deadly men” who move “heavily like divers in deep seas” are “wearily talking in their deadly sleep,” “the dreary puns are issuing like bubbles” from their mouths. Then Craig wants his readers to believe that “an old and troubled mariner once came to me to tell of an island placed beneath the sea–a sunken island” on which he had lived for seven years, during which he had seen and heard “something very beautiful to see and to hear,” beyond any description. “What happened under the sea […] is what I should like to make visible in The Tempest upon a stage,” Craig concludes.11 Quite obviously, this “old mariner” never existed. Craig only devised this character to the purpose of instilling subliminally Coleridge’s name in his readers’ minds, by referring clearly to his most famous poem, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner. Craig’s intention, in this article, is to take up covertly Coleridge’s challenge, by insinuating that a daring and imaginative stage director can stage The Tempest without betraying any of its spiritual value. Prospero’s enchanted island is situated in the hereafter.12 This is suggested through a deliberately altered quotation of one of Ariel’s songs: “In such an isle full fathoms five indeed our fathers lie.” In Craig’s view, staging The Tempest amounts to realizing in this world the beauties that await us after death. 10

In Craig’s library, which is part of the Craig Collection at the BnF, there is no copy of Books and Characters. But this does not mean that Craig never possessed one: a number of the books he owned disappeared from his library before it was acquired in 1957 by the Bibliothèque Nationale. 11 Edward Gordon Craig, “On The Tempest,” Books and Theatres (London & Toronto: J.M. Dent & Sons Ltd, 1925), p. 161-4. 12 See Katharina Wild, Schönheit: die Schauspieltheorie Edward Gordon Craigs (Berlin: Theater der Zeit, 2011), p. 92: “Schlüssel zur vollendeten Schönheit ist […] der Tod. […] Die Orientierung an Tod und »Jenseits« ist für Craig unabdingbare Voraussetzung für eine Inszenierungs- und Spielweise, die sich durch Schönheit auszeichnet.”

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Main Outlines of an Imagined Mise-en-scène To sum it up, Craig wished to stage a play he disliked, in which he just saw the matter for an essentially dream-like and metaphysical spectacle, and the lines of which he compared with the gurgle of bubbles issuing from the characters’ mouths. It will therefore be an amazement to no one that Craig was not particularly eager to make the text of the play audible. He highlighted the fact that it is Prospero himself who bids Ferdinand (4.1.59)13 be “all eyes,” not “all ears.”14 He wanted actors to talk as fast as possible. At the end of 2.1, he even wanted all of them to “overlap very cleverly.”15 The broad outlines of his mise-en-scène are summarized as follows: The words to race along. Splashes of words. The action to be slow–a flow of action. The faces–eyes–queer and startled mostly–and as in the Pompeii paintings. The magic. The grotesque and gruesome.16

Music was to play a prominent part throughout the spectacle.17 Craig suggested that it be based on a music-hall tune.18 Indeed, sound effects in general would have been extremely important: Here as you begin this scene [1.2], read the strange lines pages 61 and 62– “The Isle is full of noises–sounds and sweet airs–instruments–voices” [3.2.127-128] etc., for it gives us the direction we need. IT MUST NOT

13

Line numbers are given according to David Lindley’s edition in the New Cambridge Shakespeare series (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002). 14 EGC Ms B 18, p. 88r: “Why doesn’t he make him say ‘all ears’—why all eyes” (1938). Besides, Craig inscribed, probably in the 1950s, on his copy of The Tempest which is now part of the Eton College Library’s Craig Collection, in front of Shakespeare’s words “No tongue! All eyes!”: “Shakespeare’s order.” I express my gratitude to L.M. Newman and Michael Meredith for sending me a reproduction of this document. 15 EGC Ms B 18, p. 59r. 16 EGC Ms B 18, p. 12r (undated annotation). Craig’s emphasis. 17 EGC Ms B 18, p. 12r: “Entirely accompanied by music and then I should enjoy to produce it and to see it performed—if not—not” (1923). 18 EGC Ms B 18, p. 24r: “I am reminded of ‘Shift up a little bit further […]’ That was the refrain of an old Music Hall song in the 1890s in London. […] I will suggest that the composer of the music for this scene [1, 2] shall take this old tune […] and giving it a double turn make new music of the old.”

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BE AT ALL A REASONABLE place–for there [to] be an overplus of magic in place–people–doings–sounds and sight.19

The dances required in some scenes should not look like classical ballet. Ideally, Craig would have rather used dances conceived by Isadora Duncan, or ethnic dances, or indeed dances that only exist in dream.20

Characters Craig did not write much about most characters of the play. He mentioned that Sebastian must be evocative of a dog, and Antonio of a cat.21 Ariel is referred to once as “she” (p. 59r), once as “he” (p. 99v); as a consequence, it is impossible to determine whether Craig thought of an actor or an actress. The only two characters about whom he provided somewhat more detailed information are Prospero and Caliban. He regarded Prospero as another Faustus, who does not sell his soul to the devil, and who drowns his books instead of burning them (a difference to which Craig seems to have assigned a deep symbolic meaning).22 He thought Leonardo da Vinci provided the direct model for Prospero: his contemporaries sometimes regarded him as some kind of a magician, and Craig fancied that Shakespeare had had an opportunity to see one of his manuscripts.23 Craig compared the moment when Prospero renounces to magic (5.1.33-57: “Ye elves of hills, brooks, standing lakes, and groves…”) with the moment when Faustus is made young again. As he loses his magic power, Prospero also loses his bitterness and cruelty– which indicates that, until that moment, Craig found him bitter and cruel. 19

EGC Ms B 18, p. 19r. EGC Ms B 18, p. 82r: “Ballet—but NOT of Sadlers Wells—NOT of Covent Garden—NOT of the Scala in Milano—NOT of Paris Berlin Barcelona New York and not of the School of I.D.; only I.D. at her very best could and did. Somewhere in Java—or in Scotland or in Dream–such a ballet could be met with.” 21 EGC Ms B 18, p. 45r: “Sebastian: heavy insolence of the 2nd and idle brother—a dog (1922). Antonio—malicious and thin and like a cat.” 22 EGC Ms B 18, p. 12v: “And had Shakespeare in mind to draw a Faustus who did not sell his soul to the Devil?—who drowns his book, not burns his books—who with a devil at heel, an angel ahead, drives his purpose on to a perfect end.” 23 EGC Ms B 18, p. 13r: “Leonardo da Vinci was at this time beginning to be a mythical figure–he was known as someone who lived in Italy and made magic–his books reveal much of this–he believed he could make men fly—Stories of his midnight experiments reached England–one of his manuscripts was seen by Shakespeare—Yes–I only guess at this—but I guess after reading Prospero.” 20

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Prospero is then to show the audience that he is being transfigured and regenerated: “The aged man. He too must emerge a young spirit–all affection and no longer bitter or cruel. He is a kind of Faust–not sold to the Devil. This must be more than a renunciation–an ecstasy.”24 In spite of this, Prospero cannot help displaying “sharpest irony–almost cruel”25 towards Gonzalo, when he tells him somewhat later (5.1.123-124): “You do yet taste / The subtleties o’th’isle…” As to Caliban, Craig insisted on three occasions that it is a “tragic” character. 26 His “movements must be as strange and require all that a tragedian can imagine and control,” his voice must be “tragic and deep” on the words “I will kiss thy foot–I prithee be my god” (2.2.125-126), and it is “trembling tragically” on the words “We shall lose our time, / And all be burned to barnacles” (4.1.243-244). Caliban, Trinculo and Stephano are “not always to be raising a laugh: only rarely that.”27 However, Craig regarded their first meeting (2.2) as a moment of commedia dell’arte.28 Caliban’s physical appearance is certainly grotesque, but it is also based on representations of mythological beings: the Egyptian god Bes, or a “white fat Giant” from a wayang kulit show.29 Caliban is also a symbol for the “mob,” when he demands “freedom, high-day, freedom” (2.2.162).30 On the whole, it is therefore an ambiguous character, and it is difficult to determine whether Craig had a positive or a negative reading of it.

24

EGC Ms B 18, p. 100r. EGC Ms B 18, p. 104v. 26 And even four, including the copy of The Tempest that belongs to the Eton College Library’s Craig Collection, and on which Craig wrote, in the 1950s, the words “nigh tragic” in front of Caliban’s last lines in 2.2. 27 EGC Ms B 18, p. 12v. 28 EGC Ms B 18, p. 62r. 29 EGC Ms B 18, p. 12v. There is, on p. 164 of L.M. Newman’s edition of Craig’s Black Figures (Wellingborough: Christopher Skelton, 1989), a photograph by Helen Craig of a wooden figure designed and cut by Craig in 1914 for a William Butler Yeats play, and later renamed “Caliban.” This figure is now in the Eton College Library (as L.M. Newman and Michael Meredith notified me, for which I thank them). The circumstances for its renaming are unknown. It is crouching, in a posture very similar to the one displayed by William Poel (1852-1934) on a photograph taken ca. 1897 of his own production of The Tempest (reproduced for instance in David Lindley’s edition of the play (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), p. 23), and to a drawing by Craig in EGC Ms B 18, p. 95v. 30 EGC Ms B 18, p. 68r (an annotation dated 1922). 25

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Decors Craig designed sets for The Tempest with particular care. He chose this play, in his article “Thoroughness in the Theatre,” as one of two examples31 for the care that is required in designing scenes. He reckoned that the play requires eight distinct scenes, and expressed his belief that “The Tempest can be produced in ten or even twenty different ways, and that each interpretation can be right.”32 In his main Tempest manuscript, Craig alternated between a minimalistic approach calling for just lighting effects and a set of gauzes that forms some kind of box in which the action was to take place, and more elaborated sceneries that may include a revolving stage. 33 Craig made five drawings for the scene during which Sebastian and Antonio are prevented from killing Alonso and Gonzalo by Ariel’s arrival (2.1): two are to be found in his main Tempest manuscript and are dated 1922, and the other three are separate designs: one is dated 1905, another is dated 1939, and the last one is undated but might have been drawn around 1905.34 Despite many differences between these five designs, they all show the same principle: the action takes place under the water, and seaweeds cover partially three blocks of marble separated by rifts. It seems that the underwater effect is achieved only by lighting multi-layered gauzes. The design held at Osaka shows that Craig intended to materialize the bubbles issuing from the characters’ mouths that he mentioned in his article “On The Tempest.” But how was this to be achieved? Through lighting effects? He did not specify it. The first two drawings enable us to reconstruct the way Craig envisioned the action. Alonso, Adrian, and Francisco are sleeping on the left-hand block of marble. Gonzalo is sleeping alone on the right-hand block. Sebastian and Antonio stand on the central block, plotting their 31 First published in The English Review, October 1911, Vol. IX, No. 3, p. 494504, and reprinted in Craig’s collection of essays The Theatre–Advancing (Boston: Little, Brown, and Company, 1919), p. 179-195. The other play is Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest. 32 The Theatre–Advancing, p. 192. 33 EGC Ms B 18, p. 14r: “Scenery. Only a scheme of lights and gauzes: top, sides, in front, at back, and under stage. C’est fini.—And on the gauzes some mast or two and some rigging–water, strips, gauzes, floors.” 34 See EGC Ms B 18, p. 51v and 58v; Paris, BnF, ASP, Maq 10979; Paris, BnF, ASP, Maq 10980; and Osaka, Ohtani University Library.

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conspiracy. Ariel emerges from the rift between the central block and the right-hand block, and whispers the song While you here do snoring lie in Gonzalo’s ear before he swims on upwards. The design held in Vienna, Österreichisches Theatermuseum,35 dated 1905, also shows an underwater set for an undefined scene.36 No human figure is to be seen here, but Craig introduced nevertheless two rows of bubbles supposed to issue from characters’ mouths. Were they intended to remain visible throughout the scene, or are they an indication that the presence of characters is actually implied? At any rate, it seems once again that the underwater effect was to be achieved by lighting multi-layered gauzes.37 On the drawing for 2.2, of which Craig sketched a copy on manuscript EGC Ms B 18 (p. 61v), and the conception of which he dated 1922, the action takes place on dry land. An indigo cloud claws at the top of a steep cliff the bottom of which is bathed by white breakers. Craig specified that, throughout the scene, Stephano was to remain “always on the edge of the precipice” (p. 62v).

35

ÖTM HZ-HS13182. There is no textual annotation on the drawing to identify the scene it represents. In 1942, Craig wrote a description thereof, without specifying for which scene it was meant: “The Tempest. Scene design (pastel on grey paper). Signed ‘GC.’ 1905. Under-sea. A bed of blue, green and black seaweed fronds, and white stones.” (Catalogue of the drawings handed over by Craig to Joseph Gregor in June 1942, BnF, ASP, no shelfmark). 37 Vana Greisenegger-Georgila’s description of this stage design in the exhibition catalogue Ungezähmte Natur als Schauplatz: Bühnenbilder aus drei Jahrhunderten (Vienna: Brandstätter, Österreichisches Theatermuseum, 2011), p. 106, is largely erroneous: this scene does not make use of Craig’s famous “screens,” since in 1905 he had not invented them yet; this is not a heath landscape, since we are under-sea; this is no vegetation one “typically encounters close to the sea,” since these are sea-weeds that grow under the sea, and it does not “bend in the direction where the tempest wind blows,” but it drifts with marine currents. Besides, the two rows of bubbles are not mentioned at all, although they are somewhat surprising in what is interpreted as a “heath landscape.” But the exhibition curator’s other comments on this drawing are relevant, especially when it comes to the importance of verticality. 36

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It seems that the same setting was already sketched on one of the three designs38 (see Figure 3-1) drawn by Craig six years earlier, in June 1916, which represent a quite original and stunning scenic device to which, oddly enough, Craig never alluded in his manuscript. On these three designs, the performance seems to take place in a circus, or at any rate on a circular stage. The audience is sitting on seats disposed on one half only of the circular hall. The arena is divided by what Craig labelled as a “mirror.” This “mirror” is circular, has a diameter of 6 metres, is supported by a black plinth with wrought edges, and held by two wires. Craig wrote that it was “like a crystal,” and specified: “For The Tempest seen through the ‘water’ of the mirror–‘The yellow sands.’”39 This device used a technique called by Craig “White Fx” but he did not explain what this technique was. It seems difficult to imagine that the action took place behind the audience’s back and was reflected in an actual mirror; more likely, this so-called “mirror” was to be transparent. Was it meant to be a disk of gauze producing mirror effects when struck by slant beams of light? It is also difficult to determine whether the entire performance was to take place behind the “mirror,” or whether the fore side of the arena was to be used occasionally. Craig specified that the space situated behind the “mirror” was a “place for distance pieces and play,” which would tend to show implicitly that the action takes place alternatingly behind and before the “mirror.”40 The size of this device seems to have entailed a technical challenge, since Craig wrote: “Too big for W[hite] F[x], otherwise allright.”41 However, such a way to set a distance between the audience and the action is evocative of the “Figurenspiegel” built fifteen years later, in 1931, in Vienna, by puppeteer Richard Teschner (1879-1948).42 It is also possible to be reminded of the device designed by Romeo Castellucci in 2008 for his spectacle entitled Purgatorio, in which part of the action is seen through a circular gauze.

38

Paris, BnF, ASP, Maq 10957, 10958 and 10959. Maq 10958. 40 Maq 10959. 41 Holograph annotation on design Maq 10957. 42 It is a puppet stage seen through some kind of a window with a diameter of 112 centimetres. It is a permanent exhibit in the Österreichisches Theatermuseum’s Teschner-Raum, and was described in detail by Jarmila Weißenböck in Weihnachtsspiel: Figurenpantomime von Richard Teschner (Vienna: Österreichisches Theatermuseum, 1992). 39

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Fig. 3-1 Edward Gordon Craig, set design for The Tempest, undefined scene (2.2?). 1916. Paris, BnF, ASP, Maq 10958. © BnF. Reproduced with the consent of the Edward Gordon Craig Estate.

The absence of any allusion to these three designs in manuscript EGC Ms B 18 makes one wonder whether they were meant for Shakespeare’s play. The date of 1916 and the insistence with which Craig mentioned “yellow sands” could be thought to lead us to the masque entitled Caliban by the Yellow Sands which was organized that same year by Percy MacKaye (1875-1956) in a New York stadium on the occasion of the Shakespeare Tercentenary. Craig and Percy MacKaye were very good friends, and one might imagine that he designed this scenic device for a spectacular show meant to be performed in an atypical place. However, the correspondence of Craig and MacKaye shows that it is not the case: prior to 1916, MacKaye mentioned his project in very vague terms,

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without even revealing its title to Craig, and he wrote to him on 13 August 1916, several weeks after the play had been performed for the first time by the end of May: “How I wish I might have done it with you.”43 These three designs, which are so difficult to understand, remain therefore quite mysterious. Craig made almost no further designs and comments on the last three acts of Shakespeare’s play. He actually focused on the very first scene, which he deemed the most challenging part of The Tempest.44

Opening Scene This is a tricky scene, a “mixture of the symbolic and naturalistic” with “almost prosaically ‘realistic’” details.45 Eighteenth- and nineteenthcentury productions of the play indulged in spectacular renditions of the storm, “leading to an increasing concern with realism, often at the expense of the text.”46 But Craig was a declared enemy of realism, and for him the issue was: How to approach the initial storm in a symbolic rather than realistic way? The first dilemma he faced was the question of whether or not to display the ship. On a design dated 1905,47 Craig envisioned a single set divided in two parts distinctly separated by a diagonal; the lower part, on the right side, shows caves situated on the island, as it seems; in the upper part, on the left side, the ship is depicted in a still fairly realistic way. Craig specified “each part to be lighted separately.” In 1935, the ship was reduced to a representation of the deck (with a mast) and cabin; characters were to be “running up and down all the time.”48 In the 1950s, he envisioned “another way–the way of the puppet show,” based on a 43

BnF, ASP, EGC Mn MacKaye (Percy). In 1930 Craig was invited to attend a performance of The Tempest at the Old Vic Theatre in London, in which his cousin John Gielgud was acting as Prospero for the first time in his career, but he left the theatre immediately after the end of the first scene, which grieved John Gielgud tremendously. See Jonathan Croall, Gielgud: A Theatrical Life (London: Methuen, 1002), p. 137. 45 David Lindley, introduction to his edition of The Tempest, p. 6. 46 Christine Dymkowski, introduction to her edition of The Tempest in the Shakespeare in production series (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), p. 72. 47 This design was inserted in the cover of manuscript EGC Ms B 18 (p. 130). 48 EGC Ms B 18, p. 16r. 44

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reproduction of Saint Peter’s fishing boat, a fresco by Taddeo Gaddi in the church of Santa Maria Novella in Florence,49 but he did not explain what he meant by “the way of the puppet show.” However, Craig found it of course potentially much more interesting not to show either ship or storm. He wrote in 1939: “We are left with: (1) suggestion by lights and this and that of a storm and wreck, (2) the hypnotic powers of Ariel seen at work upon the eight or ten [or] twenty more passengers. I have not heard of nor seen either of these two possibilities attempted.”50 Craig thought about the first possibility in 1905, 1921, 1930 and 1939. A lantern was to swing “round–across–shadows moving as a result.” Beneath it, the actors were to stand on “a double-way which clanks this and that way […]; all four sides slope a little towards centre–result effect of some sort of bridge all dusk and indigo below the […] moving lights and shadows above it.” The second possibility occurred to Craig in 1922. Apart from the boatswain, who was to lie prone on the ground, all characters were to stand “lined up on deck.” The sun was to be shining in a “pale blue sky;” in the background, “hills” and “yellow sands” were to be displayed. Ariel, with the help of musicians, was to hypnotize both passengers and mariners, and create in them “a sense of storm calamity and wreck” while they were to “sway like waves” and “whisper or yell or chatter as in their sleep.” On 3 May 1942, very precisely, Craig had new, much more radical ideas for this passage where “the words are the Essence of the Scene” (for a transcript, see Appendix A). Prospero was to be sitting in an armchair, listening to the lines that were to be delivered offstage, and reacting to them. Or he was himself to deliver them, “reporting as one who is mesmerized reports in regular, quiet, unemotional tones.” Craig envisioned a third possibility: the text could have been pre-recorded and played on a gramophone close to Prospero.51 At this point in time, Craig did not choose between these three possibilities. But in his satisfaction that he had found the beginning of a solution for the opening scene issue, he seems not to have worked on The Tempest again between 1942 and 1955. In that year, 1955, he resumed his annotations on his Tempest manuscript. Two articles published in 1956 by Kenneth Tynan and Peter Brook, who had both visited Craig at his home, bear evidence that by then 49

EGC Ms B 18, p. 15r and 16r. This quotation and the following ones: EGC Ms B 18, p. 13v. 51 EGC Ms B 18, p. 16v and 18r. 50

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The Tempest had become again a major concern for him. Tynan wrote: “He explained that he had much to do: there were some new ideas about The Tempest that needed his attention,”52 and Brook added: “The next moment he is dreaming of a new production of The Tempest or Macbeth, and will begin to make a few notes, perhaps a drawing or two.”53 Craig was extremely fond of Peter Brook and Natasha Parry, to the point that the entry dated 9 April 1956 in his day-book reads as follows: “I told Peter of a few of my secrets for Macbeth–‘May I use them?’ ‘OF COURSE as you are Peter.’”54 Given Craig’s paranoid tendencies (he thought any stage director was eager to plunder his ideas without crediting him), such a dialogue is quite amazing. Although Craig mentions only Macbeth here, it is clear that he told Peter Brook of a few of his “secrets” for The Tempest as well. Craig pasted in his manuscript a letter sent to him by Peter Brook during the summer of 1956: The news is that I’m doing The Tempest at Stratford with cousin John [= John Gielgud (1904-2000)] next year: once again I’m going to take your counsel and try to work all from one hand, sets, costumes and all […]. Have you any wise words on the play you’d care to drop this way? It’s fearfully difficult. […] Send me a clue! I send you fond love, Peter.55

On 20 August 1956, Craig wrote a detailed answer (see transcript in Appendix A).56 He suggested that the whole production be built on the two words dream and sleep from Prospero’s famous line in 4.1.156-158: “We 52 Kenneth Tynan, “Gordon Craig,” The Observer, 29 July 1956; reprinted in Curtains, 1961, then incorporated in the collection of Tynan texts edited by Kathleen Tynan as Profiles (London: Nick Hern Books, 2007), p. 105-108 (quotation: p. 108). 53 Peter Brook, “Gordon Craig,” The Sunday Times, 29 July 1956; incorporated as “Gordon Craig: a Meeting in 1956” in The Shifting Point (London: Methuen Drama, 1988), p. 23-35 (quotation: p. 25). 54 “Daybook 1956,” BnF, ASP, EGC Ms B 540(2), p. 5. The emphasis is Craig’s. 55 EGC Ms B 18 (p. 127-128). 56 He kept a draft of that letter in manuscript EGC Ms B 18, pp. 121-123.

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are such stuff / As dreams are made on, and our little life / Is rounded with a sleep.” At first, the stage would be empty and dimly lit. Then Prospero would be discovered asleep in a rocky armchair, “his elbows on the arms and his hands held in air […] swinging gently from side to side.” In his sleep he himself would deliver “all the words printed as Act I scene I.” Progressively a “tangle of ropes and shadows” would be discerned on the ground, representing the stage of the Lyceum Theatre, such as Craig knew it in his youth. Colours would be evocative of an undersea landscape, and fish would “seem to be swimming in and out of the ropes.” Then figures would appear, not walking but seeming to “float down or bubble up.” Voices would be heard but the text would not be clearly perceived, except for a few words such as “Sword” or “Milan.” Craig stopped there: he had rather meet Peter Brook and tell him the rest from face to face. He invited him to carry out “the massacre of the awful rubbishy lines and ideas” in which the play consists. Was this letter actually sent to Peter Brook? Most probably, as Craig did not write on it the word “Not sent” as he used to when he deemed it wiser not to transmit his letters to their intended recipients, once he had written them.57 At any rate, Peter Brook seems not to have answered it.58 On 18 December 1956, Craig wrote another letter, meant this time for his cousin John Gielgud. Once again, he deemed it important enough for a partial copy of it to be kept in his Tempest manuscript (see transcript in Appendix A).59 At the beginning of the play Prospero was to be alone on stage; in his sleep he was to move perhaps one hand, while he was dreaming the shipwreck. Several voices were to deliver the text offstage, on a background of music making and singing. The actor was to focus exclusively on the mimics of his face, the rest of his body was not to move at all. Then the sun was to rise, its beams pouring through deep waters, conveying the idea that perhaps the action was taking place under the sea.60 A few moments later the sun was already to set, and Prospero to 57

It is the case, for instance, for a typically venomous letter that Craig meant for Kenneth Tynan in August 1956, but eventually refrained from sending (EGC Ms B 18, p. 125). 58 Neither the manuscript EGC Ms B 18, nor the correspondence between Craig and Peter Brook and Natasha Parry (BnF, ASP, EGC Mn Brook (Peter)) contain any letter referring to Craig’s suggestions. 59 EGC Ms B 18, p. 17. 60 Kenneth Tynan reported in his article that Craig enthused over Commandant Cousteau’s (1910-1997) documentary movie Le Monde du Silence. Although his

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start his long speech (1.2) in order to put Miranda “quite to sleep.” Did John Gielgud receive this letter? There is no physical evidence that he answered either. Whether Craig eventually refrained from sending his letter to his cousin, or his cousin found his suggestion too bold to be acknowledged, must be left to speculation. The first performances took place at Stratford in August 1957. Craig eagerly read the newspapers in order to know more about Brook’s miseen-scène and how both the audience and the critics received it, and he was somewhat disappointed. He pondered over the reasons why that production could be regarded as a semi-failure, and concluded that it confirmed that the play was intrinsically unplayable:61 If the press notices on Peter and John’s attempts on Shakespeare’s Tempest do not read that hearty as they might, it’s because Tempest is a real problem for the stage, and I have doubts about Peter’s and John’s ability to solve this problem. Report seems to suggest the two did not move along the same lines. It’s well nigh an impossible play to stage–it’s not of a piece–it has not the clearness of Hamlet62 or Othello or Midsummer Night’s Dream–it’s another dream and all dream and Peter has failed to see this. He seems to have used my idea of the swinging lantern in scene one.

Indeed, Peter Brook used some of Craig’s “secrets.” He “managed to impact an underwater effect by decorating the stage with streamers suggesting seaweed, as the company moved through the maze at least full idea of an undersea staging of The Tempest occurred to Craig quite early, it is clear that this movie influenced him and enabled him to refine his vision. According to Tynan, Craig said about it: “It’s like nothing you’ve ever dreamed of. Or, rather, it’s like everything you’ve ever dreamed of.” (Kenneth Tynan, Profiles, p. 106107). 61 “Daybook 1957,” BnF, ASP, EGC Ms B 541(3), p. 55. 62 However, Craig regarded for quite a long time Hamlet as an unplayable play as well, e.g. in On the Art of the Theatre, ed. Franc Chamberlain (London and New York: Routledge, 2009), p. 75: “Hamlet has not the nature of a stage representation. […] Hamlet was finished—was complete—when Shakespeare wrote the last word of his blank verse, and for us to add to it by gesture, scene, costume, or dance, is to hint that it is incomplete and needs these additions.” And again on pp. 138-9: “Not if the finest and most passionate actors in the world were to come together and attempt to perform Hamlet could the right representation of Hamlet be given, for I fear to represent Hamlet rightly is an impossibility. Yet since this was written (…) I have myself attempted to produce Hamlet (…). Knowing it was impossible, why did I attempt it? There are many reasons: I wanted to strengthen my belief—I wanted people to realize the truth.”

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fathom five.”63 He also “made the play a projection of Prospero’s inner world […]–a dream world.”64 The electronic music he himself composed created an uncanny atmosphere–the isle was full of noises. And one of the scenic effects that impressed contemporary critics most was the use of “an enormous poop-lantern which swung slowly through a tremendous arc at the front of the stage as the curtain rose on the storm.”65 But is this swinging lantern really an original idea of Craig’s? According to Cary M. Mazer and Stephen Orgel, Frank Robert Benson already used the same device in his production of The Tempest at the London Lyceum Theatre in 1900.66 And Craig attended those performances, as he explicitly stated in his memoirs.67

Resurgences and Coincidences Over time, Peter Brook became very critical of his 1957 production at Stratford, in which he deems he introduced “some very extravagant ideas.”68 After 1957 Peter Brook and Natasha Parry exchanged fewer and fewer letters with Craig, and although Brook never completely denied 63

Edward Trostle Jones, Following Directions: a Study of Peter Brook (Bern: Peter Lang, 1985), p. 107. 64 Stephen Orgel, introduction to his edition of The Tempest in The Oxford Shakespeare series (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), p. 83. 65 Muriel St. Clare Byrne, “The Shakespearean Season at the Old Vic, 1956-57 and Stratford-upon-Avon, 1957,” Shakespeare Quarterly, 1957, Vol. 8, No. 4, p. 461492 (quotation: p. 490). 66 Cary M. Mazer, Shakespeare Refashioned: Elizabethan Plays on Edwardian Stages (Ann Arbor, Mich.: UMI Research Press, 1981), p. 72: “a lantern swung back and forth on an otherwise dark and bare stage, while the actors tumbled about.” But Mazer does not state explicitly that this was in the 1900 revival of Benson’s production. Benson’s production was revived again, at Stratford, in 1904, 1908, and 1911, and the lantern could have been introduced at any of these later dates. It is Stephen Orgel, in his introduction to The Tempest (p. 73), who asserts that the swinging lantern was used by Benson in 1900 (as opposed to his 1891 performances, which omitted 1.1 altogether). I do not know on which sources he draws (the only source he mentions is Mazer), and I would tend to regard this assertion as dubious. 67 Edward Gordon Craig, Index to the Story of my Days (London: Hulton Press, 1957), p. 221: “F. R. Benson had a season at the Lyceum Theatre. It seemed to me rather ridiculous. I saw him as Caliban in The Tempest. […] Benson’s idea of Caliban was to come on the stage with a fish between his teeth.” 68 Jonathan Croall, Gielgud, p. 403.

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Craig’s influence on him,69 he admits more easily his debt to Antonin Artaud (1896-1948). He had several opportunities to stage The Tempest again, notably in 1968 in London, at the Roundhouse. This production was deemed particularly striking because it approached Shakespeare’s text with an extreme sense for freedom and did not care to deliver it literally any longer: “While key words from Shakespeare’s text were occasionally used [in the shipwreck scene], the non-verbal sounds of destruction really carried the meaning.”70 Such an approach may seem to put into practice, some ten years later, Craig’s advice to “massacre the awful rubbishy lines” except, occasionally, for some important words such as “Sword” or “Milan.” Craig’s ideas about the staging of The Tempest, such as he conceived them in the 1940s and 50s, were very much ahead of their time. The image of an actor whose body does not move at all and whose acting focuses exclusively on his face is evocative of Happy Days, which Samuel Beckett wrote in 1960-1, or of That Time, which he wrote in 1974-5. The image of a figure sitting in a rocky armchair, moving just his forearms in a slow, mechanical swing, and delivering a text in a somnambulistic tone, is echoed, for instance, by Rockaby, written by Samuel Beckett in 1980. A number of 20th century productions of The Tempest bear fortuitous similarities with some of Craig’s ideas. In 1951, at Stratford, Loudon Sainthill designed for Michael Benthall a submerged island the ground of which was covered with submarine plants and sea shells.71 In 1978, at the Young Vic Theatre in London, Michael Bogdanov chose to present The Tempest as a sequence of fantasies that take place inside Prospero’s head.72 In Braham Murray’s production in 1990 at the Royal Exchange Theatre in Manchester, Prospero was alone on stage during the initial storm scene, the text of which was barely audible.73 In 1991 at the Guthrie Theatre in Minneapolis, Jennifer Tipton symbolized the initial storm with

69

See the interview that Georges Banu had with Peter Brook and Natasha Parry, and that was published by Banu as an appendix to the 2004 reprint of the French version of Craig’s On the Art of the Theatre. Georges Banu, “Souvenirs de Craig avec Peter Brook et Natasha Parry,” in: Edward Gordon Craig, De l’art du théâtre (Paris: Circé, 2004), p. 215-223. 70 Edward Trostle Jones, Following Directions, p. 110. 71 Christine Dymkowski, Tempest, p. 83-84. 72 Christine Dymkowski, Tempest, p. 85. 73 Christine Dymkowski, Tempest, p. 106.

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a light swinging back and forth over the stage.74 In 1993, at the Royal Shakespeare Theatre at Stratford, Sam Mendes had the storm figured by a lantern that Ariel set swinging.75 Although none of these directors was aware of Craig’s ideas on The Tempest, it is striking that they all shared some common concepts with him. Can Derek Jarman be labelled a “Craigian” film director? Most probably not, even though the sets designed by Christopher Hobbs for his Edward II movie (1992) sometimes seem to have sprung straight from designs and woodcuts by Craig (very likely undeliberately). Jarman was no more familiar with Craig’s manuscripts than Beckett, but his adaptation of The Tempest (1979) sometimes seems close to Craig’s conceptions. The initial wreck scene is shown as a dream that Prospero is having: images of Prospero sleeping and muttering in his sleep a few words from the dialogue alternate with more or less blurred images, distorted by a blue filter, of a sailing ship on a stirred (although not stormy) sea. From the very beginning, the sound track creates a submarine environment: faint rumblings and a regular, hypnotic deep breathing convey the idea of what a diver can hear under the water. Derek Jarman kept only a small portion of the text, and some scenes are totally speechless. Images and sounds, much more than verbal communication, are Jarman’s preferred channels to convey the content of Shakespeare’s play. At the end of the movie, Prospero is shown sleeping again. This symmetry between the beginning and the end of the movie may convey the notion that all events in between were but a dream–and the images proposed by Derek Jarman enforce that notion. Most of the action takes place in the spacious, unfurnished rooms of a castle, with damaged walls, more like the reverse side of a decor than a decor. Straw and disparate properties are scattered on the floor, making the sets look somewhat like an empty stage (not necessarily the stage of the Lyceum Theatre, of course) after a performance, before it has been cleaned up for the next performance. In 1991, Peter Greenaway proposed another cinematographic vision of The Tempest, entitled Prospero’s Books, with John Gielgud as Prospero. Craig and Greenaway were influenced by the same sources: Rembrandt, early Italian painters, Baroque and Classical architecture, which may explain that it is possible to discern a number of common features between Greenaway’s movie and Craig’s conceptions. Once again, sounds play a significant role: Caliban’s line “the isle is full of noises” was a clue to 74 75

Christine Dymkowski, Tempest, p. 104. Christine Dymkowski, Tempest, p. 106.

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Greenaway the same way as it had been to Craig. Water is omnipresent throughout the movie, visually and in sound effects, and some scenes are shot under the water. There are many dances, which, although they do not look like what can be reconstructed from Isadora Duncan’s art, are just as alien to classical ballet. Among the books that Prospero brought with him on his island, Greenaway mentions a Leonardo da Vinci sketchbook. More importantly, the feature that was deemed most striking and innovative by critics is that, during most of the movie, all characters’ lines are delivered by John Gielgud, who was evidently not aware that fifty years earlier, his cousin had envisioned the same treatment76 (at least for the opening wreck scene–nothing proves that Craig would have dealt with the entire play as a monodrama).

By Way of Conclusion Where does Craig’s modernity reside in this project? Surely, he did not have a “political reading” of the play, nor an anticolonialist interpretation of it. Even though he ridiculed the stage directions devised by Arthur Quiller-Couch, which turned Miranda into the archetypal chaste and bashful Victorian maid, he certainly did not have a feminist approach to this character. His purely dreamlike and metaphysical conception of the play might even be deemed retrograde by those who want the theatre to be primarily the expression of political awareness. Craig’s modernity must be sought elsewhere. He passed the notion that the text can be sometimes a cumbersome burden (which can–or should–be discarded) on to Peter Brook. The kind of acting he fancied in 1942 is a prefiguration of Samuel Beckett’s theatre to come. It also foreshadowed the “postdramatic” treatment of classical drama, such as Hans-Thies Lehmann analyzes it.77 The scenery he conceived in 1916 for a circular hall, which highlights the theatricality of the action by showing it through a circular “mirror,” can be compared with devices used by Romeo Castellucci in 2008 in Purgatorio. And eventually, it was the avant-garde cinema of the late 20th century that realized some of the ideas he had conceived for the theatre, without film directors being aware that such ideas had already been expressed decades earlier. 76

Jonathan Croall, Gielgud, p. 519: “He was amazed when Greenaway suggested he speak all the parts.” 77 Hans-Thies Lehmann, Le Théâtre postdramatique (Paris: L’Arche, 2002), p. 201 ff.

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In the first half of the 20th century, no one active in the art of the theatre could ignore Craig. He had his devotees and his fierce detractors, but every stage director felt compelled to articulate their position as to his bold ideas on mise-en-scène. It seems that after the 1950s some link missed in the transmission; Stanislavsky’s teachings are still very much alive today, but Craig is virtually unknown to younger generations of actors, scenographers and stage directors. I hope that the present essay will contribute to demonstrate that Craig’s radical conceptions are just as relevant today as they were ahead of his own time.78

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This is also the conclusion of the recent book by Katharina Wild, Schönheit, p. 257: “Craigs Arbeiten können heute immer noch und vielleicht mehr denn je wichtige Impulse für die Erkundung eines neuen, zukunftsweisenden, macht- und kraftvollen Theaters liefern.” And Peter Brook said once to Georges Banu: “Il est bon qu’il [= Craig] soit accessible aux gens qui sont en train de faire le théâtre d’aujourd’hui” (Georges Banu, “Souvenirs de Craig,” p. 221).

PART II: ALTERNATIVE SPACES

CHAPTER FOUR EPHEMERAL ECHOES AND BRASH POSSIBILITIES: THE LIBERATION OF ADAPTING SHAKESPEARE’S EARLY COMEDIES DIANA E. HENDERSON

Let me begin with an undeniable statement: Anglo-American hegemony in professional Shakespearean studies and Shakespeare in performance—to the extent it ever existed—is a thing of the past. It has been half a century since Jan Kott’s groundbreaking essays and the works of Heiner Mueller, Giorgio Strehler and others demonstrated the importance of Shakespeare in Europe to the wider world, and more recently we have witnessed the ways the institutionalization of European Shakespeare scholarship has provided a major intellectual corrective to Anglocentrism, for instance through a decade of SHINE conferences and the professional society, ESRA (the European Shakespeare Research Association), they helped create. But it is equally apparent that the performance of Shakespeare is not confined to Europe, either: the end of European colonial hegemony similarly has given way to different nationalist and transnational agendas involving Shakespeare across the globe. Creative performance of the comedies has played its part in this phenomenon, though not, in most locales, to the same extent as the tragedies. This last observation has prompted me to muse more specifically about comic genres and their modern performative possibilities. In the half-year prior to the 2011 conference in Le Mans, and in Boston alone—not known as the great theater city of the Northeastern United States—I was able to enjoy the Propeller Theatre’s Comedy of Errors directed by Edward Hall; I took my students to both Sulayman AlBassam’s The Speaker’s Progress and the Actors’ Shakespeare Project’s

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more traditional version of Twelfth Night; and I danced away part of a Saturday night with a theatrical acquaintance at The Donkey Show. Two observations follow, beyond the obvious ones that the performance of Shakespearean comedy is alive and well, and that my credibility as a mature Shakespeare scholar may be cast in doubt by acknowledged disco dancing to a nightclub version of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. One point is that “real world” conditions and events transform these performances, perhaps with increasing urgency, and raise questions about what I mean when I say “Shakespeare’s Comedies.” The clearest illustration among the productions mentioned was the impact of political upheavals on Al-Bassam’s creative collaboration entitled The Speaker’s Progress, both within its narrative (that is, in its use of a fictitious 1960s Arab Twelfth Night production to expose political repression and uphold theater’s importance), and through its actual performance (in the ways the “Arab spring,” and then even more complicated autumn, did and did not transform Al-Bassam’s use of Shakespeare during the production run). The earlier works in Al-Bassam’s Shakespearean trilogy—Richard 3: An Arab Tragedy and the Al-Hamlet Summit—were works of powerful anger and topicality. He did not let go of these tonalities in The Speaker’s Progress, emphasizing the ways in which the unspecified Arab state repressed as dangerous the social inversions and erotic energy of comedy. This was a production using comedy as a vehicle for satire, in similar ways to Pavel Kohout’s Poor Murderer and certain eastern European productions of Midsummer Night’s Dream during the Soviet era. But recent events external to his play led Al-Bassam to alter the ending of The Speaker’s Progress by displacing the Speaker himself, performed by AlBassam as a cosmopolitan theatrical professional who had surreptitiously imported Shakespeare’s foreign script as a means to maintain artistic expression and critique. Instead, the performance concluded with two young women tentatively reciting Arabic poetry and song, as if to signal the fragile possibility and uncertain shape of a new model of Arab society, both in its politics and aesthetics.1 It raised the question of whether AlBassam’s angry satire had or had not been returned to the genre of romantic comedy, and if so, whether this return comes at Shakespeare’s cost—that is, whether a new Arab comic theater requires the disruption 1

The alteration was referenced at a workshop held in Boston, among other places; I attended a Sunday matinee, Oct. 16, 2011, and base my comments on that performance. See also Christopher Wallenberg, “With Arab Spring, a play about change,” The Boston Globe Oct. 9, 2011, Arts: Theater section. Last accessed 9.1.2012 at http://www.highbeam.com/doc/1P2-29822525.html

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and displacement not only of repressive fundamentalist regimes, but also of the very cosmopolitan trans-cultural tradition that has given rise to “global Shakespeares,” including Al-Bassam’s own previous AngloKuwaiti productions. My second observation, or perhaps provocation, illustrated by the plays I saw in Boston and reinforced by subsequent comic productions seen elsewhere: such an urgent sense of the contemporary moment, or of very recent historical moments in dialogue with the contemporary (which characterizes even the loose allusiveness of The Donkey Show), was less apparent in the plays I saw that retained Shakespeare’s English script as the primary source of onstage voicing. This was true even (or especially) of the Actors’ Shakespeare Project Twelfth Night, despite that company’s commitment to finding the contemporary relevance and connection between Shakespeare’s texts and their Boston-based audience. When juxtaposed with Al-Bassam’s version, however, ASP’s form of accessible theater looked positively quaint.2 Such a tight association between what some might call radical presentism and textual revisionism has not always been the case, as earlier experimental productions following Shakespeare’s texts, such as the English Shakespeare Company’s Henry IV, Part I or Peter Sellar’s Merchant of Venice, ably demonstrate. Thus, by contrast, this recent tendency (at least in the comic productions I have attended) raises the question of whether we might now usefully attend to such relationships to temporality or immediacy as a second, sometimes independent variable when analyzing the subgenres of Shakespeare’s comedies in performance, either discrete from or in relationship to the use of the early modern script. In doing so consciously rather than casually, might we also help advance the terms of our scholarly commentary? Might we begin to distinguish more finely the riff on from the spin-off, and, perhaps most refreshingly, the spin-forward, with those distinctions encouraging us to ask questions better befitting each type of production? With these broad questions of time, the world, and our roles within it kept in mind, let us turn to the specific challenges of the early comedies in performance. 2

This is not meant as an evaluative judgment about the theatrical value and quality of either show, but merely a descriptor of stylistic and political choices. Nor can the observation be generalized to ASP’s work in other genres. The difference between their 2011 season’s fairly traditional comic productions and some of their more experimental work may have registered more strongly for me, having worked with them as a consultant.

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All of Shakespeare’s plays of course demand adaptation for modern audiences. More pronounced, however, are the needs of the earlier comedies, perceived as tightly situated within inherited Elizabethan generic and social conventions. The reliance of Love’s Labour’s Lost, The Comedy of Errors, and Two Gentlemen of Verona upon their original audience’s familiarity with courtly masquing, commedia dell’arte improvisation, the aristocratic value of male friendship, and other extratextual elements can make them particularly daunting. For as much as we sometimes wish we could, neither theatrical artists nor scholars can time-travel back to the early 1590s and recapture their specific energies— and indeed, some, like the majority of the preponderantly upper- to middle-class public who attend theatrical productions, are not even interested in making that imaginative leap. As I have written elsewhere of his comedies more generally, to revive Shakespeare’s particular comic norms of staging and referentiality would be akin to exhuming a jester’s skull and expecting its “chop-fallen” countenance “to set the table on a roar” (to cite that most mordant of Shakespearean reflections on comedy, Hamlet act 5, scene 1).3 Immersion for the audience in a fantasy that still allows visceral connection and confirmation of one’s own perspective always appeals more broadly than does historicist excavation: hence the continuing popularity of Shakespeare’s later comedies, in which the gender-bending boy-heroines can be transformed by actresses into recognizably modern women, the themes and poetry are densely overdetermined and psychologically suggestive, and the erotic fun and narrative lines have a familiarity born of their own subsequent influence. But because the early comedies, especially Two Gentlemen of Verona and Love’s Labour’s Lost, wear their courtly origins, as it were, on their sleeves, the gap between Shakespearean script and modern performance is not so easily leapt.4 How do we find a way into this work afresh, when the corrosive power of its satire and local allusion has been rubbed away by the centuries, when the conventions of our media, storytelling, and gendered casting as well as our civil society have altered so radically?

3

Diana E. Henderson, “Shakespearean Comedy, Tempest-Toss’d: Genre, Social Transformation, and Contemporary Performance,” p. 139, in Shakespeare and Genre: from Early Modern Inheritances to Postmodern Legacies, ed. Anthony R. Guneratne (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011): 137-152. 4 On those courtly origins and for more detailed poetic analysis of Love’s Labour’s Lost, see Diana E. Henderson, Passion Made Public: Elizabethan Lyric, Gender, and Performance (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1995).

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To judge by the performance history, we succeed in part by embracing the paradox, and playing much more freely with each drama’s formally as well as referentially ephemeral characteristics. It is here that youthfulness itself, that most evanescent of phenomena, along with music, and particularly the musical as genre, can help address as well as accentuate the challenges. In the process of analyzing such works, I argue, we will discover that the Shakespearean musical of the past half century provides ample evidence that critical presumptions about an Anglo-American, Broadway-to-Hollywood axis constitute an inadequate aesthetic or cultural studies model for their analysis—that is, for fully understanding either the Shakespearean musical or the commercial musical genre. This last point bears emphasizing before I turn to specific examples, because most recent work on the Shakespearean musical, even the most politically progressive and sophisticated, remains caught within the binary grip of that Anglo-American nationalist discourse of competition. It has been nearly a decade since Dennis Kennedy wrote in “Confessions of an Encyclopedist” that theatre history needed to broaden, arguing that we must “look overtly at the convoluted ways that national notions of theater are challenged by the post-colonial, by the internationalizing of commerce and culture, by diaspora, immigration, race, or global television.”5 Although some scholars of Shakespearean musicals on film and stage have indeed adopted postcolonial discursive models in their analysis, this has not sufficiently displaced a nationality-based assumption that Britain was, and the U.S. now is, the hegemonic core of cultural capital in an anxious competition between English-speaking nations—making all other locations peripheral.6 In Le Mans, it seemed an apt time and place at least to question those premises for the musical as genre, just as others— especially Asian, French-Canadian and African diasporic scholars and 5

Dennis Kennedy, “Confessions of an Encyclopedist,” in Theorizing Practice: Redefining Theatre History, W. B. Worthen and Peter Holland, eds. (Basingstoke, 2004), p. 35. 6 Among the relevant scholarship on Shakespeare musicals, the Anglo-American axis, and musical theater as a genre, see especially Frances Teague, Shakespeare and the American Popular Stage (Cambridge University Press, 2006); Samuel Crowl, Shakespeare at the Cineplex: The Kenneth Branagh Era (Athens, OH, 2003), pp.40-46; Katherine Eggert, “Sure Can Sing and Dance: Minstrelsy, the Star System, and the Post-postcoloniality of Kenneth Branagh’s Love’s Labour’s Lost and Trevor Nunn’s Twelfth Night,” in Shakespeare, The Movie, II, ed. Richard Burt and Lynda E. Boose (London, 2003), 72–96; Gerald Bordman, American Musical Theatre: A Chronicle, 2nd ed., Oxford, 1992; and Rick Altman’s The American Film Musical (Bloomington, IN, 1987).

