Shakespeare and Modern Theatre

The Performance of Modernity

Michael Bristol, Kathleen McLuskie, Christopher Holmes

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2005
• eBook ISBN: 9781134601196
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

The book gathers together a particularly strong line-up of contributors from across the literary-performative divide to examine the relationship between Shakespeare, the 'culture industries', modernism and live performance.

1
Modernity, modernism and postmodernism in the twentieth-century’s Shakespeare
HUGH GRADY

In every era the attempt must be made anew to wrest tradition away from a conformism that is about to overpower it.

Walter Benjamin (1968: 255)

Shakespeare and modernism

The impulses which brought about the new aesthetic movement of modernism at the beginning of the twentieth century were often iconoclastic and violent. The 1910 Futurist Manifesto, for example, exhorted its readers as follows:

Take up your pickaxes, your axes and hammers, and wreck, wreck the venerable cities, pitilessly. Come on, set fire to the library shelves. Turn aside the canals to flood the museums. . . . So let them come, the gay incendiaries with charred fingers. . . . Here we are! Here we are!

(Quoted in Williams 1989: 51)

This militant anti-traditionalism was in evidence everywhere in the arts at the beginning of the century. Revolutions across the cultural sphere produced radical transformations in painting, music, and literature. At first this wave of radical aesthetic experimentation was called simply ‘modern art’, and it ramified into scores of sub-movements, trends, and new directions which today we group together as a complex modernism.

Given the modernist desire to overcome tradition and the past, it seems something of an anomaly, then, to realize that in both the theatre and in literary criticism – two cultural institutions experiencing the challenge and shock of modernism early in the twentieth century – Shakespeare was an important component of the modernist revolution. The appropriation of Shakespeare as a modernist meant a thorough revision of his nineteenth-century image as a Romantic and realist, celebrated for his life-like characters and poetic powers. Already, in the 1890s, George Bernard Shaw had campaigned against Shakespeare’s high status in fin-desiècle cultural life, arguing tirelessly that after Ibsen, Shakespeare’s dramaturgy was obsolete and only the strength of traditionalism in antiquarian Britain prevented this from being generally acknowledged (Shaw 1961). In Shaw’s caustic view of literary history, Shakespeare was an anti-modern ripe for the overthrow.

Of course, the overthrow never came. Instead Shakespeare was refunctioned as a modernist poet and playwright of multiple dimensions for the twentieth century, and it was Shaw and his version of literary history that came to seem dated and quaint. As Raymond Williams argued, realists like Shaw perhaps deserve more credit as harbingers of modernism than they have generally received, having much the same relationship to more radical innovators to come as the Impressionists had to the Cubists in painting (1989: 31–5). But it proved a much more successful strategy for emerging modernists to transform than to discard Shakespeare.

In the second half of the twentieth century, I believe, a similar if less dramatic aesthetic revolution has taken place, and it, too, has changed the way we perceive Shakespeare. Modernism itself, under the twentieth century’s endemic pressures for constant renovation and renewal, has given way to a new aesthetic paradigm – that of postmodernism. In what follows, I want to try to trace the production of a modernist and then a postmodernist Shakespeare over the course of the twentieth century. This development has been complex, and describing it involves us in an array of confusing terms – modern, modernism, modernity, modernization (not to mention postmodern and its variations), which deserve explication and exploration. In addition, some argue that postmodernism is really a variant of modernism (e.g. Halpern 1997: 2) – a position which has its logic but which, I will argue below, is less persuasive than its contrary. But as we will see, different aesthetic paradigms can coexist in the same period. And to be sure, modernism itself proved a highly contradictory development, with opposing directions and impulses, and Shakespeare was implicated in more than one of its tendencies.

One strand of modernism, epitomized by the Italian and Russian Futurists (and by occasional American poets like Hart Crane or Carl Sandburg), tried to celebrate and appropriate the unprecedented social and technical developments that were so rapidly transforming the world in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, as electrification, automobiles, airplanes, telephones, cinema, and other technical innovations radically transformed – modernized, we say – daily life and its rhythms for millions.

