The Routledge Handbook of Shakespeare and Global Appropriation

Christy Desmet, Sujata Iyengar, Miriam Jacobson, Christy Desmet, Sujata Iyengar, Miriam Jacobson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781351687522
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

The Routledge Handbook of Shakespeare and Global Appropriation brings together a variety of different voices to examine the ways that Shakespeare has been adapted and appropriated onto stage, screen, page, and a variety of digital formats. The thirty-nine chapters address topics such as trans- and intermedia performances; Shakespearean utopias and dystopias; the ethics of appropriation; and Shakespeare and global justice as guidance on how to approach the teaching of these topics.

This collection brings into dialogue three very contemporary and relevant areas: the work of women and minority scholars; scholarship from developing countries; and innovative media renderings of Shakespeare. Each essay is clearly and accessibly written, but also draws on cutting edge research and theory. It includes two alternative table of contents, offering different pathways through the book – one regional, the other by medium – which open the book up to both teaching and research.

Offering an overview and history of Shakespearean appropriations, as well as discussing contemporary issues and debates in the field, this book is the ultimate guide to this vibrant topic. It will be of use to anyone researching or studying Shakespeare, adaptation, and global appropriation.

Part I

Transcultural and intercultural Shakespeares

1
“… the great globe itself … shall dissolve”

Art after the apocalypse in Station Eleven

Sharon O’Dair

Traditionally regarded as Shakespeare’s farewell to art, Prospero’s lines in The Tempest also speak to the current moment, to an anticipated moment of a global collapse:

The cloud-capped towers, the gorgeous palaces,

The solemn temples, the great globe itself,

Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve,

And …

Leave not a rack behind.

The Tempest.¹ 4.1.152–56

This reminder of our frailty and insignificance – our little lives rounded with a long sleep – urges professional self-reflection about the scope and salience of the Global Shakespeare enterprise. This chapter considers the future – and the ethics – of Shakespeare performance and scholarship and does so by offering an ecocritical analysis of a recent post-apocalyptic adaptation of King Lear, Emily St. John Mandel’s novel, Station Eleven (2014). Station Eleven emphasizes the role of art in society before and after a plague-induced apocalypse that is also a carbon apocalypse, when people no longer can turn on lights or the sound system, when they no longer can travel easily by car or plane and must look, instead, to the past, to sun and candle, to horsepower and human power. Before that, I discuss briefly two disasters relevant to these concerns that took place on the Gulf Coast of the United States and that have affected all of that country and, indeed, the world.

In 2010, off the coast of Louisiana, the Macondo oil well exploded, killing eleven of its crew. Drilled by Transocean for British Petroleum, on a multi-billion dollar rig called the Deepwater Horizon, Macondo became the largest oil spill in American history, spewing crude oil into the Gulf of Mexico for eighty-seven days, from April 20 until July 15, when BP announced a containment cap had stanched the flow. And in 2005, Hurricane Katrina’s landfall on the Mississippi coast was one that put New Orleans on the “clean” side of what geographer Richard Campanella explains was “a declining Category-2 storm” (2015). Katrina’s “strongest winds and waves had actually spared New Orleans,” yet the Crescent City was devastated because “a patchwork of under-engineered and poorly maintained levees had failed fundamentally” (Campanella 2015). As a result, reports Thomas Beller ten years later, many in New Orleans have concluded that no one should call the disaster by the name of Katrina (2015). For these activist New Orleanians, “Katrina” implies a natural disaster, something unavoidable, something for which humans are not responsible. For these activists, the flood in New Orleans was a disaster, like the Macondo blowout, created by human greed and error by behavior that is neither good nor wise but is normalized around the world, among all 7 billion, 500 million of us.² Beller thinks that the activists exemplify “an ascendant theme in ecological thought: that the distinction between what is nature and what is not has blurred beyond recognition” (2015). He follows ecotheorist and literary critic Timothy Morton in suggesting that, as Beller puts it, “there are some phenomena that defy our attempts to categorize them as natural or not” (Beller 2015).

But is this correct? Does this line of argument by the activists that “Katrina” misidentifies the disaster exemplify this “ascendant theme” in ecological thought, ecological theory? Does blurring capture what the activists in New Orleans insist upon? What they want? Morton agrees with the activists that anthropomorphizing the storm, calling it Katrina, “implies something invading our social space from the outside.” But the activists would not agree with Morton that a storm, like Katrina, reveals that “nonhumans can be agents and do stuff” (quoted in Beller 2015). Morton wants Katrina, whatever we call it, to exemplify ecological theory’s blurring of the line between human and non-, the cultural and the natural. The activists want to call the storm something else, something that clarifies the lines, draws them more boldly. The storm was a man-made disaster, say the activists, which to acknowledge would force a focus on human responsibility for the flooding of New Orleans in order to ensure that such malfeasance does not occur again, there or anywhere else. In insisting on theory here, Morton thwarts or disables activism, or the need for it, which may be part of the point. Indeed, some have argued that a resistance to environmental activism has characterized the phenomenal growth over the past decade of ecocritical theory and hence ecocriticism, in terms both of numbers of practitioners and their status within the academy (Fraiman 2012; Garrard 2012).