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performers—have done for staged Shakespeare. I began doing so (perhaps counter intuitively) by looking at works staged from within those very English-speaking nations which are far from endorsing—and indeed, in at least one instance overtly defy—any comfortable national agenda. This method thus extends what I tried to do in the book Collaborations with the Past, in revealing fractures within the dominant Shakespearean performance tradition –or here, an overtly commercial entertainment form staged within that geographical domain—rather than focusing on more radically ‘political’ work aimed at those already skeptical about the AngloAmerican axis and thus more easily recognizable as postcolonial.7 I turn again to personal witnessing in order to illuminate my sense of how Shakespeare’s early comedies come to modern life in performance precisely through emphasis on the evanescent. Many will share the experience of having their judgments of particular Shakespeare plays fundamentally shaped by some of the first productions they attended. In my case, the two pertinent Love’s Labour’s Losts were a musical version performed on the Folger Shakespeare Library’s mock-Elizabethan stage in Washington DC in 1974, and the Julliard Acting Company’s mid-1980s touring production which I saw in Burlington, Vermont. What remains especially vivid after a quarter of a century is their use of visual tableaux linked to music and youth. In the first instance, I have an indelible image of Don Adriano de Armado’s entrance, sliding, guitar in hand, from an Upstage Right balcony along some form of acrobatic wire, his preposterous lovesuit made utterly transparent. The humor here required no knowledge of Elizabethan sonneteering or of Nicholas Hilliard’s miniatures of melancholy lovers, yet captured the spirit of that milieu immediately through modern staging and analogy. As this moment suggests, the production, directed by Patrick Bakman, emphasized the farcical aspects of Love’s Labour’s. By contrast, the Acting Company’s touring production took advantage of its cast’s youth, most being recent graduates of the Julliard Conservatory, adding costumes and a swing straight out of Fragonard’s painting: this allusive combination captured both the beauty and delusive privilege of the noblemen’s story in a way that emphasized their inexperience and personal charm, but framed it with a poignant awareness of what was to come. (Stressing the youth of a nobleman remains one of the more popular ways to offset Shakespeare’s sympathy for aristocratic male figures now regarded as boorishly privileged, as similarly attested by the casting of Sam Crane as Bertram in 7 See Diana E. Henderson, Collaborations with the Past: Reshaping Shakespeare Across Time and Media (Cornell University Press, 2006).

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the 2011 Globe Theatre production of All’s Well That Ends Well in London.) Clearly these productions built upon and updated the components already present in Shakespeare’s play, which, like Two Gentlemen of Verona, not only borrows from European contemporary sources but also highlights the language of love lyric associated with youth, and includes particularly memorable songs: in Love’s Labour’s Lost, those of Winter and Spring with which the play concludes (“When daisies pied,” “When icicles hang”), and in Two Gentlemen of Verona, the famous “Who is Sylvia?” These dimensions of the comedies thus correlate brilliantly with the most popular of modern theatrical genres, the musical. But what happens when these impulses are combined to make more explicit commentary upon the present day, rather than serving primarily to suggest timeless or at least reiterated continuities of experience from Shakespeare’s day through later eras? This would seem an occasion for a bold spin-forward, revealing that the early comedies are in no way effetely Elizabethan. It might also be the place to challenge the familiar emphasis on a UK-US national competition in performing Shakespeare and musical comedy. Two musicals have indeed demonstrated that this is the case—although one might well not know it by reading the scholarship. To start with the earlier of the two, chronologically: perhaps the most celebrated, or notorious, of shows to combine these potent appeals of youth and music was Joseph Papp’s 1971 production of the musical version of Two Gentlemen of Verona. Following upon the success of Hair, the show that established the “rock musical” genre after debuting at Papp’s Public Theater in 1967, Two Gentlemen of Verona (Two Gents) similarly featured a score by Galt MacDermot; this time his collaborators were playwright John Guare and director Mel Shapiro, who together provided the book and lyrics while still working with Shakespeare’s text. In contrast with the Acting Company’s Love’s Labour’s Lost mentioned earlier, youthfulness here licensed an emphasis not so much on the updating of a ‘classic’ but instead on the brashly new, evident both in musical styles and in casting. Originally part of New York Shakespeare Festival’s summer series of free performances in Central Park—a major vehicle for outreach and Papp’s populist vision—the musical’s success led to a Broadway transfer, the first

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instance of a non-profit show retaining its financial and production rights with that move.8 From the perspective of American musical historian Gerald Bordman, however, this Two Gents was new in a less congenial way. He first emphasizes that those attending at the St. James Theater “resented a $15 top price for much the same show that had been given free months earlier”—a claim that rings hollow, given uncertain weather conditions at the outdoor Delacourt Theater and the hours one spent waiting in the Park for tickets, and which in retrospect seems even more quaint given the subsequent skyrocketing of commercial theater ticket prices. However, Bordman himself is vexed not by the price but by technical changes, including reliance on microphones. He writes: Two Gentlemen of Verona exposed the lamentable state of musical production and talent on Broadway when a performance had to be canceled as a result of a breakdown of its amplification system. Singing in ‘live’ Broadway shows was rarely fully ‘live’ anymore.9

One witnesses here the scholar’s conservative distress at the spin-forward, the musical ceasing to uphold operatic notions of a performer’s excellence based on the unassisted body’s ability to project song. Obviously entitled to his opinion—I myself hate the now-accepted sight of portable headset microphones sticking out in front of actors’ mouths—Bordman’s remarks nevertheless inhibit his attending to the specific achievements of this Shakespearean adaptation, and put the scholar in the same position as a negative journalistic reviewer. This is typical “old style” theatrical commentary, upon which much of our performance scholarship still relies. I stress this example because it seems salutary for us to be considering how such an account sounds to a new younger generation raised in the digital age, including those unfamiliar with the old conventions— especially now that new modes of crowd-sourcing and digital access compete with and make even more obvious what has always been a theoretical lack in the “picks and pans” version of theatrical criticism. It would seem imperative now, for example, for a performance scholar to reconsider that night of the Two Gents’ technological breakdown as a prompt to think more generally about how “liveness” changes with new 8

Cited from Dinitia Smith, “Age of Aquarius Returns in Shakespearean Romp,” Theater section, The New York Times August 16, 2005: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/16/theater/newsandfeatures/16vero.html 9 Gerald Bordman, American Musical Theatre, p. 674.

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media and new ways of using media, especially given that Bordman acknowledges the newly typical nature of this Broadway show’s reliance on amplification systems.10 Conversely, if the scholar does not want to examine the general shift with an inquiring rather than judgmental mind, it would seem important to devote at least some attention to what was in fact distinctively rather than typically new in the particular case of Two Gentlemen. Without someone doing so, one remains hard-pressed to imagine why the show ran for 18 months on Broadway, winning the Tony Award for Best Musical over Grease and Stephen Sondheim’s Follies. In retrospect, what strikes me as notable about this Two Gentlemen of Verona was not its miking nor its score, nor even the acting excellence of a cast led by Clifton Davis, Jonelle Allen, Carla Pinza, Jerry Stiller and Raul Julia. Rather, it was its imaginative synthesis of the narrative impulses of the most politically pointed Shakespearean musical to date— West Side Story—with the immediacy of the new rock musical form as a venue for youthful subversion. The combination gave new edge to a Shakespeare play that, for moderns, may only appear radically disruptive (and then only in a reactionary way) in the gender politics of its concluding scenes, with the attempted rape and subsequent ‘offering’ of Silvia to Proteus. According to the musical Two Gents’ playwright John Guare, “Verona, in our minds, was San Juan… Milan was New York,” a concept which allowed the bilingual actors such as Carla Pinza and Raul Julia to improvise Spanish phrases. When Pinza playing Shakespeare’s Julia finds Proteus’s love letter, for example, the actress intuitively responded: “I’ll kiss each several paper for amends. Aye, mira, here is writ ‘kind Julia.’” The writers then incorporated her improvisation into the show.11 Furthermore, while there had been earlier all-black musical adaptations of Shakespeare such as Swingin’ the Dream, this Two Gentlemen of Verona was not only much more commercially successful, but used non-white leads in a mixed race show that did not overtly make race the issue, except as a musical resource. As such, it corresponded to the progressive optimism of much of the late-1960’s youth counterculture, in which race was visible but not allowed to be immediately perceived as a problem—foreshadowing what eventually became a new cosmopolitan cultural emphasis on diversity as in itself a positive value. In this social

10

On this topic, Philip Auslander’s Liveness: Performance in a Mediated Culture, New York: Routledge, 1999 has much to offer. 11 Smith, 2005: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/16/theater/newsandfeatures/16vero.html

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performance, the musical comedy genre served as a means to bracket, or rather flaunt, still rampant off-stage prejudices. If Two Gentlemen of Verona were the end of my story, however, I would not have gone very far in decentering the emphasis in Shakespeare scholarship on Broadway as the stage musical’s hegemonic hub. Even its narrative still moved from Puerto Rico to New York as the glamorous center, thereby upholding the American melting pot mythology that submerges cultural otherness. Furthermore, while Papp’s multi-racial populism certainly played an important part in moving dominant theatrical practices forward toward liberal inclusion, allowing Shakespeare’s words new accents, the production too was evanescent: his Two Gents did not persist in professional repertories or become a canonical example of the American musical, as both its Tony competitors Follies and Grease have. Only in 2005 did another production of this musical appear in New York, and then it was a highly self-conscious revival rather than a fresh start, relying on the original creative team’s active endorsement and seeming ultimately a bit nostalgic. Where the show did maintain some audience, it was not on Broadway but, appropriately, among the young—in occasional collegiate and amateur productions that could exploit the show’s own youthful energy. Increasingly, that form of energy has been recommercialized and fed back into New York theatre, through Diane Paulus’s revival of McDermot’s earlier musical Hair, new musicals based on older scripts such as Michael Mayer’s Spring Awakening, and of course the Shakespearean comic manifestation of this impulse, the lively hip-hop Bomb-itty of Errors (created by former NYU students). For a professional step forward that relied on more than pop or youth culture alone, however, one needs to look back around and across the Atlantic. Only one year before that New York revival of Two Gentlemen of Verona, a very different Shakespearean “spin-forward” made headlines as the first “black British” musical to play in London’s West End.12 And it is 12

The “black British” label most often referenced The Big Life’s (almost entirely) black cast representing a particular form of black British life; the show was also notable in having a black director. For comments on this breakthrough, see Lesley Ferris, “The Big Life: The Ska Musical,” Theatre Journal 57 (2005), 110–12; and Akin Ojumu, “Reach for the Ska,” The Observer, Review Section, p. 7: 18 April 2004. Also www.guardian.co.uk/stage/2004/apr/18/theatre1. Extracts in the following discussion are drawn from Diana E. Henderson, “Catalysing What? Historical Remediation, the Musical, and what of Love's Labour's Lasts,” Shakespeare Survey, volume 64: Shakespeare as Cultural Catalyst, ed. Peter

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with this show, The Big Life: The Ska Musical, that, even while still discussing productions that made news by playing the Anglo-American theatrical capitals, we can see emerging something I would call a truly postcolonial Shakespearean musical, both in its content and its cultural function. Again, it was an early Shakespeare comedy, Love’s Labour’s Lost, that provided the narrative framework, and again the work was somewhat more innovative than even the headlines implied. A rollicking show integrating ska rhythms with a story of racial prejudices experienced by the Windrush immigrants, The Big Life is a brash paradox. Like al-Bassam’s The Speaker’s Progress, The Big Life draws on multiple temporalities to make political points with aesthetic complexity. Its scriptwriter Paul Sirett turned both to Shakespearean comedy and, crucially, to Trinidadian novelist Sam Selvon’s 1956 novel The Lonely Londoners, from whence derived not only the post-war sociopolitical context but also a key scene location and the main title, indicative of the musical’s submerged irony: “One day the ship dock in London and he went to Piccadilly Circus and watch the big life.”13 At the same time, the show’s comic genius was a present-tense audience commentator, Mrs. Aphrodite; a talkative older spectator who held court during scene changes from her dress circle box, she animatedly opined about the specifics of different West Indian island cultures as well as recalling her own vivid, sometimes salacious experiences. Mrs. Aphrodite succeeded as a temporal bridge by inhabiting both the fiction’s and the audience’s location, and speaking very much in the current moment. Indomitably mediating the temporal and knowledge gap between the ’fifties Caribbean and twenty-first-century London, she, like the musical numbers, offset the sociopolitical sadness of a stage fiction in which four young men of color discover that, in terms of professional advancement, broken dreams are ‘the price we pay’ for hope.14 In its origins as well as its temporality and tonality, The Big Life was double but not duplicitous, hearkening back to two very different Stratfords: the hub of the Shakespeare industry, Stratford-upon-Avon, where scriptwriter Sirett served as literary manager for the Royal Holland (Cambridge University Press, 2011): pp. 97-113. Reproduced with permission. 13 Quoted as part of the epigraph to Paul Sirett and Paul Joseph, The Big Life: The Ska Musical (London, 2004), p. 28. (Production opened 17 April 2004 at Stratford East; move to West End 2005; subsequent revival at Stratford East.) 14 Sirett and Joseph, The Big Life, p. 85.

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Shakespeare Company at the time, and the Theatre Royal Stratford East in London. Long before the 2012 Olympics put East London on the map internationally, Stratford East had been made famous in theatrical circles by Joan Littlewood’s original productions there of A Taste of Honey (1958) and another genre-bending musical, Oh, What a Lovely War! (1963). Perhaps surprisingly to Shakespearians but appropriate to that theatre’s progressive history in representing British racial and class politics, it was this latter Stratford that had much more to do with this adaptation of Love’s Labour’s Lost coming into existence. In fact, in constructing a dual-time musical, Sirett cited the analogy with Littlewood’s World War I musical that similarly represented important historical events approximately fifty years prior to its performance, managing to combine acid politics (with contemporary overtones) and musical comedy conventions. Stratford East’s tradition of communitybased performance continued under Littlewood’s successor Philip Hedley, whose workshops helped train local talents such as Clint Dyer, who made his directorial debut with The Big Life, and Paul Joseph, reggae musician and composer of its musical score. The Theatre Royal is located in the borough of Newham, which reportedly had the highest percentage of ethnic minorities in Britain (61 per cent) during the years when the play was being developed; Hedley’s commitment to this community thus led to Stratford East’s inclusion and representation of a diverse theatrical base, and more exceptionally to the hiring of black and Asian directors. At the time of The Big Life’s transfer to the West End, Dyer (whose own parents had emigrated from the Caribbean in the fifties) called attention to this progressive distinction from heralded “mainstream” productions of black playwrights’ works with white directors, claiming “We might not be as starry as a big-name director but surely there must be something we know about the experience that they will never be able to harness.”15 At the same time, The Big Life was a multi-racial collaboration, with Sirett and Hedley, both of whom are white, playing key creative roles within a dominantly 15 Information about The Big Life’s production process draws on my correspondence and 24 January 2006 interview with Paul Sirett, as well as the published reviews of the Stratford East and West End productions. See, in addition to Ferris and Ojumu, Fiona Ritchie, “The Big Life, by Paul Sirett” Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation, 1 (2005), 1–5, and Ray Funk, “Shakespeare Goes Ska on the Windrush,” The Kaiso Newsletter No. 44 (9 May 2004) www.mustrad.org.uk/articles/kaiso44.htm, www.britishtheatreguide.info/reviews/biglife-rev.htm, www.stratfordeast.com/big%20life.htm, http://www.stratfordeast.com/whats on/The%20Big%20Life.

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black group project. The production’s history thus conjures up and complicates both identity-based racial assumptions and the presumption of a highbrow/lowbrow divide often posited in and about Shakespearian performance. The disillusionment of the Windrush immigrants—gradually becoming “educated” as to their racial inequality and economic exclusion—provided a counterbalance to both the apparent frivolousness of Love’s Labour’s Lost’s amorous education and the energetic fun of the musical score and comic form; it offered a different structural route to the seriousness Shakespeare inserts abruptly with Mercade’s intrusion (although a version of that concluding coup de théâtre also appears in The Big Life). The other obvious change involved class: Sirett radically re-imagined Shakespeare’s four studious lords as black men seeking good fortune in London among the first wave of legal Commonwealth immigrant workers: their pact—for three years, not one—is somewhat more pragmatically motivated by the desire for economic and professional advancement. Romantic misfortune still appears as an initial motive, but in a supporting role: Bernie (skeptical, like Berowne before him, of their ability to sustain the prohibitions on “no relation with woman” as well as no alcohol, no cigarettes and weekly fasting) is also reeling from an on-board breakup with his fiancée Sybil. More seriously, despite their high hopes the men soon discover the difficulty of finding a job or even housing in post-war, racist London, and thus are forced (by economic rather than the diplomatic “necessity” of Love’s Labour’s Lost) into sharing an East London bed-and-breakfast with ‘the ladies’. Close quarters lead to temptation, and soon the men are surreptitiously seeking out their singing friend Admiral—loosely based on the resonantly named calypso star Lord Kitchener—to borrow a romantic song. Exposure ensues, and the men become allied suitors. But like the visit of the Muscovites in Love’s Labour’s, their wooing attempt goes awry, as the women take advantage of low lighting in the Zanzibar Club to lure the men into misdirecting their pledges of love. After their temporary humiliation and penitence, the word of death intrudes: Zuleika’s sick father, whom she could not afford to visit back home in Africa, has passed away, and only after all the lodgers pool their resources can she now (too late) return, for his funeral. The journey, coming on the heels of the fantasy Africa of the Zanzibar Club, recalls another diasporic back-story for these migrants, a triangulated history as old as the Atlantic slave trade itself: if not exactly dwarfing the binary hierarchy of colonizer/ colonized or the subaltern speaking back to the imperial center, which dominates

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both postcolonial critical discourse and the musical’s main plot, the recollection of African origins at least re-places the Caribbean subjects in another international frame of kinship, albeit one under the radar of the dominant culture in their new urban “home.” Again economic realities shaped by racial inequity create a social rather than “natural” change of fortune. This being a musical, the performance doesn’t end with these more serious undercurrents within the fiction but—as in Shakespeare’s play— with a song. However, instead of displacing the main characters’ milieu and turning to the natural world for mixed messages, as Shakespeare does, The Big Life’s finale celebrates a distinctively modern social world in which Ferdy can fill his time apart from his beloved being ‘good to myself’ and join in with all the others to ‘never let the love stop!’16 Here the utopian generic conventions of the musical finale reinforce the importance of the score in providing a tonal counterpoint to the sadder moments within both Shakespeare’s inherited story and Sirett’s interpolations. Rather than the ladies (from France) coming to the lords’ territory (Navarre), the men are now collectively the new kids on the block, coming to the women’s “home”—albeit one the women do not own, in a city that marginalizes them as well. The whole question of territory, of being at home, is seriously at stake. Music, language and allusion become the means by which the men and women together try to re-create home, and thus they function as something more fundamental than in Love’s Labour’s Lost: they are, but are not merely, fashion, decoration and amusement. By substituting song-buying for sonneteering, Sirett adds another Cyrano-like function for Admiral and shows the men easily outwitted. But this difference also reinforces a change in emphasis between Shakespeare’s object of mockery and The Big Life’s: whereas the Navarrese lords fail in being amateurish and clichéd rather than original in their own linguistic compositions, here the song signifies the Caribbean community and the value of romance itself as something holding the displaced immigrants together. Ultimately, The Big Life illuminated the crossover appeal of a popular musical collaboration with Shakespeare, realizing its potential for presenttense community building that is neither simply nostalgic nor antihistoricist – though it certainly has been thoroughly commercialized. Within this context, the distance of fifty years from the fictionalized 16

Sirett and Joseph, The Big Life, p. 111.

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events allowed one to enjoy the changes they have brought – among them, the opportunity to create a Shakespearian musical comedy out of that difference, without effacing the history of race. As I hope the specifics from The Big Life demonstrate, nation-based labels do not capture the fluidity, layering, and interpretive challenges of actual artistic practice and post-colonial late capitalism. Exclusive emphasis on the ‘special relationship’ between the United States and Great Britain, or the tension therein, has an increasingly limited value in twentyfirst-century media studies and critique: if it is not exactly replicating the binary hierarchical thinking it purports to expose within artworks, it certainly feels a bit dated, and thus impedes the perception of more complicated global exchanges and transnational artistic flows. Looking back at The Big Life as one instance of a contemporary British musical might help move the conversation forward fruitfully, both by bracketing the United States and by complicating the tendency to make specific productions stand in for an entire nation’s imaginary at one historical moment. The stage musical clearly reminds us that there is no one undivided British subject position, and never was; that the inclusion of “racial- and ethnic-minority casting” of specifically black British actors at the turn of the twenty- first century represents an actual (and long overdue) gesture not so much towards “cool Britannia” as to a reconceived Commonwealth; and that, for all the anxiety produced by and the spectral generic presence of the United States, that “special relationship” is not the only or sometimes even the dominant mental model for British artists. Nevertheless, we are still in a paradoxical landscape. In its sardonic take on Britain’s “welcome” to its post-colonial Caribbean citizens, The Big Life defies the UK versus US mode of critique common in discussing Shakespearean musicals, yet its perky conclusion highlights the recalcitrant commercialism of the form. It illustrates the generic adaptability of Shakespeare’s comedies, but it was the depth of its modern social and emotional resonance as well as its multimedia theatricality that made The Big Life a triumph; as the first black British musical to be performed in London’s commercial West End, it was a belated milestone; yet in remaining unproduced on film, on or off Broadway, or elsewhere in the world, it indicates the gap between racial visibility and equality—between postcolonial artistic representation, and the “everyday” world in which inherited hierarchies persist and often blind us to the new. It, like the Broadway Two Gents, may become all too ephemeral.

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Indeed, the ironies of The Big Life’s production history have been made even more obvious by the hoopla surrounding London’s 2012 cultural Olympiad featuring William Shakespeare on center stage—at the Globe, RSC, National Theatre, the British Museum, and even within the Olympic Stadium opening and closing ceremonies…but oddly, with little or no reference to Stratford East, the theater located in the neighborhood of the Olympic Park itself, or to its authentically home-grown multicultural Shakespeare production. This, while the (in many ways admirable) Globe-to-Globe festival attracted sustained scholarly and public attention, and the RSC staged a less-than-Bollywood version of an Indian Much Ado About Nothing.17 2012 will most likely therefore register among most Shakespeareans as the hallmark year for a long overdue move to a more inclusive, diverse approach to Shakespearean production in England, primarily because the preponderance of attention remains focused on Stratford-upon-Avon’s and London’s familiar, established performance venues. Notwithstanding, earlier, less heralded productions such as The Big Life may in the long run have more to teach us about 21stcentury Shakespeare—if we remember them. When first performed, names such as Navarre and the Princess of France in Love’s Labour’s Lost would have inevitably carried political resonances far from comedic. Around the 21st-century globe? Not so much. As an ironic result, the more radical updates of Shakespeare’s scripts, such as The Big Life—and, in another key, the musical of Two Gentlemen of Verona—arguably do a better job of capturing the tone and allusiveness of his comedies than do “straight” or even slightly rejigged international imports. Just as or more importantly, their playing with Shakespeare may afford new or renewed possibilities for our contemporary entertainment forms as well, including (even) that recalcitrantly commercial genre, the theatrical musical.

17

The Globe-to-Globe festival immediately spurred numerous scholarly talks, as (for instance) at the National Taiwan University Shakespeare Across Media conference (June 2012) and the International Shakespeare Conference sponsored by the Shakespeare Institute, Stratford-upon-Avon (August 2012). I attended the RSC Much Ado (dir. Iqbal Khan, starring Meera Syal) on Aug. 8, 2012.

CHAPTER FIVE DISCOVERING CHARACTER THROUGH SOMATIC AWARENESS: AN ACTOR'S JOURNEY VALERIE CLAYMAN PYE

A site for meaning, the actor’s body functions as the bridge between the audience and the poet/playwright. Actors have long commanded responsibility of the playwright’s words, transforming the literal characters written upon the page and presenting those linguistic marks as threedimensional beings upon the stage, and through their instrument body, embodying the fiction. Today, and in the second half of the twentieth century, much of how the actor (in the Western tradition) executes this task relies upon the teachings of Constantin Stanislavski’s codification of the actor’s process. Indeed, from the title Building a Character one can imagine how actors may construct a personification of Character through a close analytical reading of the characters (in this case, the marks) laid before them on the page. In fact, in the sixteenth century the word “character” would have meant exclusively those printed symbols. In this way, the “modern” idea of a fictionalized, theatrical Character can be traced directly back to the literal marks upon the page and how those marks are read for activation within the actor’s body. In my own undergraduate actor training I was taught to list two things: those things the characters say about themselves and those things others say about them: an excellent example of what is known as direct and indirect characterization. In fact, our idea of the actor’s “role” comes directly from the Elizabethan actor’s roll: the rolled up scroll of lines each actor received, while “part” similarly derives from that part of the script that contained an actor’s cues and lines. Although interesting, it’s hardly surprising to find our theatrical vernacular rooted so deeply in past practices. I begin with this contextualization as a reminder of how language can reflect practice. It is

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the actor’s job, his or her practice, to consider deeply the relationship between the words on the page and the stories told on the stage. As a result, the actor becomes both an orchestrator of as well as a participant in the event while engaging concurrently the instrument body, the text, and the audience. In this way, the actor moves through the ephemeral “two hours’ traffic of our stage” in real time, whilst moving simultaneously through the marks upon the page from which the story’s “traffic” springs. In this essay I will consider how the actor’s somatic connection to the structure of the text helps to uncover the actor’s Character/part/role in performance. This will not serve as a prescription for a definitive form of theatrical practice (if such a thing exists); rather it will serve to illuminate one example of a practitioner’s process of constructing a performance. Unlike the reader’s process of constructing meaning, which is solitary in nature, the actor’s process is of a dual nature: it begins with the actor’s personal understanding of the text and culminates with the audience’s reception and understanding of the fiction. The actor must therefore read beyond the “reading” for sense; read within and among the text in order to find those sensual clues that will advance beyond the actor’s own cognitive perception in order to engage the senses, or sensibility, of others. In this way, the actor can read the diagnostic marks on the page as a musician interprets the notes in a musical score. As a musician readies an instrument for the execution of notes, so must the actor ready his or her body for instrumentation of the text. I begin the process by warming up the body and voice in order to release excess physical tension and to focus my awareness on my body’s receptivity. By warming up, I aim to achieve an optimal state for the body, to strive for a condition in which I maintain only the amount of tension required to remain upright, remembering that the laws of balance are such that energy is moving simultaneously through the body in multiple directions. This state is not necessarily measurable, but its ideal continues to engage cyclically the loop of heightened somatic awareness the actor engages in practice. I divide the body into three: the upper body, midsection, and lower body, and I address each of these three areas to maximize the amount of tension released as well as to augment the flow of energy within. I will refrain from prescribing ways of warming up at this juncture (particularly because this can be a highly individualized process and there are many ways of executing the task), but I wish to acknowledge its importance to the actor’s creative process, in both rehearsal and performance.

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In order to begin to become attuned to the possibilities of what is present within the text, I enter into a corporal relationship to it by activating the presence of the verse within my (freer) body. Some of my methods are wholly my own, and others common practices within the field. As I mine for possibilities, I search constantly for clues that speak to me: the repetition of a particular sound, the ways in which sounds come up against each other; how thoughts are developed. I never know what I may discover or what I may find useful, but I explore the text somatically. I engage with the meter physically by bouncing a ball. I speak aloud the text. I find the meaning of the text’s punctuation in my body by moving and changing directions at each point, which indicates to me not only the direction of thought, but also the length of those thoughts as they appear.1 Lots of short thoughts may tell me that this character is thinking on his feet; longer thoughts may indicate that there is a period of working it all out, of pursuing a deeper connection to the thought before moving on to the next. I speak aloud only the consonants, then only the vowels.2 I speak the verbs, looking at what the action tells me.3 I may develop a particular sense of the character’s state of being, of his emotional inner life, if you will, by paying attention to the alliteration or assonance and pursuing what that means to my understanding of the text and to my connection to the other (fictional) characters on stage. I turn my attention towards what begins to germinate, so I can choose those areas I wish to cultivate further. Throughout my period of exploration, I interrogate what the characters on

1

A common practice in actor training, moving between punctuation points is included in the prescribed techniques of many practitioners, the earliest of which appears in print Cicely Berry’s The Actor and The Text (which first appeared in 1987 as The Actor and His Text). Berry includes it in several other books including Text in Action (2001) and Working Shakespeare: The Workbook (2004). Other advocates of this practice include Patsy Rodenburg (Speaking Shakespeare, 2002), and John Basil (Will Power: How to Act Shakespeare in 21Days, 2006). 2 Another common practice amongst actors, popularized by Berry (1987, 2001, 2004), as well as by Joseph Olivieri (Shakespeare Without Fear: A User-Friendly Guide to Acting Shakespeare, 2001) and Adrian Noble (How to Do Shakespeare, 2010). Kristin Linklater does not specifically prescribe speaking only vowels and consonants, but dedicates the first chapter of her book Freeing Shakespeare’s Voice: The Actor’s Guide to Talking the Text (1992) to their importance. 3 Louis Fantasia (Instant Shakespeare: A Proven Technique for Actors, Directors, and Teachers, 2002), Patsy Rodenburg (2002), and John Basil (2006) all encourage that attention to be paid to verbs, adjectives, and adverbs.

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the page can illuminate (in my imagination) about the Character on the stage.4 In this way, I aim to move beyond Kristin Linklater’s idea that “the word on the page becomes its meaning-in-the-imagination, the meaning becomes imagination-experienced-in-the-body (sensorily and/or emotionally), and that experienced-meaning becomes the spoken word (31-32). As I work through the complex relationship Linklater outlines between me and the text, I aim to arrive not only at the destination of the spoken word, but to manifest and reveal how Character is constructed (and thereby read) by the relationship between my instrument-body and the signs and symbols on the page. In Patsy Rodenburg’s chapter “The Imaginative Exploration of the Text,” Rodenburg highlights three main points in regards to Shakespeare’s language: 1. “Shakespeare is always concrete and specific in his choice of words” (196). 2. “Shakespeare uses language to give concrete reality to potentially abstract ideas and feelings” (197). 3. “In Shakespeare you are what you speak (198).5

If (according to Rodenburg) “I am what I speak” in Shakespeare, then the somatic connection I have to “what I speak” must, to some extent, illuminate what it is that I “am” while I perform. Furthermore, Neil Freeman argues in Shakespeare’s First Texts that “how things were set on paper, as well as what was set on paper, conveyed information to the first readers” (ix). If it is true that information was conveyed in this way to readers, it must also be true that actors today can read the same information and apply it to performance. So as I heighten my sense of somatic awareness to the sounds and rhythm of what I speak, I also 4

Of all the current published practices that examine methods for engaging Shakespeare in performance, only Adrian Noble addresses the idea that the term “character” would have meant something very different to actors in Shakespeare’s company. Perhaps Noble’s more recent publication date (2010) indicates a shift towards the inclusion of scholarship in practice. 5 I could spend a great deal of time interrogating what Rodenburg means by her problematic use of the word “concrete”, but that would take me from the nature of this essay. I read these to mean “deliberate” in point one, and I substitute “materialize” for “give concrete reality to” in point two. I urge the reader to do the same.

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consider how punctuation helps to shape my somatic connection, and I consult multiple editions of the text for variances as I explore. To illustrate how an actor’s heightened somatic awareness can lead to the discovery of performance choices about Character, I will offer a close reading of two texts: one tragedy, one comedy. I urge the reader to engage practically with these texts and follow along with my suggestions; speak them aloud to forge a personal connection. The aim is to engage with the text in practice so as to deepen one’s understanding of the text; reading aloud supports this engagement while reading silently promotes a more solitary reception. I shall begin the first exploration with Othello, and I’ve chosen Iago because of his famous last words, “Demand me nothing: what you know, you know: / From this time forth, I never will speak word.” (5.2.302-303). His defiant silence enrages us, but if we pause for a moment and look at some of his earlier speeches we can see how he has already provided the audience with an answer. I’d like first to look closely at Iago’s speech at 1.3.381-402, which I offer below: Iago Thus do I ever make my Fool, my purse: For I mine own gain'd knowledge should profane If I would time expend with such Snipe, But for my Sport, and Profit: I hate the Moore, And it is thought abroad, that 'twixt my sheets She ha's done my Office. I know not if't be true, But I, for mere suspicion in that kind, Will do, as if for Surety. He holds me well, The better shall my purpose work on him: Cassio's a proper man: Let me see now, To get his Place, and to plume up my will In double Knavery. How? How? Let's see. After some time, to abuse Othello's ears, That he is too familiar with his wife: He hath a person, and a smooth dispose To be suspected: fram'd to make women false. The Moore is of a free, and open Nature, That thinks men honest, that but seem to be so, And will as tenderly be lead by'th' Nose As Asses are: I hav't: it is engendered: Hell, and Night, Must bring this monstrous Birth, to the world’s light.

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This particular text is from the First Folio, but I do not claim this essay as a form of First Folio performance technique. If we consider the ways in which the characters on the page serve as vital clues for performance, we ought to value their orthography, but we must also acknowledge the possibility of their imperfections. The Folio’s individual typesetters may well have influenced its orthography, although their marks (characters) are consistent with the development of rhetorical arguments in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. I find that many modern editions are edited for the modern reader, not for the modern actor and that editors’ regularization of the text often can disrupt the relationship between character and Character. For this reason, I like to compare the Folio’s choices with other editions to read “within and among” the text for performance clues and somatic differences, but the same can be said of the earlier Quartos. Reading a text, with its mostly silent and solitary reception, is different from performing it, from speaking it. When we read a text, we construct our own understanding of the text, we make meaning for ourselves and we can pause, reinforce, investigate, and interrogate at will. When we perform a text we become responsible for the audience’s reception as well as our own. Unlike what is possible for us as we read, when we are in control of our reception, we must help our audiences make meaning of the same text, but they have no luxury to pause, reinforce, investigate, or interrogate because we continue to speak and the play continues to unfold three dimensionally. I’d like to point out that at the beginning of the speech we are already attuned to the trochee “Thus” and all of our energy is brought right into the moment, this moment of change. I have taken this speech out of context, but if we were doing the whole scene, we would also discover that Iago has just switched from prose to poetry. It’s remarkable how Shakespeare gives us two huge character clues to illuminate Character. This is also Iago’s first time alone with the audience. What else does this text tell us? Iago is talking about three different men: Roderigo, Othello, and Cassio. The first task is keeping clear whom he is talking about, or the audience will never follow the logic and a dynamic portion of Iago’s Character will be obscured, rather than revealed. I’d like to look more closely at the third line, which the Folio presents as: “If I would time expend with such Snipe” (1.3.383). We are missing a

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beat somewhere. Most modern editors follow Q1 and correct the line to “If I would time expend with such a snipe,” which regularizes it and makes it into an iambic line. If we look at the Folio syntax we notice that there is an absence of the schwa sound “a,” which opens the mouth a bit and softens the sound overall. Without the regularization, we are left with a consonant combination of “s-ch-s-n-p,” which keeps the mouth closed and the jaw together. This configuration begins to reveal the activation of inner workings, which leads us towards the construct of Character. We can keep to the meter by having a moment of silence in place of the schwa. This friction of the consonants “such/snipe” creates a silent “moment” and gives the actor an opportunity for greater impulse, as though Iago needs to ask “such” (what?) “Snipe” (he answers). It also gives the actor action: a need to coin in the moment the precise language to suit his turn, rather than knowing the comparison in advance. It may seem negligible: just a little letter, just a little sound, but when we have the schwa the mouth is open, there is release and that release dissipates some of the energy the actor can use to help make meaning and reveal Iago’s Character. The next line (1.3.384) is perhaps the line that offers Iago’s motivation from which his actions spring6: “But for my Sport, and Profit: I hate the Moore.” We can consider how the energy of the line moves towards the point and following the colon (at which most modern editions place a period/full stop) the meter elides to meet the iambic, and reveals further his Character. It’s not neatly organized, but straight on the heels of what precedes it, as though Iago can hardly keep the words in his mouth. But FOR my SPORT and PROfit_i HATE the MOOR

I want to point out the use of monosyllabic words in this line and what they do in the mouth. I think we can consider the mouth an extension of our activated body, in that our awareness of our body is heightened and closer consideration of how we speak what we speak informs us. Our monosyllabic words reveal: “but for my sport and I hate the Moor.” The 6

The question of Iago’s motivation can hardly be addressed without acknowledging, as David Bevington does in his edition of Othello, that Iago belongs to a select group of Shakespeare’s villains, including Richard III, Edmund, Aaron the Moor, and Don John, who have their vestiges in the medieval Vice tradition. However, despite this lineage to the Vice, to which Iago refers meta-theatrically: “And what’s he then that says I play the villain?” (2.3.331) and Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s famously marginalized notes regarding “motiveless malignity,” Iago’s motivation is often attributed to his lack of promotion and his suspicion of cuckoldry.

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monosyllables continue in the next line (1.3.385): “And it is thought abroad, that 'twixt my sheets.” If we consider only the monosyllables again we have: “and it is thought that twixt my sheets.” And let’s look at the closed jaw sound of “twixt” and we get a sense of how Iago’s contempt is made physical. The next line (1.3.386) invites debate: the Folio sets it as: She ha's done my Office. I know not if't be true,

This differs from the way it appears in Q1 as well as most modern editions: “He’s done my office. I know not if’t be true.” I imagine that proponents of the First Folio would argue that Iago is talking about Emilia doing his (Iago’s) office with Othello. Certainly, this syntax (if we elide the pronoun “I” once again) makes the line iambic as well logical: He’s DONE my OFFice_i KNOW not IF’T be TRUE, (which places the fricative “IF’T” in a stressed position).

What if it’s not tidy? What does that reveal? We can use the pronoun “she” or “he,” it makes no difference metrically, but what one discovers is: She HA’S done MY ofFICE. i KNOW not IF’T be TRUE,

This is certainly an eccentric reading, but one that may indicate Iago’s own cognitive disorder; it reveals a sense of cerebral friction that actors can appropriate as motivation to Character. Regardless of what the actor chooses to do with it, suddenly, we have an Alexandrine—a line with 12 beats, and that certainly says something about Iago’s state of mind. Although we have a slightly unusual stress in the word “ofFICE” it heightens the sense of that closed jaw contempt that we identified earlier with the emphasis on “fs.” We can also notice that in looking at the monosyllables and using the rhythm they provide we get to the core of what is motivating Iago, and perhaps a good reason why the line is not intended for regularization. Is this what drives Iago? Is this why the line must be twelve syllables and not ten? Is this why Iago speaks, “What you know, you know”? Of course in the Elizabethan playhouse, as in today’s theatre, the audience does know, and Iago makes them complicit by plotting with them. This is where the tragedy comes from: as an audience we are complicit and yet we cannot stop the wheels in motion.

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Notice how the line follows (1.3.387-388) with all monosyllabic words, except for “suspicion”—another closed jaw word with little release. But I, for mere suspicion in that kind, Will do, as if for Surety. He holds me well,

We also discover the internal rhyme between “true” and “do.” As we move forward we not only find the repetition of the “s” and “sh” sounds, but the antithesis of suspicion and surety. After this point, a new plosive alliteration is introduced with the sound “p,” although the speech retains the repetitive sibilant combinations we identified earlier. We see this in the progression: “purpose o proper o place o plume.” The plosive counterpart “k” is also engaged as Iago introduces Cassio, in another trochee (1.3.390): “CASSio’s_a PROPer MAN: let ME see NOW.” The following line (1.3.391) invites us to question whether or not we have an internal trochee at play: To GET his PLACE, and TO plume UP my WILL

This line is perfectly iambic, but the repetition of the plosive along with the action of the verb could equally lend itself to read like this: To GET his PLACE, and TO PLUME up my WILL

This internal trochee might indicate in the rhythm of the syncopation a spitting quality, which supports Iago’s motivation. As Iago’s motivation becomes more complex, his words are increasingly polysyllabic. The next line (1.3.3992) is: In DOUble KNAverY. How? HOW? Let's SEE.

This line brings up a point I have long considered in regard to engaging text through an activated body and voice in practice versus engaging the same text through textual analysis. Although I recognize the spondee and pyrrhic as analytic forms, I no longer believe that these forms exist for the dynamic actor in practice. The voice responds to subtleties and stimulus in ways that marks on the page cannot. On the page, each unstressed syllable receives the same diacritical mark (noted by the sweeping ˘ ), so do the stressed syllables (/). On the page, there is nothing to discern nuance and flexibility between the unstressed syllables in relation to the stressed syllables they sit alongside. In the activated body, not all unstressed

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syllables are of one uniform weight, nor are all stressed. In this way, you can have an unstressed syllable that appears to have a great deal of stress, but in relation to the stressed syllable it precedes it remains “unstressed.” Although some may view the questions “How? How?” as a spondee: HOW? HOW?, I would argue that if the actor with an engaged instrument were to speak it as a spondee of equal weight we would lose the humanity in the speech. By keeping to the iamb, we can see how the second question repeats because the first one was not alone sufficient. The second one demands further consideration, it probes further. For this reason, the emphasis does not remain even, even if that first, unstressed question holds its own relative degree of weight. This is equally true for the pyrrhic: when spoken, the unstressed syllables divulge nuances and reveal to the ear the differences in stress and weight between syllables, rightfully identifying them as iambic. The next line follows again with a trochee: kick-starting the action to come, which culminates in completing the thought with a feminine ending at the full stop. In this way, the plan’s hatching begins with a rattle, and so ends with one. The start line (1.3.393) also includes an elision, as if responding to the earlier jostle. AFTer some TIME, to aBUSE oTHELlo's EARS, That HE is TOO faMILiar WITH his WIFE: He HATH a PERson, AND a SMOOTH disPOSE To BE susPECTed: FRAM’D to MAKE woMEN false.

This last line is questionable, though. Is the last foot also trochee? (WOMen) And does the final word, although it’s clearly syllable eleven, end with stress? (WOMen FALSE)? What I notice about this passage of four lines is that it engages a technique that I call “telescoping.” I coined this phrase to illustrate a device Shakespeare uses that moves incrementally towards a point. It is similar to building a list, or laddering, but instead of stating items one after the next, it rather brings into focus each component of a larger whole towards a destination point. Like a telescope, you can focus each idea to get closer and closer to your point. I describe it as “telescoping” because in my mind’s eye I see the hinged, antique telescope where each section can be adjusted to view the object as a whole. I’ll illustrate what I mean.

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After some time, (closer …) to abuse Othello's ears, (closer …) That he is too familiar with his wife: (closer …) He hath a person, (closer …) and a smooth dispose To be suspected: (closer …) fram'd to make women false. (point!)

We’ve arrived at the target: “make women false.” Remember that the line was a feminine ending, eleven beats. What follows (1.3.397) is equally full. It also cannot be contained within the regular pentameter: The MOOR is OF a FREE, and Open NATure,

The double entendre implies that Othello is too liberal, a notion that sets Iago off and that we have examined previously at length. Once Iago is activated by this idea of Emilia’s infidelity, he continues with his third feminine ending: That THINKS men HONest, THAT but SEEM to BE so,

What is peculiar about this line (1.3.398) is that Shakespeare could have made it wholly in iambic pentameter, but he doesn’t. The line could be: That THINKS men HONest, THAT but SEEM to BE

He doesn’t, and since he doesn’t we must consider this part of our task of uncovering the layers of Iago’s Character. Why must Iago speak “so”? Why does he sustain his regular irregularity before returning to a regular line of iambic pentameter (1.3.399)? And WILL as TENderLY be LEAD by'th' NOSE

We recognize the cattle reference here, the insinuation of coercion, but there is also a double entendre between nose and knows, as in Othello has carnal knowledge of Emilia; the idea of carnal knowledge will figure prominently in the next full thought. We have just explored several lines in which the text could not be contained within the pentameter, and now we have a curiously short line (1.3.400) of only four beats: As ASSes ARE:

Many modern editions put a full stop here, where the Folio has a colon, and the colon is actable. The period indicates completion, but the line is not complete: it has six missing beats. This moment is a moment of poise:

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of impending action. With his thoughts fixated on copulation he conceives his plan (1.3.401-402): I HAV’T: it IS enGENDered: HELL, and NIGHT, Must BRING this MONstrous BIRTH, to THE world’s LIGHT.

We see the plan conceived literally and metaphorically. It is engendered, ready to be birthed into the world of the play. Finally, we recognize the exit cue of the rhyming couplet, and the audience’s intimate encounter and acquiescence is complete. In the audience’s first encounter with Iago they grow privy to his inner thoughts, the motivation for his actions to follow, and thereby discern information regarding his Character. In fact, Iago is so preoccupied by the fear of being cuckolded that he returns to the idea the next time he is alone with the audience. He speaks of Desdemona (2.2.283-309), and reveals not only his desire for her, but the root of his desire: Now I do love her too, Not out of absolute Lust, (though peradventure I stand accountant for as great a sin) But partly led to diet my Revenge, For that I do suspect the lusty Moore Hath leap'd into my Seat. The thought whereof, Doth (like a poisonous Mineral) gnaw my Inwards: And nothing can, or shall content my Soule Till I am even'd with him, wife, for wife.

We can apply the technique of telescoping to this passage, and there is a parenthetical phrase that illustrates how even pulling back from the point can help to bring an idea into focus. Now I do love her too, (closer …) Not out of absolute Lust, (back …) (though peradventure I stand accountant for as great a sin) (closer …) But partly led to diet my Revenge, (closer …) For that I do suspect the lusty Moore Hath leap'd into my Seat. (closer …) The thought whereof, (closer …) Doth (back …) (like a poisonous Mineral) (closer …) gnaw my Inwards: (closer …) And nothing can, (closer …) or shall content my Soule Till I am even'd with him, (closer …) wife, (closer …) for wife. (Point!)

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As if this admission is not enough, Iago continues to speak freely, tossing within parenthesis the suspicion of Cassio’s cuckolding: (For I fear Cassio with my Night-Cap too)

In the Folio this appears as “Night-Cape,” which may relate to the image he links to Othello: “twixt my sheets.” Iago does not expand upon this idea, and it’s possible that it is included not to serve the purpose of a plot point, but rather to substantiate the motivation of Iago’s action. In the activated body we have this telescoping of ideas that embeds itself into the pulse of the language. Even when the idea is framed in parenthesis (thereby taking it aside the point) it continues to support the movement of the text within the speaker, and helps to unveil the voice of the fiction. In this way, as Iago responds to Othello within the fiction “Demand me nothing: what you know, you know: / From this time forth, I never will speak word.” The audience is fully aware of their intimate moments with Iago where he spoke with candor and depth about his motivation. He has already revealed, “Why he hath thus ensnared my Soul and Body?” He has no impetus to reply to Othello’s demand. We may apply the same examination of character orthography to comedy, and I have selected Twelfth Night for these purposes. I would like to look specifically at Malvolio’s final speech (5.1.321-337). MALVOLIO Madam, you have done me wrong, Notorious wrong. OLIVIA Have I, Malvolio? no. MALVOLIO Lady, you have. Pray you, peruse that letter. You must not now deny it is your hand: Write from it, if you can, in hand or phrase; Or say 'tis not your seal, nor your invention: You can say none of this: well, grant it then And tell me, in the modesty of honour, Why you have given me such clear lights of favour, Bade me come smiling and cross-garter'd to you, To put on yellow stockings and to frown Upon Sir Toby and the lighter people; And, acting this in an obedient hope, Why have you suffer'd me to be imprison'd, Kept in a dark house, visited by the priest,

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And made the most notorious geck and gull That e'er invention play'd on? tell me why.

At this point in the play, Maria, Fabian, and Sir Toby have duped Malvolio into believing that his mistress, Olivia, is in love with him. After suffering a great deal of humiliation and abuse, a grossly mistreated Malvolio confronts Olivia about the abuse he has endured at her hand. He begins by addressing her by her title, Madam, as Sebastian, Feste, and Orsino do. His mode of address switches as he becomes more intimate with her: a tactic that he employs in order to plead his case. Malvolio then calls her “Lady”: and in this shift he moves from the pursed-lip title of formality, “Madam,” which closes the mouth and restrains emotion. In “Madam,” the “m”-“m” essentially closes the emotion off on the hum of the final consonant “m,” and moves towards a new, more open title, “Lady,” which provides the blended vowel combination, the diphthong sound “a” (“ei” in phonetics), which opens the mouth and provides a sense of release to the speaker. This juxtaposes the short, crisp sound of “æ,” the mid-mouth vowel we use with the word “pat” in “Madam.” In addition to the change in the first vowel sound, we have the potentially long final vowel “y,” which can be short, long, or half-long. Even without engaging its potential length, the sound is more open simply by moving from a (labial) consonant to a vowel. We might consider that Malvolio switches from one mode to the other both because he is open to confronting her about his mistreatment, and also because he is trying to appeal to her sense of grace, which ladies ought to possess. Once he has done this, he feels free enough to make demands of her: “peruse that letter.” He offers Olivia proof, and demands she acknowledge her responsibility.7 His speech is matter of fact: “you have”; “you must not now deny it is your hand.” What I find quite interesting is how Malvolio continues to engage simple, monosyllabic words for these several lines, with the exception of “invention.” Indeed, what follows continues to remain primarily monosyllabic, although if we look separately at those polysyllabic words we discover a more complex through-line of Malvolio’s inner workings from which the actor can craft Character: “modesty,” “honor,” “favor,” “cross-gartered,” “yellow stockings,” “upon” “Toby” “lighter people,” “acting,” “obedient,” “suffered,” “imprisoned,” “visited,” 7

For an excellent consideration of Malvolio’s demand for accountability and resultant shame I will refer the reader to Allison P. Hobgood’s thorough essay, “Twelfth Night’s ‘Notorious Abuse’ of Malvolio: Shame, Humorality, and Early Modern Spectatorship” (Shakespeare Bulletin 24.3: 1-22).

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“notorious,” “invention.” Reading those polysyllabic words in isolation we discover first those things of great importance to Malvolio, and then those of great contempt. The speaking of this text reveals another possible clue for performance that might be overlooked when reading. There is a repetition of the voiceless plosive “p,” and its voiced counterpart, “b.” At its first appearance, it serves as a plea: “Pray you, peruse,” but the successive expulsion of air can escalate to reveal Malvolio’s increasing disdain. This gives the actor a means to manifest Malvolio’s inner response to the mistreatment he has endured. Furthermore, plosives can be exploited for comedic purposes; that push of air can represent the push that Malvolio attempts to suppress in order to preserve whatever dignity he can retain. The progression of plosives leads us right to the final question of the speech, and we understand Malvolio’s desperate need for answers. Read the list of plosives: “pray,” “peruse,” “bade,” “put,” “upon,” “Toby,” “people,” “obedient,” “hope,” “imprisoned,” “kept,” “priest,” “played.” Interspersed among the plosives, we find a trail of voiced labial consonants that follow the address, “Madam”: “me,” “must,” “from,” “me,” “modesty,” “me,” “me,” “smiling,” “me,” “imprison’d,” “made,” “most,” and “me.” The labial closing required of these words may indicate a virtual mouth-stopping or lip biting as Malvolio tries to maintain his sense of decorum, or contain his emotion. Engaging these bilabial nasal sounds reveals the friction between the emotion-containing mouth stop, and the need for release that is present in the push (or escape) of air through the plosives. To connect further with Malvolio’s state, we may consider one more nasal sound: “n.” We can identify this sound with the word, “no,” as voicing this sound alone can stand in place of the actual word, as evidenced by the chastising, “n, n, n.” If we follow the string of Malvolio’s “n” sounds, we find: “done,” “not,” “now,” “deny,” “hand,” “can,” “hand,” “not,” “not,” “invention,” “none,” “grant,” “then,” “and,” “in,” “honour,” “given,” “frown,” “upon,” “and,” “in,” “an,” “obedient,” “imprison’d,” “in,” “and,” “notorious,” and “invention.” I have not included the words “smiling” and “acting” in this list because, although they contain the letter “n” in their spelling, these end with a velar nasal “ng” sound. I am not advocating that every Malvolio ought to spew emphatically and freely those expulsives, but recognizing the intrinsic build can help the

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actor clarify who Malvolio is and what he is going through at that moment. Malvolio has been subject to an embarrassing litany of events, and he struggles to maintain every last bit of dignity he can muster. It is as though he implores, “Please treat me Properly!” The application of character to Character here enables the actor to engage alternate tactics as Character is constructed (should he so choose). It happens to be quite funny if the actor adheres to the plosives and allows the potential inner volatility an escape route, but should he not choose to utilize this in performance the exploration still contributes to those performances that employ alternative tactics. As I illustrated with Iago, we can apply the technique of “telescoping” to this Malvolio text. As we do, we can see how Malvolio moves towards his point, and also how “telescoping” compliments the use of plosives. You must not now deny it is your hand: (closer …) Write from it, if you can, in hand or phrase; (closer …) Or say 'tis not your seal, (closer …) nor your invention: (closer …) You can say none of this (point): well, grant it then And tell me (new telescope), in the modesty of honour, Why you have given me such clear lights of favour, (closer …) Bade me come smiling and cross-garter'd to you, (closer …) To put on yellow stockings (closer …) and to frown Upon Sir Toby and the lighter people; (closer …) And, (closer …) acting this in an obedient hope, (closer …) Why have you suffer'd me to be imprison'd, (closer …) Kept in a dark house, (closer …) visited by the priest, (closer …) And made the most notorious geck and gull That e'er invention play'd on? (point) tell me why.

Using the technique of “telescoping” we can clarify what Malvolio sees as his two main points: that [Olivia] “can say none of this” and that he has been “made the most notorious geck and gull / That e’er invention play’d on.” The telescoping components are all contributors to his undoing. Throughout this essay I have endeavored to examine the ways in which an actor can construct Character through a close critical and somatic reading of the characters upon the page. I have considered how the application of heightened somatic awareness can help to make textual sense of Shakespeare’s verse, and thereby indicate possibilities for choices in performance. I have attempted to recreate a three-dimensional experience of practice in a two-dimensional format, which, ironically, opposes directly my prescription for engaging the body for performance.

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By looking at the ways in which the activated body and responsive voice react to text I have explored a variety of ways the actor can engage and embody the paradigms of theatrical Character. I have addressed the possible friction(s) and contradiction(s) between practical and literary examinations of Shakespeare’s verse, and offered what I hope will serve as alternate ways of “reading” a text. Throughout, I have confronted the notion that freeing both our bodies and minds to engage deeply with the text positions us in our enquiry as agent between the text and the audience. By deepening our engagement to our bodies and allowing the body’s discoveries to inform our cognitive perception of the text, our engagement to that text flourishes and our audience’s engagement thrives.

Bibliography Basil, John. Will Power: How to Act Shakespeare in 21 Days. New York: Applause, 2006. Berry, Cicely. The Actor and the Text. Third ed. New York: Applause Theatre Books, 1997. —. Text in Action: A Definitive Guide to Exploring Text in Rehearsal for Actors and Directors. London: Virgin Publishing, 2001. —. Voice and the Actor. London: Harrap and Co., 1973. Bevington, David. The Complete Works of Shakespeare. Sixth Edition. Longman, 2008. Fantasia, Louis. Instant Shakespeare: A Proven Technique for Actors, Directors, and Teachers. Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2002. Freeman, Neil H. M. Shakespeare’s First Texts. Vancouver, Canada: Folio Scripts, 1994. Hobgood, Allison P. “Twelfth Night’s ‘Notorious Abuse’ of Malvolio: Shame, Humorality, and Early Modern Spectatorship” Shakespeare Bulletin 24.3 (2006): 1-22. Linklater, Kristin. Freeing Shakespeare’s Voice. New York, Theatre Communications Group, 1992. Noble, Adrian. How to Do Shakespeare. New York: Routledge, 2010. Olivieri, Joseph. Shakespeare without Fear: A User-Friendly Guide to Acting Shakespeare. Orlando, FL: Harcourt, Inc., 2001. Rodenburg, Patsy. Speaking Shakespeare. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002. Tucker, Patrick. Secrets of Acting Shakespeare: The Original Approach. New York: Routledge, 2002.

CHAPTER SIX FITTING THE GLOBE INTO THE RING: CIRCUS IN SHAKESPEAREAN PERFORMANCE DOYLE OTT

The Circus is the only spectacle I know of, that when you are watching it, has the quality of a truly happy dream. —Ernest Hemingway, “The Circus” We are such stuff As dreams are made on, and our little life Is rounded with a sleep. —The Tempest

Both Shakespeare and circus have transcendent, dreamlike moments, and it is little surprise that artists have combined the circus and Shakespeare repeatedly over the two-hundred and forty year history of the formal Euro-American circus, or that this practice gained frequency with the rise of the “New Circus” in the last quarter of the twentieth century. Such combinations have often proved commercially successful, and have given artists access to new audiences. The circus has provided popular appeal for productions of Shakespeare, and Shakespeare has lent social respectability to circus performances. The use of skilled physical performance that we might now associate with circus was common in Elizabethan theatre. Shakespeare’s original clowns would likely have known how to juggle and perform other skills. Soule notes, “Even while representing a mimetic action, however believably, the Elizabethan comic performer often engaged simultaneously in various kinds of openly nonmimetic play, including pure physical display, song and dance, or acrobatic combat” (Soule 168). American clown and master teacher Jeff Raz compares Will Kemp’s famous stunt of dancing from Glasgow to London with similar feats of skill and endurance by modern circus performers, such as Philip Petit’s wire walk between the World Trade

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Center towers. The combination of circus and Shakespearean production has been employed to heighten the sense of realism on the stage, for instance in the use of horses in eighteenth-century hippodramas documented by Saxon and in the aerial work employed to stage battle scenes in recent productions (Magill 13). Circus has also provided metaphorical imagery and magic for productions of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, The Tempest and Macbeth. The combination has provided circus with legitimacy and appeal for educated audiences, and provided theatrical presentations with popular appeal. Despite this commercial appeal, reflected by the restaging of productions such as director Robert Woodruff's 1983 The Comedy of Errors, the blending of circus and theatre has not always been entirely successful. Critics and artists have often noted a tension between these two modes of performance. The blending of circus and Shakespeare in performance raises phenomenological issues stemming from the essentially mimetic nature of theatrical performance and the actual physical presence of circus performance. The juxtaposition of the two types of performance creates interesting resonances and dissonances within a performance. Drawing on evidence of historical productions and focusing on modern productions, mostly in the United States, I will explore ways in which the blending of Shakespeare and circus performance work synergistically, as when the circus act creates a stage picture without diminishing the power of Shakespeare's language. I will begin with an exploration of some of the phenomenological issues that arise from the practice of using circus bodies to present Shakespeare's words and then examine in more detail some of the historical precedents for the melding of circus and Shakespeare. The difference in audience receptions of circus performance and drama such as Shakespeare's creates a dissonance that even the finest technique and skillful framing may not completely alleviate. This dissonance stems from the aesthetic differences between circus and theatrical representation. These differences mean that audiences receive circus and dramatic performance in different ways, causing them to switch back and forth between modes of perception, which may account for the mixed critical response to the productions I will discuss. Circus performance presents a visceral actuality while drama presents a virtual reality. Whereas the dramatic actors present an art of seeming and trade in creating illusions of reality, the circus performers present themselves to the audience. The circus performer plays with actual forces of gravity, with real risk and potential of failure or injury. As Coxe puts it, “I think it fair to say that the theatre is a spectacle of illusion, and the circus a spectacle of actuality. After all, jugglers actually do keep six clubs

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turning in mid-air, and a flyer really does turn three summersaults between leaving the bar of his trapeze and reaching the hands of his catcher” (109). Circus education specialist Reg Bolton joked about the difficulty in framing this physical immediacy in a dramatic setting, saying that when an actor starts juggling his “character disappeared leaving the audience to think “Hey, that guy’s pretty good. I wonder if he’s going to drop one” (Bolton, interview). Both Coxe and Bolton point out the tension between the mimetic aspect of theatre and the actuality of circus technique. Stoddart points out that the issue of mimesis in circus performance is complicated. She notes that the circus’s “aesthetic components” have changed throughout its history: One of the key distinctions of which to take account in this respect is between representational and non-representational, mimetic and nonmimetic displays, and as discussed above, these distinctions have a historical context. Whilst the circus before 1782 was an eclectic and opportunistic assemblage of equestrian display, animal tricks and burlesque, the importance of the stage after this, during the so called Romantic era, transformed the nature of the circus spectacle for a considerable period of time until, under the influence of American circus in the second half of the nineteenth century, it was in some ways returned to its fairground roots where display took precedence over drama. (79)

Even within the display-based circus there are complex issues of representation of gender, ethnicity, and species that have mimetic aspects, particularly in the “new circus” currently practiced alongside “traditional” circus. In discussing the use of circus in physical theatre, Govan, Nicholson and Normington state, “The circus practices display the transgressive nature of bodies that are developed to the margins of possibility” (162). One way in which the use of circus may resonate with the original Elizabethan performance of Shakespeare's plays is in the gender transgressions implicit in circus performance. The double crossdressing of boys playing women disguised as men in early performances of Twelfth Night, for example, plays with gender in ways similar to the gender transgressions of the circus’ muscular risk-taking women and lithe, elegant men. Neither case directly implies transgressive sexuality, but “The normal expressions for gender aesthetics are reinscribed” (Govan, Nicholson and Normington, 162). Companies such as Cirque du Soleil both frame their productions in quasi-mimetic, theatrical terms and play with transgressive gender ambiguity. Nonetheless, the distinction between mimetic performance and display of actualities is useful in thinking about the interplay of the aesthetics of circus and dramatic performance.

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Because of this aesthetic difference, drama and circus create different responses in the audience. If, as circus theorist Peta Tait claims, “A performer’s moved action is encountered kinesthetically as well as subjectively by a spectator” (140), then the spectators of circus-based Shakespeare may simultaneously experience the auditory and linguistic pleasure of the language and also physically catch (in Merleau Ponty’s parlance) the physical circus performance. This may account for the uneven reviews of the Karamazov production, in which reviewers clearly enjoyed the production while strongly criticizing the performers' command of Shakespeare's language. While some of the criticism undoubtedly reflects the rhetorical skill (or lack thereof) of the performers, it also seems possible that the physical performance supersedes the linguistic aspects for the spectator, so that even competent command of the language is in part “drowned out” by the physical awareness created by the audience reception of the circus elements. In considering the effects of circus skills presented through film, Tait notes that “It is not only the immediacy of physical presence that is lost with other forms of representation, but the way bodies in movement demand reciprocating bodily awareness from spectators during live performance” (141). That is to say, in watching live circus, the spectator becomes more aware of his or her own body in terms of its own abilities and limitations and also its reactions to the potential danger of the act. While the theatre can make us laugh and cry, it seldom makes us hold our breath or gasp with the frequency of a well-performed circus performance. The difference in responses to circus and theatre makes the audience switch between modes of perception. When a display of physical skill shares space with a dramatic performance presenting a virtual reality via language and movement, the differences between them are highlighted for the audience. Precisely because it presents actual events rather than fictions, live circus performance defies “literary embodiment,” according to Stoddart (6). The circus performer exists for the audience in real space and time, while the dramatic actor exists in a virtual space and time. The audience viewing both at the same time, perhaps even in the same performer, must simultaneously engage in the suspension of disbelief required by the dramatic representation and the wonder at the actual skill of the performer. To the extent that one mode of perception cancels the other out, as when for instance the physical display elicits a physiological response such as a gasp for its pure virtuosity, the audience has to switch between modes of perception. The process might be imagined as similar to the foregrounding and backgrounding a viewer uses to see the two images present in some optical illusions, such as the famous image that seems to

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be either a vase or a pair of faces in profile. The audience member can appreciate the actual physical skill of the circus artist or the virtual world created by the dramatist, but to do both simultaneously either requires an additional leap of perception only made possible through high levels of skill and careful framing by the artist, or that the viewer switch between two types of reception. The tension between presentational virtuosity and mimetic virtuality shows both in the historical precedents for the melding of circus and Shakespeare and in more recent examples. What we now call circus, while obviously having much older roots, is generally considered to have been created by Philip Astley in 1768 in Britain as a primarily equestrian form of entertainment. This emphasis on equestrian performance continued through the nineteenth century and provided one of the earliest impulses to perform Shakespeare through the use of circus: the hippodrama. The beginnings of Shakespearean hippodrama came fast on the heels of Astley’s original circus. As noted by A. H. Saxon, author of the single article I have found explicitly dealing with circus and Shakespeare, “The earliest allusion to Shakespeare in any circus occurs in an eighteenth-century bill of the Royal Circus, ‘which featured a rider who would act as Mark Antony between his leaps’” (59). While a rider costumed to evoke a character from Shakespeare's works falls far short of a full Shakespearean production, the practice does show an early step towards later, more involved combinations of circus and drama. Nor was this an isolated incident: “In the circus of Thomas Taplin Cooke, for example, which, beginning in the late 1830's regularly showed up in a series of permanent circus buildings erected throughout England and Scotland, the noted equestrian James Cooke appeared on horseback as Sir John Falstaff, Shylock and Richard the Third” (Saxon 60). Most of the British circus buildings of the period had proscenium stages attached to one side of the ring to facilitate the hippodrama (Coxe 110), and Helen Stoddart relates that the hippodrama was so pervasive that from 1782 until late in the nineteenth century “the stage remained as a kind of unbroken umbilical cord connecting the circus with the theatrical roots of some of its performers and facilitating the spectacular enactment of the military background of others” (37). During this period, mounted dramatic reenactment and representation in the circus was the norm, and individual performers’ practice of Shakespearean representation was present almost from the start. According to Saxon, the earliest example of something like a full hippodrama of any of Shakespeare’s plays in the ring appears to be a March 20, 1817 production of Macbeth ou les Sorcières de la forèt at the

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Cirque Olympique in Paris (69). Hippodrama productions of Shakespeare were also popular in the United States, where “the last two acts of Richard III were played with horses at the Lafayette Amphitheatre in New York as early as February 1826” (Saxon 69). The circus hippodrama appears to have reached Britain slightly later: During the season of 1856-57, at a time when the Shakespearean revivals of Charles Kean were drawing unprecedented houses at the Princess's Theatre in Oxford Street, William Cooke, then manager at Astley's hit upon the idea of producing Shakespeare in the form of hippodramas . . . Cooke succeeded in producing only four such plays: Richard III (Cibber's version), Macbeth, Katherine and Petruchio (Garrick), and 1 Henry IV. (Saxon 62)

Saxon notes that while the mounted Macbeth was very successful, Cooke’s subsequent hippodramas received a less enthusiastic response. Indeed, Coxe relates that the Shakespearean hippodramas were not commercially successful, in referring to “William Cooke, who lost 40,000 pounds in seven years by presenting Shakespeare and grand opera on horseback” (114). A second major melding of Shakespeare and circus took a much more verbal form. Whereas the hippodramas created the spectacle of Shakespeare's battles, the clowns who billed themselves as “Shakespearean jesters” beginning around 1840 sought to evoke the wit and verbal mastery of Shakespeare's clowns. This linguistic approach to clowning was made possible by three factors. First, the circus clown had fully emerged as a foil for the ringmaster, and unlike the knockabout clown which had emerged earlier from the circus tradition of comic riding, the clown now had to hold his own against the verbal finesse of the ringmaster. Second, the popularity of Shakespeare as theatrical fare and reading material resulted in an audience familiar enough with the original plays to appreciate the quotations. In the expanding United States during this time, settlers choosing what books to take often brought Shakespeare, as Alexis de Tocqueville attests to with his often quoted line “There is hardly a pioneer hut in which the odd volume of Shakespeare cannot be found” (538). Third, circuses were still small enough that a single speaker could be seen and heard well enough to make a dramatic performance effective. Saxon writes, “However inexplicable it may seem, the public’s enthusiasm for this type of clown was so great that within a few years most every circus, those in Germany, France, and America included, could boast its own Shakespearean jester” (61).

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Dan Rice, perhaps the most famous of these “jesters,” both parodied Shakespeare's plays on stage and liberally incorporated Shakespearean quotes into his act in the circus ring. His costume and appearance recall the “Uncle Sam” character still common in political cartoons, and “Unlike most clowns of the day, Rice did not wear clown white, regarding himself as a jester in the Shakespearean sense rather than a buffoon. ‘A successful clown,’ he said later, ‘must possess more intellect, ability, and originality than a comedian’” (Culhane 50). As Rice biographer David Carlyon notes: Rice’s “Shakespeareanism” centered on two burlesques, “Dan Rice’s Version of Othello” and “Dan Rice’s Multifarious Account of Shakespeare's Hamlet.” Despite the titles, he did not write them. … Nevertheless they were his, just as singers have signature songs written by others. Rice introduced his burlesques into the ring and became known for them. Nor were they stray doggerel. Their rhymed couplets of iambic pentameter and clear synopses of the plays showed a sophisticated capacity. (57)

Carlyon goes on to note that the Othello script, in particular, is more of a straight retelling of the story than a comic script. Rice was not alone in creating the Shakespearean clown. As circus historian Culhane writes, “there were precedents for what Rice was doing: Joe Blackburn of Kentucky, considered by Rice to be the greatest clown of the 1830's, billed himself as ‘the gentleman jester’; Joe Cook had recited Shakespeare while wearing a dress suit; and two of Rice's contemporaries, Joe Pentland and Pete Conklin, used Shakespearean quotations in their acts” (Culhane 50-51). In Britain in 1848, William Wallett became a clown at Astley’s circus. Whereas Tom Barry, the clown Wallett replaced, had relied largely on physical humor, “Wallett was a competent equestrian and contortionist, but he engaged mainly in repartee, and when he was criticized for the new interpretation of the role he replied, 'Others said that the speechifying was not in character, that a clown should have heels but no tongue; ignoring altogether the Shakespeare's description of Yorick, his ‘flashes of merriment that were wont to set the table on a roar.’ He was remembered for his tongue and not for his heels” (Culhane 55). Wallace and Rice performed together briefly in the United States, when for four weeks they presented an act that consisted of Wallace reciting well-known Shakespearean quotations and Rice responding with a comic paraphrase of the quotation (Brown 172). The popularity of these “Shakespearean jesters” makes this the one of the most successful joinings of Shakespeare

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with circus; Dan Rice was one of the most famous performers of his day and enjoyed considerable popular and commercial success. In addition to the hippodramas and Shakespearean clowns, there also appears to have been a practice of presenting fully staged Shakespeare plays simultaneously with circus performance in the mid-nineteenth century as well. Joseph Andrew Rowe (d. 1887) who was an equestrian and manager of circus companies that toured the West Indies and Central and South America built a series of circus amphitheaters in San Francisco beginning with a makeshift performance space called Rowe’s Olympic Circus in 1849. According to Londré, “Rowe may also have been the first impresario to mount professional dramatic productions in San Francisco, combining circus entertainment with performances of Othello, Richard III, and The Lady of Lyons. These productions were undistinguished, featuring obscure, second-rate American or English actors and performers, but they proved popular with entertainment-hungry Forty-Niners” (134 Londré). Including Shakespeare on the bill also smoothed Rowe's path to acceptance of his amphitheaters. As an 1850 notice in the Daily Alta California newspaper notes, “A theatre was loudly called for, the people and the press favored the idea that a theatre was needed and would meet with the very best support” (“Olympic Theatre”). In a city wary of the Wild West generated by the huge influx of miners and immigrants from many cultures, civic leaders would have regarded Shakespeare as both a civilizing influence and as a reinforcement of the English language in San Francisco. The commercial appeal of adding circus to Shakespeare continues through to the present. During the first part of the twentieth century, there seem to have been relatively fewer examples of the combination of circus and Shakespeare, particularly in the United States. The massive three-ring spectacles of the American circus in this period were too large for the verbal performance of the “Shakespearean jester” style of clown. While this style of clowning continued to some degree in the vaudeville circuit, audiences saw it as somewhat old-fashioned and it certainly lacked the popularity enjoyed by Dan Rice and others. Meanwhile, naturalistic acting styles began to dominate theatrical performance of Shakespeare. Some European productions of Shakespeare that did draw on circus in the first part of the twentieth century appear to have borrowed the images and conventions of the circus without actually drawing on circus performance technique. In 1916, for example, Cocteau worked on a condensed version of A Midsummer Night’s Dream to be performed at the Cirque Medrano in Paris. The production was to include a “stylized circus orchestra”

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(Whiting 463) and would have been shaped by the requirements of the performance space, but otherwise appears to have been intended to be performed in a standard theatrical mode. Much later, Giorgio Strehler and Piccolo Teatro staged Re Lear following the success of Arlecchino servitore di due padroni in 1947: “The production was set in a circus ring with Lear and his Fool both portrayed as circus clowns. Lear is the authoritarian White Clown and the Fool is the Auguste, yet the Fool also plays the role of instructor in clown logic to the King, who holds the titular power of authority” (McManus 97). Interest in the combination of circus and Shakespeare re-emerged in the later twentieth century with two intertwined developments. The first was the emergence of experimental performances that sought to rediscover a theatricality that could reinvigorate a theatre that had become overshadowed by film and television. The second was the development of the “new” circus and propagation of circus techniques fed in large part by countercultural interest in popular performance forms and distrust of canonical texts. In the latter half of the twentieth century, there are two major types of fusion of circus and Shakespeare, one privileging Shakespeare, and other foregrounding the circus performance. These can be represented by two landmark productions. The first, Peter Brook's famous Midsummer Night's Dream, is the epitome of the “serious” Shakespearean production employing circus arts as a theatrical device to support the production. The second, the Flying Karamazov Brother's Comedy of Errors directed by Robert Woodruff, represents the highly skilled circus performance that employs Shakespeare as a framework. Both demonstrate the tension implicit in combining circus and drama. Peter Brook’s 1970 production of Midsummer Night’s Dream with the Royal Shakespeare Company stands as the touchstone for contemporary practice combining circus skills and serious Shakespearean performance. In this production the actors played on a stark white box set, and used juggling skills such as plate spinning, simple acrobatics and basic trapeze skills to create the world of the play, and particularly the magic aspects of that world. While the circus skills appear to have been performed with adequate competency, they were by no means high level and none of the performers were trained circus performers. While Clive Barnes’ review of the performance praises John Kane (Puck) for “performing his tricks with true circus expertise” (15), Brydon writes that “Brook used the circus as a vehicle to suggest and explore the play's magic; impressive as the results

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generally were, the device did not, to me at least, justify the hyperbolic praise showered upon the production. Brook's actors were in their circus guise competent but far from magical; they did no more than any reasonably fit person could have learned to do with intensive practice, and the mechanisms were transparent” (207). Dramatic actors led by a theatre director created the performance, and while the circus elements certainly contributed to a visually stunning production, they were arguably less than integral to the show. David Selbourn, who was invited to observe the rehearsal process and has documented it in book form, notes his own reservations about the acrobatics. For him the circus elements had the potential to be seen as another mid-twentieth century primitivist impulse, an appropriation of a culture to add spice to an essentially Western spectacle. Richard Proudfoot, on the other hand, notes that “no illusion was allowed, the means of the fairies’ teasing of the mortals were as visible as the devises of ‘Pyramis and Thisbe,’’” and that the circus trick used to represent the play's magic flower (a plate spun and balanced on a stick) was “sometimes dropped” (Proudfoot 268). The actuality of the circus tricks, which are more subject to gravity and human error than typical stage illusions, becomes central in Proudfoot’s reading of the production. He sees the inclusion of circus techniques as a method whereby Brook and his actors strip away the illusions of the play and make it immediate and more real to its audience. Whatever the opinions of various critics regarding the circus skills in the production, they all agree that the language was paramount, and that Shakespeare’s text drove the production. A 1983 production of The Comedy of Errors demonstrates a different approach to the pairing of circus physicality with Shakespearean text. Whereas the Royal Shakespeare Production, in Barnes words, “stripped the play down, asked exactly what it is about” (15), the production of The Comedy of Errors produced by the Goodman theatre in Chicago as a vehicle for the Flying Karamazov Brothers juggling troupe treated the text as a framework in which to present the skills of the performers. The Comedy of Errors does of course lend itself to the inclusion of broad clowning. This approach has been employed in more than one production by the Royal Shakespeare Company. In the 1976 production directed by Trevor Nunn, “The two Dromios are red nosed, red haired clowns with short baggy jeans and braces. Their stocky bodies shift easily into expert acrobatics and footwork” (Emerson 498). Adrian Noble’s 1983 production also used circus-style clowning. In Roger Warren's review of this production he writes:

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At Stratford in 1982, Adrian Noble presented the Fool in King Lear as half music-hall comedian, half circus clown: in 1983 he applied this treatment to all the characters in The Comedy of Errors. Like the Fool, the Dromio twins wore white-face makeup and false red noses, overcoats and baggy trousers. The other characters also wore clown makeup, and performed circus and vaudeville routines to a garish musical commentary from a stage band that played from an orchestra pit sunk into the forestage, as at a Victorian music-hall. (Warren 167)

While these clown-based productions of Comedy of Errors drew on the trappings of circus more than actual circus technique, they do demonstrate an acceptance of the idea of using circus in presenting Shakespeare’s earliest comedy. In fact, some of the discussion surrounding Woodruff’s production indicates a belief that this particular play actually requires a broader performance style than most of the Shakespearean canon and that circus is a near-perfect fit. The production featuring the Flying Karamazov Brothers ran for six weeks at the Goodman Theatre in Chicago in 1983 was revived for the Olympic Arts Festival in Los Angeles in 1984. It then received a New York run at the Beaumont theatre in 1987, during which time it was also televised as a Live from Lincoln Center broadcast. Whereas most of the prior twentieth-century circus productions of Shakespeare seem to have been generated as concepts about circus, this one was generated by a specific set of performers, and as such recalls the work of the nineteenthcentury “Shakespearean fools” who freely used Shakespeare’s work to their own ends. As Kalson relates, “Ever since the brothers’ first Chicago appearance, Gregory Mosher, the Goodman’s artistic director [ . . . ] harbored a desire to bring back the Karamazovs, wedding them to Shakespeare” (Kalson 227). Director Robert Woodruff made the most of the performance skills brought by the new vaudeville performers in the cast: “The director has freely adapted and reshaped the text for this particular cast and incorporated juggling and circus skills, not as a pastiche to the action, but as its essence” (Fink 511). The cast (which varied somewhat from the original staging through the subsequent re-stagings) included the Karamazov Brothers, a juggling troupe that had already had a run of their variety show at the Goodman, Avner Eisenberg, another juggling troupe known as Vaudeville Nouveau, and members of the San Francisco-based Pickle Family Circus. Unlike the Royal Shakespeare Theatre's circus-themed productions in which highly trained Shakespearean actors learned some basic circus skills, this was a Shakespeare-themed circus performance, in which expert jugglers,

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acrobats and clowns stretched their abilities to handle Shakespearean text. Critics were generally dismissive of the resulting production's value as Shakespeare. Writing about the televised performance of the production Coursen states, “The production does not know whether it wants to be drama or circus. The two elements compete against each other” (530). Similarly, while Fink praises the physicality of the performers, he writes: “Language however, was this production's weakest element. Dialogue was constantly up-staged with as much action as possible, as if the director had little confidence in the script or his actors' ability to interpret it” (512). Kalson also notes the importance of the skilled physical aspects of the production: “Perhaps the director initially considered the juggling merely as a frame for the Shakespeare; but what he finally opted for was a view of the play as a vehicle for the juggling in a production that engaged the eye while disengaging the ear” (228). Robert Brustein was scathing in his review of the New York production. While he appreciated the concept and notes that “The results are winning for a while, and I should report that the audience I was with seemed to enjoy itself immensely,” he goes on to state “About the only thing I learned from this Comedy of Errors is that even minor Shakespeare must be acted: the major limitation of the evening is the absence of performers who can speak the lines” (176). Ultimately, his review dismisses the production, concluding “It skirts the surface of experience, offering amusement without involvement, laughter without discovery, technique without depth; and the name of that game, my friends, is escapism” (Brustein 178). Despite these mixed critical reviews, the multiple restaging and eventual televising of the Karamazov Comedy of Errors provide ample evidence for the popular appeal and commercial viability of the show, and if nothing else it helped to inspire my own path in circus and theatre. The disparity in the reactions to the various late twentieth-century circus-based productions of Shakespeare's plays demonstrates the tension between theatre and circus in performance, a tension which often leads artists to privilege one or the other in production. Either the production takes the approach of the Royal Shakespeare productions and employs a circus concept in what is essentially a text-based approach to the scripts, or else Shakespearean text is freely adapted and provides a mere framework for the circus performance. The Chicago-based Midnight Circus’ All the World’s a Stage, produced in 1999, employs the second approach. Noted circus historian and critic Earnest Albrecht cites the production as a successful blend of circus and theatre:

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All the World’s a Stage was a brilliant conception that imagined what would happen if the Bard of Avon were suddenly to find himself surrounded by the circus. That such a meeting seemed perfectly logical was only the first of several coups de theatre that this amazingly deft production was able to pull off. Shakespeare appeared in the midst of a magician's classic transformation act . . . In this instance it was Shakespeare who appeared in place of the magician, uninvited, unexpected, and decidedly unamused. Thus began the real transformation, turning Shakespeare from a skeptic who looked at the circus around him rather suspiciously and asked “Where are the words?” to a believer more than ready to take part in a charivari that ends the show. (Albrecht xiii)

Even more than the Woodruff Comedy of Errors, this production recalls the free appropriation of Shakespeare practiced by the Shakespearean clowns of the 1800s. An embodied Shakespeare's conversion to circus aficionado reads as a fulfillment of the circus performers’ desire to make Shakespeare one of their own. Some more recent Shakespearean productions employing circus technique appear to benefit from the proliferation of circus training programs and combine high-level circus technique with well-acted Shakespearean language. The 2001 Royal Shakespeare Theatre productions of the Henry VI plays employed aerial techniques including trapeze and vertical rope. In a review in the circus magazine Spectacle Magill writes that “Circus skills have enabled the director of the seldom performed Henry VI plays, Michael Boyd, to release the plays from the dusty shelves of academia and allow them to take on an immediate dynamic as thrilling theatre works” (13). The productions were unusual in that they weren't comedies. According to Gavin Marshall, the aerial coach and choreographer as well as performer in the productions, “‘In Part I there is a lot of rope work and this does suggest a thrilling dynamic for the battle scenes. As we move further into the plays, especially the Jack Cade rebellion of Henry VI, Part 2 we place the rebels around a single trapeze reflecting the danger of the revolt and through trapeze stimulate the language’” (Magill 13). The aerial rope techniques employed in Part 1 provided an exciting visual aspect to the fight scenes, while the trapeze seems to have worked on a metaphoric level similar to the spinning plates and trapezes of the Peter Brook Midsummer Night's Dream. Magill’s article is unique in the documentation of circus skills in Shakespeare in that it deals with the potential physical risk of circus arts in production. He again quotes Marshall: “‘Health and Safety was a big issue with new training regulations coming in.’” He also credits London's Millennium dome with producing “hundreds of aerialists who are very interested in this kind of

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work and using their skills for the theatre” (13). The increase in the availability of circus training may point to the potential for more seamless pairings of Shakespeare and circus technique. I was privileged to attend a 1994 production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream at the Marin Shakespeare Festival in California that capitalized on the presence of the Pickle Circus and the Circus Center in San Francisco, and employed acrobats and aerialists, as well as Pickle clowns Jeff Raz (a veteran of the Karamozov’s Comedy of Errors) and Diane Wasnak as Bottom and Puck, respectively. As in other circus productions of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, the circus elements came into play to denote the magic of the fairies and to heighten the slapstick of the Rude Mechanicals. Wasnak and Raz each have strong formal training both as actors and acrobats, and their working relationship allowed Puck to enter sliding head first down a pole and literally stand on Bottom while bestowing the ass-head on him and to literally ride Demetrius and Lysander, and others through the woods while competently delivering Shakespeare's text. Wasnak’s Puck also provided a clear example of the transgressive gender presentation circus performance brings to theatrical production. She engaged in more physically demanding stunts than any other cast member while dressed as a male or genderless satyr, while delivering her lines with a clearly feminine voice. Several circus training grounds in the United States have begun to include Shakespeare in their curricula. At Circus Center in San Francisco, Joan Mankin offers a workshop in Shakespearean clowning as part of the professional Clown Conservatory. At the Actors Gymnasium in Evanston Illinois, Felicity Hesed directed a student production of The Tempest, in which actors versed in physical theatre joined circus students to perform an abridged version of the play, and acting conservatories are in turn, including circus skills in their curriculums with greater frequency. The availability of such cross training in dedicated circus schools and in acting conservatories may help reduce the tension between circus and theatrical production that has been an issue in past productions. Certainly actors with a more thorough grounding in circus arts would have allowed Brook a broader palate to draw on for his Midsummer Night’s Dream, and stronger acting skills would have allowed Woodruff to address many of the critics' issues with his Comedy of Errors. However, other factors underlying the tension between the dramatic and circus modes of performance may be more than a matter of acting or circus technique. Despite or perhaps because of the dissonance between the primary modes of Shakespeare and circus performance, the combination of the two has often proved popular and commercially viable. This popularity

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explains in part why the artists involved use circus to embody Shakespeare. The use of circus provides popular appeal and the appearance of accessibility to the Shakespearean production, which audiences might otherwise perceive as highbrow or difficult to understand. The mere invocation of Shakespeare's name, on the other hand, dispels many of the negative low-culture connotations sometimes associated with circus, particularly in the United States, and the use of Shakespearean character, dialogue and plot provides a strong framework for the circus performance. Further, the dissonance created by the melding of circus and Shakespeare may prove a source of strength for a production. Part of the enjoyment of the spectacle may in fact lie in the pleasure of switching between the physical response required by the circus performance and the linguistic pleasure of Shakespeare’s poetry. The original productions of Shakespeare’s plays by all accounts appear to have been full- bodied experiences for their audiences, many of whom stood and all of whom were subject to the sounds, smells, and even flavors of an often boisterous Elizabethan crowd. If circus does indeed bring the audience into a physical experience of its own body, then perhaps it serves to replace some of the physical sensation that framed the plays in the first place. Finally, there is logic of a sort in pairing circus and Shakespeare that subverts the dissonance others and I have theorized. The heightened language of Shakespeare's verse requires a different set of vocal and other acting techniques than contemporary realist theatre. This heightened language arguably supports heightened forms of movement, and indeed Shakespeare wrote in sword fights, dances, and, in one of the most famous stage directions in the history of theatre, a bear chase. Shakespeare's verse is strong enough at the very least to support the use of circus, itself a sort of kinesthetic equivalent of poetry. Regardless of the function and functionality of Shakespearean circus production, the practice has existed for most of the history of circus. Given the large number of companies producing Shakespeare and the increasing number of circus artists and companies, it seems likely that we can look forward to circus technique providing even more extreme embodiments of Shakespeare’s plays.

Works Cited A Midsummer Night's Dream. William Shakespeare. Dir. Robert Currier. Forest Meadows Amphitheatre, San Rafael, 6 August 1994. Albrecht, Ernest. The Contemporary Circus: Art of the Spectacular. Maryland: Scarecrow Press, 2006.

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Barnes, Clive. “Historic Staging of ‘Dream’.” Rev. of A Midsummer Night's Dream, by William Shakespeare. Dir. Peter Brook. Royal Shakespeare Company, Stratford. The New York Times 28 August 1970: 15. Bolton, Reg. Personal interview. 27 August 2005. Brown, Maria Ward. The Life of Dan Rice. New Jersey: Self Published, 1901. Brustein, Robert. “Vaudeville and Radio.” Rev. of The Comedy of Errors, by William Shakespeare. Dir. Robert Woodruff. Vivian Beaumont Theatre, New York. The New Republic 6 June 1987: 28-30. Rpt. in Shakespearean Criticism: Excerpts from the criticism of William Shakespeare's Plays and Poetry, from the First Published Appraisals to Current Evaluations. Ed. Michael Magoulias. Vol. 26. Detroit: Gale Research Inc., 1995. 176-77. Brydon, Diana and Irene Rima Makaryk. Shakespeare in Canada: A World Elsewhere? Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2002. Carlyon, David. Dan Rice: The Most Famous Man You've Never Heard Of. New York: PublicAffairs, 2004. Coursen, H.R. “The Comedy of Errors on Television.” The Comedy of Errors: Critical Essays. Ed. Robert S. Miola. New York: Routledge. 1997. 525-46. Coxe, Antony D. Hippisley. “Equestrian Drama in the Circus.” Performance and Politics in Popular Drama: Aspects of Popular Entertainment in Theatre, Film and Television, 1800-1976. Ed. David Bradby, Louis James, and Bernard Sharratt. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 1981. 109-18. Culhane, John. The American Circus: An Illustrated History. New York: Holt, 1991. Emerson, Sally. “Trevor Nunn's Musical Production, 1976.” Plays and Players 37 (1976): 37.Rpt. in The Comedy of Errors: Critical Essays. Ed. Robert S. Miola. New York: Routledge. 1997. 497-498. Fink, Joel G. “Robert Woodruff's Circus Production.” Theatre Journal 35 (1983): 415-16. Rpt. in The Comedy of Errors: Critical Essays. Ed. Robert S. Miola. New York: Routledge. 1997. 511-14. Green, Amy S. The Revisionist Stage. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994. Govan, Emma, Helen Nicholson, and Katie Normington. Making a Performance: Devising Histories and Contemporary Practices. London: Routledge, 2007. Hemingway, E. “The Circus.” Ringling Bros., Barnum and Bailey Magazine 1953: 7, 51.

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Hesed, Felicity. Personal interview. 28 January 2009. Kalson, Albert E. “Shakespeare Meets the Karamazovs.” Shakespeare Quarterly 34.2 (1983): 227-28. Londré, Felicia Hardison and Daniel J. Watermeier. The History of North American Theater: The United States, Canada, and Mexico: from PreColumbian Times to the Present. New York: Continuum International Publishing Group, 2000. Magill, Stewart. “Circus and Theatre Meet at the Royal Shakespeare Company.” Spectacle: A Quarterly Journal of the Circus Arts 4.2 (2001): 13. McManus, Donald Cameron. No Kidding: Clown as Protagonist in Twentieth-Century Theatre. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2003. “Olympic Theatre.” Daily Alta California 18 March 1850: 2. California Digital Newspaper Collection. Web. 10 Oct. 2012. Proudfoot, Richard. “Peter Brook and Shakespeare.” Drama and Mimesis. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1980. 157-89. Rpt. in Shakespearean Criticism: Excerpts from the criticism of William Shakespeare's Plays and Poetry, from the First Published Appraisals to Current Evaluations. Ed. Michael Magoulias. Vol. 12. Detroit: Gale Research Inc., 1990. 268-9. Raz, Jeff. Personal interview. 30 December 2008. Saxon, A.H. “Shakespeare and Circuses.” Theatre Survey 7 (1966): 59-79. Selbourn, David. The Making of A Midsummer Night's Dream: an Eyewitness Account of Peter Brook's Production from First Rehearsal to First Night. London: Methuen, 1982. Shakespeare, William. The Tempest. New York: Penguin Books, 1968 Soule, Lesley Wade. “Tumbling Tricks: Presentational Structure and ‘The Taming of the Shrew’.” New Theatre Quarterly 20.78 (2004): 164. Stoddart, Helen. Rings of Desire: Circus History and Representation. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000. Tait, Peta. Circus Bodies: Cultural Identity in Aerial Performance. New York: Routledge, 2005. Tocqueville, Alexis de. Democracy in America. Trans. Henry Reeve. New York: Pocket Books, 1976. Warren, Roger. Review of The Comedy of Errors, by William Shakespeare. Dir. Adrian Noble. Royal Shakespeare Company, Stratford, 1983. Shakespeare Quarterly 34.4 (1983): 455-56. Rpt. in Shakespearean Criticism: Excerpts from the criticism of William Shakespeare's Plays and Poetry, from the First Published Appraisals

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to Current Evaluations. Ed. Michael Magoulias. Vol. 26. Detroit: Gale Research Inc., 1995. 167-68. Whiting, Steven Moore. Satie the Bohemian: From Cabaret to Concert Hall. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999.

CHAPTER SEVEN SHAKESPEAREAN COMEDY AS A WAY OF LIFE: PERFORMANCE AND THE VOLUNTARY SECTOR MICHAEL DOBSON

It seems to be impossible to speak of Shakespeare’s comedies in performance from the outside. Shakespearean comedy is at all levels an inclusive genre, and the history of its life in the world is a history of joining in. As audience members, we are invited by the very nature of Shakespearean drama in general to participate imaginatively as co-creators in its workings: but the comedies in particular seem to go even further, modeling ways in which we might take part not just as engaged spectators but as participants. Even the nominated scapegoats among their dramatis personae, from Shylock to Malvolio to Caliban, have repeatedly prompted the desire not so much to use or acquire the plays from without as consumers, as to be in them as participants, both on stage and even beyond. I want to suggest in this essay that this is partly a long-term symptom of the productive misfit between the Shakespearean drama and market capitalism. Shakespearean comedy, I would argue, was never quite professional, and as a result it has repeatedly escaped from the realm of the commercial and taken in that of the civic, the philanthropic, the voluntary. I’m going to do this in two stages. I’m first going to point out that Shakespeare’s plays are themselves the product of a period in which the boundaries between the market and the voluntary sector were being drastically redrawn, and that they consciously show it. I’m then going to look at some of the unexpected ethical consequences which the comedies have as a result had in the voluntary sector over the centuries since they were written. Shakespearean comedy, I want to suggest, is very much concerned with imagining more benign forms of collective life, and one side-effect has been that it does not merely depict societies but actually helps to convene them. This phenomenon, though, has been overlooked by cultural historians to date, largely because it has taken place most signally

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among a category of theatre personnel which has been systematically marginalized since Shakespeare’s own time, namely amateur performers.

Living through Theatre: Shakespeare and the Voluntary Sector, 1564-1616 The social changes associated with the Reformation, from about forty years before Shakespeare’s birth to perhaps forty after his death, moved the boundaries between the public, the private and the charitable in ways which affected much of the dramatist’s experience. To give one very quick example: one of Shakespeare’s first London addresses was in the parish of St Mary’s, just inside Bishopsgate.1 Within earshot, just outside the gate, was a famous London institution. The Bethlehem Hospital was originally a priory of the Order of the Star of Bethlehem, and before the Reformation it tended the mentally ill on a charitable basis. After the Dissolution of the Monasteries, however, what came to be called Bedlam became what British politicians would now call a public-private partnership. It was nominally adopted by the Crown, and it was nominally controlled on the public’s behalf by the City of London, but its governors now accepted only those patients whose families, guilds or parishes could pay handsomely for their accommodation. Those who could no longer afford this now-privatized healthcare—which in practice consisted mainly of imprisonment and whipping—were turned out, to become, if they survived at all, homeless beggars.2 (This is a policy which Mrs. Thatcher’s government would eventually call “care in the community.”) Shakespeare, of course, did not forget either Bedlam or the spectacle of the mad and dispossessed. In King Lear it is the sight of Edgar in his guise as the vagrant “Bedlam beggar” Poor Tom, in the central storm scenes, which prompts the now mad and dispossessed king to reflect on his failure to redistribute wealth among all of his subjects. As the play’s title page records, Shakespeare and his company even arranged to confront their royal patron, James I, with this harrowing and improving show on a day specifically associated in the pre-Reformation calendar with charitable

This essay reworks and rethinks material I had been working on in Shakespeare and Amateur Performance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), and I am grateful to CUP for permission to reuse some of it here. 1 See Samuel Schoenbaum, Shakespeare: A Compact Documentary Life (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), 221. 2 See John Stowe, Survey of London (1598: London, Everyman, 1965), 148-9.