A year or so after Macondo was capped, however, Peter Maass reviewed a number of books about the disaster that had quickly made it into print; he noted no blurring, other than that resulting in the quick erasure of the event from the American consciousness: “business-as-usual has returned with surprising speed to the Gulf of Mexico and to America” (2011). In chronicling this rapid erasure, Maass spends most of his time dissecting the pressures, perils, and rewards of an oil market barely encumbered by regulation. But he concludes with a literary turn, noting what readers of literature had known or wondered since the very day of the explosion, April 20, 2010 – that the well and its site had been named after the town in Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude, named by a group of employees who offered the highest bid in a contest BP had devised to raise money for the charity United Way. Of course, Maass concludes, “No one could know how miserably appropriate the choice would be.” But even this miserable irony is not all:

The final twist of One Hundred Years of Solitude is relevant, too. A text that had been impenetrable is finally deciphered at the end of the novel. Written one hundred years earlier, it foretold the events that destroyed Macondo. When it comes to drilling for oil and the hazards of climate change, the texts that predict our future are accumulating. They are all too clear.

Maass 2011

Maass refers here to the Macondo blowout, and probably to Katrina, too. Macondo and Katrina are apocalyptic; they unveil; they are revelatory. And unlike the impenetrable text in One Hundred Years of Solitude, Katrina is a text that for many reveals the future, the human-made future, all too clearly. For these, it is a text without blurred lines. Most of humanity, however, does not read Katrina in the same way: “business-as-usual has returned with surprising speed to the Gulf of Mexico and to America” (Maass 2011).

James Berger suggests in his influential After the End: Representations of Post-Apocalypse that the post-apocalyptic studies “what disappears and what remains, and of how the remainder has been transformed.” Yet it does so with fresh assurance: the apocalypse is a “definitive catastrophe – not only final and complete but absolutely clarifying.” The post-apocalypse reveals a world “in which all identities and values are clear,” the “murkiness of life” as it was before suddenly irrelevant (Berger 1999: 7, 8). Here Berger posits an ideal typical understanding rooted in tradition; as he points out, and as our response to Katrina demonstrates, modern and contemporary post-apocalyptic scenarios reveal less clarity (1999: 8).³ Station Eleven, like its Shakespearean antecedent, King Lear, offers a world of scarcity and danger, where, as Craig Dionne points out, “one survives by taking shelter from the elements and by hiding from others,” others who may be armed and vicious, out for blood or whatever it is you have got that they want. But if, as Dionne claims, King Lear “leaves us … with no real plan to move forward” (2016: 29, 146), Station Eleven reveals the plan: to walk, for years and possibly forever, with knives, crossbows, and guns, with senses sharpened, “an absolute focus taking hold,” because “this is what it would take” to survive (Mandel 2014: 190). When asked about the apocalypse, about how the world has changed since it occurred, Kirsten Raymonde replies, “I think of killing” (Mandel 2014: 265). “A wire of a woman, polite but lethal,” she thinks of the killing she has done – two people with strikingly accurate knife throws and then a third in the course of the novel – and she thinks of the killing done by the Georgia Flu, the pandemic that drew a line, “a before and an after,” through the lives of the few who survived (Mandel 2014: 20, 267). We might also think of the old King’s “kill, kill, kill, kill, kill, kill” (King Lear 4.6.183). Or even of “the big fat O, the nothing that haunts [King Lear], the “O, O, O, O!” with which Lear expires” (O’Toole 2015). These are clarified values, indeed, but they are not values we moderns normally embrace.