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giving, St Stephen’s Day—the day on which Good King Wenceslaus looked out, December 26th, now remembered in Britain as Boxing Day. Even more to the point as far as Shakespeare was concerned, if healthcare and social work had mainly belonged to religion rather than to the marketplace in pre-Reformation days, so too had drama. Clearly the Latin plays Shakespeare studied at grammar school in Stratford were important to his development as a playwright—otherwise he wouldn’t have rewritten one of them, Plautus’ Menaechmi, as The Comedy of Errors. But when it came to understanding drama as something highly physical as well as verbal, capable of dealing with enormous stretches of human history, and willing to risk lifelike juxtapositions of the comic and the tragic, Shakespeare owed at least as much to the vernacular traditions of the mystery plays.3 Since the fourteenth century, English cathedrals had on the festival of Corpus Christi been the center of immense annual dramatic enterprises, scripted by the clergy but acted by ordinary lay citizens organized by profession. These mystery cycles, performed on outdoor stages or on processions of pageant wagons, acted out in episodes the whole of Biblical time—from the fall of Lucifer through the Creation and Fall of Man, the Flood, the Prophets, the Nativity, the Passion, the Resurrection, right through to the Last Judgment. They were supplemented at other times of the year by the performance of morality plays, also composed by clergy, in which the individual soul was tempted by the Vice, a demonic and sarcastic pantomime villain who would be explicitly remembered by Shakespeare as he composed the roles of Edmund, and Richard III, among many others. After the Reformation, however, these ecclesiastically-sponsored forms of theatre were gradually abolished, though some proved very tenacious. Just twenty miles from Stratford, the Coventry cycle of mystery plays was not finally suppressed until 1579, when Shakespeare was fifteen; most scholars now agree that by then he must have seen them performed at least once. Other, more secular forms of non-professional theatre were also under attack: “Whitsun pastorals,” like those remembered by Perdita in The Winter’s Tale; May morning mummings and dancing, like those scripted and compered by the schoolmaster in The Two Noble Kinsmen; and the maskings and disguisings represented in Much Ado About Nothing and Love’s Labour’s Lost and The Merchant of 3

On Shakespeare’s pervasive debt to medieval drama see especially Peter Holland, Ruth Morse and Helen Cooper, eds., Medieval Shakespeare (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 157-222.

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Venice. As these examples of amateur kinds of performance now being depicted and exploited within professional drama may suggest, over the course of the sixteenth century some of the energies and procedures of earlier, voluntary-sector forms of drama were taken over by the new breed of career theatre people who staffed the permanent, purpose-built commercial playhouses which began to appear in London from the 1560s onwards. Formerly a communal, religious and civic activity associated with particular festivals, during Shakespeare’s lifetime drama was largely privatized, increasingly confined to special fee-charging buildings in which, scandalously to some, it was always holiday. The playhouses themselves, moreover, enacted and underlined this movement from the sphere of religion to that of commerce. The original headquarters of Shakespeare’s troupe the Lord Chamberlain’s Men was the Theatre, built in 1576 in the precincts of the decommissioned Holywell Priory in Shoreditch. When the company later acquired an exclusive and highly profitable indoor theatre in 1608 it was the converted hall of a former monastery, the Blackfriars. Shakespeare’s plays, however, even if their original performance depended economically on enclosing what had formerly been common cultural ground, do not forget their civic, voluntary-sector roots, and this is one reason, as I shall show, why they have so often grown them again over the course of their afterlives. I’ve already mentioned Shakespeare’s acknowledged debts to the mysteries and the morality plays in his tragedies and histories, but such debts surface in the comedies too, plays particularly invested in discovering and celebrating forms of civic harmony. One of Shakespeare’s favorite images for social concord, in fact, is that represented by the performance and enjoyment of nonprofessional drama—whether the pageant of the nine worthies in Love’s Labour’s Lost, or the masque of spirits in The Tempest, or the mechanicals’ performance of “Pyramus and Thisbe” that is saved up as the culmination of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, long after the play’s other, less interesting plot elements have already been resolved. The historical sources of this vision perhaps come closest to being depicted openly at the end of The Merry Wives of Windsor. Here the mercenary and lascivious Sir John Falstaff is lured to a nocturnal rendezvous with Mistress Ford at Herne’s Oak in Windsor Park; but just when he thinks he is about to enjoy a threesome with both Mistress Page and Mistress Ford, he is ambushed by a troupe of Windsor townspeople, among them Anne Page disguised as the Queen of the Fairies and numerous local children impersonating elves.

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This highly moral piece of local amateur drama is put together by citizens under the auspices of the Church: the parson of the parish, Hugh Evans, is a leading participant, and it is he who rehearses all the children. To that extent this is a piece of historical color, a reminder that this play, although often treated as though it depicted Elizabethan England, is actually set in the reign of Henry IV. It here offers a glimpse of a merrier, pre-Reformation England when civic amateur theatre was viewed as “fery honest knaveries,” and the Church and the stage were in perfect harmony.

Living through Theatre: Shakespeare and the Voluntary Sector, 1616-1916 If the end of The Merry Wives of Windsor might have reminded its first audiences of the vanishing religious and civic drama of the middle ages, however, for present-day Britons it is reminiscent of a more recent form of non-professional drama—since when we see townspeople dressed as fairies and their queen under a tree, it generally means that we have stumbled upon yet another local outdoor amateur production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Shakespeare’s plays may have participated in the erosion of the theatrical voluntary sector in his own time, but they have been central to its redevelopment since. I’m going to try to demonstrate this during the remainder of this essay by looking closely at two of the most historically important amateur dramatic societies which the islands off western Europe have ever produced. The first is the Private Theatre of Kilkenny, which flourished from 1802 to 1819; and the second is the Stockport Garrick Society, established a century later and still going strong. The main point I want to make about each of them is that for these volunteer thespians, doing Shakespeare, especially when it came to the comedies, extended beyond the stage into the concerted reform of civic life. What seems to be at work in these instances is what Rene Girard termed “mimetic desire,” but a version of that desire much less destructive and egotistical than the one set out in Les feux d’envie (Shakespeare, A Theatre of Envy, 1991). It is certainly true that some Elizabethans seem to have anticipated Girard’s account of how desire for a single object can become contagious between individuals, who are driven more to imitate the possessor of the object than to value the object in itself. This is a phenomenon which the sixteenth century theatre’s critics recognized, and associated with drama in general. John Rainoldes, for instance, was a student actor as an undergraduate—he played Hippolyta, Queen of the

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Amazons in a play mounted for Elizabeth I during her visit to Oxford in 1566—but he grew up to be an implacable enemy of theatre in all its forms, as well as, incidentally, the main driving force behind the King James Bible. According to Rainoldes, the emotions enacted on stage were inescapably contagious. Individuals rash enough to go and watch actors presenting stories of lust, avarice and tyranny would inevitably become lustful, avaricious and tyrannous themselves, by the very nature of the artform—and as for what embodying such things for a living inevitably did to the actors themselves, don’t get him started.4 Girard’s book on Shakespeare is fairly anxious and disapproving about mimetic desire, in a comparable manner. What the examples I’ll be describing may suggest, however, as some critics of Girard have suggested in other contexts, is that mimetic desire can also operate in benign ways and, moreover, in collective ways too. Not only have specific individuals imitated forms of compassion from Shakespeare’s tragedies rather than forms of violence, but whole groups of people have come together around Shakespeare’s comedies in conscious and unconscious attempts to propagate the harmonious social relations which the resolutions of these plays imagine. Many of Shakespeare’s plays, as I’ve already indicated, actively model and demonstrate how to stage non-professional performances: and in following their lead in this direction, groups of amateur players have often sought to make such voluntary-sector theatrical enterprises the focus of attempts to reconfigure civic society itself in the image of the concord achieved within the plays. What is sad is how often those attempts have been forgotten by a theatre history convinced that unless someone is getting rich from ticket sales nothing significant is happening. When I was researching my PhD thesis on the eighteenth-century performance history of Shakespeare’s comedies, I set out to examine all the copies of their stage versions which the Bodleian Library possessed. Around shelfmarks Vet. A5 1847 and M.adds 128 d.4 I came upon on a particularly striking cache of such things, in fact sometimes of multiple copies of the same edition, often bound up together. Many were elaborately marked-up in faded pen, their annotations recording cuts and stage business and the exact lengths of time that different acts took to perform. From notes about some expensivesounding scenery, furthermore, and from the sheer number of part-books and promptbooks involved, it was clear that I had stumbled upon the traces of some very large-scale theatrical activity. The printed texts in question 4

See John Rainoldes, Th’overthrow of stage-playes (Middleburg, 1599)

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dated from the mid-1790s to about 1815, a period of theatre history I knew well, but though many of them had been supplied with manuscript cast lists I was able to recognize only one name among the players: that of Miss O’Neill, who had apparently played Desdemona and Juliet. The Irish-born Eliza O’Neill was a major star of the London stage between 1813 and 1819, when she earned such a reputation as a tragedienne that when Jane Austen went to see her perform she carefully picked up an extra handkerchief.5 But who were all these other people she had been acting with? I double-checked, but their names nowhere appeared among the personnel of either Drury Lane or Covent Garden or in any of the biographical dictionaries which covered the provinces. It was only when I finally came upon a larger book shelved a little distance away from its smaller companions—a rare, privately-printed volume called The Private Theatre of Kilkenny ([Kilkenny], 1825), that I was able to start piecing together the story that lay behind these documents, and it took a visit to the local museum in Kilkenny itself before I really knew much about these otherwise forgotten non-professional performers. This group of Ascendancy gentlefolk, sometimes calling themselves “The Kilkenny Theatrical Society” and thus possessing some claim to be the first true amateur dramatic society in the British Isles, used to take over the playhouse at Kilkenny for a three- or four-week season of serious drama every year between 1802 and 1819. So as not to offend those who thought respectable women should not perform in public, they hired professional actresses to play female roles. Eliza O’Neill performed with them at two different points in her career. She appeared first in 1812, as a hungry up-and-coming player of small roles on the Dublin stage who was about to try her luck in London, but when she returned to Kilkenny in 1819 she was a wealthy and established metropolitan star. On this latter occasion she waived any fee, married the rich Irish MP who was playing Iago and Friar Laurence to her Desdemona and Juliet, and promptly retired from acting altogether. According to “The Private Theatre of Kilkenny,” the local playhouse was rendered fit for this caliber of performer by a lavish program of refurbishment, and I was able to confirm this at the Rothe House Museum in Kilkenny, which preserves the architect’s drawings from the last set of alterations. These show that this theatre had a very deep stage to 5 See Deirdre le Faye, ed., Jane Austen’s Letters (1995: London: Folio Society, 2003), 283.

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accommodate state-of-the-art perspective scenery; an immense green room backstage for the social comfort of its patrician actors and their friends; and a luxurious auditorium in which most of the stalls area downstairs was subdivided into private boxes. (In fact admission prices throughout the house were as high as those for a place in a box at either of the professional Theatres Royal in London.) Despite this luxury, the whole enterprise was dedicated at once to the simulation and the alleviation of distress. All the profits from these performances—which the amateur actors maximized by paying for their own costumes—were donated to funds for local poor relief. When this company performed King Lear, they actually intended that real life Poor Toms should not be cold any more. As the prologue to the first show of the first season put it in 1802, [It is] benign Compassion brings you here, Swells the fond sigh, and prompts the willing tear, And Pity, guardian of the helpless poor, Leading her vot’ries to our grateful door.6

Above the theatre’s proscenium arch was painted the slogan “While we smile, we soothe affliction,” which sounds like a premonition of Comic Relief, but in practice the Kilkenny audience seems to have spent more of its time crying than smiling. The governing idea of this annual festival of semi-professional theatre was that its clientele would be moved by established tragedies and by more recent specimens of comedie larmoyante into a state of virtuous fellow-feeling with that suffering part of the community which would share in each show’s profits. Caring for Shakespearean characters—beginning with the cast of The Merchant of Venice in 1802—was to extend into caring for the poor. As one epilogue had it, Fictitious tears bid genuine cease to flow, And our feign’d sorrows lighten real woe.7 The moving spirit behind all this, one Richard Power, suffered from a prime case of mimetic desire. Most people knew him simply as the respectable brother of a local aristocratic landlord. Power, however, determined to become that which he had seen on the stage, preferred to see himself in more flamboyant dress, and he had his portrait painted in the costume he wore as Hamlet. According to his wealthy fellow performers 6 7

The Private Theatre of Kilkenny, 5. Ibid.

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he “was eminently gifted for the performance of the Danish Prince, a character in whom are combined all the qualities of the soldier and the gentleman.”8 The portrait which records this piece of casting, by Joseph Patrick Haverty, now on display at the Rothe House, depicts an aristocratic amateur performer who, like Hamlet, wants to act his own favorite literary tragedies himself, among a few chosen fellow-players, with a level of refinement impossible among the vulgar groundlings who frequent merely commercial theatres. And not only has Power had the nerve, and the money, to have his portrait painted in the role of Hamlet—the role in which every major classical actor since Thomas Betterton had staked his claim to be Shakespeare’s truest representative on earth. He has in one detail gone better than any professional Hamlet in the play’s history, since the portrait shows that his costume includes the result of some serious heraldic research. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, members of the Danish royal family, and only members of the Danish royal family, wore a special medal declaring them to belong to the Order of the Elephant. Shakespeare apparently neither knew nor cared about this curious distinction: but Richard Power evidently did, and for his own artistic satisfaction he was prepared to invest considerable sums in having his own Order of the Elephant. Such details might be caviar to the general, quite apart from being invisible from the back of the circle; but they mark out the amateurs of Kilkenny as self-appointed benefactors of art as well as of charity In their own time these voluntary-sector tragedians were recognized as serving the public good at a national level too. Not only did their exclusive productions of Shakespearean tragedy benefit the aesthetic self-esteem of their participants and the coffers of local charities, but they contributed to the Irish economy and to the cohesion and peace of Irish civil life. The Kilkenny theatrical seasons drew impressive lists of prominent intellectuals, politicians and socialites to the town each year—among them Maria Edgeworth, Henry Grattan, and Thomas Moore, the author of Moore’s Irish Melodies—so that according to one eyewitness “Kilkenny was the Athens and the Bath of the Emerald Isle.”9 In the face of the divisive recent trauma of the 1798 uprising, and the continuing tendency of Irish landowners to spend their lives and their fortunes in England, the private theatre of Kilkenny, claimed one proponent,

8

Ibid, 105. See Ierne: or Anecdotes and Incidents of a Life Chiefly in Ireland… (London, 1861), 161.

9

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So Prince Hamlet’s enthusiasm for private amateur dramatics, and King Lear’s enthusiasm for giving clothes to the shivering poor, here managed to get themselves imitated beyond their respective plays, as a whole sustained project of civic renewal and national reconciliation. If there is a problem with the Kilkenny model of how Shakespeare’s plays might participate virtuously in civic life, it is this venture’s implicit and sometimes explicit snobbery. However egalitarian King Lear may be in its implications, tragedy normally thrives on social distinction—Hamlet, after all, is a prince, and he doesn’t like people to forget it—and for all their commitment to charity, the prologues written for the Kilkenny theatricals spend as much time congratulating themselves that the less well-off can’t afford to get in and spoil the performances as they do on considering the plight of the destitute. In the long term, the future of voluntary sector Shakespeare for the public good lay less with the performance of plays which lament the fact that special individuals die, and more with the performance of plays which celebrate the fact that the common-or-garden species survives. A century after the Kilkenny theatricals, another group was founded, similarly determined to run its own playhouse, where Shakespeare could again be saved from the corrupting vagaries of the showbusiness marketplace. But this group weren’t aristocrats, like Prince Hamlet: they were artisans, like Bottom the Weaver. And they started out with comedy. On October 24th 1901, in the Church Coffee Tavern on St. Petersgate in Stockport, Cheshire, a meeting was held to discuss “A Proposed New Stockport Dramatic and Literary Society.” By the time the local newspapers were reporting this event, the society’s newly-elected President was already expressing visionary hopes for the future. One day, he dreamed, there would be subsidized theatres, providing improving drama for local people at the expense of the public purse: but in the

10

Private Theatre of Kilkenny, 9; see also Dublin Evening Post, 28 November 1809.

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meantime, the only antidote to the crassness and inertia of showbusiness was to be provided by non-professionals: Amateurs may set an example to the professional theatrical world if they will. Theatrical managers are unfortunately bound down [sic] by commercialism and tradition… Is not the time approaching when even in conservative England it will be considered as necessary to have municipal theatres—conducted on artistic as distinct from profit-making lines—as to establish libraries, art galleries, &c? At any rate, until this happy consumination [sic] is attained, let amateurs work their hardest to raise the standard of the art. – Yours &c. EDWIN T. HEYS 31, Tatton-road North, Heaton Moor, October 30th 190111

At the same time that the society embraced this view of the future, it chose a name identifying it with the greatest achievements of the Shakespearean theatre’s past. As the printed constitution issued the following month declares, “The Society shall be called The Stockport Garrick Society.”12 Its official stationery marked the Society as sacred to Shakespeare by incorporating an engraving of Anne Hathaway’s Cottage. This gesture identifies Stockport’s Shakespeare not with the corrupted and ambitious metropolis but with provincial innocence and humble, rustic courtship: this is Shakespeare as the people’s poet, a sort of English Robert Burns, someone only truly at home among thatched roofs.13 The Stockport Garrick is usually cited as the most important of the early twentieth-century amateur dramatic societies, for three good reasons. It was the first civic amateur club to acquire its own playhouse (in 1905); it helped to stimulate a revival of artistically-inclined theatre in the northwest more generally, including the important work of Annie Horniman’s Manchester repertory company at the Gaiety;14 and it was the first amateur 11

Edwin T. Heys, letter on “Amateur Dramatic Work in Stockport,” unidentified press cutting c.November 1 1901, in Stockport Garrick Society archive, album 1. 12 For the most recent developments, see www.stockportgarrick.co.uk. 13 On the unprecedented significance and connotations of Anne Hathaway’s Cottage for the late Victorians and Edwardians, see especially Nicola Watson, The Literary Tourist: Readers and Places in Romantic and Victorian Britain (Houndmills: Palgrave, 2006), 86-9. 14 See, for example, Anne I. Miller, The Independent Theatre in Europe, 1887 to the Present (New York: Long and Smith, 1931), 217: “Imbued with the best of the

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group to stage plays by Ibsen and Shaw, praised for so doing by the likes of Harley Granville-Barker.15 But the early Stockport Garrick is if anything even more remarkable for what it did beyond the theatre, for the way in which its initial productions of Shakespeare’s comedies ramified outwards to become the center of a much larger social enterprise. Like Shakespeare’s playhouses at Shoreditch and the Blackfriars, the Garrick was consciously built on territory taken over from the church. In fact Heys had already put what became the new organization’s opening production of The Merchant of Venice into rehearsal with the drama society of the local Unitarian church before deciding to split off and form the nondenominational Stockport Garrick—a move which only happened after the church elders discovered to their outrage that Heys had without permission started to dig a tunnel under their church hall to provide invisible access between its stage left and stage right wings. The Merchant of Venice eventually had four performances at the Stockport Mechanics’ Institute in February and March 1902, and it was subsequently played at the Theatre Royal, Stockport, in December 1903, along with a new production of Twelfth Night. It clearly satisfied the area’s vigorous local press (the Society’s archives preserve five reviews, each from a different publication). These articles reveal, however, that although this was an impressive and large-scale production (involving most of the society’s 130 members in one capacity or another), it was not in any respect an aesthetically ground-breaking one. Rather than outdoing the professionals of their time, as the elite amateurs of Kilkenny had sought to do, the Garrick was happy to follow their lead. As surviving photographs show, the costumes, unlike Power’s enhanced Hamlet outfit, were such as might have been used in almost any professional Shakespearean production of the preceding seventy years. The novelty of the occasion, as one journalist makes clear, resided not in the style in

repertory spirit, the Stockport Garrick Society prepared the way for the first true modern repertory theatre in the English-speaking world, Miss Horniman’s Manchester Repertory Theatre Company, which opened in the autumn of 1907.” 15 In this it would be emulated, for instance, by the spin-off Altrincham Garrick Society, established by a founder member of the Stockport Garrick, W.S. Nixon, in 1914. See Pamela Knox, The Flame Still Burns: The Story of Altrincham Garrick Theatre (Altrincham: Altrincham Garrick Society, 1993), 1. It would also be emulated by the Bury Garrick Society and the Marple Garrick Society. GranvilleBarker visited the Stockport Garrick as a lecturer; for his comments on the society see “The Theatre: The Next Phase,” English Review April-July 1910, 631-48; 632.

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which these amateurs performed Shakespeare, but in the fact that they had the nerve to attempt Shakespeare at all: Last evening the members essayed a public performance, and the presentation was none other than Shakespearian. Theatrical managers have with few exceptions avoided Shakespeare as they would the bankruptcy court. In fact the two have not infrequently been associated. Rarely, indeed, has Shakespeare been exploited with financial success, and the difficulties which the production of Shakespeare’s plays have involved have daunted even the most experienced of managers. But our local Garrick Society may succeed where others have failed, and after last night’s performance of “The Merchant of Venice,” we can only congratulate the members of this body upon their courage and their splendid success.16

As the Manchester Evening Mail remarked, “The play was presented in a very thorough manner, and the staging and dressing were all that could be desired.”17 The point of the exercise, clearly, wasn’t to do Shakespeare innovatively; it was to do it properly, as any theatregoer of the time would have understood it, emulating the production values attained by professional companies. Although the Garrick considered its “great Shakespearean revivals” to be “the most important part of its work,”18 many of the intellectual energies of the society went into its productions of more modern drama, including new scripts composed by members. But as pillars of an alternative theatre repertory otherwise dominated by Ibsen and Shaw, Shakespeare’s defiantly outmoded plays were here identified not just as uncommercial but potentially as anti-commercial into the bargain. It is clear from the archives of the Garrick and other societies like it that the underlying ideal of this new Edwardian wave of amateur Shakespeare, derived ultimately from John Ruskin and William Morris, was the restoration of the organic society, the return to an imagined collective artisan life of unalienated labor. Shakespeare’s hand-made drama, in this reading, belonged less to commercial modernity than to the spacious, ceremonious harmony of an idealized Middle Ages: less to Stockport, perhaps, than to the Forest of Arden.

16

Unidentified press cutting, March 5 1902, ibid. March 7 1902, ibid. 18 Letter from ‘A Garrick Member’, County News March 2 1906, ibid. 17

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In keeping with this vision, and with his society’s religious origins, Edwin Heys sought to make Shakespeare the cornerstone of an entire virtuous and co-operative way of life, and an enlightened Mayor was happy to be enlisted as the society’s president. From the first, the Stockport Garrick, pledged “to foster and further the higher forms and aims of dramatic art and literature,”19 ran a social program as full as that offered by the Unitarians from whom it had seceded. This society could provide a year-round communal identity for anyone who could afford its five shilling annual subscription. Its stated primary purpose was to stage at least three plays every season “by masterminds like Shakespeare, Ibsen, G.B. Shaw etc., the production of whose works would in most towns involve a monetary loss.”20 But the Garrick, which was open (unlike some earlier literary societies) to both men and women and was thus attractive to young people of marriageable age, also held monthly social evenings involving recitations and music by members; it hosted festive occasions, such as “Ye Merrie Spinsters’ Partie” (April 1903) and “Benedict’s Party” (January 1904), which featured progressive whist; it ran its own orchestra; it held an annual dance; it threw garden parties; and it ran a junior section for children, a sort of thespian Sunday school, the logical concomitant of the Society’s view that “drama is a great educational and moral force.” It also ran well-advertised and well-attended fortnightly literary discussions and lectures. In its inaugural season lectures were given on “David Garrick,” “The Merchant of Venice,” “Shakespeare’s London,” “Wagner: The Reformer of Opera,” “The Flowers of Shakespeare,” and “A Pilgrimage to the Shrine of Shakespeare.”21 In time the society, in collaboration with the educational charity the Ancoats Brotherhood, would organize its own pilgrimages to Stratford; meanwhile its members escaped into the preindustrial world locally as best they could on organized rural cycling excursions. They also gathered amicably for an annual picnic, held initially at Redesmere, whose woods provided, as a local paper coyly remarked, “ideal spots for budding Romeos and Juliets.”22 Fostering courtship, putting its members into contact not just with each other but with Shakespeare’s flowers (and possibly with both at once), encouraging them to flee the city for restorative celebrations of poetry and friendship in the unspoilt countryside, the Stockport Garrick did not just stage Shakespearean comedy but aspired to live it. This surely is a clear case of 19

‘Constitution and Syllabus, 1902’, in ibid. Ibid. 21 “Stockport Garrick Society,” reprinted from The Stockport Advertiser, June 20th 1902, ibid. 22 City and County News, July 18 1902, ibid. 20

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collective mimetic desire, and an envy-free, socially enhancing case of collective mimetic desire for the public good at that. It is only fitting that in recent years this society, like many other amateur theatre groups, should have gone one logical step further and taken to rehearsing and staging some of its Shakespearean productions outdoors—so that their audiences, and not just their casts, can feel that they too have got together in the Forest of Arden, or a garden in Illyria, or a wood near Athens. Appropriately for a society devoted to drama as a means of ethical social renewal, the Stockport Garrick enjoyed one of its first acknowledged triumphs with a production of that play in which civic amateur performance underpins domestic and social virtue, The Merry Wives of Windsor. The Stockport Garrick first produced this play in 1906, with “New and Elaborate Scenery” and, at its climax, “a Special Fairy Dance by Miss Dora Whalley and 20 Children.” Ten years later, presumably with a fresh generation of children, they chose to revive The Merry Wives of Windsor as their contribution to Manchester’s celebrations for the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare’s death. The production won a banner from the self-improving Life Study Association—a banner which still proudly adorns their theatre’s foyer.

Living Shakespearean comedy, 2013 Banner or no, the achievements of the Kilkenny theatricals and the Stockport Garrick in sustaining great drama in the voluntary sector have been largely forgotten in recent years—principally because the task of making sure Shakespeare’s plays still get performed even if they aren’t going to make money was taken on, in the heyday of the Welfare State, by the public sector. In the post-war period, the amateur theatre simply got upstaged by the inception of subsidized professional companies, a development which the likes of Edwin Heys had always wanted anyway. It’s now exactly fifty years, for example, since the foundation of the Royal Shakespeare Company, an organization which has sought to carry out many of the same cultural, social and economic functions earlier served by those pioneers at Kilkenny and at Stockport: staging Shakespeare’s plays in the manner and in the auditoriums they deserve; maintaining Shakespeare’s place in public life as a communal good able to bring together those of all persuasions; and encouraging pilgrimages to Stratford, by people who might otherwise spend their time and their money elsewhere. I for one sincerely hope that the current government will not cut the RSC’s funding to the extent that British audiences will

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once more only have the chance to see Shakespeare regularly if they are prepared to see the plays performed by unpaid and untrained volunteers. I am delighted, though, that in 2012 the RSC decided to acknowledge the ancestral common ground between the public sector and the voluntary sector by initiating the Open Stages project, through which some amateur groups have been enabled to perform in the RSC’s theatres and to share the RSC’s resources. It is important that people should be able to see Shakespeare’s comedies performed as well as they can be performed: but it is also important that, individually and collectively, they should have the chance to imitate and to inhabit them. Professionally speaking, I am officially a detached, forensic expert on Shakespeare’s comedies, someone now employed more or less to personify the academic study of their texts. But just as important to my twenties as my university training was my experience of performing in As You Like It on an island in Poole Harbour;23 and my grandfather founded the Middlesbrough Little Theatre; and one of my children is called Rosalind. This is part of what Shakespearean comedy does: it is not just a high art but a folk art, and it has always been about joining in.

23

On the Brownsea Open-Air Theatre, which celebrates its 60th anniversary in 2013, see www.brownsea-theatre.co.uk.

PART III: SHAKESPEAREAN CINEMA

CHAPTER EIGHT THE BARD COMES TO YELLOW SKY: SHAKESPEARE’S TEMPESTUOUS WESTERN ERIC C. BROWN

The popularity of Shakespeare in the boomtowns and mining camps of the Old West has not always received a great deal of attention, even when such popularity winds its way into films that take up the West as their subject. Almost sixty years ago, Levette J. Davidson observed that “Shakespeare was considered as one of the good things in life that the new found gold or silver should buy. Moral opposition to the theater, still strong in some areas back East, did not exist. Instead, the better type of drama was highly respected and patronized as a mark of culture.”1 The Bard’s popularity is attested to in Western nomenclature: Davidson notes that “one of the prominent business establishments of Central City, Colorado [. . .] was named the Shakespeare Saloon,” and following Davidson’s lead, Jennifer Lee Carrell has shown that the name “Shakespeare” imprinted itself throughout the West: “a town and canyon in New Mexico, a mountaintop in Nevada, a reservoir in Texas and a glacier in Alaska.”2 Even more prolific were nineteenth-century mining claims: Colorado, for instance, “sports mines called Ophelia, Cordelia and Desdemona. There is even a ‘Timon of Athens,’ [. . .] a fitting name for a mine [. . .] because the play’s hero – a mad, bankrupt misanthrope – accidentally discovers ‘yellow, glittering, precious gold’ while digging in the forest for roots.” The legacy can still be tracked today in the Ghost Town of “Shakespeare, New Mexico,” which beckons visitors with 1

Shakespeare Quarterly 4.1 (January 1953): 39-49, 41. Cf. “Shakespeare in the California Gold Rush,” Chapter 11 of Esther Cloudman Dunn’s Shakespeare in America (New York, 1939), pp. 205-18; Clair Eugene Wilson, Mines and Miners: A Historical Study of the Theater in Tombstone, University of Arizona Bulletin 6.1 (Tucson, 1935), 128. 2 Davidson, p. 41; Carrell, “How the Bard Won the West,” Smithsonian 29.5 (August 1998): 99-107.

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reenactments of shootings, hangings, and dancing Can Can girls, all played out around the Stratford Hotel, Avon Avenue, and other streets where the Shakespeare Gold and Silver Mining and Milling Company once flourished. But it remained a consequence of the theater that Shakespeare left the most significant marks across the frontier. Carrell argues that “Since Shakespeare was seen and heard more than read, no one needed much, if any formal education to have at least a passing acquaintance with the works,” and relates the story of “Montana rancher Philip Ashton Rollins,” who “said that many ranch owners brought Shakespeare west with them. It was not unusual to see ‘a bunch of cowboys sitting on their spurs listening with absolute silence and concentration while somebody read aloud.’ Further, Shakespeare was popular because of the poetry, not in spite of it. After listening to the blood and thunder ‘dogs of war’ speech in Julius Caesar, one top hand told Rollins, ‘Gosh! That fellow Shakespeare could sure spill the real stuff. He’s the only poet I ever seen what was fed on raw meat.’” The most popular plays, indeed, were the great tragedies, followed closely by the Henriad: Davidson relates that audiences “even turned out in Denver on July 27, 1861, to see a local gambler appear as the lead in Hamlet, on a bet made in response to an item in the Rocky Mountain news in which the writer offered to wager one hundred dollars that no one could play that part after only three days’ study. The performance was a ‘highly creditable one’” (Davidson 42). The great Shakespearean actors of the day could make ten times the money out West that they could in the East, and even barnstorming troupes were welcomed by the populace. An 1878 production of Henry V in Colorado Springs crammed forty speaking parts, as well as a horse, all onto one small stage. According to one contemporary account, the horse’s “tail touched the back of the stage, and his forefeet were firmly planted among the footlights”; the climax of the play, during King Henry’s impassioned St. Crispin’s Day Speech to his troops, was the accidental and irretrievable lodging of the actor’s spear in the low-vaulted ceiling (qtd. Davidson 45). Given this context, it is unsurprising that adaptations and citations of Shakespeare have turned up in a number of mainstream Westerns and quasi-Westerns. In Dodge City (dir. Michael Curtiz, 1939), Errol Flynn plays a lawman who wonders whether William Shakespeare began his career “by holding horses,” to which his witless partner (Alan Hale) replies, “I never heard of him. What part of Texas he from?” Flynn shoots

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back, “Stratford-on-Avon.”3 John Ford’s My Darling Clementine (1946) features a brief of Hamlet’s “To be or not to be” speech, Ferdinando Baldi’s Get Mean (1976) plays at Richard III, Clint Eastwood’s Unforgiven (1992) features the prolific Shakespearean actor Richard Harris as “English Bob,” George Cosmatos’s Tombstone (1993) includes a raucous performance of that St. Crispin’s Day speech from Henry V, Kevin Costner’s The Postman (1997) deploys Shakespeare throughout as a poet of the underclasses, and Uli Edel’s made-for-television King of Texas (2002) recasts King Lear as a cattle baron.4 Perhaps the most underanalyzed treatment of Shakespeare in a Western, however, is William Wellman’s Yellow Sky (1948), a film based on a story by W. R. Burnett and purportedly adapted from The Tempest, and starring such notables as Gregory Peck, Anne Baxter, and Richard Widmark. While almost every current reference to the film notes that it is “loosely based” on The Tempest, few critics have actually made any detailed links between the two works.5 In his book The Invention of the Western Film, Scott Simmon

3

My thanks to Michael K. Johnson for this reference. The latter has been an especially popular Westernized play: Broken Lance (dir. Edward Dmytryk, 1954), The Man from Laramie (dir. Anthony Mann, 1955), and perhaps A River Runs through It (dir. Robert Redford, 1992) all borrow from it. Othello has been interpreted as a shaping force on Jubal (dir. Delmar Daves, 1956). On King of Texas in the context of other Westerns and (in)authentic Shakespearean adaptation, see Richard Burt, “Shakespeare, ‘Glo-cali-zation,’ Race, and the Small Screens of Post-popular Culture,” in Shakespeare the Movie II, ed. Burt and Lynda E. Boose (New York: Routledge, 2003), pp. 14-36. For an analysis of River Runs through It, see O. Alan Weltzien, “Norman Maclean and Tragedy,” Western American Literature 30.2 (Summer 1995): 139-49. 5 See for instance Phil Hardy’s encyclopedic listing in The Western (New York: William Morrow, 1983), p. 176. In fact the Shakespearean attribution is relatively recent and almost entirely unexplored. Contemporary reviews of the movie in Variety, the Los Angeles Times, and the Chicago Daily Tribune made no mention of Shakespeare, while Bosley Crowther’s piece in the New York Times only hinted at a “tempestuous tale” (“Peck, Baxter and Widmark Star in Western,” Feb. 2, 1949). In “Shakespeare’s Cinematic Offshoots,” The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare on Film, ed. Russell Jackson (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2007), pp. 303-23, Tony Howard offers one of the few analyses of the adaptation, calling it a “harsh post-war Western” in which “Shakespeare’s sea gives way to thirst” (315). Lisa Hopkins glosses it rather quickly in Shakespeare’s The Tempest: The Relationship between Text and Film (London: Methuen, 2008), finally concluding that “the differences between Yellow Sky and The Tempest are more strongly marked than are the similarities” (42). And in a wide-ranging article “Prospero’s Flicks,” Film Comment 28.1 (1992): 45-49, Harlan Kennedy compares the film 4

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glosses the general parallels: “The plot draws from Shakespeare’s ‘Western,’ The Tempest—influenced by early reports from the American colony—where another band with criminal secrets . . . find only an old man and his lovely daughter.”6 The film’s connections are never explicit, but a number of elements in Shakespeare’s play inform the film. Most evident may be the submerged anxieties between native peoples and their colonizers, but Yellow Sky seems also at times to be picking up its Shakespeare from Ford’s more explicit evocations in Clementine a few years earlier (the films are linked directly by Joe MacDonald, who was the cinematographer for both), and I want to return briefly to that film as prelude to Wellman’s work.7 In My Darling Clementine, Tombstone is being visited by the actor “Granville Thorndyke” (whose name combines two famous early twentieth-century Shakespearean actors—Harley Granville Barker and Sibyl Thorndike). One night, abducted by the Clantons from a scheduled performance, an act which further causes a disgruntled riot in the playhouse, Thorndyke is forced instead to entertain the clan in the saloon. The Clantons prove a tough sell, however, and in an abrupt but strangely savvy aside, one of the group begins to shoot at his feet: “Look Yorick, can’t you give us nothin’ but them poems?” The fact that one of the Clanton’s knows enough Hamlet to transpose the name “Yorick” onto the actor is itself significant, but this particular name also conjures up images of skulls and dead entertainers—a fairly informed jest. Thorndyke turns then to the “To be or not to be” soliloquy, as Wyatt Earp and Doc Holliday listen in. At the aborted conclusion, about to be escorted away back to the theater by Earp and Holliday, he announces to the bar: “Shakespeare was not meant for taverns nor for tavern louts.” This insult prompts the Clantons to start shooting, a brief skirmish thwarted by Earp. But the question here, given the earlier aside, is whether the Clantons are insulted with other cinematic Tempest adaptations, arguing that Yellow Sky “foregrounds the redemption theme and puts the salvation-exposed baddies [. . .] up front” (46). 6 Simmon, The Invention of the Western Film: A Cultural History of the Genre’s First Half-Century (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2003), p. 268. On adaptations of The Tempest in general, see also “The Tempest and Its Travels, ed. Peter Hulme and William H. Sherman (Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 2000) and Chantal Zabus, Tempests after Shakespeare (New York: Palgrave, 2002). 7 Yellow Sky was later remade as The Jackals (dir. Robert D. Webb, 1967), starring Vincent Price and set in South Africa. The vaguely self-parodic remake does not much elaborate its forerunner (though it does include stock footage of predatory wildlife).

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at being called louts or whether they’re insulted at not being good enough for Shakespeare. Or perhaps they are insulted for Shakespeare’s sake, knowing from their Henriad that Shakespeare was in fact an adorer of the tavern life.8 For one repeated message in a number of Shakespeare westerns is that he is a poet not of the elite but of the masses, a moral confirmed in the 1993 Tombstone, during which an actor overcomes the abusive Clantons with a rendering of the St. Crispin’s Day monologue, arguably the greatest leveling speech in the canon. Yellow Sky never cites Shakespeare in this way, but it too is concerned with collapsing these dualities—tavern and theater, louts and literati, the brutal and the civilized—and its borrowings from The Tempest coincide with an exploration of a number of intriguing generic and ideological boundaries.9 The film is unique among Westerns in its adoption of a romance rather than a history or tragedy as its informing play. (Though the lyrics to “My Darling Clementine,” with which its namesake film begins, may also offer a Tempest subtext—“a miner Forty-Niner and his daughter” living on their own in a cavern, in a canyon. The lyrics conjure up, too, a Westernized Ophelia: the image of Clementine drowning while blowing bubbles through her ruby lips above the water is not less absurd than Ophelia floating mermaid-like while her clothing bears her up, singing “snatches of old lauds” [4.7.176-77].) And yet The Tempest seems a natural fountainhead for Westerns.10 As Simmon implies, the play’s trajectory is one of westward expansion, charting the course of British imperialism into New Worlds. The struggles between Caliban and Prospero thinly veil representations of such anxieties in the Americas— highlighted by Trinculo’s oft-cited contention that the English “will not give a doit to relieve a lame beggar,” but will “lay out ten to see a dead 8

On this Hamlet scene, see Scott Simmon, “Concerning the Weary Legs of Wyatt Earp: The Classic Western according to Shakespeare,” Literature/Film Quarterly 24.2 (1996): 114-27. 9 The Burnett story upon which the film is based likewise bears no explicit Shakespearean marks, at least in its published form Stretch Dawson (New York: Fawcett Publications, 1950). 10 Anthony Miller, “’In this last tempest’: Modernising Shakespeare’s Tempest on Film,” Sydney Studies in English 23 (1997): 24-40, points out that in Paul Mazursky’s Tempest (1982), the Caliban figure “Kalibanos” (Raúl Juliá) watches old episodes of Gunsmoke on a Sony Trinitron in his cave. Miller reads Kalibanos’s interest as “renew[ing] the old dream that America, in this case the mythical American frontier of the TV Western, offers the saving simplicity and virtue that Phillip [Prospero] dreams of connecting with in the Mediterranean” (39).

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Indian” (2.1.31-3). Yellow Sky recreates the pattern in its familiar dichotomy of Whites and Indians, in this case Apaches. But Caliban is diffused in Yellow Sky, as are all The Tempest’s characters, into a series of recombinant figures and moments. The attempted rape of Miranda by Caliban, for instance, is reassigned not to the Apaches but to the gang of outlaws at the film’s center. Meanwhile, the film’s leading man—Gregory Peck as “Stretch” Dawson—embodies a host of Calibanisms even as he also emerges as Alonso, king among men, and Ferdinand, the courtly lover to Prospero’s daughter. (To further embroider the point, one of his cronies describes him, sarcastically, as “kinda noble.”)11 Yellow Sky, then, unpacks rather than re-packages its predecessor’s ideological characterizations, but without the advantage of postcolonial and other historicist readings of the play, its presentation is also fairly and at times unwittingly orthodox. Forgiveness, reconciliation, the keeping of one’s word—at one time the overriding critical hallmarks of Shakespeare’s Prospero—are the prevalent moral directives in Yellow Sky. White flags and innocent, bystanding lizards are not to be shot at, canteens of precious water and bank vaults are not to be stolen from, but a degree of vengeance is still acceptable. Likewise, murderous plotting and subterfuge are of course condemned, and they never implicate or taint the good guys. Simmon regards it as “self-conscious about ‘postwar’ problems,” since it is “set two years after the Civil War and filmed two years after World War II.”12 The wrong doings of the outlaws are explained, for instance, by one character’s observation, “I guess the war has upset a lot of these boys, set them off on the wrong foot.” Given that The Tempest has been remade into a Civil War TV-movie (dir. Jack Bender, 1998), with Peter Fonda as “Gideon Prosper,” the play’s own obsession with intestine shocks and civil butcheries appears to invite particular comparisons to this era in American history.

11

Howard, “Cinematic Offshoots,” p. 316, points out that “Most Tempest films focus problematically on Miranda’s sexual awakening” and that “in Yellow Sky [ . . . ] there’s no Ferdinand: she’s won by an ‘experienced’ older man.” But as with every act of adaptation, Yellow Sky’s characterizations are really interpretive reversions, never absolute in any case, and this film seems more concerned than most with transmogrifying Shakespeare’s figures. Stretch’s “experience,” for instance, may be as much a critique of Ferdinand’s posturing worldliness (so ready to impress Miranda as king) as a mixing of types. 12 See Simmon’s The Invention of the Western Film, p. 269.

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Like Shakespeare’s play, Yellow Sky begins with “a tempestuous noise of thunder and lightning heard.”13 Seven outlaws, led by “Stretch,” move across a bleak landscape under threatening skies. Ill omens abound: the year itself, 1867, reminds us that the fallouts of civil war are still in play, while the group immediately stumbles upon yet another portent: a lone, bleached skull. In the absence of gravediggers, one of the group examines the skull himself and Stretch deduces, perhaps because of the arrow still plunged through the skull’s eye socket, that this is “Apache country.” “That’s all we need,” he remarks, “run into some crazy Indians.” The skull, no jesting Yorick, as Thorndyke in Clementine, belongs they suppose to a “prospector.” And this is as close as we get to the literal idea of a “Prospero,” The Tempest’s magician-king. Something of Prospero is perhaps always immanent in prospecting—looking forward with hope of a better time to come, the hint of hidden gold or the dawn of a new golden age. The relics of a prospector here displace Yorick and the Hamlet antics of My Darling Clementine, a palpable and grim realism instead of the imaginary musings of a Danish Prince, while the invocation of “Prospero” in the prospector likewise announces the film’s departure from Shakespeare’s major tragedies and into the surreal realm of the late romances, making the argument that such topoi better befit the Western genre. The investigation of the skull is followed by a survey of the surrounding lands—the group notes the “salt flats down south” through which “not even a rattlesnake” could pass. Much of the filming was in fact done partly in Death Valley. These salt flats will later become metaphor for the “thousand furlongs of sea” (1.1.65) that swallow up Shakespeare’s mariners. The prompting for the group’s passage across is not, as in Shakespeare’s play, the wedding of a princess but the robbing of a bank. For once the group has stocked up in a local town on both water and whiskey, and stolen a few thousand dollars, they are chased from the town by a posse of garrison soldiers. The saloon scene—and drinking in general—form yet another link with The Tempest, which contains two of Shakespeare’s most famous drunks, the butler Stephano and fool Trinculo. Caliban too partakes of the “celestial liquor,” and the intoxication of the trio both undergirds and unravels their conspiracy to take over the island themselves.

13 Quotations from Shakespeare’s plays refer to The Riverside edition, ed. G. Blakemore Evans, et al., 2nd ed. (Boston: Houghton, 1997).

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Fig. 8-1 Arrow through the skull of an anti-Yorick.

The whiskey in Yellow Sky receives a similar treatment: these seven outlaws (trimmed to six by the soldiers) soon devalue the whiskey they once sought so greedily. A sand-spewing chase ends with the soldiers letting the group plunge into the salt flats; as their lieutenant remarks, “let ‘em go…save us the trouble of hanging em.” The continual threat of execution, if not hanging outright, also marks one of the significant tensions of The Tempest. The very first scene, of course, discourses on hanging as preferable to drowning, and Gonzalo, who has been parrying with the Boatswain over his “hangability,” concludes “I would fain die a dry death” (1.1.7-8). This dry death looms now over Stretch’s gang, who ride wearily across the salt flats. One of the group, Charles Kemper’s “Walrus,” offers to “trade whiskey for water,” and a fight later ensues during encampment over a full canteen. The water-challenged Walrus apparently gets his name from his combination of pinniped corpulence and tusk-like mustachio. But the name also is suitably pelagic, returning us to the roaring seas of The Tempest even as the salt flats serve as their own desiccated memorial to the briny deeps (ironizing Gonzalo’s preference for a “dry death”). With their horses dying, and at least one of the gang, John Russell’s “Lengthy,” shooting a lizard for being “better off” in the desert than they

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(to the consternation of a younger companion, Half-Pint), they stumble upon the promise of an oasis: a town shimmering across the parched and wave-like dunes. Collapsing into a wind-blasted ghost town, an analogue for Prospero’s supernatural, spirit-swarming island, they are greeted by a dilapidated sign: “Yellow Sky: Fastest Growing Town in the Territory.” The irony too much, they collectively keel over only to be roused by the click of a rifle: enter Anne Baxter who stands apprehensively above them while Stretch leers up at her from under his hat. Baxter’s character, Constance Mae, is first known as Mike, and the film makes every effort to masculinize her, in preparation for her orthodox return in the finale to a traditional female role. (Kennedy describes her as “a Rosie the Riveter from the recent war with no makeup and worksleeves still rolled up.”)14 Her analogue in The Tempest is most clearly Miranda, but she too embodies an amalgam of Tempest types: at once Miranda and Ariel, the androgynous, ethereal servant to Prospero, and even something of the wild, witchy Sycorax. As Miranda, she has been sheltered in the abandoned silver mining camp of Yellow Sky, raised with Apaches, as Miranda is raised with Caliban, and unused to the ways and appearances of other men. As Ariel, she is her Grandfather’s factotum, running their modest farmstead, guarding it from outsiders. As Miranda, she is depicted as a naïve victim; as Ariel she is the consciously alluring siren calling the men alternately to their safety and demise. Indeed, the title “Yellow Sky” may owe something to an extended passage from The Tempest, the song that Ariel sings to lure Ferdinand away from his fellows (even as Mike transforms and transposes Stretch from villain to hero): “Come unto these yellow sands, / And then take hands (1.2.375-76).15 Ferdinand, upon hearing this, declares “This music crept by me upon the waters, / Allaying both their fury and my passion / With its sweet air; thence I have followed it, / Or it has drawn me rather” (1.2.392-95). The agency is important here: who is leading whom is a central issue in Yellow Sky: Stretch’s pursuit of Mike, for instance, quickly displaces any interest in his old gang, as Ariel’s song allays Ferdinand’s grief over his lost father. And as if Miranda and Ariel were not enough, with Mike’s first appearance, when she directs the thirsting gang to a spring of water, her character further shifts, for it is Caliban in The Tempest who shows “all the qualities o’ th’ isle, / The fresh springs, brine-pits, barren place and fertile” (1.2.337-8). 14

“Prospero’s Flicks,” p. 47. Hopkins, Text and Film, p. 42, also speculates that the “yellow sky of the title […] could echo The Tempest’s yellow sands.” 15

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She can be seen here as a desirable Miranda-Caliban hybrid, a figure who represents a chance at true romance and in whom the men can invest fantasies of leisurely domesticity and service, ample provision, and comic reconciliations. The complicated signals such identifications create are borne out in the remainder of the film, as the narrative attempts to unravel competing discourses into some kind of generically recognizable solution. The “yellow sands” of Ariel’s song become the yellow luster of gold in Yellow Sky, after Stretch’s men determine that Mike and her prospector grandfather are hoarding riches in the abandoned mines. Stretch makes a preliminary foray to their home, where Mike holds him at gun point. His request for food—“we can’t live on fresh air”—sounds suspiciously like another anti-Hamlet maneuver, reversing the Prince’s claim to Claudius that he feeds upon the “chameleon’s dish” and “eats the air, promise cramm’d.” As if to push the point home, Stretch tries to usurp the chain of command (“there’s six of us,” he adds, “and we usually take what we want”) and seizes upon Mike’s gun, only to have her punch him out. Her grandfather, played by James Barton, materializes now for the first time and trains his pistol on Stretch: “She’s as tough as a pine nut,” he warns, and the wounded Stretch seems to concur: “it will come in mighty handy when you get married,” he quips. Ariel was imprisoned in a pine tree before Prospero freed him, and perhaps the “pine nut” toughness of Mike owes something to this. For the film ultimately paints the pine-tough masculinity as the prison from which she must be freed, even as, like Ariel, she awaits a Prince or a Prospero to break the spell. The most influential element of The Tempest, however, may be the attempted rape of Miranda by Caliban, an act reimagined numerous times in Yellow Sky. Beginning with the band’s first visit to the whiskey saloon, where the entire gang is transfixed by a strange barroom picture depicting a woman lying prone on horseback, anxieties over sexual aggressiveness emerge throughout the film. (In fact, so consumed is the film with these tensions, they seemed to have prompted one of the clumsiest taglines in cinema history: “It was a moment for being a woman for only a woman's weapon could keep her alive... now!”) When Mike first arrives at their watering hole, the outlaws ogle her and then offer to help her with the bucket. Most conspicuously, the villainous Dude (Richard Widmark) has been primping for her arrival. Their help rapidly disintegrates into aggression, quelled only after Stretch forces Lengthy, the most persistent, to “shut up” and “stay away,” an edict he subsequently passes over everyone else. Later in the film, she is tripped at the same spring by Lengthy and eventually pressed against a tree—the kind of Sycoraxian

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violence once smote upon Ariel. After her first appearance at the spring, Stretch that night seeks Mike at her home, where he is again held off at gunpoint. This time, however, he asserts that “women got no business carrying guns” and then launches the first volley in his film-long attempt to refashion her: “You know, if you was prettied up a bit, you might look almost like a female.” This apparently gives her some pause, because she then drops her guard, and he succeeds in knocking the gun away. The two grapple amongst the stables, thrashing back and forth until Stretch pins and actually head-butts Mike. After forcing himself upon her, he adds “I just wanted to show you how safe you’d be, if I really wanted to get rough . . . .” Shaken, Mike at last escapes him and, in retaliation, shouts out, “You smell. Even Apaches are cleaner than you. Didn’t anybody ever tell you before that you smell bad?” Just before her grandfather arrives, she has already re-secured her gun and proceeds to shoot Stretch, purposefully, across the scalp—parting his hair and avenging her head-butting in one shot. Only when we see Mike return to her bedroom, adorned with a picture of a woman in elegant hoop-dress, are we supposed to see just how stinging was Stretch’s criticism of her prettiness. The Tempest has often been read as a play that either elides or marginalizes female sexuality. Caliban’s mother, the “damn’d witch Sycorax,” has already been deposed not once but twice (first from Algiers and then from the Isle); she arrives on the island as a “blue-ey’d hag” who is “with child” (1.2.269). Elsewhere, Claribel, Alonso’s daughter, has been safely married off in a distant country, while the spirit Ariel’s female forms include a monstrous Harpy—a classical figure of broad allegory, inimical especially to the sanctity of male-male harmonies. Moreover, the presiding goddesses of Prospero’s masque include Ceres, Iris, Juno, but not a wisp of Venus. This masque—meant to instruct Ferdinand and Miranda in both chaste and married love—concludes with a “graceful dance” of nymphs. Their partners, meanwhile, are notably “reapers,” and the pattern they develop captures the conjunction throughout—liberality and libido must be trimmed and tempered to thwart the threat of both reaping and raping. Yellow Sky, in its transformation of its virago heroine, gestures at some of these competing tensions in Shakespeare’s play—the interchange of love and violence, bounty and dearth, the multiple monstrosities of unruly women. And like the powerful females in The Tempest, most of whom are off the page, the idea of Mike as a desirable object is tempered first by the suppression and containment of her sexual potency, even as the film finally revels in the transcendent power of malefemale love to sublimate the most desperate and degraded social outliers. (Undoubtedly, one reason The Tempest has proven resistant to direct film

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adaptation is its Aristotelian unity of time and the unreal rapidity with which such radical change takes place on the island—Ferdinand’s grief turned to enamorment in less than a scene, and so forth.) Stretch becomes aware after his rough-and-tumble with Mike that the others are also interested in her. To further muddy things, Dude has been following his hunch, and located an active mining shack some distance from the homestead. He notes that “Apaches been living in it; I could smell ‘em . . . strong as a fox’s den”; this is on the heels of Mike’s criticism of Stretch’s own toilette, not to mention her shot at his unkempt hair, and seems to prompt him to renew himself. Hereafter he is combed, shaven, and deodorized. And despite his previous gritty travels, he ornaments himself in a seemingly spotless uniform—recalling Gonzalo’s notice in The Tempest, “our garments, being (as they were) drench’d in the sea, hold notwithstanding their freshness and glosses, being rather newdy’d than stain’d” (2.1.62-4). He is able to distinguish himself now utterly from the Apache men Mike has been raised with, and offer up in his new sartorial elegance the kind of brave new world envisioned in Mike’s own fancy dress. Meanwhile, the Apache shack not only recalls the cave of Caliban, a bestialized plot firmly separated from the cell of Prospero, but also reminds us that this territory is still contested, a conflict that will later resurface when the Apaches return to the area. Stretch’s transformation also performs a chiastic function: as he gravitates towards his Miranda, his group drifts and Dude supplants him as leader. Determined to exhume the gold, Dude convinces the rest to follow him. Stretch confronts them: “You fellas figure you got a new boss, eh?,” and the usurpation process clearly mimics the series of deposements, actual or plotted, in The Tempest (Prospero by Antonio, Alonso by Sebastian, Caliban by Prospero, Prospero by Caliban, Stephano, and Trinculo). Democracy itself becomes destabilized under Stretch’s dominion—he tells the rest flatly “votes don’t mean a thing to me,” and at least for a time he is able to maintain control. Mike and her grandfather are indeed protecting gold—a significant alteration from the plot of The Tempest, in which the island space is variously degraded and celebrated but never taken as materially valuable, and Stretch’s group besiege the pair to discover where it’s hidden. In this explosion of avarice, the film owes more perhaps to Chaucer’s Pardoner and his tale warning that “Radix malorum est cupiditas,” a trope which had already been recently exploited in John Huston’s The Treasure of Sierra Madre (1948) and would be recast in such Westerns as Sergio Leone’s The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly (1966).

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After Grandpa is shot and wounded in the leg, then carried to and left bedridden in his home, we learn that he too has a vision of a new world: he hopes to use his gold-money to restore Yellow Sky to its former greatness. Mike supports him, declaring “that money’s yours; they got no right to it,” another ironic echo of Caliban and, here, his pronouncement to Prospero and Miranda “This island’s mine . . . / Which thou taks’t from me” (1.2.331-2). Questions of property are constantly challenged in both works: in his utopian vision, Grandpa here assumes the mantle of Gonzalo in The Tempest, the aged counselor who sees potential in the deserted isle for an idealized commonwealth, without “treason, felony, / Sword, pike, knife, gun, or need of any engine” (2.1.161-2). In this “plantation,” as Gonzalo calls it, all men and women would share, idly and equally, in the “foison” and “abundance” of its produce. “Bourn, bourn of land, tilth, vineyard, none,” he declared, positioning this ideal realm as one with only communal property and no individual possession. The outlaws of Yellow Sky of course ironically support just such an imagined state—they rob, even from each other (as with the canteen of water in the salt flats), and force upon the new lands of an idealized West a violent counterreading. Without boundaries, property, contract, only violent lawlessness and degeneration can follow. Both Grandpa and Stretch seem to acknowledge this; they arrange a compromise, in which Grandpa retains half the buried loot in order to pursue his dream of a new local commonwealth. The remainder of the group, under Dude’s persuasion, resist the arrangement, and Dude begins to resemble in this the usurping “Duke” of Milan in Shakespeare’s play—Antonio, who has taken Prospero’s land, and “new created / The creatures that were” his (1.2.81-2), but only, in his argument, because of its neglect. Prospero was too concerned with his books, his “liberal arts” and magic, to govern effectively; Stretch too consumed with Mike to continue running his gang. The agreement with Grandpa has nonetheless led them to the hidden mine where the gold is buried. They must dig it out, the tunnel having been collapsed by Mike and Grandpa, and the lusty digging and dirtying once more return the gangs’ thoughts to Constance Mae. Bull Run, a young and inexperienced member, reveals his own idealization of Mae—“she’ll never be anything but pretty.” Lengthy, meanwhile, wants the gold and the girl, while Dude simply the gold. We learn that he too has been deposed. Once a landowner in San Juan, with a beautiful girl of his own, he was shot in a gambling match and lost everything. His motivation is to “come back. Loaded.” In this, Dude manifests yet another side of Prospero—the right Duke sent packing, biding his time for that “most auspicious star” (1.1.182) that will turn around his fortunes.

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With the reinvigorated attention to Mike, her next trip to the watering hole results in the most graphic reenactment of Miranda’s attempted rape. She arrives again with her bucket, but this time is tripped by Lengthy and eventually pressed against a tree—the kind of Sycoraxian violence once smote upon Ariel. Bull Run rushes to prevent this “violation of her honor,” prompting a fight between himself and Lengthy in which the latter attempts to drown him in the Spring. The brawl has been brewing since Half-Pint’s objection to Lengthy’s shooting of the salt-flat lizard (and its traces of the Titus Andronicus fly-killing scene), who stood in for the innocent Mike/Miranda, whose only collective harm was the inhabiting of their own skins. Stretch arrives in the nick of time to save Bull Run and turn the tables on Lengthy, submerging him to the point of drowning. But Stretch turns upon Mike here, as well, demanding that she “stop swinging her hips all over the place” and stay away from his men. She is, after all, no innocent lizard. That night, the fighters licking their wounds, Stretch once again visits Mike, who has been summoned from her sleep by the snatches of an old folk song, “I’m sad and I’m lonely,” sounding from the gang’s campfire and performed by no less than Walrus. Mike is gazing out wistfully over the hills when Stretch surprises her. Finally he succeeds in overcoming Mike’s defenses—he has after all spruced himself up—and they soon are kissing under a romantic Milky Way. She now returns his affections, kissing and coddling him. But Walrus’s music belies the happy union. The song was popularized by the poet and sometime folk-singer Carl Sandburg in his 1927 collection of folk songs American Songbag, in which he remarks, “there is a human stir throughout the book with the heights and depths to be found in Shakespeare.”16 The lyrics, which float around Mike and Stretch during this encounter, continue: Young ladies, tak’ wahnin’, tak’ a wahnin from me. Don’t waste your affections on a young man so free. He’ll hug you, he’ll kiss you, he’ll tell you mo’ lies, Than the cross-ties on the railroad or the stars in the sky.

These parallel moments—a young couple entwined in false hugs and lying kisses, as illimitable as the stars above them—problematize the union, and in their present forms the union turns out to be untenable. She flees the embrace, and questions whether Stretch’s “word” is valid. Mike still 16

See Sandburg, American Songbag (orig. New York: Harcourt, 1927; rpt. Harcourt, 1990), p. xiii.

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masculinized, still attending on her grandfather, Stretch still devious, they appear destined to leave the world of Romance and live out the lament: “I’ll build me a cabin in the mountains so high, / Where the blackbirds can’t see me, and hear my sad cry.” Such an undesirable conclusion would, in other words, perpetuate rather than redeem the conditions of The Tempest—abject isolation, a mind wracked with regret and rejection. In the tinted afterglow of this rendezvous, and the doubting of his valor, Stretch has an intimate tête-à-tête with Mike and her grandfather to confirm his good intentions. During this surreptitious meeting, he first relates that he “comes from good people”; it is a reenactment of the formal wooing between Ferdinand and Miranda, in which the prince and future king announces to her, “I am the best of them that speak this speech, / Were I but where ‘tis spoken” (1.2430-1). He describes his upbringing in the Kansas border wars, almost losing his parents to Quantrill’s raiders and their eventual deaths in an epidemic. His mother was a “stickler for religion,” and he could read the bible by the age of seven. He then swears upon a bible—the Prospector’s version of Prospero’s good books—that he is “going through with our deal, to the letter.” In the culmination of this transformative scene, Stretch re-introduces himself to Mike, asking whether she doesn’t have a better name. She replies: “Constance Mae,” and he answers in kind: “Dawson’s mine. James Dawson.” It is the beginning of their denouement into orthodox Western characterizations: he no longer “Stretch” but a chivalric champion, she the distressed maiden. The renaming is a reidentifying with the forms behind which they’ve been imprisoned—by war and by duty. The following day the gold is unearthed. Almost simultaneously, a number of Apache Indians return to the town. They make a bold entrance down the deserted main street of the town, and next are shown carousing, wrestling, and shooting as Stretch’s gang takes cover to wait them out. Assuming that the grandfather has double-crossed them—compelling them to dig out his gold and then leaving them to “his” Indians, Walrus concludes, “we’re sure gonna be mighty rich corpses.” But the danger is purely imagined. The Indians have arrived not to help grandpa rout the outlaws but to consult with him about a problem on their reservation. Nevertheless, their arrival initiates yet another visit from Dawson, who is doubly impressed upon discovering that Grandpa could have but did not set the Apaches against him. With the threat dispelled almost as quickly as it was conjured, and with the remainder of the gang having no intention of dividing any of the gold, they now confidently follow Dude into a showdown with James, Constance, and her grandfather. In one of the

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better exchanges in the film, as the trio are holed up in their home, Grandpa asks James, “What’ll they do next?” James responds, “It’s hard to say without me there to tell them.” Anarchy has been loosed, but the film confidently strides into a classic showdown, what Simmon sees as its descent into noir, in which order will be reinstated. The drunken butlers and jesters of the gang, Stephanos and diminutive Trinculos in the guises of Walrus and diminutive Half-Pint (like Trinculo, a name that sounds like “little drink”) are converted and forgiven for their conspiracy, but the upstanding Bull-run, the ducal Dude and predatory Lengthy are killed, finally double-crossing even one another. In the end, Stretch has made the full sea-change into a redeemed Ferdinand. He restores the original stolen money to the bank. Forgiveness, it might be said, is always easier for the victors, and just as Prospero’s “pardoning of the deceivers” is partly qualified by his restoration of his dukedom, the return of stolen bank loot seems mitigated partly by the $50,000 in gold James has now inherited. James’s final act is the purchase (not, the film emphasizes, the theft) from a fashionable woman at the bank of a florid, four dollar chapeau. Riding from town with the surviving courtiers (Walrus, Half-Pint), he crowns the transformation of Constance by placing the hat on her head and sweeping her off into, at last, a rightly ordered womanhood. Thus this new world is really a reversion to the old (about which the same could be said of The Tempest), and is celebrated by the return to conventional roles—Mike will now constantly be Constance Mae, an eternal spring of maidenhood, while the bad Stretch will be left in the dust for the good James. Freed of her responsibility to her grandfather, and her grandfather freed of the burden of designing her future, Constance too becomes Miranda full-fledged, rightly oriented for her union with Ferdinand. This movement towards civility continues in the implication that the group will now return to a new kingdom as well—a rejuvenated, if romanticized, Yellow Sky. The film finally appears to champion the civilizing process that swept the Old West into a new world of modernity. In this respect, the film may share as much with Crane’s famous and more ambivalent tale “The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky”: old codes replaced by new, drunkenness and duels by honeymoons and home life. (Even Crane’s tale makes reference to a bard as accompaniment and signal for this shift: “Save for the busy drummer and his companions in the saloon, Yellow Sky was dozing. The new-comer leaned gracefully upon the bar, and recited many tales with the

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confidence of a bard who has come upon a new field.”)17 In this historical process, Shakespeare often serves as a touchstone for both the old world (raw poetry) and new (refined taste)—Carrell points out that he was something of a western paradox: his “popularity in the American West dwindled as the West was settled and ceased to be wild.”18 Shakespearean Westerns seem to re-enact this process, displacing or incorporating (sometimes beyond recognition) the plays for the demands of the cinema—not only reminding us of Shakespeare’s high profile on the American West but also exploiting the familiar tensions between popular culture and high, literary art, making implicit claims along the way about how film has the power to bring Shakespeare to the masses in a way no frontier campfire singer or tavern owner ever dreamed. Among such Westerns, Yellow Sky is one of the better examples of a rereading that values the complexities and uncertainties of the text more than the Shakespeare brand name. The ending of Yellow Sky suggests a conservative reading of The Tempest, but its alternately playful and problematic treatment of romance, especially, also proposes an open engagement with Shakespeare, one defined more by incertitude than conviction.

17

On the theatricalism of Crane’s story, see Martin Scofield, “Theatricality, Melodrama and Irony in Stephen Crane’s Short Fiction,” Journal of the Short Story in English 51 (Autumn 2008): 41-49. 18 Carrell, p. 107.

CHAPTER NINE RECLAIMING THE PASTORAL: KENNETH BRANAGH'S CURIOUS CAMERA IN AS YOU LIKE IT MISTY BECK

Despite being loved by theater goers, Shakespeare’s pastoral comedy As You Like It has not been popular with critics or filmmakers. In fact, only a handful of film adaptations have been made of it.1 Perhaps this should be no surprise: from Samuel Johnson on, literary critics have been vexed by the pastoral, either for its particular brand of escapism—call it nostalgia, mystification of power, or utopianism—or for its mixing of discursive modes. Combining idyll and satire—dreamy bucolic life and scathing social criticism—has been chief among the formalist complaints. Johnson inveighed against the inclusion in pastoral of “complaints of errors in the church and corruptions in the government” early on and felt the pastoral was necessarily a narrow genre, limited by its purview in rustic life (196-97). Denying the dialogical energy at the heart of pastoral also poses problems for twentieth- and twenty-first century critics. In a review of Kenneth Branagh’s 2006 film adaptation of As You Like It, for instance, Samuel Crowl believes that Branagh dwells too much on the enmity between brothers, provides too generous coverage of a large cast of characters, and inserts “military conflict [as] a subtext” (98) instead of focusing on Rosalind and Orlando, “the defining occupants” of the “Japanese garden-as-green-world” (99). The dialogic energy feels to Crowl like an untoward mixing of modes. Such energy can spill over into troubling violence, or an equally disturbing stasis—but these dialogical oppositions are the groundwork of the pastoral, however challenging they may prove for performance. How is a director to translate the pastoral on 1

Paul Czinner (1936) with Laurence Olivier and Elizabeth Bergner; Basil Coleman (1972 BBC) with Helen Mirren; Christine Edzard (1992); Kenneth Branagh (2006).

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stage, to manage the stasis wrought by conventional pastoral verse, its urban artifice poised against its appeal to rustic values or, conversely, its inclusion of social criticism in an otherwise idyllic space? Given the dialogic tensions intrinsic to pastoral, and its own vexed critical and performance traditions, As You Like It offers a way to explore the transmediation of pastoral into other performative spaces. Branagh’s film adaptation in particular suggests how questions about contemporary pastoral—its location and its language—might be addressed in the medium of film. It does so by means of what I’ll call the “curious camera”—a highly mobile and self-reflective camera presence that relates to both performance conventions and pastoral place. Branagh uses cinematographic style to create a specially marked pastoral space, where the thematics of love and community, hunger and separation can be explored, and where both pastoral cliché and idioms of violence can be interrogated. The curious camera and its hyperbolic movements are matched in the end with a series of mise en abymes, taking us back to the self-consciously distancing, dialogic power of pastoral, and the shifting, renovating, questionable power of its green world. Before exploring the cinematographic treatment of pastoral, it is worth pausing first to reflect on the resistance of many postmodern critics to the mode, despite its long tradition of critiquing the operations of power. For instance, in an article tellingly subtitled “Romantic Rapture and Semantic Rupture in As You Like It,” Keir Elam claims that the accomplishments in rejuvenating the debased and corrupted court of the play come entirely from the infusion of romance elements—“the poetics of the green world,” not from pastoral conventions, “the poetics of the golden world” (222), which, he believes, only signal nostalgia and an “edenic illusion of uninhibited play” (221). He resists one of pastoral’s basic premises, that it necessarily be grounded away from court, in bucolic terrain, so that it has the ethical standing to critique court politics. For as Linda Woodhouse adroitly argues, “It is by eschewing power and comfort that one gains authority to attack the powerful and comfortable. One must depart from power’s premises to find the perspective and authority to unmask power’s abuses, pretenses, futility.” Not recognizing or admitting “pastoral’s double tone—contentment in a simple life and criticism of the powerful— destroys the pastoral mode” (199). The reasons the pastoral mode seems so “inimical to our general cultural climate” are diverse (193); among them, Woodhouse suggests, is an underlying urban and suburban bias—if it’s in the country, what good

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is it? The pastoral is criticized for romanticizing rural labor, on the one hand, or dismissed as complicit in power’s operations when it does include scenes of actual labor.2 In Shakespeare’s As You Like It, pastoral labor is discounted as unrealistic, despite the shepherd Corin’s detailing of country practice in his debate with Touchstone, or the fact that Corin does not “shear the fleeces” of his own flock, his status being a laborer for a landowner who is “churlish” about supplying the needs of travelers. As Woodhouse puts it, “Nobody listens to this Cassandra among genres” (207). But why does no one listen to the pastoral anymore? What would it mean to do so? How might pastoral fit into the postmodern world? Where or what is “the green world” in an urbanized society? And how is it realized in the modern and technologically dependent genre of film adaptation? If staged in the most “natural” of woodsy settings, such as the grounds of Glamis Castle in Scotland, we might end up with performances such as Helen Mirren’s as Rosalind, in which her discomfort with swarms of biting bugs has been said to account for a dour Roz and a cool affection. (The problem strikes me as ironically paradigmatic of a modern urban/nostalgic response.) Christine Edzard’s 1992 production goes in the opposite direction – marble columns of the court are opposed to the environs of a slum. It has its strengths: the exiled Duke Senior looks all too familiar warming his hands over a smouldering ashcan, declaiming the riches of poverty, praising the life “exempt from public haunt, [which] / Finds tongues in trees, books in the running brooks, / Sermons in stones and good in everything” (2.1.15-17), a homeless man incoherently making sense. This uncanny resemblance strikes a contemporary chord and clearly takes aim at the cold divisions wrought by impersonal operations of monied interests. Yet, if Edzard can construct a pastoral setting in the wastes of a London slum, where there is scant green, does nature or bucolia have anything to do with renovating the spirit or world today?

2

Chris Fitter’s recent article is instructive. While Fitter argues insightfully that the play is concerned with the new “vestry values,” such as hard work, workdiscipline, and moral rectitude, accompanied by an attack on holidays and rural forms of recreation, he does so at the expense of the play’s hero, Orlando. Fitter believes Orlando is nothing more than a bankrupt gentleman “shrill with self-pity” (120), designed by Shakespeare to be laughed at for his “overweening gentility” (121). Fitter seems to miss entirely the operations of the pastoral to align Orlando with the disinherited, as the property-less younger brother, in the play’s critique of the politics of primogeniture.

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Moreover, what do we do about one of the other essential features of pastoral: its language? Pastoral poetics—its heavily conventionalized setpieces, rustic speakers, the whole apparatus of dialogue and debate: how does one translate all this into performance? And into film performance at that? Edzard handles this by typical means of cutting text and using voiceover, and by dramatizing what is only available in words, such as reported events from court. In contrast to earlier productions, however, she changes the natural imagery associated with pastoral language entirely. Consider, for instance, the magical transformation of the relationship of the estranged brothers, Oliver and Orlando. Providing Oliver’s speech as a voice-over, Edzard uses filmic means to show what was only available as indirect discourse in the play text. There, the transformation occurs when Orlando discovers Oliver sleeping under an oak, threatened by a snake and a lioness, and we learn what happens as he narrates the events to Aliena and Ganymede. Edzard follows this text, yet rather than wild animals, she gives us two men to embody the struggle against externalized threats of aggression, and rather than an “old oak . . . mossed with age” sheltering Oliver (4.3.110), she reveals a large, abandoned wooden structure. The gap between stylized text and film image is acute. As Oliver narrates his own story, Edzard shows us the earlier scene: Oliver trying to sleep in the crawl space under the ramshackle structure, where he is first threatened by “a green and gilded snake” (114)—a man who peers down between the slats on Oliver but slips away when he stirs, and then by the “lioness,” a man running along the building, who in fact assaults Oliver, reaching for his watch. The threat to pastoral ease is simultaneously retrospective (Oliver’s voice-over of what had happened) and present,3 as images of aggression—and vulnerability—are shown to be human, not some other wild (or poetically invented) animals; and they are directly linked to a culture of violence, separation, and poverty. Through exposing the immense gap between word and image, Edzard brilliantly transmediates pastoral dialogism into film. Her treatment of the problems of language and location thus exposes the fragility of the pastoral in the modern, urban world, its vulnerability to such ruptures. Still, I continue to wonder, what of “the green world”? Is there no place for such indigenous terrain in contemporary life, even in film, where we can be transported to any time or place? Can language and image not be integrated with dramatic action in a green place? In his film adaptation 3

There are doubled film presents, that of the unfolding assault and rescue, and that of story-telling occasion, as the camera cuts back to reaction shots of Ganymede and Aliena.

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of As You Like It, Branagh transfers the setting to Japan, where he has said, “three stones, some grass, a water feature, and you are in another world”—a pastoral world, in which the “tension between the restorative and healing and meditative powers of that quiet contemplative landscape against the roar and traffic of city and court life is caught very well . . . and works as a very strong dynamic. . .” (qtd. in Crowl 99). Set in late nineteenth-century Japan (during the Meiji period, when the country was briefly opened to trade), the production is nonetheless filmed in the English countryside, in Wakehurst Place in West Sussex. By fictively displacing the play’s historical setting, Branagh creates “a legendary, impressionistic” setting, not a “purely real and reconstructed one,” as Sarah Hatchuel points out (365). Branagh’s pastoral setting is at once both artificial and natural, both “English” and imaginary. It’s a green world that’s bracketed and displaced, while still signaling direct connection through image and language.

*** Branagh uses what I earlier defined as “the curious camera” to establish filmic pastoral space, exposing that space’s doubleness, our being “in it” and “not in it” at the same time (to borrow Aliena’s phrasing). This technique seemingly arises directly out of dialogue with the film style of an earlier performance of As You Like It, Paul Czinner’s 1936 version. While for the most part, Czinner’s treatment of the woods and sheepcotes of Arden are unremarkable, filmed as backdrop for the action, on a few occasions the cinematography more directly probes the woods, which take on a kind of dramatic agency.4 After Czinner’s Orlando (Laurence Olivier) is alone in the woods for the first time and vows to carve Rosalind in every tree, the camera gradually becomes unmoored from its motivated hiddenness, whether a putatively objective neutrality or a classic point-ofview stance, to take on a freer aesthetic power. Beginning with a series of point-of-view shots capturing Jaques’ dismay as he sights first one and then another scroll of poetry or name carved in a tree, the camera gradually loosens itself from the hold of Jaques’ point of view, as it runs 4

In addition to the scene described following, another occasion is when Orlando is picking his way through the forest, and stumbles across his brother, whose chest is being crossed by a large snake. The camera has similarly begun on high to capture the difficulty of the natural terrain. The opening shot of the film also begins on high, with a low angle shot of first cloud-patched sky and then a gigantic oak tree in full leaf; as the camera begins to lower, the shot is dissolved into branches before the camera peers into a lively, working barn yard.

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through a series of dissolved images, moving in on a tree trunk and back out again, as a kaleidoscope of trees circles behind the central image, creating a sense of entwined, emotionally infused space. The sequence is beautiful, as the camera glides gracefully from tree to tree, with slight angles and arches, before finally dissolving and tightly refocusing on a small birch at eye-line height, returning us to normal continuity editing with a traditionally motivated camera. Branagh takes that unconstrained camera movement, exaggerates and repeats it. His camera is insistently circular when it establishes the pastoral scene. Like Czinner, Branagh lets the camera rest lovingly in long shots of the tree tops, circling from on high before descending. In two important monologues, the Duke’s “Brothers in Exile” and Jaques’ “Seven Ages of Man” speeches, Branagh’s camera calls attention to itself as an observer of the scene. These are very long shots in which the camera moves from behind underbrush, which obscures the scene, and tracks through the woods, slowly circling in on the speaker. A close-reading of the “Brothers in Exile” monologue illustrates the camera presence and raises important questions. It begins with a low-angle shot of the single remaining branch of a huge old tree, and then pans down to where the crown and trunk have been blasted apart lower on the trunk, suggesting the ravages of time, with crown and upper boughs nearly obliterated. Obscured behind the tree, at a distance, we can just make out Duke Senior, who begins speaking, flat and calm, his voice blending in with a chorus of bird song. As he continues, the camera maintains the long shot of the Duke and his men, but it continues along a path, behind brush, with a deep-focus at eyeline height. The camera turns and moves in toward the group, step by step across the grass, a movement which is miked so we can hear the grass being trampled by this unknown, curious observer. As the camera pulls in, it bisects the group, dwelling for the briefest of moments on Jaques and Amiens before centering its focus on the Duke, as he gently describes “this our life, exempt from public haunt,” framed by the oak tree behind which the camera began its journey. Moving to the right and back, the camera suddenly reverses angle, cutting to our first close-up of the Duke, now facing the camera, who looks at Jaques just as he utters the final line of the monologue, we’ll find “good in everything.” It is a remarkable foregrounding of the camera, first insisting on the correspondence between the image of the tree and the Duke, both missing their crowns, and second, establishing the camera as a “live” point of view as the Duke tries to ameliorate the exiles’ condition by philosophizing on the gifts of the forest and a stoical attitude toward the human condition.

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The curious camera both establishes and breaks the mise en scene, making us aware of the crafted nature of this performance even while suggesting the felt sensory experience of the forest, which dramatically seems at least as important as the words the Duke is uttering. When later Jaques pronounces the longer, cynical “Seven Ages” speech, with the camera following the same pattern of movement but on an opposite trajectory (leftward not rightward), we are invited to compare these moments. Both the Duke’s romanticized view and Jaques’ cynical one of the human condition are shown as partial truths, opposite ends of a spectrum that are not satisfying or whole in and of themselves. The curious camera thus performs an essential pastoral function, to show oppositions, to invite our speculation, our participation in response to its withholding of judgment. The relatively flat intoning of these two important monologues establishes a counterpoint to the camera—achieving pastoral stasis at the level of style in presenting a key set of interpretive cruxes over the nature of human nature, in community or isolation, a “brother in exile” or “one man playing many parts.” One matter is not held in critical abeyance, however, and that is the body’s physical needs, dramatized by the cold exiles, the fatigued travelers in need of succor—and the starving, infirm, aged Adam. Arden is a place of hunger. In the play itself, the struggle to maintain the body is also seen as a struggle to maintain the spirit, and it is not done through separation or violence. That’s the point of the Duke’s speech to his “brothers in exile” when we first meet them, and it’s the vehicle for humor in Touchstone’s having “to bear” Aliena’s complaints as they enter the forest. Hunger, cold, and weariness might seem merely the occasion for pastoral moralizing or humor, yet with the entry of Orlando and Adam, the “bare distress” of separation is dramatized. Orlando’s language when bursting on the band of brothers, “Forebear and eat no more” (2.7.92), condenses the issues of hunger and relationship, even at the point of the sword. Orlando must be disarmed, but it is not through reciprocating violence; in Shakespeare, entry into community is entry into language. Despite Orlando’s repeated threat, the Duke responds with not just soft language, but highly structured, chiastic lines: “What would you have? Your gentleness shall force / More than your force shall move us to gentleness” (106-107). The ideal of gentleness, in opposition to force, is at the heart of pastoral oppositions in the play. While gentle manners at court are skewered by Corin as unfit for the country later, here, the banished duke asserts gentleness itself as a code of safe conduct. Shakespeare suggests the value of reciprocity poetically—and of food practically. The linguistic

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pivot—the pastoral turn—is when Duke Senior reciprocates a poetic turn on Orlando’s response to his question, “What would you have?”: Orlando: I almost die for food, and let me have it. Duke Senior: Sit down and feed, and welcome to our table.

The simplicity of the language, the Duke’s verbal echoes reassuring Orlando, leads to a moment of entry into community and succor—a moment that effectually ends the use of threatened violence in Arden. “I thought that all things had been savage here” says Orlando as he sheathes his sword. Orlando had mistaken poverty for brutality; his attempt to use force is chastened by the customary values of hospitality. In Branagh’s filming of this scene, the camera operates deftly, capturing reaction shots and cross-cut action between the group of men and Orlando, who is notably on higher physical ground when he enters, just as the group of men are preparing to eat a pot of stew, made without venison.5 While the camera is nimble here, it is not a curious presence—it is as if the violence threatened by Orlando cuts into its ability to be a reflective presence in the woods. When Orlando sheathes his sword and acts on faith that the men will wait while he retrieves Adam, we enter a reflective space, a moment for metatheatrical reflection, and the curious camera again participates, framing and circling the melancholy Jaques as he runs through his vision of the stages of man, his face barred by branches for most of the speech, highlighting the inscrutability of his perspective, the existential isolation and dreariness at its core. Foregrounding the camera is only one cinematographic technique used to establish pastoral space in Branagh’s adaptation. Repeatedly, establishing shots of woods and transitions between scenes are from on high, with lots of high angles and crane shots, as well as through dissolves from scenes of art and nature, a bonsai tree at court to a tree in a forest, for instance. The establishing shots of Arden and the lovers’ various entries into it are particularly beautiful, and they suggest the energy of the green world that Branagh’s camera tries to capture and convey. After all the characters have been shown leaving the court, with Orlando’s dwelling in 5

This change from Shakespeare’s text puzzled me—why have the Duke acquiesce to Jaques’ vegetarian principles?—until I considered the ways that hunger and violence are interpenetrated in Branagh’s version. Hunger is the result of violent separation from community, which all the exiles face; to restore Jaques to the community, the community foregoes violence to other animal life, so that all can feed together.

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flames, an image of a still moon is projected on the left side of the screen. The moon fades into a beautiful high shot of the forest at sunrise, with mountains in the distance and a rich variety of trees below. As the camera pans right and gently drifts downward, the woods dissolve in the background and the camera sharply focuses on the upper midsection of a tall tree, whose crown and base are out of the frame. The rightward drifting panorama dissolves and the camera continues to be highly mobile, angling up to the tree tops and altogether creating a kaleidoscopic effect very similar to Czinner’s framing of Arden, when Orlando is casting his verses and Rosalind’s name on its trees. Here, however, the camera is creatively unmoored from the beginning, not reliant on the point of view of a character or on the stylistic demand that its role go unnoticed. The camera is a dramatic player in the woods. From the low-angle shot of the tree tops, the camera circles and lowers, revealing the group of Aliena, Ganymede, and Touchstone trudging through the tall trees of Arden, and then it moves on, resting momentarily on individual points of view, individual plants, waterfalls, forest residents, and even a large sculptural fence. The pastoral woods, then, as shown both through cinematography and image selection, are not wild nature, but worked nature, and art (including the camera) is part of the process.

Fig. 9-1 Gathering in the pastoral woods of Arden

This curious camera, which swoons and bounces and spirals in the woods as it captures the initial shots of the exiled lovers and the forest is positively athletic, demonstrating a joy in movement as well as curiosity about the movements of others. This final feature, its joyous mobile curiosity, is perhaps shown nowhere better than in its spiraling motion in capturing the trees of Orlando’s verse. That scene immediately follows, in Branagh’s adaptation, Oliver’s treatment at the hands of Duke Frederick,

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bloodied and rejected, left weeping alone in the burnt out grounds of his abode, exiled to search out the brother he has hated. Moving from violence to love, we begin again in darkness, in a long shot directly overhead a small flame, with a whitish object on the right. Only as the camera begins to sashay downward, and Orlando’s voice is heard, saying “hang there my verse in witness of my love,” can we begin to make out his body and the white scroll that is his verse, hung on the tree. The camera arcs gently outward from its position directly above the flame and pauses in its gradual descent to land momentarily above and in front of Orlando, whose soliloquy determines his course of action, a trajectory of love: These trees shall be my books And in their bark my thoughts I’ll character, That every eye which in this forest looks Shall see thy virtue witnessed everywhere. (3.2.5-8)

The shot continues without cutting, as it glides into a medium close-up of Orlando during his soliloquy and then pulls back, maintaining an eye-line track to a long shot, until Orlando ends his soliloquy with the selfdirection, “Run, run Orlando, carve on every tree / The fair, the chaste, the virtuous, Rosalind” (3.2.9-10)—at which point the camera obeys in its own fashion, moving back from its direct focus on the large scroll Orlando has hung to reveal first all of the lower tree branches in the vicinity hung with white scrolls, and then craning back to a its original position but looking outward, to reveal that every tree in sight is filled with white papers of verse. It’s extravagant and astonishing. The entire scene has been captured in a single embracing shot, revealing joy in its discovery of Orlando and its own technique, its own technical capacity to engage in and represent the scene of love. By contrast, when filming the pastoral lovers Silvius and Phoebe—the only characters in the entire play to always speak in verse—it is straightup classic Hollywood style (continuity editing and a camera that does not call attention to itself in any way). Branagh thus signals the utter banality of the “native” pastoral lovers, whose tropes (scornful mistress and faithful lover) are thus seen as flat, static elements, part of the scenery, easy to fold under the more complex trains of development in Rosalind and Orlando— as well as to fold into the comic fabric. The first close-up of Silvius, for instance, shows him lying backward in a canoe, enunciating a loud, long moan, before he and Corin begin the pastoral debate of youth and age over the knowledge of love. It’s silly and fun and manages to capture another of the many inflections of love and linguistic play in the pastoral comedy.

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The only place where the camera is particularly interested in the conventional pastoral lovers is when they join Orlando and Ganymede (the disguised Rosalind), right after Orlando has expressed his fatigue at only playing at love. “I can live no longer by thinking,” he says, rejecting the game of disguise he’s been playing with Ganymede. When Ganymede promises that he will produce Rosalind for Orlando to marry, Phoebe (followed by Silvius) rushes into the frame and proclaims first anger and then love for Ganymede. This moment is built on a series of highly patterned short verses—suggesting a poetic style that is overly taut, stretched as thin as the emotions involved, and as far as the trope of love in disguise can go. The scene climaxes in stichomythic dialogue, as all four of the characters trading some of the most highly patterned lines in the play: Phoebe: Good shepherd, tell this youth what ’tis to love. Silvius: It is to be made of all sighs and tears, And so am I for Phoebe. Phoebe: And I for Ganymede. Orlando: And I for Rosalind. Rosalind [as Ganymede]: And I for no woman. Silvius: It is to be made of all faith and service, And so am I for Phoebe. Phoebe: And I for Ganymede. Orlando: And I for Rosalind. Rosalind [as Ganymede]: And I for no woman. (5.2.87-97).

At this moment in Branagh, the camera begins to spin around the lovers one way and then another, matching the conventionalized force of the lines with its own hyper movements, clockwise and counterclockwise, thus signaling its affinity with the stylized pastoral discourse. It only ends when the four lovers are piled on the ground, reduced to repeating the same line, “If this be so why blame you me to love you?” (107, 108, 109), as Rosalind silences the group and promises contentment for everyone. Aside from this scene, with its centripetal force, as the lovers circle in closer on Rosalind, the pastoral clichés of Silvius and Phoebe are otherwise visually represented as dull or empty forms. Even the debate of court versus country between Corin and Touchstone is a little stagey, its humor remote from the world of its viewers (built on exchanges of manners, such as whether it is better to kiss or shake hands, given the realities of life in the country or the court). To their exchange, Branagh adds another layer, the invented subtext of Corin as a former missionary, not simply a native shepherd. It’s an odd moment, when

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Touchstone discovers a bible and photograph of Corin in vestments during their dialogue on the merits of the country life and court life. Is Branagh thus suggesting that the “dream of Japan” (from the opening intertitle), of seeking a place of pure innocence, is delusionary? Even Corin has been implicated, at least in the framework of “love and nature in disguise” (again the opening intertitle). And this despite the attention to Corin actually laboring in a small sheepfold. The old pastoral tension, between artifice and naturalness, is not easily resolved. The opening scene may suggest as much, with a mise en abyme, or shattering of representational illusion, of artifice in the face of the real. Sarah Hatchuel explains how the blurring between boundaries affects the aesthetic, “with regular mises-en-abyme of fiction and of the screen.” She describes the initial mise en abyme and its connection to themes of violence and representation well: The story opens with a Kabuki piece . . . plunging the audience into theatricality at the very beginning. The show is then interrupted by Duke Frederick’s violent coup which destroys the stage set as if the world of war and politics brutally replaced the world of make-believe. This is made especially apparent when an arrow embeds itself in a wall through a character’s black wig. The actor is forced to remove the wig, thus showing how stage illusion has been shattered by the hard realities of warfare. (368)

If this is Branagh exposing the violence of representation, before the retreat to the forest and its cinematographic interrogation of that space and the refugees within it—then two related themes are foregrounded at the court: the struggle between both sets of brothers (Oliver and Orlando, Duke Frederick and Duke Senior), given the system of primogeniture, and between Rosalind and Duke Ferdinand, given his usurpation of the crown and her embodying the memory of the rightful ruler, her father, the banished duke. Branagh conveys the violent interactions between the brothers and between Duke Ferdinand and first Rosalind and then Oliver, in tightly focused interior scenes. Each time we return to Duke Ferdinand, he fills more of the frame, in increasingly bare rooms and darkening interiors. The increasingly tight frames express the duke’s growing rage, as his visage fills the frame in a kind of claustrophobic violence. These are moments that Crowl found so uncomfortable, akin to those which have long rippled the surface of pastoral poetry—darkness as well as light, satire and sanctuary. Interestingly, in the play text itself, a sign of that very unease is writ large, at least to the trained ear: there is no poetry for 400 lines—it is as if

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the text is illustrating the goatherder Audrey’s remark, “I do not know what poetic is” (3.3.14). When formal poetry does enter the play, it is in the cold, sterile voice of rejection, which Duke Frederick uses to dismiss Orlando following the wrestling match, for bearing the wrong family name, that of a man loyal to his deposed brother, Duke Senior. This omission and re-entry of verse suggests that the basic work the pastoral must undertake is to renovate the debased language of an oppressive court, moving it from a language of separation to a language of union and love. In other words, the formal absence of poetic language, the lacking music of verse, indicates a court culture badly in need of renovation, and that need is tied, violence of language to violence of action, to the world before and after the forest. The centrifugal force of the initial plot of exile and alienation is countered first by the pull of the forest, and then by the camera’s centripetal tendencies within it. The chaos of love in the forest follows a parabolic trajectory, from spinning above and bouncing through the woods, to circling lovers and in the end, as the four pairs of lovers wed, ending in a circling dance, a dance which is then continued on through the woods, with the music of the wedding dance carried along, as the entire band of exiles (sans Jaques), dances back to court. We arrive back to where we began, but with a difference, in a route of union and riot of song. There, the dance is shot from directly overhead, a bird’s eye view, as it pulls rapidly back to capture the kaleidoscopic movement of the dancers— four women in the center, four men joining and circling around, both groups exchanging places, one drawing in as the other moves out, all the while another group is circling the opposite direction. The dancers throw their flowers into the air—impossibly, fantastically high—and the flowers and confetti dissolve, in an apparently final cinematic mise en abyme, into a banner depicting the four couples tripping away, while the laughter and music continue and the camera pulls back yet again, gradually revealing three large flowering trees, under which the four couples are small figures, tiny characters on a scroll. Of course, the play between image and language does not stop there, as the credits roll and Rosalind then steps out from behind a tree in the woods, to speak the epilogue while crossing the production lot. The operatic, over-the-top quality of the two endings emphasizes the role of artifice in the pastoral, and it attests to how film enters the artificial space of the pastoral, a space that paradoxically affirms the less artificial rhythms of pastoral space—the forest of Arden. The lovers and exiled followers of Duke Senior returning to court by dancing through the woods

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in effect foreground the adaptation’s lack of realism, the “magic” of the camera—and this is continuous, I believe, with Shakespeare’s intent. The camera directly connects the court with the wonder of the woods and with song. So, we might ask finally, is this sleight of hand, or slight of art? Does the rejuvenation of magic in the woods do anything to affect the structures of power in that world, to undo the violence wrought by its operations? The stylized camera movements, which amplify the motion of Czinner’s camera and thematize it, signal connection to that earlier film, in its embrace and dwelling in the trees, suggesting a line of discourse, of inheriting and remaking convention. On the one hand, then, the style of cinematography, the curious camera, captures something of the poetics and the magic of pastoral tradition—of pulling away from the world in order to return to it in better heart. And yet the curious camera here also suggests the skepticism, the dialogic tension between believing and doubting, that is at the heart of pastoral. Branagh gives play to the violence underlying the pre-Arden world, drawing the standard tricks of Hollywood and inventing a scene to do so. Yet in Arden, he reinvents, in cinematographic terms, through a curious camera, a pastoral space that interrogates relationships, focusing on teaching love and community and critiquing violence and separation. In the end, the lovers return to recreate the world and thus become part of the “artful tapestry” of history—the tapestry closing the film, this simple story to read or view, with image replacing language. And then Rosalind artfully intrudes, and her words— Shakespeare’s words—undo the image (and then the image of the set undoes the original context of that language). In the end, we are perhaps tempted to say, it is simply as you like it—nature and culture, word and image, motion and stillness, court and country, love and corruption, isolation and community, play and reality. The curious camera may not be able to solve the dilemmas of interpretation, but it frames them for us, engages in the world, takes pleasure in its beauty, and suggests the similarly curious circuitry of love and art in the green world. The temptation is to defend the pastoral on the terms of the court, in terms of how well it can expose the operations of power and reclaim them. That, however, would be a failure—a failing to make the claim for pastoral art on its own basis, for habits of attention, engagement, and love that its green world can cultivate. Branagh got it—the scene he invents to stage the court coup is a direct attack on art and performance. That concern is in the playtext, too, in the very absence of verse in the scenes at court and in its debased, ungentle entry into the play, following wrestling, a blood

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sport. Both play and film suggest how the strategies of power involved in those institutions are ineffectual in maintaining the world they purport to underwrite, as Frederick’s court fall away from him, and as his daughter and niece take their energy away from that world. Branagh shows the power of the green world, not only to rejuvenate and reconcile the lovers and other exiles, but also as a place from which to critique arbitrary exercise of power and the forms of poverty it engenders. Arden provides access to food, community, love, and self-representational strategies. It is a place to renovate language and vision. As film image brings Shakespeare’s language to life in a medium unimaginable to its author, the question of whether pastoral any longer fits in a postmodern world, and of the green world’s significance in particular, is at least partially answered. The mode may be dispersed across new forms and landscapes, but those new forms suggest more than ever the enduring tension between nature and art, the real and the representational, the documented and the created. As a medium, film itself is in keeping with pastoral dialogic tension: single still shots creating an illusion of motion. The self-conscious artifice of pastoral thus finds a home in the very medium of film, as Branagh’s curious camera earlier intimates. Yet rather than placing us in pure artifice, the filmic representation of pastoral encourages renewed dialogic inquiry. Whether its landscape is “Japanese garden-as-green-world,” industrially blighted England, or some idyllic forest out-of-time, the pastoral mode builds on engagement of oppositions to create both its knowledge and its performative effect, that of a dramatic player in the woods, tempting us to further inquiry and travel along its curious paths.