Station Eleven won an Arthur C. Clarke Award for Science Fiction and was a finalist for both the National Book Award and the PEN/Faulkner Award; it is a bestseller, a breakout novel for Mandel. The novel begins and ends on a stage in Toronto, where a film star, aging at fifty-one years old, is playing King Lear. On stage with him in act 4 are three little girls, an innovation meant to evoke happier times for Lear and his daughters; one of the little girls is Kirsten Raymonde. Suddenly the actor playing Lear, Arthur Leander, suffers a massive heart attack and dies on stage, despite the efforts of an audience member, Jeevan Chaudhary, a former paparazzo training to be a paramedic, to save him (Mandel 2014: 10).⁴ That very day, the Georgia Flu arrives on the North American continent, in Toronto, virulent and deadly, continuing its wild, quick, and devastating pass through humanity, killing 99% of the population (Mandel 2014: 253; Vermeulen 2018: 11–12).⁵ It is as if Arthur had a heart attack and so did the planet – or at least the human part of it. Mandel’s elegiac musings on loss and survival are filtered primarily through the experiences of these three characters that she puts on a stage in the novel’s first pages, but especially through Arthur and Kirsten, man and girl become woman, past and present – or arguably, present and future – linked together because of art, because of a passion for acting and a mysterious comic book named Dr. Eleven, a comic book unlike any other.⁶

In Year Twenty, calendars having been recalibrated upon the collapse, Kirsten walks with the Traveling Symphony, a group of musicians and actors who perform Shakespeare and music of all sorts to small communities who cling to the shores of Lakes Huron and Michigan. Readers learn early that the Symphony had “performed more modern plays sometimes in the first few years, but what was startling, what no one would have anticipated, was that audiences seemed to prefer Shakespeare to their other theatrical offerings.” Dieter, one of the actors, thinks the reason is that “people want what was best about the world” (Mandel 2014: 37–38). Indeed, sounding throughout the novel is a phrase stenciled onto one of the Symphony’s three caravans, horse-drawn remains of pick-up trucks: “Because survival is insufficient” (58). For Mandel herself, the “line became almost the thesis statement of the entire novel” (Scott 2015). Thinking that “a period of absolute mayhem and chaos and horror [could not] last forever everywhere on Earth,” Mandel set out to imagine and explore “the new culture and the new world that begins to emerge” (Scott 2015). The Traveling Symphony is where she places hope in the post-apocalyptic. Shakespeare, too, is where she places hope.

Because the novel insists on something more than survival and emphasizes Shakespeare in Toronto and around the shores of the Great Lakes, it is unsurprising to read some gushing by reviewers, upon the novel’s release, about the crucial importance to society of art and performance. Mandel’s “message,” according to one, is that “civilization – and just as importantly, art – will endure as long as there is life” (Barnett 2014); another concludes that

what is sufficient, what continues to make life livable, is beauty – whether it be the beauty of art (people still crave the enchantments of ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream’ even after society has collapsed) or the beauty of memory (a TV Guide found amid the rubble becomes wondrous when it points to a world that no longer exists).

Domestico 2014

Nor, in contrast, is it surprising to read critics who push back against such gushing, as Sigrid Nunez does in The New York Times: “Survival may indeed be insufficient, but does it follow that our love of art can save us?” (2014). Nunez echoes Kate Soper’s deflating counter to Jonathan Bate’s audacious claim in The Song of the Earth that poetry will save the earth: given the small readership of poetry, Soper writes, “I would argue, more modestly, that poetry … can probably do rather little in itself by way of ‘saving the earth’ ” (2011: 22–23). And I would add that anyone reading Bate in the early part of this century should have come to the same conclusion. Poetry, drama, prose fiction – art – is not going to save the earth, which is not to say that art cannot aid in navigating the Anthropocene or in learning how to change the ways we live, our carbon and consumption dependencies.

A smattering of literary critics has now published analyses of the novel, focusing, too, on apocalypse, its causes, and its meanings. Mark West thinks the apocalypse in the novel is not the result of the Georgia Flu but of global capitalism, symbolized by the global economic collapse of 2008; it’s a collapse that Mandel minimizes and does not critique. The hope that reviewers see in Station Eleven occurs as a result: Mandel avoids apocalyptic revelation, working rather “to redeem the pre-apocalyptic world” (West 2018: 21, 23). In a different register, one more attuned to the early modern, Philip Smith agrees: “St. John Mandel’s post-apocalyptic scenario returns us to an era when Shakespeare contained all the seeds of culture” (2016). Like West, Smith is skeptical of such redemption or hope, adding to West’s distaste for capitalism a distaste for modernity’s (and, he argues, Station Eleven’s implicit) colonialism and imperialism (2016: 300). Pieter Vermeulen thinks the novel’s apocalypse can be read as about “climate change (among other Anthropocene phenomena)” and, in particular, about the dangers and ubiquity of climate change denial. Too, and in contrast to West and Smith, Vermeulen argues that “Station Eleven is not about the unperturbed continuity of a humanist tradition – indeed, that the persistence of culture depends on artifacts (paperweights, comics, scripts) underscores its contingency.” That ...