Works Cited Branagh, Kenneth, dir. As You Like It. HBO, 2007. DVD. Crowl, Samuel. Film Review, As You Like It (2007). Shakespeare Bulletin 26.1 (2008): 97-101. Czinner, Paul, dir. As You Like It. (1936) Perf. Laurence Olivier, Elizabeth Bergner. Alpha Video, 2004. DVD. Elam, Keir. “‘As They Did in the Golden World’: Romantic Rapture and Semantic Rupture in As You Like It.” Canadian Review of Comparative Literature/Revue Canadienne de Littérature Comparée 18.2-3 (1991): 217-32. Edzard, Christine, dir. As You Like It. Sand Films, 2007. DVD.

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Fitter, Chris. “Reading Orlando Historically: Vagrancy, Forest, and Vestry Values in Shakespeare’s As You Like It.” Medieval and Renaissance Drama in England (2010): 23: 114-41. Hatchuel, Sarah. Review of “Kenneth Branagh’s As You Like It, Or All The World’s A Film.” Shakespeare 3.3. (2007): 365-68. Johnson, Samuel. Samuel Johnson. Ed. Donald Greene. Oxford and New York: Oxford UP, 1984. Shakespeare, William. As You Like It. Ed. Barbara A. Mowat and Paul Werstine. New York: Folger Shakespeare Library/Washington Square P, 1997. Woodbridge, Linda. “Country Matters: As You Like It and the PastoralBashing Impulse.” Revisions of Shakespeare: Essays in Honor of Robert Ornstein. Ed. Evelyn Gajowski. Newark: U of Delaware P, 2004. .

CHAPTER TEN L’HOMME BLANC ET L’HOMME NOIR: OTHELLO IN LES ENFANTS DU PARADIS DOUGLAS LANIER

As all cinephiles know, Marcel Carné and Jacques Prévert’s Les Enfants du paradis is as quintessentially a French film as there is, one which consciously fashioned itself as a French classic from the start and which has consistently topped most surveys of the best French film ever made. What makes it intriguing is that for all the film’s insistent, glorious francophilia, its climax occurs during a performance of Othello which comes at the end of a series of allusions, overt and implicit, to Shakespeare’s play. Myriad critics have before spotted the allusions to Shakespeare’s play and contextualized Frederic Lemaitre’s performance within the history of nineteenth-century Shakespearean performance, but few have situated the film’s use of Othello in the history of Shakespeare on screen or addressed its attitude toward Shakespeare. One important exception to this generalization is Russell Ganim. In an article entitled “Prévert reads Shakespeare,”1 Ganim focuses on the many ways in which Lacenaire and Iago are kindred characters–both are 28 years old and of ambiguous sexuality, both look upon their peers with misanthropic disdain and believe their true value to be overlooked, both exude a calculating rationality that masks inner rage, both are masters of words and innuendo, both reveal (in Iago’s case, “reveals”) the sexual discretion of a superior’s beloved, and both are playwrights of a sort, creating elaborate real-life “performances” that lead eventually to the death of their superior rival (Othello and Count Montray). Valuable as Ganim’s analysis is—and I recommend his article heartily—at one level it does not go far enough, for, I want to observe, resonances, parallels, echoes and analogues of Othello suffuse Les Enfants du paradis, far 1

Ganim, Comparative Literature Studies 38.1 (2001): 46-67.

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beyond the few scenes in which the play is specifically referenced. Garance, for example, corresponds in many ways to Desdemona, for both women are obscure, idolized objects of male desire that at some level the men cannot securely possess. Both women are wrongly accused of crimes in public and private (Garance twice so in the first half of the film), both unwittingly awaken jealousy in the men in their lives, and both end up with murderous husbands (or in the case of Garance, a murderous paramour). Baptiste himself observes that “Othello would make a nice pantomime,” and identifying with Othello’s remorse in the final scene, goes on to observe that Shakespeare’s tale of romantic self-destruction is “a sad, absurd tale, like so many others. Like mine or yours, Madame Hermine.” Baptiste’s idealization of Garance, his investment in her as a means to redemption of his at first stigmatized identity as Anselme Deburau’s denigrated son, and his potential for violent rage in service of his devotion to her, exemplified by his destruction of the outsize bouquet Count Montray gives Garance at the Funambules, a potential we see again in artistic form in his killing of the ragman in the pantomime Chand d’Habits—all of these suggest affinities between Baptiste’s emotional sensibility and Othello’s. In the film’s second half Count Montray sneers at the indecorous barbarity of the Othello performance, but he too succumbs to the same impulse to jealousy that all the male protagonists at some point feel, though he conceals the barbarity of his emotions by channeling through gentlemanly ritual, challenging his rivals to duels. Ironically he is only in attendance at the Othello performance at all because he is convinced—wrongly, like Othello—that Frédérick, playing Othello, is the man Garance truly loves, a misconception he falls into when Garance doesn’t give him the indication he wants that she is devoted exclusively to him. And he is killed in a Turkish bath, a setting which links him metaphorically with the “malignant and turbaned Turk” in Othello’s final speech. Even Nathalie, Baptiste’s wife, plays out a combination of Emilia and Bianca’s roles, pathetically pursuing a man who doesn’t really love her, herself being so touched by jealousy at one point that she breaks the silence of the Chands d’Habits pantomime and breaks its spell. And analogues with plot points and mise en scene from Othello also appear—to take one example of each, Lacenaire’s waiting for the authorities to arrive after he has killed the Count, an act which will surely lead to his own execution, has some resemblance to Othello’s selfimmolating actions after Desdemona’s murder. The curtained bed that has become iconic as the site of forbidden sexual desire and death in nineteenth-century performances of Othello appears several times in Les Enfants, most notably in Baptiste’s room where it is the site of Garance’s

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trysts with Frédérick and Baptiste. It is as if Othello has been disassembled —narratively and thematically deterritorialized—and become a freely circulating network of themes and motifs in which all the main characters of the film partake, a Shakespearean body without organs, a point to which I will return presently. The film’s first explicit reference to Othello seems to articulate in iconic language the poetic realist sensibility of Les Enfants. It comes from the lips of Frédérick, the character most consistently and explicitly associated with Shakespeare’s play. He announces early in the film that he longs to be a famous, respected actor, and Othello becomes his vehicle for doing so. Lying in his bed in Madame Hermine’s boarding house, Frédérick practices these lines from his script: Yet I’ll not shed her blood, Nor scar that whiter skin of hers than snow And smooth as monumental alabaster. Yet she must die, else she betray more men. Put out the light, and then...

This passage from Othello as he pauses before Desdemona’s murder neatly captures the central psychological tension experienced by the men in the presence of the elusive Garance. On the one hand, they idealize and idolize her as Othello does Desdemona; Lacenaire speaks of her as his “guardian angel” and Baptiste associates her with magical, distant moonlight, so much that he cannot consummate their relationship when she offers herself to him. Indeed, Garance’s role as the statue of Phoebe in Baptiste’s pantomime L’amoureux de la lune, where he adores her as Pierrot, literalizes Othello’s image of the “monumental” virginal Desdemona he places on a pedestal, whom he adores but cannot bear to sully. On the other hand, Othello’s jealous, violent desire to possess her for himself alone, his horror at her entertaining “more men,” is one also shared by Garance’s suitors, though it manifests itself in different ways. Othello’s tortured oscillation between desire, even reverence for the idealized female object, his impulse to control that object, and his rage at her elusiveness are central to this passage and to a reading of Othello as tragic Romantic hero, brought low by his pursuit of a transcendent object he can never securely capture. It is not for nothing that in Garance’s first appearance in the film, she is presented as the figure of Truth in a carnival sideshow. This quality, the film suggests, is the foundation of authentic art, art which speaks to the aspirations of the “children of paradise,” the commons who inhabit the cheap seats, and it is this quality which Baptiste

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manages to express in his pantomimes and underlies his popularity. At this point in the film, however, Frédérick is incapable of feeling the sentiment he voices, for he views all women, Garance included, as objects of sexual pleasure, creatures to feed his narcissism. Frédérick’s self-consciousness, his retreat from emotional involvement into self-regarding wit and exuberant charm, something he taps brilliantly in his send-up of L’Auberge des Adrets, manifests itself in his penchant for hammy acting, something he demonstrates here with his grandiose gestures and declamatory style. Indeed, Frédérick quips, “yes, let’s turn out the light,” and casually tosses the script aside, one of his signature gestures that marks his carefree lack of commitment, and almost immediately, intrigued by singing in the next room, he takes up his affair with Garance, engaging her with his characteristic witty repartee and casual erotic charm, the very antithesis of Baptiste’s idealization and abandonment of Garance earlier in the evening. Frédérick’s plotline consists of his development of sufficient emotional attachment to Garance to experience jealousy and thus to perform Othello with some authenticity.

Fig. 10-1 Frédérick reads Othello.

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In the film’s first half, however, Frédérick remains trapped in narcissism, self-consciousness and verbal wit, a point made in the scene where backstage at the Funambules Garance and Frédérick discuss their faltering affair. As the scene opens, Garance speaks wistfully of her longing for a love that is silent or uses few words, precisely the kind of love Frédérick, even the easy talker, cannot offer. After she declares that he must be unhappy with her because he can’t resist joking, he replies with a dismissive speech about jealousy: Would you rather I badger you with questions, delve into your memories, spy on you, follow you in the street, hugging the walls where I’ve written your name? Or shake you awake at night to ask who you’re dreaming of?

Frédérick precedes this speech with tossing aside Garance’s moongoddess hairpin, another indication of his inability to idealize her enough to be jealous; for Frédérick, jealousy seems absurd, a cliché, a kind of emotional indulgence he refuses to engage in. After revealing that she has already spoken Baptiste’s name in her sleep, he invokes Othello: That’s all. But what do you mean, that’s all? But isn’t it enough to fill my heart with despair? O perfidious creature! Othello killed Desdemona for much less. For nothing. Othello became a widower by his own hand. For nothing. For a trifle, a little handkerchief. A batiste handkerchief, no doubt.

What is especially noteworthy about this speech is Frédérick’s tone. Throughout much of it, he lapses into bemused histrionics, mocking the melodrama of “O perfidious creature!” by overacting it with a sweeping gesture. But at one point, on the line, “Othello became a widower by his own hand, for nothing” Frédérick fleetingly shows the capacity for genuine jealousy, awareness of the possibility for tragic immolation over a woman, the very antithesis of and a threat to his narcissism. Almost immediately he pulls back from that sentiment, turning instead to a bad pun on “batiste mouchoir,” a witticism he repeats with self-satisfaction, much to Garance’s dismay. And as he exits there enters the man who will become his erotic rival, Count Montray, with his ridiculously ostentatious bouquet. In the film’s second half, Frédérick’s meeting with Garance at the Funambules as the two watch Baptiste’s Chand d’Habits constitutes a crucial change for Frédérick. What we see of Frédérick’s success—the example the film gives is his travesty of L’Auberge des Adrets—rests upon his quick wit and energy, performative self-awareness, and gift for puncturing authority and decorum. But exuberant though his performance

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is, it offers no artistic grandeur, precisely the quality that prompts Frédérick to see Baptiste’s performance. Frédérick’s exchange with Garance reveals something new, a retrospective recognition that Garance’s attachment to Baptiste wounded his pride. As if replaying their earlier conversation Frédérick calls Garance “Desdemona,” and he returns to the issue of jealousy: I think I am jealous. I don’t know. I’ve never felt anything like this. It’s insidious, unpleasant. It infects your heart. You reason, but your reason fails you. Do you realize, just now, because of you, because of Baptiste, I felt jealous. Me, jealous! And full of regrets. That man, that traveler taking you away, and me letting you go. And to make things worse, there’s Baptiste performing like a god.

This time, however, Frédérick struggles to maintain composure, becoming uncharacteristically sincere and flooded by the pain of loss and envy, though he still experiences jealousy at something of a distance, speaking of it as if it were a separate entity assaulting him from outside. And his romantic jealousy remains bound up with professional jealousy, a recognition that Baptiste is the superior artist. Talking about jealousy, he says, putting it at verbal arm’s length—this is Frédérick’s characteristic psychological strategy—robs jealousy of its power—but when Garance suggests it was nothing more than a mild fit from which he’s recovered, he takes exception: Why should I recover so fast? What if I enjoyed it? What if jealousy was helpful to me? Helpful, even necessary! Thank you, Garance. Thanks to all of you, I can at last play Othello. I didn’t feel the character. He was alien to me. Now he’s a friend, a brother. I’ve found him. Othello, my heart’s desire! After you, Desdemona! I’ll go embrace Baptiste. I owe him that much.

Amidst the flash of fury at his wounded pride, here for the first time Frédérick recognizes the connection between emotional experience and artistic authenticity that grounds Baptiste’s pantomimes, though we should also notice that even here Frédérick’s experience of jealousy is oddly at a remove, useful for playing the part which is his heart’s desire but not integral to his emotional being. Othello is “a friend, a brother,” but not himself. And so at the end of the speech, we once again see the reemergence of Frédérick’s cynical histrionic side with his “After you, Desdemona,” though it is underlaid with unsuspected love and regretful longing for Garance. The filming of Arletty in this sequence—in ravishing close-ups, veiled, in shadows—establishes visually what Frédérick cannot

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quite say, that she has become for him an ungraspable object of desire in retrospect.

Fig. 10-2 Frédérick and Garance in the Othello performance

Without doubt, Frédérick’s Othello performance constitutes his apotheosis as a stage actor. It has a psychological depth, intensity and grandeur we’ve not seen before, and an exchange of close-ups between Garance and Frédérick at its climax underlines that its authenticity and power springs from his complex feelings for her. What is more, as Frédérick’s Othello speaks of murder, the camera pulls into Lacenaire’s face, bearded like Frédérick’s own in costume, suggesting an affinity between Othello’s rage and Lacenaire’s—this moment, the camera seems to suggest, plants the idea for Lacenaire’s revenge upon Count Montray.

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Montray himself, ever the spokesman for the arid, elitist taste of the classical theaters, finds the spectacle vulgar, a judgment which gives Frédérick’s performance the frisson of popular rebellion and allies it with Les Enfants du paradis. The irony is that the Count’s drive to own Garance, to discover and destroy his romantic rivals for her attention, only works to strangle off her spirit, a fact broadly hinted at from the Count’s very first entrance with what Baptiste waggishly calls a funeral bouquet. His attempt to insult Frédérick after the performance and goad him into a lover’s duel spectacularly backfires, for Lacenaire, affronted by the Count’s imperious elitism and evident hypocrisy, casts the unwitting Count in a real-life variation on the Othello scenario he so despises, what Lacenaire calls not a tragedy but a farce. In Othello the beloved’s infidelity is entirely imagined, but here it is real and very public. Drawing a curtain aside as if opening a play, Lacenaire reveals Baptiste and Garance embracing on the theater balcony, Carné’s nod to Romeo and Juliet. There’s more to say here—the film does not end with this discovery— but what’s notable about this network of Othello themes and motifs is that though persistent, they are diffuse, largely denarrativized, typically marked with a difference from Shakespeare, what one might call “kaleidoscopic.” There are myriad resemblances between characters in Les Enfants and those in Othello, but those resemblances come in and out of view–the characters of Les Enfants do not follow those of Shakespeare’s play, and the full resonance of Othello really only comes into full view at Frédérick’s performance. Even there, there are crucial differences that accord with the poetic realist sensibility of the film. Because the curtain falls at the moment of Desdemona’s murder (on the portentous line “it is too late”), we never get Othello’s remorse, his anagnorisis or his arguably tragically redemptive suicide. This is quite different from Othello’s assimilation into film mid-century in Anglo-American contexts, whereas in Les Enfants Shakespeare’s play is also often used to explore the fluid boundary between art and life. In Anglo-American popular film there is a strong tradition of the play Othello serving as an oppressive masternarrative that, once invoked, takes over the life of the person playing the Moor, drawing out jealousy and leading to real murder (or attempted murder) on the stage. Two films roughly contemporary with Les Enfants offer variations on this theme, Men are not Gods (dir. Walter Reisch, 1937, UK) and A Double Life (dir. George Cukor, 1947, USA). What both films (and others like them) capture is the extraordinary cultural authority of the Shakespearean text and plotlines in the Anglo-American sphere, though that authority is registered in perverse form, as a text which

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dredges up unconscious emotions and compels its players to act out its imaginary scenarios in real life. What makes Les Enfants’s cinematic use of Othello distinctive (and perhaps distinctively French) is its dispersal of the Shakespeare narrative. When Othello proper finally appears at the end of the film, it seems like a momentary crystallization—but by no means an authoritative or final one—of themes and motifs of the narrative we’ve been watching all along. That narrative is constructed as a classic tale of French heritage, an articulation of a resolutely French history and set of values. Like Olivier’s Henry V, another heritage film created in the shadow of World War II, Les Enfants reminds its audience of the national culture and history they were fighting to preserve. If, then, Les Enfants was self-consciously conceived in part as a French heritage classic, precisely the status it now holds, on a first viewing Othello seems curiously out of place in the film, particularly since it has been Hamlet, not Othello, that has been most influential as a model for modern French culture. But I want to suggest here that within the flow of the narrative of Les Enfants Othello seems less like a master narrative, a source for the plot or characters, than an effect of this very self-consciously French story, a fleeting space of reterritorialization in the circulation of the particular kinds of desire and aesthetics that marks these tales as French. If we think of Othello as a product, not a source, of the Les Enfants narrative, then the ambivalence with which Shakespeare’s play is deployed comes into clearer view. On one level, given Shakespeare’s longstanding reputation as a chronicler of essential human nature, Carné and Prévert’s evocation of Shakespeare is designed to indicate the universality of the film’s themes, even as at the same time Shakespeare is shown to be essentially French in sensibility, at least in the case of Othello. At another level, however, Shakespeare is evoked as a paragon of spoken drama, the antithesis of classist classical French theater and thus potentially a theater of the people to rival the pantomime. It is important, then, to recall the note that Frédérick sends with his bouquet to Garance at his performance: “Desdemona came tonight. Othello is no longer jealous. He is cured. Thank you.” The note reads in two ways, as a witty registration of Frédérick’s erotic and artistic pride, in effect a return to his characteristic mode, but also as an acknowledgment of the cathartic nature of his performance. It is as much a purging of jealousy as it is a drawing upon it, another example of distancing through words, albeit fine words magnificently performed. By contrast, Baptiste’s pantomimes, presented as a quintessentially French art form, distill, physicalize and heighten the underlying emotions—they are not a means for purging so much as reliving and elevating them. Les Enfants lionizes the world of nineteenth

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century Parisian theater in all its manifestations, but its final alliance is with Baptiste and his art. It is his art which is finally favored by “les enfants du paradis,” for after all the film’s ironic final image is of a street—by implication a nation—filled with Pierrots. And, moreover, Baptiste’s pantomime is also allied with silent film, the art form for which Carné was clearly nostalgic and which in the 1940s constituted France’s great contribution to world cinematic culture. The film’s second half sharpens the contrast between theater and pantomime and makes clear that though Shakespeare’s Othello may epitomize the best of the art of the dramatic word, the foundations of the cinematic future, the art form preferred by modern enfants du paradis, belonged not to the man in black but to the man in white, not l’homme noir but l’homme blanc. For all his virtues, like the Moor, Shakespeare himself remains ever the Other in the world of the film.

PART IV: SHAKESPEARE WITHOUT BORDERS

CHAPTER ELEVEN TRACES OF SHAKESPEARE’S TRAGEDIES IN AFRICA BENAOUDA LEBDAI

Shakespeare’s Legitimacy in Africa The history of Africa is dense, disturbing, tragic and traumatic, from the slave trade with the greatest human displacements ever to the colonial occupation of the continent, officialized at the 1885 Berlin Conference. Despite the claims of colonial ideology that Africa presented a cultural desert, there has been a growing interest in and appropriation of Shakespeare since at least the seventeenth century. The colonial period certainly brought chaos into the cultural life of Africans, which explains why educated Africans in missionaries quickly understood that they had to save their African culture and their own languages from disappearance. Interestingly, they often found ways of enacting that preservation through Shakespeare’s tragedies, which is not a mere coincidence. These plays were translated into local languages such as Kiswahili, Juba, Arabic, Kikuyu and Somali in the Eastern and Northern parts of Africa, into Krio, Wolof, Bambara, Yoruba, French and into Pidgin English in Western Africa, into Zulu, Tswana, Venda, Xhosa and Ndebele in Southern Africa. Shakespeare was virtually over present in most parts of Africa and the phenomenon grew with time. When asked why they chose and concentrated on Shakespeare’s plays, the translators’ arguments were telling as they did insist on their need to show that African languages possessed a rich and colorful vocabulary capable of expressing Shakespeare’s subtleties and literary complexities, which African audiences understood and appreciated as suggested by South African translator of Shakespeare in Mzansi Minky Schlesinger: “Macbeth, King Lear or our Romeo and Juliet had huge returning audiences and certainly

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spoke to the ‘hearts of South Africans.’”1 Similarly, Martin Banham reports that “African audiences applaud and respond vocally to verbal performance as much as to action.”2 So, Shakespeare played an important part in the survival of African languages, which proved that they were as expressive as any other languages. Indeed, Nyerere translated Shakespeare in Kiswahili to show Tanzanian students that their language was rich and beautiful arguing that “its beauty and richness can be augmented only if put to novel uses.”3 The cultural battle was without doubt political. Shakespeare, for whom there was a great respect, became a reference for many African intellectuals who needed “to become citizens of the world”;4 henceforth his texts were studied in African missionary schools during colonial times and in high schools and universities through Shakespearean production during the postcolonial period. The consequence was that Nigerian and Ugandan students, for instance, read Shakespeare’s tragedies in village squares, creating travelling theatres to entertain and educate people through King Lear and Othello which were adapted and translated into “Pidgin Nigerian English.” Those comedians used masks and songs to appeal to illiterate audiences who enjoyed the tales. The Nigerian students’ target was to reconnect the people with pre-colonial African storytellers who were the keepers of history and legends. African playwrights, directors and translators knew very well that proverbs, witty jokes, riddles and choirs as used by Shakespeare were also part of African cultures and customs. The role of music, dance and masquerades used in Elizabethan times spoke and appealed to African audiences who appreciated and understood the hybrid performances as used in Nigeria for example “in a manner typical of Yoruba storytelling, which utilises both proverbial riddles and a powerful repetitive choric chants.”5 Africans perceived the 1

In “Shakespeare in Mzansi: A South African Perspective,” Sentinel Literary Quarterly 4.1 (October-December 2010). On line http://www.sentinelpoetry.org.uk/slq/4-1-oct2010/interviews/tinashemushakavanhu.html 2 Martin Banham, Roshni Mooneeram, and Jane Plastow, “Shakespeare and Africa,” in The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare on Stage, ed. Stanley Wells (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 284. 3 In Lemuel A. Johnson, Shakespeare in Africa and Other Venues (New York: Africa World Press, 1998), 138. 4 Carol Sicherman, “Ngugi’s Colonial Education: ‘The Subversion . . . of the African Mind’,” in African Studies Review 38.3 (1995): 16. 5 Banham, “Shakespeare and Africa,” 293.

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Bard as an African “griot”6 who provided good entertainment, communality, social and moral messages, “a continuity in the development of African theatre.”7 Shakespeare’s tragedies additionally played a role in questioning colonial racism. The postcolonial period witnessed a greater interest in Shakespeare for political and social reasons: with the independence of African countries in the 1960’s, African people were thrilled to have recovered their freedom and to be able to rule their lives. But the general and short-lived euphoria soon was replaced by disillusion and anger. The new African leaders happened to be terrifying dictators like Idi Amin Dada or Robert Mugabe. The tumultuous political postcolonial turmoil invited once again Shakespeare’s tragedies on African stages to express dark and distressful feelings. Committed African playwrights and directors decided that Shakespeare would intervene not only culturally but also politically to awaken people’s consciousness. In East Africa, Julius Nyerere, the first President of Tanzania, was an intellectual who denounced dictatorships, neo-colonialism and the revival of African culture through his translation of Julius Caesar in 1969 as Juliasi Kaizari. He also translated The Merchant of Venice in 1972 as Mabepariwa Venisi in Kiswahili for their relevance for an East-African audience, first by giving Kiswahili its deserved place in the linguistic education of Tanzanian students as he declared in the introduction of the first edition: “I will be happy if this translation will assist fellow students in advancing their Swahili studies,”8 and in the sense that both plays were adapted with an announced ideological stand, as the Kiswahili title of The Merchant of Venice, translated back into English became The Capitalists of Venice. This clearly underlines Nyerere’s message. In his adaptation, Shylock became Shylocks, which implies a community, the people of Africa always rejected, exploited and denigrated. The socialist ideology of Nyeréré’s translations met great success during the performances, as Nyerere especially promoted an equal sharing of wealth among Africans. The infatuation for the British playwright was a fact then. Shakespeare was very much present in East Africa as other Tanzanians such as Mushi or this anonymous scholar from Dar Es-Salam who translated Macbeth and 6

In African culture a griot is a storyteller, a poet, an artist, the one who tells the glorious moments of the tribe, the village. He is the memory of the people. 7 Ali Khangela Hlongwane, “The Soyikwa Institute of African Theatre and Its Rural Theatre Project,” in African Languages and Cultures 1.2 (1988): 165. 8 Julius Nyerere, in Alamin. M. Mazrui, Swahili Beyond the Boundaries: Language, Literature, and Identity (Ohio University Press, 2007), 151.

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The Tempest in Kiswahili, to be performed in villages. The idea was to bring universal knowledge and culture to newly independent Tanzanians. Shakespeare can also be traced in Uganda, where a “Shakespeare Company” was created by a group of committed playwrights who were very active culturally. Their objective was to perform Shakespeare’s drama in a Ugandan tribal language in faraway villages where people did not have access to cultural activities, as was the case for people in the capital Kampala. The journalist Joseph Dowden reports a young Ugandan’s words which are significant in terms of the appropriation of Shakespeare in this country: “‘If Shakespeare were with us now,’” an African friend once told me, “‘he would have a much better rapport with me than with you.’ He and Shakespeare, my friend explained, could talk about sacred groves and the power of spirits. Both of them could understand the raw paranoia of kings and lords and knew the horrors of anarchy and catastrophe.”9

The Prevalence of Tragedies Kenyan playwright Ngugi Wa Thiong’O affirms that many of Shakespeare’s tragedies were “read at almost all levels of the educational system.”10 Shakespeare was also taught in schools as part of the acquisition of a “common global culture.”11 Those “readings” of Shakespeare’s texts had an impact on many African students such as Ngugi Wa Thiong’O who argued that drama was appreciated by African people, for whom it was a sheer ancestral enjoyment, as was the case for Elizabethan people. The critic explained that those readings gave him “fantastic images of the world of struggle, of great upheavals, of change, of movement.”12 His play Dedan Kimathi is surely a convincing example of Shakespeare’s influence on the playwright in terms of tone but also of power and the construction of convincing heroes. Prospero-like characters are present in Ngugi’s literary texts such as A Grain of Wheat for which the first title was indeed Prospero in Africa.13

9

Richard Dowden, a review of an African Julius Caesar in Uganda, in All Africa, 4th July 2012, http://allafrica.com/stories/201207050169.html?viewall=1 10 L. A. Mbughuni, “A Study of the emergence of New Trends of Modern Theatre and Drama,” in The Writing of East & Central Africa (London: Heinemann, 1984), 249. 11 Ngugi Wa Thiong’O, Moving the Centre (London: James Currey, 1993), 12. 12 Ngugi Wa Thiong’O, Moving the Centre, 14. 13 Johnson, Shakespeare in Africa, 29.

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Many African directors perceived Shakespeare’s stories as “raw material,” which helped them to develop and rewrite African stories with similar dramatic effect. People felt and witnessed those similarities in African villages. In West Africa, it is in Sierra Leone that Shakespeare became a tradition in drama productions. In 1964, Thomas Decker translated Julius Caesar into the African language Krio to show that his African language could equal the beautiful and poetic English language. He declared: “My aim is to make propaganda to the Krio language by proving that the most serious things could be written in it.”14 The act is militant, as he wanted Shakespeare to be available for people who did not understand English. Thomas Decker wanted to prove that Africa was not the savage continent colonial ideology wanted it to be. Besides, one can add that Shakespeare’s tragedies were performed through adaptations in which African mythologies were present as in Mali and Senegal. The heroes who appeal to colonial and postcolonial subjects and audiences are Shakespeare’s tragic ones like Hamlet, Richard III, Macbeth and Othello because they are aristocrats in difficulty. African spectators perceive some kind of hope and justice through these heroes’ fates. In Nigeria, the Nobel Prize winner Wole Soyinka was inspired by Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream to structure the inter-text of his play A Dance of the Forests, put on stage on the independence day of Nigeria in 1960.15 As the play was a harsh criticism of those who confiscated power, it was performed only once. Wole Soyinka was compared to William Shakespeare (with whom he shared the same initials), a foreshadowing for the Nigerian playwright as Shakespeare has always been mentioned in his political and literary comments. In 1980, for example, he proclaimed that “the Prospero-Caliban syndrome … was dead,” invoking the art of the colonizers to assert that the problems in Africa were now between Africans in these postcolonial times.16 In Africa, the most popular tragedy and the one most performed all over Africa is undoubtedly Macbeth, whose central figure is no longer a Scottish murderer but an African dictator. In West Africa, Macbeth was performed at the “Théâtre Sorano” in Dakar, in 1965. In the Ivory Coast, Marie-José Hourantier directed Macbeth with the theatre group Bin KadiSo in 1993. In Ghana the playwright Joe de Graft created an original 14

Banham, et al., Shakespeare and Africa, 285. Interview with Wole Soyinka in Soyinka, Six Plays (London: Methuen, 1984), xiv. 16 Soyinka, Interview, Six Plays, xxi. 15

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version of Macbeth adapted to a Ghanaian audience under the title Mambo, Let’s Play Games, My Husband, in 1978. Its postcolonial setting allowed de Graft to comment on current African politics, denouncing through this tragedy greed, ambition, the misuse of power and the exploitation of people.17 In Nigeria, Wale Ogunyemi staged A’are Akogun in the city of Ibadan, a one hour “compact version of Macbeth,” in which he mixed Shakespeare’s text with Yoruba myths and rituals.18 He used mime and Yoruba drumming as well as choric chants in a dialogue where both languages Yoruba and English were mixed. In Botswana Macbeth was performed as an opera through allegorical characters who denounced the harsh use of power against African peoples’ basic rights. The actors were disguised as animals, as baboons, which was a diversion to avoid censorship. The show was meant to be pedagogical for African leaders who clung to power like fierce animals. The Baboon Lady Macbeth addressed the audience with this political lesson: “no gentleman ever made it to the top” by “oppressing the rest and testing the best,” which was an appropriate warning for dictators and their wives.19 In the history of the continent there are indeed many unscrupulous leaders who were identified in Shakespeare’s tragic characters. African writers were not mistaken when they turned to Shakespeare to express the hazards of human condition, the quest for power, the intricacies of oligarchies, jealousy, corruption, betrayal, political crimes, and ultimately the defense of justice. So, landmark characters such as Macbeth, Hamlet, Julius Caesar, King Lear or Othello bore symbolical implications for Africans as these characters represented African problems and shortcomings. Shakespeare’s tragedies helped Africans to be implicitly critical of their political upheavals. With their powerful images and metaphors Shakespeare’s dialogues spoke to African audiences. Through Shakespeare’s tragedies, African directors expressed and explored their very personal political projects and desires as their commitment was to awaken the consciousness of people, showing them that they were right in their judgements of their disastrous situation. King Lear was another favorite as it is an open criticism of corrupt political systems, and could be staged to provide an impulse to topple rotten systems. When Lear breaks down under the storm, it implies to African audiences that the old feudal 17

Banham, Shakespeare and Africa, 297. Banham, Shakespeare and Africa, 286. 19 Quoted in an article by McCall Smith in: http://www.rnw.nl/africa/article/shakespeares-macbeth-meets-africa-botswanasfirst-opera 18

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Fig. 11-1 A mid-1980s Julius Caesar produced by the Cape Performing Arts Board (CAPAB), with Theo Vilakazi as Brutus and Ralph Lawson as Cassius.

order and the old conception of nature can collapse thanks to the new bourgeois conception of nature. A monarch is disturbed when the world of wealth for the few is questioned, so Lear bears that symbol of hope. In Julius Caesar, the conspirators wonder how many times such situations would be repeated: “How many ages hence / Shall this our lofty scene be acted over / In states unborn and accents yet unknown” (III.i.111-13), a prophecy which speaks to postcolonial Africa where coups are still a common practice and where the threat of bloody actions haunt people. Although it is not a tragedy, The Tempest also inspires many African playwrights and translators. The seventeenth-century Caliban/Prospero

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relationship was topical for Africans because they felt that Shakespeare provided Caliban with some energy even though Prospero remained the real master of the land and the language, which he taught to Caliban: “Europe taught Africa language and its profit is to know how to curse.”20 Thus for many Africans, William Shakespeare was already postcolonial. Perhaps the most famous such appropriation is Aimé Césaire’s The Tempest, an Adaptation for a Negre Theatre at Hammamet Theatre Festival in 1969, given from the point of view of Caliban who became a character in revolt. 21 It was part of Césaire’s strategy to develop Black African theatre by giving Caliban a deliberately positive attitude, as he was in revolt against his condition, opposing Prospero the White, Prospero the totalitarian dictator, quite openly. Caliban was put in a position to overthrow Prospero and was the one making history at last.22

South Africa’s Love Story with Shakespeare South Africa has long had a special relation with Shakespeare.23 Indeed, the first performed tragedies can be traced back to 1607 when British sailors, on their way to India and South Africa, performed Hamlet and Richard III in Sierra Leone, interestingly for African audiences. In 1799, Hamlet was performed in Algoa Bay (Port Elisabeth today) and in 1800 British soldiers performed the play Henry IV in Cape Town. The tragic history of this complex country led Black playwrights to use Shakespeare’s tragedies as a means to protest against the apartheid system. Shakespeare’s tragedies were appreciated for entertainment thanks to their poetic and political content. Many studies show that there is a striking parallel between South Africa and the Elizabethan era in terms of atmosphere and history as suggested by the critic Lewis Nkosi:

20

Adewale Maja-Pearce, Who Is Afraid of Wole Soyinka? (London: Heinemann, 1991), 91. 21 See Michèle Dancourt, “Euripide et Shakespeare réécrits par Soyinka et Césaire,” in Comparative Literature and Translation (Rabat: CCLMC, 2005), 91. 22 Beyond performance, Shakespeare’s Prospero and Caliban have inspired essays on race relations such as Black Sin, White Masks by Frantz Fanon. See Peau Noire, masques Blancs (Paris: Seuil, 1952). 23 This issue is explored substantially by David Johnson in Shakespeare and South Africa (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1996). Johnson studies the presence of Shakespeare in South African curricula during the colonial and postcolonial eras.

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Chapter Eleven It was the cacophonous, swaggering world of Elizabethan England which gave us the closest parallel to our own mode of existence; the cloak and dagger stories of Shakespeare; the marvellously gay and dangerous time of change in Great Britain came closest to reflecting our own condition.24

Such parallels underscore the seeming timelessness of Shakespeare in the sense given by Jonson in 1623 that “he was not of an age but for all time.”25 Solomon T. Plaatje, the first Black translator of Shakespeare in South Africa, discovered him in a performance of Hamlet in 1896. 26 Plaatje translated four of Shakespeare’s tragedies in Tswana as Julius Caesar in 1923, to save Tswana from disappearance and to demonstrate that it was worth Shakespeare’s art. Plaatje’s Julius Caesar was performed with the contribution of a Zulu and Tswana cast in 1937.27 It was later performed in 2001 at the National Arts Festival in Grahamstown, in Cape Town and in Johannesburg.28 Shakespeare’s tragedies translated in Xhosa were inspiring for many intellectuals such as the South African comedian John Kani who declared: “Shakespeare’s words paint pictures in glorious colour in my language. They were written by a man whose use of words fits exactly into Xhosa.”29 Shakespeare’s presence was everywhere in South Africa as Lewis Nkosi reports. When musicians were returning to the “Townships” after their shows, they were asked by rogues to recite some of Shakespeare’s lines: “Their favourite form of persecuting middleclass Africans was forcing them … to recite some passages from Shakespeare, for which they would be showered with sincere applause.”30 They “inspired awe” among thugs by shouting to them “Unhand me rogues.” These triggered their sense of revolt as victims of apartheid in the townships. One can see that Shakespeare was re-appropriated in the Townships by the wretched in difficult times. South African playwright Welcome Msomi created a significant adaptation of Macbeth with his title uMabatha (The Zulu Macbeth) which was performed in Cape Town in 1974 with a Black cast. In transforming Shakespeare, Msomi staked claims for culture and respect, valorizing both 24

Lewis Nkosi, Home and Exile (London: Longman, 1983), 13. In Zahir Magazine, http://zahir.org.uk/shakespeares-timelessness-here-and-nowbecky-ellis/ 26 De Jong Haviland Company brought Shakespeare to the colonies. 27 In Alain Ricard, Littératures d’Afrique noire (Paris: Karthala, 1995), 137. 28 On Yael Farber’s production SeZaR, see http://internetshakespeare.uvic.ca. 29 John Kani, in The Telegraph, “Shakespeare, the storyteller of Africa,” 19 April 2006. 30 Nkosi, Home and Exile, 13. 25

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Zuluness and Africanness.31 Msomi explained that: “the intrigue, plots and counterplots of the Scottish clans were almost a carbon copy of the drama that took place with the early nations of Africa.”32 Through the performance of that adaptation, actors expressed their own feelings through Shakespeare’s plot: “the fighting Prowess” of Black South Africans.33 The South African playwright succeeded in showing the absurdity of apartheid as the Black audience was sitting at the back while the White in front stalls, according to apartheid laws, and all of them were watching Black comedians on stage. As everybody in the audience felt similar emotions, Msomi suggested the broader implications of such equality. Cape Coast reporters perceived the performance from an apartheid perspective. For these white reviewers, uMabatha proved that Shakespeare was really universal, as he could be adapted to Zulu culture where people were bloodthirsty, ambitious and primitive. For them, it was not odd that Macbeth was transposed naturally to Zulu culture. Rather, they stressed that Black comedians were in their natural element when playing such figures as the witches. The actors did not have to make any efforts to play their parts, as they were “credible, crouching half-naked over their pot!”34 So, the Zulu play was reduced to black magic, showing how primitive and pre-modern the Bantu of South Africa were. The same play was performed in post-apartheid South Africa under the title The African Macbeth with great success. It toured the world and was performed in the Globe Theatre in 1996. The reviews were then positive. In an interview in The Sunday Times in 2001, Msomi said: “It is all about changing people’s mindsets about themselves, about their language. Why should we be ashamed about what we are,” which shows the positive role given to Shakespeare, permitting people to be part of world culture. 35 Shakespeare was likewise present in South African texts and his themes can be found in most Black South African writings. Hamlet is apparent in Alex La Guma’s A Walk in the Night where the plot gets “rotten” as in the kingdom of Denmark. The murdered white character happens to be a Shakespearean comedian, an admirer of Hamlet. Likewise 31

See Natasha Distiller, “‘The Zulu Macbeth’: The Value of an ‘African Shakespeare’,” Shakespeare Survey 57 (2004), 160. 32 Banham, Shakespeare and Africa, 286. 33 Banham, Shakespeare and Africa, 287. 34 Distiller, “The Zulu Macbeth,” 162. 35 Distiller, “The Zulu Macbeth,” 165.

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Solomon T. Plaatje’s Mhudi was greatly inspired by Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet adapted to a South African love tale through a struggle between the Barolong and the Ndebele with a great “detail of diction.”36 The power of politics in South Africa and the love for oral stories help explain such a strong attraction. The perception of Shakespeare by Black South Africans was positive because they had the feeling that Shakespeare was opposed to colonial power and allowed an “imaginative engagement with Shakespeare” so present in works like Thomas Mofolo’s Chaka. 37 The portrayal of Chaka’s tragedy was inspired by the way Shakespeare had constructed Macbeth. The writer Bloke Modisane borrowed full speeches from Shakespeare in his autobiography Blame Me on History to express his outrage against the apartheid system. Nadine Gordimer’s My Son’s Story was very much inspired by Othello and André Brink’s Looking in Darkness revealed the novelist’s interest in Shakespeare’s tragedies. André Brink translated Richard III and Romeo Juliet into Afrikaans and Breyten Breytenbach translated Titus Andronicus into Afrikaans too, which has become a national language in today’s Rainbow country. Cecil Manona produced in 1963 The Tempest in Eastern Cape where Prospero reportedly wore a jackal skin and Caliban left the stage proclaiming “Freedom High Day.” The message was clear and well understood. Shakespeare was present even in Robben Island as he inspired all the prisoners including Nelson Mandela. It is reported that Black prisoners read neither the Bible nor the Koran, but Shakespeare’s Complete Works. Each prisoner chose his favourite lines; Nelson Mandela opted for a famous couplet from Julius Caesar: “Cowards die many times before their deaths, / The valiant never taste of death but once.”38 Similarly, the playwright J. P. Clark, very much inspired by Shakespeare’s theatre, created a theatre of entertainment and political education. In South Africa Shakespeare’s presence was encouraged by committed comedians such as the South African born actress Janet Suzman. She produced Othello at Johannesburg Market Theatre in 1988. Through Othello, performed for the first time by a Black South African, the actor and translator John Kani, she wanted to show the trauma and the “exasperation” of people with the apartheid system. Janet Suzman, with John Kani, presented Hamlet in 2006 at the Royal Shakespeare Company 36

See http://internetshakespeare.uvic.ca. Johnson, Shakespeare in Africa, 53. 38 Nelson Mandela, “Shakespeare, the Storyteller of Africa,” in The Telegraph 19 April 2006. 37

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Festival, representing the “Rainbow Country” through a cast with a Black Claudius, a White Gertrude and an Indian Hamlet. Finally, in 2012-2013, there will be a touring of Macbeth, set up by the South African Brett Bailey. Its originality is that the play is set up as a musical, based on Verdi’s opera. This politically incisive play highlights treachery, ambition and witchcraft in a crumbling state in Central Africa, probably the Congo. This cultural event shows that South Africa is becoming a cultural centre in Africa through its staging of Shakespeare’s tragedies. To conclude let us stress that the relation between Shakespeare and Africa is also promoted at the Royal Shakespeare Company which had an all-Black cast for an “Africanized” Macbeth in 1996. The Royal Shakespeare Company offered a transformation of the tragedy to make it politically and culturally African, denouncing the rotten state of postcolonial African politics. For the 2012 anniversary of Shakespeare, a World Shakespeare Festival was launched at the Globe theatre and in Stratford-Upon-Avon in mid-April. Many African adaptations were presented including a Tunisian Macbeth entitled Leïla and Ben: A Bloody History. Africans keep drawing parallels between Shakespeare’s tragic heroes and despotic African political rulers, colonial and postcolonial. These adaptations underline the universality of Shakespeare’s tragedies, which created within Africans a good insight on how societies may function and become aware of the weaknesses and strengths of either men or women in power. Shakespeare has always been an inspiration as he helped Africans to acquire a deeper understanding of human psyche, to comprehend the world they live in and to change hopefully their social and political environment. The “Africanization” of Shakespeare’s tragedies expressed their own feelings thanks to local ways of performing with special costumes, songs, masks, dances, stage directions and myths. Africans adopted Shakespeare by adapting his tragedies to African culture. They appropriated him to prove their “humanity” and to demonstrate their own “universality.” Throughout the colonial and postcolonial eras, Shakespeare has offered a wonderful opportunity to send back messages not only to the Empire but also to postcolonial leaders. The Bard became the new promising Caliban or “Shakespeare the African,” that is, “William Shake-the-Sword,” as a South African Bechuana Chief called him: “the white man who spoke so well.”39

39

Reported by Solomon Plaatje in A Book of Homage to Shakespeare, ed. Israel Golancz (Oxford, 1916), p. 338.

CHAPTER TWELVE THEATER AND NATIONAL IDENTITY: SHAKESPEARE IN HUNGARY, 1790-1990 MARTIN ANDRUCKI

Although this is an essay about Shakespeare in Hungary, I want to start off in a place far to the west of that central-European nation, namely Ireland. Consider this: according to John Walsh, until the first decades of the 19th century most of Ireland’s population spoke Irish Gaelic. But by the mid nineteenth century, thanks in large part to British educational policy, Ireland had become a country where English speakers were in the majority, and the Irish tongue had been pushed to the margins of the island in the far west and south. Today, Irish Gaelic is the first language of fewer than 100 thousand Irish citizens, while Irish business, education, literature, and drama are conducted almost exclusively in English (545-46). Why didn’t this happen to Hungarian? After all, like the Irish, the Hungarians were colonized by imperial outsiders—first the Austrians, then the Soviets. Moreover, the language was late to develop a significant literature or a position of social prestige. And yet today Hungarian is the native tongue of virtually everybody in Hungary, and of a large number of Hungarian speakers in Transylvania and Slovakia. How did Hungarian avoid the fate of Irish? Part of the answer to that question is the role played by theater in general, and by Shakespeare in particular, in helping to preserve Hungary’s cultural identity. In large measure it has been through the establishment of national theaters and the adoption of Shakespeare as a cultural stepfather that the smaller nations of Central and Eastern Europe have preserved their languages, and survived the attempts by imperial occupiers to erase them from history (Senelick, 2). And Hungary is an especially clear example of this phenomenon. Moreover, as we shall see, it was not only Hungary’s language that Shakespeare helped to preserve. Beginning in 1956, his

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plays in performance became for many Hungarians important expressions of moral independence in the face of Soviet-inspired autocracy. This connection between theater and national identity is on dramatic display in the architecture of Hungary’s new National Theater building which opened in 2002. The siting of the structure on the banks of the Danube in Budapest inspired the architect to create a building resembling a ship plowing its way up the river, running against the Danube’s powerful east-flowing current (fig. 12-1). The Danube, of course, ends in Romania, flowing into the Black Sea, not far from the border of what was once the Russian Empire, and later the Soviet Union. Considering Hungary’s long and unhappy relationship with its powerful eastern neighbor, the building’s siting in itself makes an emphatic, if tacit, political and cultural statement, telling the world that Hungary, as represented by its national theater, is a ship headed west, away from the Soviet-dominated past.

Fig. 12-1 The National Theater, Budapest

Much more explicit is the message conveyed by the architectural fragment that sits in the water of the large pool surrounding the prow of this dramatic ark. Lying on its back in the pool is a reproduction of the neo-classical façade of the old nineteenth-century National Theater building, demolished by the Communists in the mid 1960’s to make way for the Number 2 subway line. The façade is partially submerged in the

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water, as if just knocked over by a Communist wrecking ball, a bitter reminder of what many Hungarians regard as an act of cultural vandalism directed against one of the core institutions of the national identity—the national theater—and carried out by east-facing Communist functionaries. The creation of the national theater in 1837 marked an important victory in the long political and cultural conflict between Hungary and its masters in Vienna—a conflict which had suddenly intensified in 1784, when Austrian Emperor Joseph II issued a decree declaring German the official language of imperial government throughout his realm—a vast swath of central and eastern Europe where some seventeen different languages were spoken. Joseph was trying to make the machinery of government operate more efficiently, but the speakers of those seventeen languages— especially the Hungarians—saw things differently. As Lóránt Czigány tells us in The Oxford History of Hungarian Literature, this decree “particularly offended the rising national consciousness” in Hungary (101). Members of the aristocracy and intelligentsia reasoned that “a national culture can flourish only in the national language” (102). Seeing in Joseph II’s decree the first step in the erasure of Hungarian culture, a wide swath of the educated Hungarian population realized they needed to take strong measures in defense of their imperiled tongue and their equally threatened national survival. But what would be the most effective steps to take in order to rescue the Hungarian language from oblivion? One of the answers most frequently proposed was: the creation of a Hungarian theater, a place where the national language would proudly and publicly be spoken in the service of grand ideas and patriotic sentiments And it is at exactly the moment when the Hungarian language is under threat from the Emperor’s decree —in 1784 and 1785—that the, “first sporadic theatrical performances were held in Buda,” enacted by young noblemen with no dramatic training, before a public, “easily convinced that the actors’ loud recital in the native tongue was the chief virtue of, and reason for, a theatrical production” (Czigány, 143). Between these first clumsy performances, and the establishment of a fully professional national theater in Budapest, lay 43 years during which Hungarians continued to experiment with theater as a cultural preservative, while creating a body of dramatic literature in Hungarian. In Hungarian, though not necessarily by Hungarians. Thus, it is within five years of these early productions, in 1790, that the first translation of

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Shakespeare into Hungarian appears, Ferenc Kazinczy’s version of Hamlet (Mark, 108-09). Four years after that, in 1794, Hungary saw the first staging of a Shakespeare play in Hungarian, and again the text was Hamlet (Czigány, 143). The sudden appearance of Shakespeare on the Hungarian cultural horizon at exactly the time when Hungarians were working energetically to preserve their language and their identity is not just a historical accident. Far from it. With Shakespeare’s entry into its theatrical canon in the late eighteenth century, Hungary joined other central and eastern European countries in drafting the English playwright into their struggles for national self-preservation. According to Laurence Senelick, “The ability to stage Shakespeare, particularly Hamlet, is made a touchstone of a theatre’s maturity” (4). And in Painting Shakespeare Red by Shurbanov and Sokolova, we read that Shakespeare’s “association with the center of Western civilization” has made him an “icon of cultural maturity” (16). Czigány writes of a “cult” of Shakespeare in Hungary (133); István Pálffy, only partly in jest, declares that, “Shakespeare has been customarily referred to [in Hungary] as ‘the most popular and most often played Hungarian classic’” (292). Why is it that this turn to Shakespeare began when the Hungarians started to take seriously the task of preserving their language and their national identity? The answer is pretty clear: Any language capable of assimilating the vast genius of Shakespeare demonstrates its own greatness and the greatness of the nation that speaks it. Shakespeare in Hungarian would validate Hungary’s claims to cultural and political legitimacy. This Magyar-ization of Shakespeare was pursued throughout the nineteenth century, culminating in the publication, between 1864 and 1878, of the complete works of Shakespeare in translations by Hungary’s most celebrated poets. By the end of the century, Shakespeare had entered fully into the spiritual and theatrical life of the nation, fulfilling what the nineteenth century literary historian, Ferenc Toldy, had described as Hungary’s, “burning need for a complete Shakespeare. . . .[Because] [i]t is in him and through him that we must study nature . . . it is on him that we must build and develop our sensibilities” (Mark, 113). Fast-forward more than three-quarters of a century to the years following the failed Hungarian revolution of 1956, an uprising directed against the Stalinist policies of the Hungarian Communist Party and the continued occupation of Hungary by the Red Army. The uprising seemed initially to have succeeded, with Soviet troops apparently headed back to the USSR. But in a deal worked out between the Russians and the Hungarian politician, János Kádár, the revolution was stopped in its tracks. Its

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leadership was put under arrest, or executed on the spot, and Soviet tanks turned 180 degrees, re-entering Budapest, and transforming momentary victory into total defeat. Kádár then went on to run the country for the next 33 years, right up to the fall of the communist regime in 1989. But despite the political changes that had transformed Hungary since the end of World War II, Shakespeare continued to occupy a place at the top of the literary hierarchy, now presided over by Communist cultural bureaucrats. But he was also conscripted by the opponents of Kádár, his plays in performance often becoming vehicles for carefully encrypted attacks on the regime. Once again Shakespeare was serving as an instrument for cultural survival, this time by helping to save, not the language, but some vestige of moral autonomy and national self-respect in the face of Communist autocracy. Communist officialdom however, was slow to realize that Shakespeare could be put to such uses. Looking only at his texts, they saw him as a soldier in their political army. Shurbanov and Sokolova point out that, “the Soviets drafted [Shakespeare] as a commissar in their liberatory march against world capitalism. . . . Shakespeare was given a place of distinction as an artistic forerunner of the communist future. . . . The poet’s biography was revised so as to present him as the ‘son of the laboring masses’ who . . . expressed their yearnings ‘for a better and brighter future of mankind’” (20-21). Many actors and directors in Hungary were happy to accept this reading of Shakespeare. For example, as Veronika Schandl tells us in Socialist Shakespeare Productions in Kádár-Regime Hungary, a production of Richard III in 1947—the year the Communists began taking power— “was praised . . . for depicting the triumph of socialism over the Fascist rule” (16). Richard was viewed as a stand-in for Hitler, while Richmond, “appeared all in white at the end of the production, as the savior of the country and the arrival of a new political system” (16). That new system—the Tudor monarchy— was meant to be seen by the commissars as a precursor of Soviet-style socialism. They might have had a point there. But in less than a decade the cultural bureaucrats would be taught a lesson about the slipperiness of meaning on stage, a lesson about the way images and texts in performance can elude ideological controls and transmit unforeseen implications. That very same 1947 production of Richard III was revived in 1955—after the Hungarians had had eight years to experience the merits of Stalinism, and its reception was radically different from that of the earlier version. As we know, Shakespeare’s Richard eliminates his political rivals by falsely accusing them of crimes against the state, rigging their convictions, and executing them. “Who is so gross / That cannot see this palpable

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device” (3.4.10-11) the Scrivener asks about Richard’s obvious manipulations. As it happens these were exactly the techniques employed by the Communists to gain power in Hungary after the war. Moreover, these tactics were themselves imported from Moscow, where Stalin employed them during the notorious show trials of 1936-37. Hence, when Shakespeare’s Scrivener, reveals that he had written up the guilty verdict against Hastings some 22 hours before Hastings was even accused, the Hungarian audience immediately saw the parallels with present-day politics. Shakespeare did indeed seem to be their contemporary, as the Polish critic, Jan Kott, would point out in 1961. And what happened in the theater at the moment of that shock of recognition? Tamás Major, one of Hungary’s leading directors during the socialist period, recorded his memories of the 1955 production, noting that, “we all sensed that this was going to be . . . very risky. . . . And so it was. Whenever the audience felt that the words could have a current double meaning, they literally ‘pulled down the house,’ particularly at the moment when . . . the [Scrivener] came in with the prefabricated verdicts. . . . It was received with a standing ovation. This just shows that Shakespeare does not need to be made current, he makes himself current” (Schandl, 18-19). In eight years, Richard III had morphed from Hitler to Stalin. Thus, Shakespeare was discovered as a weapon that could be used against those currently in power So it was that in the bitter years after 1956, just as in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Shakespeare was again drawn into a struggle between Hungary and its imperial occupiers, who were now ruling, via Kádár, from Moscow rather than Vienna. Shakespeare’s plays would become vessels bearing a freight of coded messages which both subverted the regime and allowed artists and audiences the liberating experience of dissent—albeit dissent behind a veil. As noted above, Shakespeare stood at the pinnacle of artistic prestige in the Communist world, which, after 1949, included Hungary. However, as Shurbanov and Sokolova observe, “theatrical practice constantly destabilized [the official] injunctions [to treat Shakespeare as a forerunner of socialism] by turning the dramatic material into an allusive reference to the actual reality inhabited by the audience. Thus Shakespeare’s work was utilized in the undermining of a political system that claimed eternity for itself” (14). And so we come to the sublime irony of Hungarian theatrical life during the years of the Kádár era, a time when Shakespeare, that optimistic tragedian, that offspring of the people, that prophet of socialism,

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became, repeatedly and unmistakably, the vehicle through which theater artists and audiences expressed their hostility towards the Communist regime. As Schandl writes, theater was, “constantly turning the dramatic material into allusive references pointing to the contemporary reality the audience inhabits,” resulting in a “consensus . . . between theater practitioners and the audience” (20). And what was the “contemporary” situation to which directors were always alluding through Shakespeare’s plays? In the years immediately following 1956, Kádár conducted what Joseph Held has called “counterrevolutionary terror [that] lasted well into the early 1960s,” a policy marked by, “atrocities and judicial murders . . .” (222). Following this period of rooting out and punishing anyone who had played a significant role in the 1956 uprising, Kádár changed course, and by the late 1960s had begun a new economic policy incorporating limited elements of free-market exchange and the restoration of private property in the agricultural sector (Held, 222). These reforms resulted in a marked increase in economic activity, and the unprecedented availability of consumer goods (Held, 223). This state of affairs came to be known as “goulash communism,” and Hungary itself came to be described as “the happiest barrack in the Soviet camp” (Held, 223). Kádár even permitted limited criticism of minor communist officials and created limited opportunities to travel abroad (Held, 223). And the compulsory assent to party orthodoxy that had marked the Stalinist era—encapsulated in the slogan, “Those who are not with us are against us”—was revised in the direction of greater tolerance. From now on the party’s slogan would be: “Those who are not against us are with us” (Held, 223). But despite their circumscribed freedoms and the prosperity that distinguished them from their poorer comrades in the Soviet camp, Hungarians retained a bitter awareness that they were being governed by a man who had betrayed his country to the Russians in exchange for power They knew that behind the kitchen where the goulash was cooking there still stood the offices of the secret police and the government censors, who still threatened reprisals for violating the regime’s taboos, such as mentioning either the 1956 uprising, or the continued presence of Soviet troops on Hungarian soil (Held, 223). So at one level, Hungarian life was that of the happiest barrack, but just below that agreeable surface lurked the sense of living in a culture of official dishonesty, where one had to pretend that the most important events of recent Hungarian history either hadn’t happened, or had

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happened differently from the way everyone remembered. Hungary had become a well-fed nation starving for any public expression of the truth. Even more galling, according to Held, was that Kádár managed to co-opt “many Hungarian intellectuals if they were willing to abide by his rules. . . . Those who refused to cooperate had to keep silent” (223), Grin and bear it became the default approach to life. Thus, if you were a graduate of a Hungarian university eager to pursue a professional career, you had a choice: either play Kádár’s game, or don’t play at all. (This helps to explain one of the many shocking facts revealed on the opening of the secret police files after 1989: the great Hungarian film director, István Szabo, whose Mephisto is a masterful study of the co-optation of an artist by a corrupt regime, was himself an informer for the secret police during his years at the film academy. His choice: accept this assignment, or face professional oblivion. He accepted [Associated Press].) It was in this social and cultural atmosphere that Shakespeare’s plays became a poetic arsenal aimed at the regime. And the most frequently wielded weapons in that arsenal were Hamlet and the so-called problem plays, especially Measure for Measure. The popularity of the Danish prince on the Hungarian stage may be partially explained by the fact that Stalin hated the play, a backwards endorsement which added greatly to its cachet, making it “the favorite subject for politicized, dissident productions” (Schandl, 14). But Stalin’s disapproval was only part of the play’s appeal, which went much deeper than sending a posthumous Bronx cheer to the ghost in the Kremlin. When Hungarian artists, intellectuals, or educated members of the theater-going public read Shakespeare’s text, they saw in Claudius, that treasonous politician who had killed his own brother in order to achieve power, a figure not unlike János Kádár who had betrayed to the Russians his close friend and mentor, Imre Nagy, one of the leaders of the revolution. In Hamlet they saw an isolated and oppressed intellectual, impotent in the face of corrupt authority, and held captive in the prison of Denmark while the king and his courtiers eat, drink, and make merry. Forbidden to study abroad, spied on by his old schoolmates, daily confronted by the fact that he does nothing to restore justice, Hamlet is reduced to impotent rage—becoming a man who talks incessantly to himself, like one of those characters we avoid on the streets of a big city. In other words, Denmark was seen as a country very like Hungary, the happy barrack, while Hamlet became the mirror image of a generation of intellectuals unable either to change their circumstances or to accept them without anguish.

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Before looking at Hamlet productions from the Kádár period, it will be helpful to glance at a production of Hamlet staged in the National Theater in 1952, when Stalinist cultural orthodoxy was regnant. In Shakespeare’s text we find that Claudius, at the climax of the “Mousetrap” scene, rises and exits hurriedly after seeing his act of fratricide re-enacted by the visiting players. At that point in the 1952 production Hamlet “triumphantly jumps on [the] throne and raises his hands in a victorious manner” (Schandl, 33). The audience was meant to see that the young progressive had chased the feudal ruler from the seat of power, though of course it would require Fortinbras, leading an army of landless peasants, to complete this victory for the nascent socialist cause. Performances of the virtually un-cut text lasted five and a half hours; and the production was, “celebrated in reviews as a Socialist masterpiece” (Schandl, 39). Eleven years later, after the uprising of 1956, a sense of betrayal, failure, and national malaise seemed to hover over all aspects of Hungarian social and cultural life. In this atmosphere, in 1963, a new production of Hamlet found its way to the stage at the Madách Theater. This time around, Schandl tells us, the production exploited “the opportunities of ‘doublespeak,’” whereby “theater professionals let the audiences read potentially subversive connotations into classical productions” (40). In this version, the moment in the “Mousetrap” scene when Claudius rises and exits was played as a kind of distorted reprise of the 1952 production. Just as in 1952, Hamlet “leaps on another . . . throne . . .lifting his hand in the same way . . . “ But then he, “climb[s] down from the chair in an apologetic manner a minute later” (33). No longer the precursor of a triumphant socialist future, Hamlet has instead become the embodiment of a nation whose momentary victory in 1956 was soon overturned, leading to a period of helpless, introspective dejection. One reviewer described the production as an opportunity to “relive and rethink the events of the past ten or so years. . . . Hamlet . . . made us ask ourselves where we were to go from here” (41). Other commentators noted that his drama was acted out “in the present [in which] all embittered Hungarians lived. Along with Hamlet they realized the lack of alternatives and accepted the status quo the political situation offered them” (43). Apart from certain revisions in Hamlet’s character, the 1963 production did not differ all that radically from the production of 1952. Instead, it was, “perceived as topical by a generation because of factors which were never pronounced or recorded, but were felt and understood by the members of the audience” (Schandl, 41). Just as in the case of the two

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stagings of Richard III in 1947 and 1955, it was not the mise en scène that had changed drastically, but rather the audience, now eager to see new implications in the play. And these new implications obligingly leapt into view because the vision of the audience had been altered by new historical circumstances. Another decade passes—one including the crushing of the Prague Spring of 1968—and in 1972 another Hamlet appears on the Hungarian stage, this time in the small town of Kecskemét. Director József Ruszt, startled audiences by breaking with tradition Instead of casting an established actor in his 40s as Hamlet , he chose a young man of 26, only recently graduated from the Academy of Drama. This was a Hamlet motivated by intense, physical—even animal—energy, a quality which accentuated his entrapment in the prison of Denmark. It seemed “’contemporary’ . . . not in the costumes or the scenery, but in the way it depicted a ‘modern nervous system’” (Schandl, 46-7). Rosencrantz and Guildenstern behaved like “aggressors who were summoned to control Hamlet,” Polonius was no longer the superannuated windbag of convention, but an “artful and [determined] courtier, an ardent servant of the regime,” and Horatio was “girly, weak, and acquiescent,” depriving Hamlet of even a single stouthearted friend (Schandl, 47). Hamlet was fierce and virile, a young man in “constant revolt,” but dogged by a sense of futility, by a “’hellish inability to act, as well as the suffocating solitude of living in tyranny’” (Schandl, 48-9). Ruszt’s treatment of the play began a trend in Hungarian Hamlets: they were to become younger, more athletic, and more hopeless. In 1981, film director Gábor Bódy staged a Hamlet in GyĘr on a set designed to resemble Hamlet’s brain. He gave the play a subtitle: “an armed philosopher,” and explained that the drama exemplified the “inner conflict of [his] generation,” showing how he and his contemporaries are “forced to inertia, since they refused to participate in the everyday rat-race. . . . Yet they could not accept the status quo . . . either” (Schandl, 57). Unfortunately for the Prince, he cannot “imagine all the perfidy that mediocrity and those who feared for their power could come up with” (Schandl, 64). And so we see how, “a young, open and analytic spirit slowly commits himself to the finality of a once-in-a-lifetime bloody deed” (Schandl, 57). In other words, Hamlet’s choice is whether to die slowly of heartsickness in a corrupt world, or to create a swift ending for himself through an act of violence: to be, or not to be. Although severely pummeled by the critics, this production struck many Hungarians in their late 20s and early 30s as “OUR HAMLET” (Schandl,

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59), a voice speaking to and about them. The director was hailed as “an example to follow in the ‘world of servilism and grayness,’ someone who showed ‘that you can still be independent or even deviant . . . no one can stop you’” (Schandl, 63). But like Hamlet, Bódy was himself oppressed and heartsick, and in 1985, at age 39, he committed suicide, leaving behind a note claiming, “that all he wanted to be was a ‘European Hungarian,’” (Schandl, 65) an artist fully integrated into the cultural life of the West. Later, it was discovered that he had been an informer for the secret police since 1973. At around the time he was directing Hamlet, his police superiors criticized him for laziness—that is, for informing too infrequently on too few of his colleagues. This may have been an early symptom of his intention to break with the secret police. Perhaps, some have speculated, this incipient act of rebellion prompted the scathing criticism of his Hamlet by the official press, a warning of what might lie in store for his future work if he were to jump ship (Schandl, 63-64). Two additional Hamlets of the 80s, the last decade of the Kádár regime, are worth noting. In 1981 István Paál mounted a production at the Szigligeti Theater featuring an impressively radical reshaping of the plot. In his version, it was not the ghost of Hamlet’s father who met the Prince on the battlements of Elsinore, but instead an actor hired by Polonius to play the role of the Ghost. The idea was to seduce Hamlet into plotting to kill the king, thereby giving Claudius an excuse for executing his troublesome nephew for treason. In this version, Hamlet is a total naïf and dupe, completely deceived by the boundless Machiavellianism of a regime headed by a genial, charming, Kádár-like king (Schandl, 66-72). Thus, when the Mousetrap scene reaches its climax, Hamlet is totally flummoxed. Claudius, knowing exactly what to expect from the reenactment, responds with complete nonchalance: “[He] sat . . . visibly bored, almost falling asleep. Slowly getting up in the middle of the show, throwing his purse as a thank you at the players, he exited. . .” One further directorial touch: the Player King—who was the actor hired by Polonius to impersonate the Ghost—is actually killed during the performance of “The Mousetrap,” thus being eliminated as a witness to Polonius’s plot (Schandl, 67). A confounded Hamlet and Horatio are left behind, attempting to convince each other—not very successfully—that they have in fact caught the conscience of the king. The real-world audience itself is left wondering about Claudius’s guilt—at least until the king’s failed prayer for forgiveness. If not for Hamlet’s accidental killing of Polonius, the plot against him would have worked out smoothly. Instead—well, we all know what happened. Except that in this version, Fortinbras tolerates

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no leftovers from the previous regime, so he adds Horatio to the pile of corpses, and all the dead are swept into a mass grave, reminding the audience of the notorious Parcel 301, the mass grave in the New Public Cemetery in Budapest where many victims of the 1956 uprising are buried (Schandl, 68). Then in 1983 along came Tamás Ascher’s production in Kaposvar. Perhaps most notably, Ascher used the Mousetrap scene to accuse the Hungarian theater audience itself, and by extension the whole of the intelligentsia, of inertia and complicity with a corrupt regime, in effect of living “in a lie.” Hamlet’s staging of The Mousetrap was shown to be exactly like all the covertly anti-Kádár productions that had appeared in Hungary since 1956. Like those productions, “The Mousetrap” is a play with a double meaning, seemingly about a ruler named Gonzago and his killer, Lucianus, but really about killer Claudius and his brother, Old Hamlet. Like the covert political parables directed at Kádár, the staging of this play changes nothing in the ruler’s behavior. He carries on as before, immune to the coded gibes. And like Hamlet, the Hungarian theater audience feels a flush of self-approval for their participation in disguised acts of subversion, for deciphering all those encrypted messages. But despite their cleverness, the status quo remained unchanged, a fact which led Ascher implicitly to charge the audience with “seeking dissidence only in the theater” (Schandl, 77-78). Hamlet wasn’t the only Shakespeare play to be used as a coded message board for criticizing the Kádár regime. As I noted above, the problem plays were also frequently staged, and none more often than Measure for Measure. The Duke of Vienna, confronted with the breakdown of law and order in the city he governs, abdicates his responsibilities, hands power over to his rigorist deputy, Angelo, and then spends the rest of the play disguised as a monk, spying on and manipulating his subjects. So what’s the problem with this “problem play?” Many would say it boils down to this: how do we make sense of the Duke’s very odd behavior—his abdication of responsibility and his often cruel tricks and stratagems? And compounding this problem is the difficulty presented by the final scene, when the Duke keeps producing dumbfounding surprises, like a magician with a hatful of rabbits. Considering that Angelo is disgraced, that a vicious criminal, Barnadine, is let loose on the public, and that Isabella, who wants to be a nun, is about to be dragooned into marriage, the question arises: is this really a happy ending?

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A number of Kádár era productions tackled the latter question with particular force, emphasizing the contrived nature of the happiness produced by the Duke’s final acts. In one version, Isabella responded to the Duke’s marriage proposal by raising a grinning mask to her face (Schandl, 187); in another, the actors behaved like marionettes, responding with mechanical glee to the Duke’s manipulations (Schandl, 185); in a third, characters “fluttered their hands. Suddenly changing from forlorn victims to happy angels on cloud nine. . . . ‘Angelo flew around as an innocent boy, while Isabella, forgetting her celibacy vow, turned to the Santa Claus-like Duke with the demonic smile of a lipstick model’” (Schandl, 179). Again and again, productions in the “happiest barrack in the Soviet camp” emphasized the inauthentic, desperately forced nature of the gaiety in Shakespeare’s Vienna, mirroring the political and emotional contradictions under Kádár’s goulash Communism. István Paál, director of the Player-King-as-Ghost version of Hamlet, created what was an especially striking variant of the unhappy-happy ending. Paál staged the action in a large, but comfortable, cage ruled over by its ruthless keeper, the Duke—again evoking the happiest barrack metaphor. At the play’s end, the Duke, outraged at Isabella’s silence in response to his proposal, tore her dress off, exited, and left her standing half-naked on stage. Astoundingly, underneath her nun’s habit, Isabella was wearing sexy lingerie, thus revealing her own duplicity. According to Paál, Isabella’s life-long silence and her withdrawal into a convent “made her an accomplice of the Duke” (191). Just as Ascher turned “The Mousetrap” against the audience, Paál turned the acquiescence of the Viennese into a coded indictment of all the passive enablers of Kádárism. An indictment that included himself. Having played by “the rules of the [regime’s] cultural game” by accepting the “role of the director in a stateowned and therefore centrally-monitored, theater,” (Schandl, 193) he came to see himself as also morally compromised. In 1998 Paál, like Gábor Bódy committed suicide. On that somber note, we may want to ask ourselves what exactly did Shakespeare-in-the-theater achieve during the three decades of the Kádár regime? Were Ascher and Paál correct in seeing the coded productions of Hamlet, Measure for Measure and the other plays of the Shakespeare canon as merely exercises in impotence? Even as a kind of collaboration, since the thrill of transgression experienced by theater audiences, according to these directors, became merely an artistic opiate that displaced effective resistance? Or were these productions socially and morally salutary, moments when Hungarians could find some measure of

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self-respect, of political autonomy, in their capacity to perform acts of defiance and subversion right under the nose of Claudius? Of course, I don’t have an answer; but it is certainly a tribute to the far-reaching power of Shakespeare in performance that such questions cluster around productions of his plays. And what about Shakespeare in Hungary after the fall of Communism? Here I will draw on my own personal encounters with his work on stage during my several visits to Hungary since 1998. In that time, I have seen eight productions of eight different plays—none of them Hamlet, by the way. However, I will confine my remarks to a single production, The Tempest, directed by Róbert Alföldi in 1999 at the Vígszínház, Budapest’s grand, 19th century Italianate theater. I focus on The Tempest because it was in many ways the reverse image of all those subversive productions of the Kádár era. Now that Communism had collapsed, this production directed its gaze on the brave new world that was supposed to succeed it. It was the sensational ending of Alföldi’s staging that earned it a permanent place in my memory. After Prospero had worked his magic, restoring lost children, dispensing forgiveness, playing matchmaker, thwarting clownish treason, and weaving the various strands of the action into a tapestry of pure joy, the lighting began to change, growing flat and dull. All the characters exited except the actor playing Prospero. In the darkening atmosphere a neon sign lit up, advertising a disco named “The Island.” The actor fell to his knees, opened a beat-up brief case, took out a syringe, and proceeded to shoot up, presumably with heroin. As he lapsed into a stupor, the huge rear doors of the theater opened-up onto the street behind the Vígszínház, revealing a police car and an ambulance, which drove onto the stage. Uniformed officials leapt out of the vehicles, examined the unconscious man, loaded him into the ambulance, and drove away. Whether the anonymous addict was dead or alive we never learned. But what was clear was that everything that had happened on the island— the love, the forgiveness, the triumph of white magic over evil—was only a junkie’s fantasy, an episode of disco delirium—“the stuff that dreams are made on” and nothing more. Clearly, Alföldi was raising an important question: where was the social and economic redemption that was supposed to follow the overthrow of Communism and the installation of a new system of government? According to Thomas Ország-Land, writing three years before Alföldi’s production,

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“O, brave new world” indeed. What the director saw when he looked at the post-communist landscape was a dream about a future that was in the process of dissolving, becoming an “insubstantial pageant faded,” and leaving a mess behind. More recently, within the past five years, I have also seen productions of King Lear, Macbeth, and Romeo and Juliet. Knowing what I had come to know about the use of Shakespeare as a vehicle for social and political critique, I watched these productions on the constant lookout for axes being ground—axes of the sort sharpened by Alföldi. I must admit, however, that, even with the help of my discerning Hungarian colleague, Dr. Katalin Vecsey, I could find none. Shakespeare keeps on being produced in Hungary, and his work continues to play a role in the cultural life of the nation. But in a world without a despised despot to serve as a clear focus of artistic resistance, that role eludes sharp definition. Eugene Brogyányi tells us that, “In contemporary Hungarian theater, it is all but impossible to identify a common generational voice or thematic concern” (641). What the Geroulds say about Polish theater could just as well be applied to Hungary: with its oppositional role eliminated, theater finds itself looking for “a clear function or direction. . . .” (1082). One index of that absence of a generational voice or a clear function might be seen in the statistics for theater ticket sales in Hungary over the past 50 years. Between 1960 and 1989—the three decades of the Kádár regime—annual ticket sales averaged about 6 million. In 2010, sales had fallen below 4.5 million, a 25% decline (Stadat 2.6). It seems that in the absence of the Hapsburgs or the Communists, Shakespeare and the theater aren’t what they used to be: the cultural weapons of choice.

Works Cited Associated Press in Budapest. “Oscar winning director admits being informer.” The Guardian, Friday 27 January 2006 . Web. April 11, 2012. Brogyanyi, Eugene. “Hungary.” Cody and Sprinchorn.

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Cody, Gabrielle H. and Evert Sprinchorn, eds. The Columbia Encyclopedia of Modern Drama, Vols. I and II. New York: Columbia University Press, 2007. Print Czigány, Loránt. The Oxford History of Hungarian Literature from the Earliest Times to the Present. New York: Oxford University Press, 1984. Print. Gerould, Daniel and Jadwiga Kosicka Gerould. “Poland.” Cody and Sprinchorn. Held, Joseph. “Hungary: 1945 to the Present.” The Columbia History of Eastern Europe in the Twentieth Century. Ed., Joseph Held, New York: Columbia University Press, 1992. 204-228. Print. Mark, T. R . “The First Hungarian Translation of Shakespeare’s Complete Works,” Shakespeare Quarterly 16.1 (1965): 105-115. Ország-Land, Thomas. “Hungary at last fulfills the ideals of the 1956 Revolution.” Contemporary Review, Vol. 269, Nov. 1, 1996. Web. April 18, 2012. Pálffy , István. “Shakespeare in Hungary.” Shakespeare Quarterly 29.2 (1978): 292-294. Schandl, Veronika. Socialist Shakespeare Productions in Kádár-Regime Hungary. Lewiston, New York: The Edwin Mellen Press, 2008. Print. Senelick, Laurence. National Theatre in Northern and Eastern Europe 1746-1900. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991. Print. Shurbanov, Alexander and Boika Sokolova. Painting Shakespeare Red. Cranbury, New Jersey: Associated University Presses, 2001. Print. Stadat 2.6 Culture 1960. Web. April 27, 2012. http://www.ksh.hu/docs/eng/xstadat_long/h_zkk001.htmlWalsh, John. “Irish Language.” The Encyclopedia of Ireland. Ed., Brian Lalor. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003. Print.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN MACBETH: THE AUTOPSY OF OUR DISEASED WORLD ESTELLE RIVIER

As a play notoriously haunted by persistent superstition regarding its performance history, Macbeth—the “Scottish play”—has perhaps as a result lacked a signature modern staging.1 Pascale Nandillon’s French adaptation of the play, Macbeth Kanaval, staged from November, 21-26 2012, at the Théâtre du Radeau/La Fonderie, Le Mans, appropriates the narrative of Macbeth as a haunted production—one cursed by unforeseeable accidents and dark magic—in order to dispossess the text of any sense of stability. Nandillon’s professional company, “Atelier hors Champ,” has been recognized for some time in France as a forwardlooking and innovative group.2 My interest here is not in promoting its virtues, however praiseworthy they might be, but rather in interrogating the ways in which this company has appropriated the Shakespearean text through not only the spoken and translated words, but also the physical and aesthetical languages that express themselves through the actors bodies and gestures, the scenography and the various movements materialized in the acting space. Nandillon’s treatment of Macbeth is insistently meta-dramatic: as she puts it, “Hors-champ leads us backstage, in the wings of the Shakespearean stage where humanity, torn between grandeur and decadence, is being dissected on demand.” The play maintains an oscillation and variation of props, soundtrack and imagebroadcasting, the use of masks and changing costumes, a palimpsest of voices, and Brechtian theatre techniques. Time shifts or markers are erased, which creates proximity between the stage and the audience while paradoxically disrupting the narrative. The mise-en-scene abounds with 1

For an account of the checkered performance history, see Richard Huggett, Curse of Macbeth and Other theatrical Superstitions, (Picton1981). 2 The website of the company is particularly well documented. Please see: http://www.atelierhorschamp.org/Compagnie/compagnie.html

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cross-cultural allegorical references, situating the scenography in a kind of no man’s land that could be either everywhere or nowhere. In Nandillon’s political “dissection” of the play, contemporary society is seen as threatened by infection, either cultural, economic or governmental, the prey of all the diseases, including the moral diseases of unlimited ambition, irrepressible desire, depression and folly. With my own “autopsy” of Macbeth Kanaval, I hope to shed a light on the particularities of the performance while questioning the extent to which a foreign text is served in my country and made significant despite its disguise and transformations.

The Collage Effect Plans for Macbeth Kanaval were underway as early as September, 2011. The cast consisted of only five actors and actresses to perform the twenty-seven roles, and the end effect was an intense though disconcerting production.3 At the onset, Rossini’s beautiful Kyrie Eleison loudly accompanied the voices while immense flags were balanced in the air like huge waves. The words uttered in this scene (I.ii, which was the opening scene of the performance) were hardly audible but the music was enough to express the violence of the situation and the characters’ intrinsic forces. In the continuity of this scene the battlefield where Macbeth vanquishes MacDonwald was set in a choreography reminiscent of Kabuki dances. Throughout the production, the décor was purposely incongruous, imperfect and dull with pieces of furniture looking like dark skeletons in the chiaroscuro of the stage while others did not seem to be of any use. The goal of a majority of the effects produced in the performance was not obvious at first sight. And yet the latter created pictorial tableaux in which the bodies appeared as pantomimes lost in an abandoned theatre, a kind of experimental space where the object-play was a living matter under scrutiny. The production further created a kind of spatial collage. While it had a so-called bare stage, a central marked square (reminiscent of the red carpet in Peter Brook’s Hamlet’s) was supposed to be magic. It captured and enclosed the bodies that inhabited it. As all the players were onstage all through the performance, they came into character only once they had moved forward in the square. Thus the proscenium was a place of both 3

The cast (in alphabetical order) included Séverine Batier, Serge Cartellier, Alban Gérôme, Myriam Louazani, Sophie Pernette.

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observation and action. At the edge of the square, the actor was guided by the choreography of his body, which is different from a pure gesture that the mind precedes. The word is here directed by spontaneity or irrationality, without any preconceived pattern. Moreover, props were progressively added within the apparently nude environment: chairs, a banquet, masks, water in a basin, swords, a throne, and huge flags. They did not define any precise temporality and only appeared under a feeble light so that one could not precisely see their outlines. Microphones, reflectors, loudspeakers, costumes and make-up were ready for use on the right and left sides. Left on trolleys, uprights and dummies, they were momentarily inactive, only waiting for the actors to invent them a function and enliven them. “Actors write the tale,” Nandillon said. “One site is added to the other; time-spaces are superimposed. They create links and an archaeology of the play’s loci.”4 For instance, the banquet was both the lovers’ bed and the bloody platform where the Macbeths’ crimes were committed. But the superimposition was also a temporal one: through these anachronistic props, to which were added visual and audio effects, the performance aimed at reducing, even deleting the frontier between the historical and the contemporary Macbeths. Time is no longer important in so far as the plot can explicitly draw a parallel with current preoccupations: “The platform is the ritual space, Pascale Nandillon observed, where the tyrant’s spectacular sacrifice is played again and again, and where the theatre explores its own devices.” We might read such a statement as an echo of Macduff’s words, Act V, scene vii: Then yield thee, coward, And live to be the show and gaze o’ the time: We’ll have thee, as our rarer monsters are, Painted upon a pole, and underwrit, ‘Here may you see the tyrant’ (52-56).5

This helps explain why extracts of historical archives were being played during the performance. Political speeches, extracts from Adolf Eichmann’s trial, and bits and pieces of previous radio productions of Macbeth (Carmelo Bene, Kurosawa, Orson Welles) or of resonant films (Apocalypse Now) escaped from a record-player from time to time. The 4

Pascale Nandillon in the play’s preamble, (2011), p. 16. Macbeth, New Clarendon Shakespeare, Bernard Groom (ed.), Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1981 (1939), p. 114.

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actors’ voices that were recorded were heard in an altered, imperfect mode, as though they were themselves the voices of diseased bodies. But these fragments were also the explicit ghosts of the past which is neverendingly re-enacted just as a theatrical performance is rehearsed. Not surprisingly, the French word “répéter” (to repeat) is used in both contexts: historical facts and performances are indeed “repeated” (répétés) to make sense. The process is everlasting. Indeed, repetition and mimesis were perhaps the determining device in the whole process of the performance. In her author’s note, the stagedirector wrote: Macbeth is a never-ending stasis which opens and closes on similar images in a mirroring process: a bleeding man, a decapitation, a coronation. There is an apnea breaking off the course of history: it is the intersection between two possibilities, either ‘repeating’ the murder or not ‘repeating’ it.6

The actors’ gestures onstage had something of this repetitive mode, just as a scratched record would endlessly replay the same melody. At one point in the play, all the characters, one after the other, came at the front, plunged their hands in the basin to wipe off their faces and tried to get rid of the red paint covering their bloody hands. As it was done with the support of a loud and long-lasting soundtrack, the sequence went to the head, became exasperating, even maddening. Was it done on purpose? Was it part of a creative experience or mere provocation? The audience could not but wonder about the artificiality of such a ritual and to what extent it conveyed the meaning of Macbeth. In such a work, the vocal partition was a useful tool. The company chose André Markovicz’s decasyllabic translation and selected some scenes only, ignoring the original chronological order and rather choosing the words that would reverberate as the leitmotivs of the play. The translation was there to highlight the turning points of the plot as well as to supply points of reference when, for instance, Macbeth and his wife put on their clothes while confessing their evil deeds and prospects right in front of the first row of the audience. At that very moment, the use of the basin wherein they vainly washed their bloody hands together with the heavy white make-up covering their insane faces seemed superfluous attributes because of the text’s resonance and efficiency.

6

Pascale Nandillon in the programme of the production, Macbeth Kanaval, Atelier Hors-Champ, Théâtre de la Fonderie, Le Mans, 21-26 November 2012.

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Fig. 13-1 Lady Macbeth and Macbeth dressing for the murders. Photograph courtesy of Frédéric Tétart.

A Choral Text If the translation is of paramount importance for any foreign-language stage-director, it remained, in such a production, a dilemma. Nandillon first chose not to choose. Meaningfully, she kept in hand various translations so as to hear and build her imaginary space of the story of a Macbeth steeped in a flow of possible interpretations. She wanted to find the “analogies and themes that would raise the images peopling the text’s insomnia, the bodies and the voices.”7 Furthermore the vocal partition was composed of roaring, echoes of murders, calls for help, cries of terror, animal and natural sounds contrasting with asides, whispers, secret prophesies and spells. It became an intricate pattern of meanings, intermingling various ways of expression to bridge the gap between the implicit and explicit texts: “The shout, just as in the opera, threatens the song,” Nandillon explained. “The whisper is the threshold where the voice may vanish. The actor’s voice is always there, on the border-line of silence.” What does Macbeth really say? What does it tell us?

7

Ibid.

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Nandillon built her production as a long dramatic poem to challenge the original form even though in Markovicz’s translation the decasyllables were kept. If the chronology of the scenes was modified to highlight some leitmotivs that were part of the subterranean structure of the text, the images of the bodies and the voices were valued through a chorus embodied by the five actors. The actor and the text became like parchments written in invisible ink: through them, something was said, something that may have been repressed by the madman, Madbeth, and needed to be deciphered. If we focus on the text’s very words, in V.vii, before Macbeth and Macduff’s final and fatal fight, Macbeth confesses: Be these juggling fiends no more believ’d, That palter with us in a double sense; That keep the word of promise to our ear, And break it to our hope. (V.vii.48-51)

Words are ambivalent and confuse those who listen to them, as the witches’ synecdochic understatement in I.i, and Macbeth’s echoing lines: “Fair is foul, and foul is fair: / Hover through the fog and filthy air” (I.i.11-12); “So fair and foul a day I have not seen” (I.iii.38). On Nandillon’s stage, the identities seemed blurred: the scenography looked like a kind of magma mingling clear and obscure hues (the bright reflection of the white faces as opposed to the darkness of the surrounding props), and the bodies, either female or male, were easily confounded. Thus the frontier between the “foul” and the “fair” (i.e., the good and the evil) was ostensibly erased. Jean-Pierre Vincent, who staged the play for the Comédie-Française in 1985, had already reassessed in a preface to his translation that the words of the play share a free and complex relationship: the witches’ “foul and fair” cue reverberates through further antonymic lexical clusters such as “night” and “day,” “heaven” and “hell,” “sleep” and “insomnia” or “somnambulism.”8 The words confront one another, shock one another with their difference, and enact in the violence of those encounters the most depraved criminal urges of the human. In the same impulse, Nandillon envisaged the play as a laboratory where the autopsy of an unsettled mind is made. In Act V, when the doctor appears, the audience witnessed the secrets and the innermost thoughts of the criminal space. The suffocating environment depicted a paranoiac meeting within closed doors where things were perceived through Macbeth’s eyes. In this scene 8

Ibid., pp. 11-12.

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(V.i), the banquet became an operating table. In the distance, Lady Macbeth wandered. She seemed remote. Half-way between her and the audience, Macbeth was observing her. He stood as the filter through which the spectator’s eyes had to watch. This horizontal disposition directed the vision, creating some strata that modified the scale (Lady Macbeth seemed small while Macbeth appeared rather tall). The stage was like a distorting mirror and the metamorphic embodiment of the hero’s distracted mind.

“A Carnivalesque Macbeth” Hence the play was never viewed from a single focalization and through a rigid framework but, on the contrary, was addressed from multiple angles, as Ross and Macduff’s brief exchange in II.iv may imply: Ross. Macduff.

How goes the world, sir, now? Why, see you not? (II.iv.21)

The scenic space became a “site for apparitions” peopled by the living and the dead altogether. Visions merge with one another: “the political masquerade,” Nandillon wrote, “is performed as in a carnival.” And because Macbeth is assimilated to a carnival or “Kanaval” (Nandillon refers here to the Haitian ritual), all the characters can easily appear in the disguise of another. Throughout the performance, the actors clownishly put heavy make-up (white powder and red lipstick) on their faces to symbolize the passage from one identity to the next. A water basin, situated at the forestage, enabled them to get rid of this ephemeral and ridiculous pomp. They either became another character or left the central square. Such a device reinforced the neutrality of the genders: the female bodies may seem masculine when they were “hidden” behind long coats or costumes. It was also a device echoing the lines of Shakespeare’s play: “And make our faces vizards to our hearts, / Disguising what they are” (III.ii.34-35). The sexes became meaningless, another performance choice reinforced by the play and the “unsexing” of Lady Macbeth, carried off partly through her potent control of the action. In Macbeth Kanaval, to become royal murderers the actor performing Macbeth and his wife were both nude, standing behind the basins and progressively masking their faces with the ridiculous make-up. Meanwhile, two other characters helped them put on their garments: long robes and coats, warrior’s masks and hats that bore no obvious historical reference. In this scene, apart from the possible unease the nude bodies in full light might occasion among the audience sitting very close, the meaning seemed twofold. Whether a man or a woman, the Macbeths are both embodiments and constructed

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metaphors of madness. No matter who kills and what they do, they are living monsters. Furthermore, aesthetically, the tableau was rather disquieting: the ugly getups and clownish faces now clearly stood as a threatening device for the proper development of the action. The production increasingly appeared disrupted and disconnected from any sensible progress so that the audience was doomed to be definitely lost in a kind of non-action and a kind of nonsensical production. Shakespeare’s play dramatizes the ambiguity of physical appearance: Macbeth first questions the witches’ prophesy by invoking the unfit garments: “The Thane of Cawdor lives: why do you dress me / In borrow’d robes?” (I.iii.108-9). He is soon followed by Banquo’s own allusions: “New honours come upon him, / Like our strange garments, cleave not to their mould / But with the aid of use.” (I.iv.144-45); and Macduff echoes both of them: “Lest our old robes sit easier than our new!” (II.iv.38).9 But dresses are mere trifles. They are empty envelopes or the improbable icons of ghosts’ corpses. As Macbeth is a traitor and usurper of a title and of a throne, both his crown and his coat are too large for him, which proves his being unfit for the role. Or is the role unfit for him? Isn’t he the female body of the criminal couple when he repeatedly alludes to his fear? As early as Act I, scene v, Lady Macbeth’s words confirm this “infirmity”: “Yet do I fear thy nature; / It is too full o’the milk of human kindness / To catch the nearest way” (15-17). He cannot answer the demands of the despotic monarch he has however designed for himself. And the carnival he walks into, where chaos and order are in opposition, will eventually strip him of his own clothes: Macbeth. Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player That struts and frets his hour upon the stage, And then is heard no more; it is a tale Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, Signifying nothing. (V.v.24-28)

If the play underscores the thin frontier between worlds (the dramatic and the natural, the historical and the fantastic or irrational), it is like the carnival a place where infringement, depravation and disorder are paradoxically allowed because they are punctual and soon replaced by order. The thin frontier between the sane and the insane or between 9 See also Macbeth Act II, scene iii, 119: “Let’s briefly put on manly readiness, / And meet i’ th’ hall together.”

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authority and chaos, was palpable in the “Kanaval” production where the royal garments going from one body to another exemplified the flickering nature of power. In the Haitian carnival form (the Kanaval) the mask is also a junction between the world of the living and the world of the dead. The fundamental forbidding is here transgressed, Nandillon explained. It is a social rite which simultaneously summons and conjures up the dead. It is also a political space where politicians can be publicly criticized and can parade side by side with the archaic figures of the Voodoo culture. According to the stage-director, Macbeth could be assimilated to a heap concealing these dead figures. Can the simulacra of performance free us from those looming visions, she asked? Or, just as Macbeth, are we waiting for the knife to tear up the screen (or the heap) to pieces so that we could be confronted to by those ghostly shapes that are part of the social body of our thoughts?

Weird Words in a Mad World The world of Macbeth remains a puzzle. And Nandillon’s space was the clever chessboard on which players stood as the fates’ playthings. If words in Macbeth “signify nothing” (V.iv.28), it is because they are uttered by possessed, bewitched, or clairvoyant persons. Working as a synaesthesia, these words voice the unseen and see the unspeakable. The Weird Sisters or Sisters of the words (“weird” being but the way Scotsmen would pronounce “word”) subvert the logical chronology of events. In so doing, they subvert our vision of it. Is it possible to repair the collective hallucination they have triggered? Is a world generated by phantasms, predictions, superstitions and unnatural sayings redeemable? The “foul and fair” thus reappears under the disguise of the word “night” because we see there the ghost of murder advancing: Lady Macbeth. Come, thick night, And pall thee in the dunnest smoke of hell, That my keen knife see not the wound it makes, Nor heaven peep through the blanket of the dark, To cry, ‘Hold, hold!’ (I.v.49-53)

By their destroying power, words infect the body of the dramatis personae. The stage-director considers Macbeth’s language as “the metaphor of the wounds on the body.”10 Words are uncontrollable: they escape from the 10

Pascale Nandillon, op.cit., p. 13

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people’s mouths and, consequently, when silence insidiously invests the court, the situation becomes all the more suspect. For all around, murders proliferate: Malcolm. Why do we hold our tongues, That most may claim this argument for ours? (II.iii.103-4)

Just as the words, violence, secrets and plots infect the realm, its bodypolitic and its bodies. Words are like daggers (Macduff: “I have no words: / My voice is in my sword: thou bloodier villain / Than terms can give thee out!” [V.vii. 35-36]), bloody and vengeful arms to thwart fate or, conversely, respond to its evil prospect. In the production, blood was symbolically present through the red of the costumes or the make-up: Macbeth could never totally get rid of the lipstick which spoiled his face. Finally as language is performative, it can never be dissociated from the dramatic sphere. As early as the play begins, language levels are intertwined: the magic of the Weird Sisters is immediately followed by the royal words. Action unfolds until its hero “full of sounds and fury” (V.v.27) dies and so do the words feeding the fable.

Conclusion Pascale Nandillon’s approach in Macbeth Kanaval was in keeping with her former projects where methods of rehearsals based on the dissolution of the “I” and the porosity of intimate frontiers were already used with texts seen as music papers to transform the body into a tongue, the singular into a plurality.11 At the top of these themes stands the sheer folly of History and the cosmic revolutions where the individual is but a prey. Similarly though from a narrative (or dramatic) point of view, Macbeth epitomizes the collapse of meaning and puts both our fears and our contemporary crimes in perspective. Lady Macduff. But I remember now I am in this earthly world, where to do harm Is often laudable, to do good sometime Accounted dangerous folly […] (IV.ii.72-75)

11 For example John Fosse’s Variations on Death (2005) or the adaptation of Vaslav Nijinski’s copybooks (2007).

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As I have tried to show, Nandillon’s treatment of Macbeth was ostensibly meta-dramatic and endowed with allegorical cross-references of traditional cultures. That is why Nandillon’s stage did not sound French only. It also took its inspiration from various civilizations such as America or Asia where, for instance, the body language is deeply present. Nandillon referred to the Chan Armies in her press-book: some of the tattoos marking the warriors’ limbs represent Buddha’s faces and are supposed to protect the body from the enemy’s rifle shootings. Symbolically, they tell the story of a rite and of its superstitions. Standing as the reference of the past events that the warriors underwent, they also bear the memory of man. Macbeth similarly serves as a vehicle for the traces of the past. In writing the eponymous play, Shakespeare fused the reality and the fiction, adding fantastic material (some sort of “tattoos”) to the original historical piece (i.e., the harsh reality of the battlefield). Not surprisingly, the legendary episode that Scotland experienced in the 11th century when the true Macbeth reigned was all the more tumultuous and tormented under the playwright’s pen. The French production attempted to shape this fusion between various dichotomies such as reality and fiction, past and present, feminine and masculine, figuration and symbolism. And in the end, the physical image or “body” of the stage was so full of scars and (abstract) “tattoos” that it became hard for the viewer to decode all the signs. We cannot deny that such a production was intense though disconcerting. The incongruities of the décor mentioned above—the vaguely Gothic and shaded household effects, the seemingly purposeless arrangement (or derangement) of other stage objects, the experimentality of a space in which bodies lost or discarded could nevertheless also become excessively representational—no doubt contributed to this unnerving experience. So too did the production’s overall demand that its audience exist in uncertainties. In the performance I witnessed, the reaction of the public was mixed, mitigated no doubt by some unbearable or provoking images for which they did not understand the raison d’être. But it must be granted that Nandillon’s choices were clever, definitely challenging the audience’s expectations and their vision of the play. For example, we cannot but admit that Macbeth can be performed by a micro-cast while the feeling of a crowd and of action do remain; furthermore, abstract tableaux animated by expressive body-movements efficiently exemplify what theatre-in-themaking is like and the décor is asserted as mere illusion. The audience would certainly have enjoyed seeing something of Scotland, and leaving the dark-lit stage for a while to reach more

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figurative landscapes, but with the benefit of hindsight such a disturbing production invited them, even forced them, to go back to the essence of the play and assess its value today. In the twenty-first century, if some artistic choices may often seem disputable, they are however a good means by which Shakespeare’s looming figure still haunts our theatres. These choices are significant in so far as they confront us with our own vices such as the appetite for omnipotence, our base instincts and our sexual inconsistencies, the female ambition and the male weakness; in other words, they are the metaphoric illustration of a world “full of sound and fury signifying” … chaos.

Bibliography Abiteboul, M. “La part du naturel, du surnaturel et de l’antinaturel dans Macbeth.” In Mythes, Croyances et Religions dans le Monde Anglosaxon, Cahier 5, Avignon, 1987. 9-23. Bartholomeusz, D. “Performance as Criticism and Creation,” Navasilu 2 (February 1979): 8-14. Bieito, C., Maria M. Delgado and P. Parker, “Resistant Readings, Multilingualism and Marginality.” In Lynette Hunter, Peter Lichtenfels (eds.), Shakespeare, Language and the Stage. London: The Arden Shakespeare, 2005. 108-137. Berger, H. “Text against Performance in Shakespeare: The Example of Macbeth,” Genre 15.1-2 (1982): 49-79. Berreby, D. “Macbeth: Curse of the Stage.” Washington Post 28 January 1988, p. D11. Coleridge, S. T. “Marginalia on Macbeth.” In John Wain, ed. A Casebook Series. A Selection of Critical Essays. Bristol, Macmillan, 1968. 77182. Kennedy, D. Looking at Shakespeare, A Visual History of TwentiethCentury Performance. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001, esp. “Shakespeare and the Visual,” pp. 1-24. Macbeth Kanaval, Programme of the production, Atelier Hors-Champ, Théâtre de la Fonderie, Le Mans, 21-26 November 2012. Milward, P. Shakespeare Meta-Drama, Hamlet and Macbeth. Tokyo: Renaissance Institute, Sophia University, 2003. Nandillon, P. Macbeth Kanaval, A Critical Presentation by the Atelier Hors Champ. Paris, 2012. ʊ. Aux Hommes, D’après les cahiers de Vaslav Nijinski, Video captation, Théâtre Berthelot. Paris, 2007.

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Shakespeare, W. Macbeth, New Clarendon Shakespeare. Groom. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981 (1939). ʊ. La Tragédie de Macbeth. Trans. Jean-Michel Déprats. 1985. ʊ. Macbeth. Trans. André Markowicz. Paris: les Solitaires 2008. Suhamy, H. Hamlet, Lear, Macbeth, Histoire de trois shakespeariens. Paris: Ellipses, 2010.

Ed. Bernard Paris: Solin, intempestifs, personnages

CHAPTER FOURTEEN GIORGIO STREHLER’S LA TEMPESTA, FROM STAGE TO (COMIC) SCREEN MARIANGELA TEMPERA

Localizing La tempesta In his notes to the version of La tempesta which opened at the Paris Odéon in 1983, Giorgio Strehler (1921-1997) wrote, with his trademark modesty: “Which text, which author, which staging could be the natural choice, over any other, to inaugurate a ‘Théâtre d’ Europe’ if not William Shakespeare’s The Tempest, interpreted by the Piccolo Teatro di Milano, an Italian theatre with an unequivocal European vocation.”1 In fact, the choice was far from obvious. It was a bold and largely unexpected move, since it meant reviving a production that had only had a short run in Italy in 1978-79 and had been taken down partially because it was far too expensive to tour and partially because, much to Strehler’s distress, it had not been particularly well received by the critics and the general public. According to Giulia Lazzarini (Ariel), it was only when a recording of his 1979 La tempesta was broadcast on national television in December 1981 that Strehler’s interest was rekindled. At the end of the broadcast, he phoned her: “‘Giulia ... but we’ve done something marvelous ... I’m going to open the Théâtre d’Europe in Paris with this show ... this is a marvelous thing.’ He had rediscovered his own show.”2 Very successful in Paris, La tempesta was then performed in Los Angeles during the 1984 Olympic Games and in New York, before returning to Italy, where critics and audiences this time loved it (the opinion of the French is highly regarded by Italians when it comes to the 1

Giorgio Strehler, “Appunti di regia della Tempesta – edizione 1983,” http://archivio.piccoloteatro.org. All the translations from the Italian are mine. 2 Anna Anzi. “I voli di Ariele: Intervista a Giulia Lazzarini,” Memoria di Shakespeare 4 (2004): 209.

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theatre). The high profile foreign engagements, along with the commercial release of the 1981 video (a very unusual practice at the time), brought La tempesta to the attention of theatre and Shakespeare scholars worldwide. Thus, a staging of the play that could have sunk into oblivion after the 1979 run came to be hailed as what “may have been the most important Shakespearean production since Brook’s Dream.”3 Inevitably, as time went by, commentators became increasingly dependent on the video for their analyses. Although shot during a live performance, the TV version had undergone a substantial amount of editing at the hands of Carlo Battistoni (under Strehler’s supervision, of course) and does not therefore accurately reflect the staging, especially when it comes to the spectacular opening sequence.4 Most critics also tend to underestimate the personal and external difficulties Strehler was facing at the time, and which played a fairly important role in his directorial choices. Strehler entrusted the translation of The Tempest to Agostino Lombardo, a leading Italian academic who was willing to accept that the final decision on virtually every single word was in the hands of the director. Discovered in 2005, after Lombardo’s death, and published in 2007, their correspondence is full of unguarded comments that throw new light on the genesis of La tempesta.5 It also shows that Strehler was already fully immersed in the project as early as the summer of 1977. At a later stage, Jan Kott was involved, along with some Italian intellectuals, in a series of in-house seminars that preceded the stage rehearsals.6 From the transcripts, it appears that the director, who greatly admired Kott’s Shakespeare Our Contemporary (1964), was fully prepared to bow to the scholar’s expertise in interpreting the text, but still retained complete artistic freedom when it came to staging it. In the end, Kott would add his own authoritative voice to those of the critics who were disappointed with the 1978/79 version of La tempesta.7 3

Dennis Kennedy, Looking at Shakespeare: A Visual History of TwentiethCentury Performance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 304. 4 The dependence on the video, mistaken for an unedited record of a stage performance, is especially regrettable in Arthur Horowitz’s Prospero’s ‘True Preservers’, an otherwise insightful reading of Strehler’s production. 5 Rosy Colombo, ed., William Shakespeare, Agostino Lombardo, Giorgio Strehler: La tempesta tradotta e messa in scena (Rome: Donzelli, 2007). 6 The seminars are partially transcribed in: Stefano Bajma Griga, La tempesta di Shakespeare per Giorgio Strehler (Pisa: Edizioni ETS, 2003), 91-111. 7 Jan Kott, “Prospero, or the Director” (1979), in his The Bottom Translation: Marlowe and Shakespeare and the Carnival tradition (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern

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A play about a dispossessed duke of Milan was bound to acquire special connotations when directed in Milan by the absolute ruler of the Piccolo Teatro, a company that, thanks to Strehler, had delivered some of the best productions in Italy, but that had nothing to learn from a Renaissance court in terms of intrigue. On 11 December 1977, the director wrote to Lombardo: This Tempesta is being born in the midst of a thousand internal and external difficulties. Internal: the usual ones, external: actors, reluctant to do La tempesta (hard to believe!), petty musings over the “value” of the roles –Antonio is a “tinca” [Lit.: a tench. In Italian theatrical jargon: a demanding but unrewarding role], ditto Gonzalo, and let’s not even mention Alonso and Sebastian, and so on. Lack of funds (we always suffer from lack of funds!) and La tempesta is inevitably very expensive. I have very little time to prepare it properly. I work too much, the theatre demands too much of me and I am surrounded by villains who constantly make my life difficult.8

The actors were not the only members of the company Strehler had to worry about. Luciano Damiani, the hugely talented but highly temperamental stage and costume designer that had worked on the Piccolo’s most famous productions, was becoming increasingly disillusioned with the director. He felt that Strehler, always very appreciative of him in private, was appropriating his ideas without publicly acknowledging the importance of his contribution. He later claimed that the director’s original notes on La tempesta rightly attributed the key visual concepts to him but that his name was nowhere to be found in the written version. Thus, on 20 February 1978, he wrote to Strehler: “I am very glad to be given the opportunity to suggest ideas that you like and that you are so good at showing off to advantage. But I think that one could honestly say that they are my ideas, and then ours.”9 The collaboration was not helped by the fact that Damiani’s beautifully detailed plans for the set had to be radically

University Press, 1987), 133-41. Kott’s comments on La tempesta are analyzed in Pia Kleber, “Theatrical Continuities in Giorgio Strehler’s The Tempest,” in Dennis Kennedy, ed., Foreign Shakespeares: Contemporary Performance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 140-57. 8 Colombo, William Shakespeare, 69. 9 Luciano Damiani, Frammenti di sipari: Prove per un processo (Rome: Edizioni Libreria Croce, 2005), 53-54. Disappointed by the director’s indifference to his complaints, Damiani left the Piccolo soon after La tempesta and in 1997 sued Strehler to obtain the copyright of his designs and compensation for his work. He lost, but the case highlighted the lack of legal protection for designers.

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revised at a fairly late stage, when the venue was changed from the Piccolo to the much bigger Lirico. Imposed by the management of the company probably for financial reasons, the move was deeply resented by everybody, including Strehler: the Lirico was notorious for its poor acoustics. On a personal level, by the end of the 1970s, the director was beginning to feel that his rule at the Piccolo would not go unchallenged for long: “One day they call you ‘maestro’. And you are flattered. You do not understand that they are politely hinting that you are growing old.”10 He had directed an open air production of La tempesta in Florence in 1948, but now the themes of the play must have appeared in a different light. Far from discouraging rumors that La tempesta would be his own final curtain, he played the identification between himself and Prospero for all it was worth, to the extent that one of his most scathing reviewers, Edoardo Sanguineti, a very influential left wing intellectual, would wonder why he had not taken up the role himself.11 The 1970s were a time of political unrest in Italy. Right wing extremists planted bombs in public squares and on trains, left wing extremists ambushed and killed prominent public figures. In March 1978, Aldo Moro, the leader of the Christian Democrats, was kidnapped by the Red Brigades who tried to negotiate with the state for his release. The final rehearsals of La tempesta took place during the negotiations, and the play opened a month after Moro’s bullet ridden body was discovered. Strehler was deeply affected by these events: La tempesta is being born at a time that to me has the connotations of the apocalypse. But a degraded apocalypse, where everything is confused, everything is annihilated within the framework of a chilling indifference: riots, carefully planned assassination, the rituals of politics. History has never been confined outside the place where we built our show. 10

Giorgio Strehler and Ugo Ronfani. Io, Strehler: Conversazioni con Ugo Ronfani (Milan: Rusconi, 1986), 279. 11 Edoardo Sanguineti, “Dentro La tempesta,” L’Unità, 30 June 1976, 9. Since the newspaper was the official organ of the Italian Communist Party, Agostino Lombardo, a party member, found the review particularly distasteful. In a letter written to Strehler a couple of days after the opening night, he says: “I have also read several reviews, including those deliberately malicious (and I am sorry that the silliest, in this sense, should be written by a Communist).” Colombo, William Shakespeare, 127.

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History has punctually arrived within the closed walls of a theatre, where a small society was working on the words of a great poet to invent dreams.12

The première did not meet with the enthusiastic response the director had come to expect from his Milan audience. As Giulia Lazzarini recollects, “Strehler, disappointed by the unfair reception, disappeared into the night, and we did not see him again. Then, for him and for us, silence fell on the production.”13 Ever resilient, the director introduced a series of much needed changes, which included paring down the text. When it reopened in October 1978, the four-hour production had been reduced to three hours (including intermission), thus mirroring the indications of Shakespeare’s text. In the following months, while the video that would eventually give his production a wider audience on television was being prepared, he also found another, quirky way of breaking the silence that surrounded La tempesta. The Piccolo Teatro and its star director were so at odds with the Italian theatrical scene and so prominent in the cultural pages that their work was frequently the target of satire. As early as 1957, a comic film, Susanna tutta panna (director: Steno), had included a lengthy performance of Hamlet in a thinly disguised copy of the Piccolo. Severely disrupted by squabbling comic characters, the performance was still greeted with applause by critics who mistook every mishap for a brilliant directorial invention. After that, autocratic Strehler-like directors had made quite a few appearances in B-movies and TV comedies. In 1979, a young upcoming film maker, Maurizio Nichetti, who had originally trained at the Piccolo, approached Strehler himself for permission to shoot an episode of his new comic film, Ho fatto splash (“I Made a Splash”), inside the Piccolo during a performance of La tempesta. By granting permission, Strehler proved capable of extending his legendary control to the parody of his own work. Predictably, the film focused on the two elements of La tempesta that even its detractors had liked: the opening scene and Ariel’s flights. Released in 1980, this (very gentle) satire of the work of the Piccolo company offers its spectators an opportunity to see the backstage of La tempesta in much greater detail than the 1981 video of the entire performance.

12 13

Giorgio Strehler, Inscenare Shakespeare (Rome: Bulzoni, 1992), 104. Anzi, “I voli”, 209.

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The Storm and the Wire The correspondence with the translator tells us that as early as August 1977 the key elements of the opening scene were already taking shape in Strehler’s mind. He was not entirely happy with Lombardo’s translation of “roar” as “tumulto” in “Put the wild waters in this roar” (I.ii.2),14 suggesting that “fragore” with its connotation of noise would be better: First of all because I would make the tempest with lots of sounds, at first with shouts, noises, ‘roars’ and so on to make the heaving sea and the tempest, then Miranda refers to something that has just happened, in front of the spectators and is very noisy. Then because roar resurfaces later on when Prospero speaks of the waves around the two of them on the carcass. Same verb, same image. If SH. had wanted to, he would have found two different verbs.15

While they were still settling down in their seats, the spectators were plunged into total darkness, their ears assaulted by “a tempestuous noise of thunder and lightning” (I.i.sd). As they were trying to assess what exactly was going on, a huge storm-tossed galleon materialized behind a thin veil and appeared to be bearing down on them. Even when I saw it, so late in the 1984 run that most spectators knew by then from press reports and word of mouth what to expect, it was still a stunning opening sequence that required perfect coordination on the part of the technicians, the musicians and the twenty-one mimes who, from the orchestra pit partitioned into corridors, operated the thousands of yards of blue silk that represented the waves. The end of the sequence was usually greeted with enthusiastic applause: “The applause was necessary: it acknowledged the effectiveness of the theatrical illusion. Our disbelief had been suspended, but we now acknowledged that the tempest was a magical one.”16 After the 1978 June première, Agostino Lombardo was understandably concerned about the difficulty the actors had had in making themselves heard over the sound effects. He even went so far as suggesting that Strehler might consider including moments of total silence in the opening sequence. He thought that this would make it possible “both to catch certain important sentences [...] and to dispel any naturalistic illusions [...] 14 All the quotations from The Tempest are from the Arden edition, edited by Frank Kermode (London: Methuen, 1964). 15 Colombo, ed., 10. 16 David L. Hirst, Giorgio Strehler (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 84.

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for those who may not have understood what’s happening!”17 Strehler went in the opposite direction. Having had proof that, at the Lirico, he could either have a spectacular storm or audible lines, he chose the spectacle, and progressively eliminated most of the spoken lines and even some of the speaking characters in Act I scene i. A decision made on practical grounds because of an acoustics problem was later attributed to far loftier reasons. According to Enrico D’Amato, one of Strehler’s assistant directors whose duty it was to record all the changes in the script, what mattered in the opening scene was the setting “because the tempest is created by the theatrical magic of Prospero who, with stage effects, cancels the word.”18 The theatrical magic of the storm was openly revealed only to the spectators of the televised version, who caught glimpses of the technicians at work on the wind and lightning machines and of the mimes getting their lengths of silk ready. On the other hand, the theatrical magic of Ariel’s flights was openly shared with the spectators at the Lirico. As early as August 1977, Strehler had decided that the role would be played by a woman: One will never find a young boy, almost a “hermaphrodite” who can act, sing and move with the supreme skill required by Ariel. [...] I think I will have to assign the role to an actress who, on top of everything, is “elderly” like Lazzarini [born in 1934] but who has the required artistic “skill”. Giulia is diminutive, childlike, almost “asexual.” Made up and costumed in a certain way (which way?) she can be very plausible. But she needs a lot of help from the costume, the face, the head, the movements the words, the tone. She needs building up.19

Ariel’s costume was again a source of friction with Damiani, who had envisaged her as a sort of Mercury in armor. Strehler did not agree and had, of course, the final word. His Ariel would be a fragile “nothing” enveloped in white veils. To signify her servitude to Prospero, Lazzarini would be hooked to a very visible wire whenever she was in his presence. The wire, which allowed her to fly all over the stage while interacting with her master, was operated by Aurelio Caracci, a highly skilled technician whom Lazzarini had to learn to trust unconditionally when she had to 17

Colombo, ed., 128. Anzi, “La tempesta dal testo di Shakespeare alla scena di Strehler,” in Giuseppina Restivo et al., eds, Strehler e oltre: il Galileo di Brecht e La tempesta di Shakespeare (Bologna: Clueb, 2010), 170. 19 Colombo, William Shakespeare, 21-22. 18

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“swoop down from a 15 meter height, then up again and then precipitate once more all the way down almost to the floor.”20 At “Be free, and fare you well!” (V.i.318), Prospero (Tino Carraro) would unhook the wire. As Lazzarini remembers, I would go under Prospero’s hand and wait for a caress like a dog. And then the hook would make that terrible noise (Strehler insisted that it had to make a lot of noise). The moment of my liberation was the highest and most terrible moment for Tino as well: where will Ariel go?21

“Nowhere,” one is tempted to reply in the light of the very ambiguous conclusion of La tempesta. An agonized look on her face, Ariel leaves through the central aisle to thunderous applause. Then all the attention is focused again on Prospero, who goes through the Epilogue, standing at the foot of the stage, facing the audience. At “Let your indulgence set me free” (Ep. 20), the whole setting collapses onto the stage, apparently leaving Prospero free to exit the Lirico with the other spectators, undistinguishable from them in his suit. This ending would be in keeping with Jan Kott’s conclusion in the seminar: “It is as if he declared his impotence, the impotence of the theatre to change the world.” To which Strehler had replied: “This must be made clear.”22 However, this ending was quite soon abandoned in favor of the one recorded in the video: as the audience starts applauding, Prospero turns back towards the stage, makes one commanding gesture, and the set rebuilds itself while Ariel rushes back through the aisle to take the final applause with the rest of the company. Powerless as it is, the theatre may still be preferable to an outside world that is experiencing a “degraded apocalypse.”

Backstage with Maurizio Nichetti Born in 1948, Maurizio Nichetti started his career as a mime. He joined the Piccolo, where he took lessons from Marise Flach who had trained with Etienne Delacroux. He then worked for a few years at the 20

Anzi, “I voli”, 208. Ibid., 212. 22 Bajma Griga, 108. 21

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Piccolo, a place where “one had to lower the voice like in church,” before starting his own company. 23 In 1979, he switched to film making with Ratataplan, casting himself as the otherworldly, silent protagonist. The film was so successful that he immediately started work on Ho fatto splash, again casting himself as the silent protagonist. A little boy, Maurizio, who falls asleep in front of his black and white TV set in the late 1950s, wakes up twenty years later in publicity obsessed Milan and goes to live with his cousin, Carlina who shares her apartment with an aspiring actress, Luisa (Luisa Morandini), and a laid back university student, Angela (Angela Finocchiaro). Eager to please but accident prone, Maurizio disrupts the shooting of a TV commercial, Carlina’s wedding ceremony and reception, and a performance of La tempesta before ending up with the girls and other young people in a corral at a trade fair, where they spend their days acting as live adverts for motorcycle casks. In the film, there is no trace of the political violence so prominent in those years. The target of Nichetti’s satire is the world of advertising, which thrives in a society dominated by unabashed consumerism. Compulsive shoppers and TV watchers were, of course, part of the framework of “chilling indifference” within which, in Strehler’s words, the extremists carried out their outrages. It would have been quite unthinkable to film Strehler’s work without his permission. Having worked at the Piccolo, Nichetti was “family,” and yet he approached the director with understandable anxiety: One day I went to Strehler’s to ask him if I could use the set from La tempesta. In practice, to ask if I could make fun of him. And we are talking of Strehler, a true genius but not exactly given to self-irony. [...] I entered the room and he started a 45 minute monologue. He did all the talking. He thanked me and explained how I was to direct my film, and then dismissed me ... . That’s how I got his permission. I did not say anything or explain what I intended to do. He knew already. [...]. He advised me to privilege what happened behind the scenes. [...] And then explained exactly what I had in mind to do. Quite disconcerting, almost mind reading.24

With the director’s endorsement, Nichetti was able to use not only the scenery, but also actors and technicians from the Piccolo. Although

23

Maurizio Nichetti et al., Maurizio Nichetti: I film, il cinema e... (Cantalupa, TO: Effatà Editrice, 2005), 29. 24 Ibid., 29-30.

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Strehler himself does not appear on screen, his photographs loom very large and his name is mentioned seventeen times. The first allusion to La tempesta comes early in the film, when Luisa takes Maurizio with her to the Idroscalo, a large pond where a commercial for a soda drink is being filmed. While they are waiting for their scene, Luisa tells Maurizio about her very modest acting career as an extra in TV commercials and concludes: “And I also work with Strehler at the Piccolo in La tempesta. Well, Strehler is always Strehler.” Towards the end of the film, Angela hears on the radio that performances of La tempesta are about to resume. Since Luisa is too drunk to rush to the theatre, Angela decides to take her place, but leaves the flat without her costume. To give it to her, Maurizio needs to get past the Cerberus-like porter of the theatre, whose cubicle is dominated by a huge photograph of Strehler. He manages to sneak in and, with the porter in hot pursuit, ends up backstage. The technicians are getting ready for the opening scene and we are given ample opportunity to appreciate how they operate the machines that are needed for the storm, while a musician bangs away at an impressive set of drums under another copy of Strehler’s photo. We see Giulia Lazzarini as Ariel, already hooked to the wire. As her makeup is being touched up, she receives movement advice from Marise Fach, Nichetti’s mime teacher, who plays herself. Her words help us appreciate how much effort and coordination are required for each of the spirit’s movements. At one point, the bewildered actress lands on the raised hands of Maurizio who has unwittingly taken the place of Prospero. As she goes up and down, she repeatedly calls out to Aurelio (Caracci), the all-important controller of the wire. Unfortunately, he lets go of her to help the porter catch Maurizio, and she is momentarily knocked out cold in mid-air. Unfazed, Marise instructs the makeup lady to climbs up a rope in order to reach and revive Lazzarini. In true Piccolo spirit, she obeys. We next realize that Luisa does indeed work with Strehler, but in the humble capacity of one of the mimes. A whole bunch of them rushes past Maurizio as he looks for Angela. Unnecessarily, as he soon finds out. Ever resourceful, she has stolen the costume of another mime, who is being berated and threatened with blacklisting and exile by an assistant director: “Make sure you find a country where nobody has ever seen Arlecchino servitore di due padroni!” Maurizio hands him Luisa’s costume, thus saving the guy’s acting career, and takes a moment to contemplate yet another copy of Strehler’s portrait. In the house, the lights go down and

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suddenly the screen is filled with the huge, threatening shape of the stormtossed galleon. It is, as usual, quite stunning. To avoid the porter, Maurizio swings from a rope and ends up on stage, where he hits the mast of the galleon (which splits much sooner than it should) and starts fighting the engulfing sea along with the actors. To separate the porter and a fireman who are hitting each other backstage, Aurelio once more lets go of Lazzarini’s wire and she too plunges into the sinking galleon with an agonizing scream. By now, it should be fairly obvious that something has gone wrong, but the spectators have unconditional faith in the director: “Gosh, Strehler is always Strehler!” is a lady’s awed comment. Maurizio slides into the orchestra pit, among those boys and girls whom Jan Kott saw “carrying the blue sea on their raised arms.”25 On film, they cut a slightly less poetic figure. They trample the hapless intruder under their feet as they frantically run along the corridors, punching a ceiling of blue silk to create the waves. Angela suggests they leave – “Surely they don’t count the waves!”— and Maurizio gratefully follows her. But his foot gets caught in the silk and, as he pulls at it, the mimes, who are rhythmically waving their arms, are fully exposed to the view of the audience. Backstage all the staff has joined in a giant melée and nobody notices Maurizio and Angela who dash out of the theatre. Unlike Ariel at the end of La tempesta, they do not consider the theatre a safe haven in a hostile Milan. They simply move on to their next adventure while the spectators remain in their seats unaware of the disruptions, and the show does, of course, go on.

How It Is Done By suggesting that Nichetti should dwell on the technical aspects of La tempesta in Ho fatto splash, Strehler allowed the film spectators to share the professionals’ knowledge of what goes on behind the scenes, thus making them, for once, more aware of the artifice of spectacle than a theatre audience. Having trained at the Piccolo, Nichetti would have been familiar with the director’s views on what actors need to know: It is to be expected that a spectator should be left speechless in front of the sea storm in our Tempest, or of Ariel’s flights. But someone who devotes his life to the theatre must know all its tricks. He must see how a few guys 25

Kott, 135.

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waiving veils can simulate a stormy sea. He must know that behind Lazzarini-Ariel’s jumps, from a ten meter height all the way down to a few centimeters from the ground, there is an expert hand that operates a winch.26

Both directly in the televised version of his production and indirectly through his involvement in Nichetti’s film, Strehler did foreground the “tricks”. However, he chose to downplay the importance of the highly sophisticated, state-of-the-art equipment required for the lighting effects that played such a major role in the overall design of La tempesta. Backstage, the cameras lingered on thunder and rain machines that have been around for centuries and on the work of the mimes that created the illusion of engulfing sea waves. Nichetti, the mime turned film director, clearly shared his maestro’s faith in the superiority of old-fashioned theatrical illusion. Early in the film, when Strehler is first mentioned during the shooting of a commercial at the Idroscalo, we see in action an inept (but very arrogant and presumably very famous) English director. With all the technology, staff and money of a film set at his disposal, he is unable to get a decent shot of two sails that are desultorily operated by extras. Later on, when the galleon from La tempesta fills the screen and leaves the film audience as amazed as the spectators at the Lirico, one can almost hear Strehler telling the inept director of the commercial: “This is how it’s done!”

26

Strehler, “Io, Strehler,” 173.

APPENDIX A EDWARD GORDON CRAIG NOTES AND CORRESPONDENCE ON THE TEMPEST TRANSCRIBED BY PATRICK LE BŒUF

Note dated 3 May 1942 about The Tempest 1.1 (EGC Ms B 18, p. 16v and 18r) May 3, 1942. Paris. Suddenly! a thought about the Tempest, act I, scene I, where the words must all be heard above any howl of the winds and the roar of the waves–for the words are the Essence of the Scene. How to do it? Every way done already I know, and every possible way to do I seem to have thought of. And now I–now I see no more a ship– mast, sailors etc., I hear no more howls and roars nearby… I see PROSPERO (Ariel nearby), Prospero alone on his island and afar off the howls, roars, cries–diminuendo–rather nearer, the voices of the mariners (crew, boatswain, etc.) and the passengers, there to tell clearly the tale of the disaster. The face and movements of Prospero tell us of his reaction to the unseen action going on off the stage. Prospero as he listens in… Or indeed the whole thing (the words I mean) could be (could it?) spoken by Prospero as a receiving instrument speaks in a room. As he listens in, as he looks on, hearing and seeing and reporting as one who is mesmerized reports in regular, quiet, unemotional tones–a monotone–till the climax comes: “We split–we split–we split.” A wail (recorded on gramophone). In fact we will try the whole 65 lines of text as a record–and let it slowly out (close to Prospero) who notes each sentence—Prospero the listener. He will be seated in [a] large ample chair in which he can (if he wish) sprawl. This way we can reveal the idea in Shakespeare’s mind.

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Short or long pauses between the several bursts of speech. Slow or rapid, loud or soft, jerked or smooth, maybe something in the lights, colours, shades coming and going. But Prospero remains still–and the commanding presence.

Draft of a letter from Craig to Peter Brook, 10 August 1956 (EGC Ms B 18, p. 121-3) 20 August 1956, Venice. Dear Peter. “Tempest”. I have reread it slowly, and I am again (as ever) furiously sad to see such a tangle-muddle-dull-vivid-all sorts. […] Now to the “clue” you wrote of, which I was to give you. It is maybe in the utter senselessness of all which happens–solemnly happens–grand parade about nothing–the words just mere sounds, more than often, fade in an ahhh of fog or in a rap-a-tap of a cracker firework, senseless, everlastingly empty… talk… Until those few moments when, in middle of this fog, come the slow bell-like words of Shakespeare. I find very few: “… Such stuff as dreams are… little life… sleep.” And so I (as a producer) start on that last word–sleep–my stage absolutely empty, not dark, not light–sleepy light. What ever comes onto that stage must be able to melt away easily, and to reform perhaps (no trick sceneries), ALL SOLIDS GONE. All is still—but unbearably still—and then a figure—Prospero—not a ship—not a storm—scene I: all the words printed as Act I scene I are NOW spoken by the mouth of Prospero, and since he makes the wretched wreck he will be at home. He seems to be… asleep: he (as ’twere) talks in his sleep… He seems to me to be seated sprawling in a rocky armchair, his elbows on the arms and his hands held in air—I see them swinging gently from side to side—pendulum—and resistance. “Did you say ‘mad’—not yet—Lear, my brother, was mad—I’m only asleep—and the whole of this stage is an island—you see boards—and ropes and litter—it’s only your fancy—it’s the empty Lyceum Theatre at day-night-day, which was all a tangle of ropes and shadows. ‘The best of this kind,’ said Theseus in another play, A Midsummer Night’s Dream.”

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A big STAGE—pale, grey, brown, shot with all the undersea pale greens and blues and crimsons. Yellows here and then—shot–with these—not spread. Fish seem to be swimming in and out of the ropes… I saw some anyhow. All vague underwater apparitions—Dream place. But I saw the figure on the rock seat and only later the bits of wreckage did form slowly, imperceptibly drift into a sort of undersea scene as above of “brown and grey shot with pale lights,” and there was the old Lyceum stage—empty. Empty of persons, silent, motionless, to be filled later (sooner or later) with talk, then with figures, which did not seem to me to walk in and out, but somehow to float down or bubble up… Voices clear at times, but lost when tittering rubbish… beginning well such as: “Listen—I………” (much of the long useless speeches lost). The voice sounds on—fades, but goes on; an occasional word: “Sword,” or “Milan,” sounds clear or far off; the rest (all idiotic) fades away. And, let us thank God, speech after speech start going and fade away. Now, to most folk these scrappy scribbles of mine would mean nothing. To you they will have some significance. If we were talking, night after night, and someone recording, we would get clearer about it all. It’s the “such stuff as dreams” which Prospero utters which is to me the only clue to island, to movements, to voices. If followed, it might lead to the massacre of the awful rubbishy lines and ideas, and to the sunrise of the main hope. What Shakespeare must have suffered over this horrible work is a crushing thought. I haven’t said all about the empty stage—full of dream, stuff to come and go, but we must meet, and drink, and, steady on, get at this. Love to you old fellow, EGC.

Copy of part of a letter from Craig to John Gielgud, 18 December 1956 (EGC Ms B 18, p. 17r and 17v) To John Gielgud, 18 December 1956. “Tempest.” Idea I have none—but a few ideas—yes. One… which is, since that old magician kept all the wreck neat and trim, it was and could

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only be in idea that the dam wreck ever existed—so I see beginning of that piece this way. Prospero stands, or sprawls, sleeping, alone on the stage… He moves a hand, maybe—he is such thing as Dream is made of–and he dreams the wreck. The words are shot out by several voices—all the scene is in sound only—mumblings and cries—the words—maybe noises—and music (oboes, flutes and singing)—the voices do everything. Prospero listens in his sleep—his face (some acting for John Gielgud—what!) rather a wicked face—he is motionless—the sounds increase—he laughs—he does what you will—but he does not move. The dam silly imitation of a wreck on the boards is swept away—the labour—the expense—the puzzlement all avoided. Scene 2 begins as the sun comes out—seemingly through deep waters. Are we under the sea? All’s one if we are or not. I see a flow of water, I hear it and see bubbles, such things as dreams are made of. A little sleep. The sun dies down—evening, and Miranda is already sleepy and papa stirs and begins his long talk seemingly to put her quite to sleep. There’s more to follow, so much to begin with. What think you? Did you say “Bosh!”

CONTRIBUTORS

Martin Andrucki is Charles A. Dana Professor of Theater at Bates College. Prof. Andrucki has directed some fifty productions in academic and professional theaters in the United States and Europe—including many plays of Shakespeare. And for twenty years he taught a freshman seminar on Hamlet at Bates. He is the author of four plays, including Manny’s War, which was nominated for the New Play Award of the American Theater Critics Association. Prof. Andrucki has served as literary advisor and dramaturg of Maine’s two professional theaters, Portland Stage Company and The Public Theatre. The author of seventy articles and essays on classical and contemporary playwrights, he has taught dramatic literature and film studies at Harvard University and performance skills at the University of Maine School of Law. Prof. Andrucki has also taught film and theater in Tokyo, London, Budapest, and Prague, and was a Fulbright Scholar in Hungary. A graduate of Columbia University, he holds the M.A. and Ph.D. degrees from Harvard. Misty Beck attended graduate school at Washington University in St. Louis, where her interests in literature, politics, and the environment shaped her dissertation, “Enclosure and English Pastoral, 1770-1830.” In it she examines how poets responded to large-scale enclosures of common lands and the loss of customary ways of living, arguing that pastoral images of lost common lands and use rights were not merely nostalgic but rather a form of political speech that gestured toward environmental as well as social critique. She has taught at Washington University, the University of Maine at Farmington, and most recently Bates College, where she is a lecturer in environmental studies and a writing specialist in interdisciplinary programs and social sciences. Her research continues to be motivated by the power of literature to tell stories of natural beauty and human consequence. Eric C. Brown is Professor of English at the University of Maine at Farmington. He has been a visiting professor at Harvard University and the Université du Maine (Le Mans). His essays on Shakespeare and Shakespeare on film have appeared in Shakespeare Quarterly, Shakespeare Survey, Texas Studies in Literature and Language, Mississippi Review, Literature/Film Quarterly, and Colby Quarterly, and he is editor of the

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Contributors

book Insect Poetics. He is currently completing a book on the history of Milton on film. Michael Dobson is director of the Shakespeare Institute at the University of Birmingham. He is the author of numerous books and articles, including most recently Shakespeare and Amateur Performance: A Cultural History (Cambridge UP, 2011). He regularly comments on Shakespearean performance and criticism for the BBC and the London Review of Books. He has contributed program notes for the Royal Shakespeare Company, Shakespeare’s Globe, and the Old Vic. He is co-editor of the PalgraveMacmillan Shakespeare series and serves on the editorial boards of Shakespeare Survey and Shakespeare Quarterly. Diana Henderson is Professor of Literature and Dean for Curriculum and Faculty Support at MIT. She is the author of Passion Made Public: Elizabethan Lyric, Gender, and Performance (Illinois, 1995) and Collaborations with the Past: Reshaping Shakespeare Across Time and Media (Cornell, 2006), and editor of Blackwell's Concise Companion to Shakespeare on Screen (2005) and Alternative Shakespeares 3 (Routledge 2008). She has published many essays on early modern drama, poetry, and gender, Shakespeare on film and in performance, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, and experimental pedagogy. She has served as a dramaturg and collaborated with the Royal Shakespeare Company and the Actors’ Shakespeare Project, and is a member of the Global Shakespeares curricular team at MIT. Misty Krueger is a visiting Assistant Professor of British Literature at the University of Maine at Farmington, where she teaches Restoration and eighteenth-century literature in addition to Shakespeare. She is currently writing a manuscript on revenge in Restoration and early eighteenthcentury tragic drama, and she has published essays on Restoration and eighteenth-century drama in journals such as Restoration and 18th-Century Theatre Research and New Perspectives on the Eighteenth Century. Douglas Lanier is Professor of English at the University of New Hampshire and author of the book Shakespeare and Modern Popular Culture, as well as numerous articles on the subject of Shakespeare, adaptation, and performance.

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Benaouda Lebdai is currently Professor at the University of Maine, Le Mans, France, teaching postcolonial literature in English and French. He obtained a Ph. D. in 1987 in comparative literature at the University of Essex, England, and was awarded a French doctorate in Anglophone African literature on the Ghanaian novelist Ayi Kwei Armah at the University of Angers in 1998. He has published articles on Chinua Achebe, Peter Abrahams, J. M. Coetzee, Nadine Gordimer, Zoë Wicomb, Joseph Conrad, Winnie Mandela, Ngugi Wa Thiong’O, Ayi Kwei Armah, Okot p’Bitek, Stanlake Samkange, Rachid Boudjedra, Nina Bouraoui, Albert Camus and Frantz Fanon. He has also taught Comparative African literature at Algiers University, Angers University, and the Catholic University of Angers. Patrick Le Boeuf is a library curator at Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris. From 2006 to 2009 he worked in the Performing Arts Department of this institution, where he was in charge of the Edward Gordon Craig Collection. Doyle Ott is a performer and director working in the San Francisco Bay Area. He has lectured in theatre at Sonoma State University, Pacific Union College and Arizona State University. His research examines the intersections of circus, theatre, and ecology in performance and education. Directing, dramaturgy and performance credits include work with the San Francisco Shakespeare Festival, San Francisco Circus Center, Bay Area Children's Theatre, Foolsfury, Antenna Theatre, Golden Thread, and the San Francisco Playwright's Foundation. He is Director of the Fairyland Children's Theatre in Oakland. Doyle holds a Ph.D. in Theatre from Arizona State University and is a graduate of the San Francisco Clown Conservatory. Valerie Pye is a theatre scholar, educator, actor, and director who has worked in these capacities both in the US as well as in the UK, where she was recognized for her devised productions as well as her scholarship. She received her PhD in Performance Practice (Drama) from the University of Exeter where she also completed her MFA in Staging Shakespeare with Distinction. Her doctoral dissertation, “The Influence of Shakespeare’s Globe on Actor Training and Contemporary Performance in End-on Theatres” examines the relationship between Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre in London and Shakespeare’s plays and includes an original actor training methodology based on that relationship. In addition to her intensive work at Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre in London, Valerie has also studied with the Royal Shakespeare Company and at the London Academy of Music

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Contributors

and Dramatic Arts. She holds a MFA in Acting from Brooklyn College. Valerie currently teaches at Stony Brook University and LIU Post, specializing in acting, voice and speech, performing Shakespeare, and autobiographical performance. She has previously taught at Brooklyn College, Fordham University, and the American Academy of Dramatic Arts. Estelle Rivier is a senior lecturer at the University du Maine, Le Mans (France). She is the author of L’espace scénographique dans les mises en scène des pièces de William Shakespeare en France et en Angleterre (Peter Lang, PUE, 2006) and Shakespeare dans la Maison de Molière (PUR, October 2012). She has published numerous articles on recent productions in France. Since 2006, she is Chair of the drama company Act’en scène, which produced Shakespeare’s Sonnets in 2008. Daniel Salerno is a doctoral candidate in English at Boston University and teaches in the Composition and Literature Department at Bergen Community College. His research focuses on religious conflict in early modern drama and the medieval inheritance of early modern literature. Mariangela Tempera is Professor of English Literature at the University of Ferrara. She is director of the Ferrara “Shakespeare Centre,” editor of the series “Shakespeare dal testo alla scena” and co-editor of the series “The Renaissance Revisited.” She has published widely on Renaissance drama and on Shakespeare in performance and in popular culture. Her fulllength studies include: The Lancashire Witches: lo stereotipo della strega fra scrittura giuridica e scrittura letteraria and Feasting with Centaurs: Titus Andronicus from Stage to Text.

INDEX

1, 2, 3 Henry VI, 115 1 Henry IV, 72, 108, 189 2 Henry IV, 15 African productions of Shakespeare, 181-93 Al-Bassam, Sulayman, 71-72, 80 All’s Well That Ends Well, 76 As You Like It, 136; Branagh film, 155-69 The Big-Life: The Ska Musical, as adaptation of Love’s Labor’s Lost, 79-85 Boethius, 11-12 Branagh, Kenneth, 155-69 passim Brook, Peter, 111-112, 211, 224; influence of Edward Gordon Craig, 60-65; letter from Edward Gordon Craig, 236-37 Calvinism, 7-9 Césaire, Aimé, 189 Chaucer, Geoffrey, 6-7, 16, 149 circus performance, 103-117; and Edward Gordon Craig, 57 clowns, 103-104, 108-113, 116 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 50-51 The Comedy of Errors, 70, 73, 104, 123; and the circus, 111, 112114, 115, 116 Craig, Edward Gordon, 48-68; correspondence of, 234-38 Davenant, William, 24-44 passim The Donkey Show, 71, 72 Dryden, John, 24-44 passim Duffett, Thomas, 24-44 passim Flying Karamazov Brothers, 112114 Foucault, Michel, 13

Gielgud, John, 61-63, 66-67; letter from Edward Gordon Craig, 237-38 Girard, Rene, 125-26 Greenaway, Peter, 66-67 Hamlet, 25, 63, 71, 73, 139, 14041, 147, 179, 211, 227; and amateur performance, 128-30; in Africa, 189, 190, 191, 19293; in Hungary, 197, 201-205 Henry V (film), 179 Henry V, 15, 139, 140 hippodrama, 107-108 Hungarian productions of Shakespeare, 194-208 Jarman, Derek, 66 The Jew of Malta, 10 Julius Caesar, 139, 184, 186, 188, 190, 192 Kilkenny, Private Theatre of, 125, 127-30 King Lear, 111, 113, 122, 128-30, 140, 208; in Africa, 182-83, 187-88 La tempesta (Strehler), 223-34 Les Enfants du Paradis, 171-80 Love’s Labor’s Lost, 73, 75-76, 123-24; adapted as The Big Life, 80-85 Luther, Martin, 7-9 Macbeth Kanaval, 210-21 Macbeth, 25, 61, 104, 208; and play Macbeth Kanaval, 210-21; as hippodrama, 107-08; in Africa, 182, 184, 186-87, 190-93 Measure for Measure, 2-23; in Hungary, 201, 205-06

244 The Merchant of Venice, 70, 184; and amateur theatre, 123, 128, 132-33, 134 The Merry Wives of Windsor, 124, 125, 135 A Midsummer Night’s Dream, 49, 63, 71, 186, 236; and amateur theatre, 124-25; and the circus, 104, 110-11, 115-16 mime, 187, 228-29, 230, 232-34; see also pantomime mimeticism, 103-07, 125-26, 135, 213 The Mock-Tempest; or the Enchanted Castle, 24, 38-44 Msomi, Welcome, 190-91 Much Ado About Nothing, 16, 85, 123 musical productions, 39, 74-85, 113, 193, My Darling Clementine (film), 14142, 144 Nandillon, Pascale, 210-21 passim The National Theater (Budapest), 195-96 Nichetti, Maurizio, 227, 230-34 nuns, in literature, 4-7; postReformation response to, 7-10 Othello, 3, 63, 90-98, 109, 110; and Les Enfants du Paradis, 171-80; in Africa, 183, 187, 192 pantomime, 123, 172-74, 176, 17980, 211; see also mime pastoral, 37, 123; and the cinematic, 159-69; criticism of, 156-59

Index puppetry, 57, 59, 60 Rainoldes, John, 125-26 Richard II, 11-12 Richard III, 108, 110, 140, 189, 192; in Hungary, 198-99, 203 Romeo and Juliet, 16, 178, 182, 192, 208 Sandburg, Carl, 151 Sirett, Paul, 80-85 Stockport Garrick Society, 125, 130-35 Strehler, Giorgio, 70, 111; and La tempesta, 223-34 The Tempest, 104, 116, 124, 185; and Edward Gordon Craig, 4868, 235-38; and Giorgio Strehler, La tempesta, 223-34; and Yellow Sky, 140-54; in Africa, 188-89, 192; in Hungary, 207-08; Restoration adaptations of, 24-44 The Tempest, or The Enchanted Island (Davenant and Dryden), 25-38 Titus Andronicus, 151, 192, 242 Twelfth Night, 10, 25, 71, 72, 98101, 105, 132 The Two Gentlemen of Verona, 73, 76-79, 85 The Two Noble Kinsmen, 10-11, 123 The Winter’s Tale, 49, 123 Yellow Sky (film), as adaptation of The Tempest, 140-54