After the mass slaughters of the First World War, however, the celebrations of violence of the Futurists began to seem disastrously misplaced, and a different departure for modernism developed, particularly in the anglophone world under the influence of a new postwar generation. T. S. Eliot was instrumental in establishing the theme that modernization had transformed the world into a vast waste land. Such writers of the 1920s and 1930s as Yeats, Hemingway, Faulkner, and O’Neill charted the new situation of spiritual crisis faced by all those who had come to believe that the modern world was devoid of meaning and beauty and could be redeemed only by art. Such ideas, in general, informed American and British modernist art in the first half of the twentieth century. Thus modernism, which had begun with a desire to overthrow all previous traditions and renovate the world in all its forms, began instead to reflect the idea that to be true to its deepest values, modernism had to refunction, rather than jettison, the masterpieces of the past.

Eliot did what he could to refunction Shakespeare, urging a de-emphasis of Hamlet and his problems (Eliot 1932) and embracing the new techniques for appreciating Shakespeare’s poetic imagery developed by G. Wilson Knight and others associated with what came to be called the New Criticism (Eliot 1949). He took on Shaw indirectly but decisively and argued that it was Shakespeare’s very ‘primitiveness’, his closeness to ancient, pre-modern rituals, that made him truly modern, while the realist theatre, by distancing itself from ritual, had become obsolete in the accelerating modernism of the twentieth century (Halpern 1997: 15–50).

The impact of Eliot’s ideas on a developing twentieth-century academic criticism was deep; the resulting critical revolution wound its slow way through the institutions of criticism and established by mid-century a specifically Anglo-Saxon modernist Shakespeare, very much imprinted with concepts from Eliot, who participated in a multi-layered critique of modernity (Grady 1991). In this peculiarly Anglo-American strand of modernism, then, modernism functioned as a critique of the processes which had created the world of modernity over several centuries. Shakespeare could be appropriated in this version of modernism as a representative of the values which modernity had devastated. And a good deal of twentieth-century literary criticism made precisely that case.

But a modernist Shakespeare needed to be more than an updated Romantic: formal issues became crucial in the transformation. Shakespeare was reinvented as part of modernism’s reorganization of time and space within art works, plastic and literary (Quinones 1985: 33–4; Frank 1945). In this aesthetic revolution, everything associated with what Quinones called the ‘historical values’ – narrative, character, teleology, and time as an orderly, linear experience – became re-coded as aesthetically passé; and painting and literature, via Picasso, Joyce, and numerous others, replaced history with myth, linear narrative with simultaneity, and linear time with forms more complex and multi-layered. As I wrote about this modernist moment earlier:

The revolt against time in the arts was a deeply felt revolt against history – the Hegelianized sense of history that had become the West’s mythology and self-justification: history as progress, the present as the desired outcome of all that had come before. When history revealed itself instead to have given birth to Yeats’s slouching beast, to Joyce’s nightmare, to Eliot’s hollow men, then history, as it had been understood, history with a telos, had lost its raison d’être and in that sense no longer existed. Time was replaced by space, history by myth.

(1991: 111–12)

I attempted to show through an analysis of critical history in The Modernist Shakespeare the extent to which Shakespeare’s meaning became radically refashioned in the wake of this fundamental aesthetic shift, as Shakespeare’s texts became ‘spatialized’, read in terms of symbols, myths, and images rather than as narratives. And of course theatrical and the new film productions of Shakespeare were just as affected.

However, the Shakespeare of the avant-garde theatre often had completely different, anti-traditionalist characteristics, as several of the essays of this volume illustrate. Shakespeare was an important figure in the radical, Futurist-inspired theatrical experiments in Moscow before the Revolution and afterwards in the pre-Stalinist phase of the Soviet Union (Carlson 1993: 354–5). The shock-value, say, of the Cubist set used in Edward Gordon Craig’s 1912 production of Hamlet in the Moscow Art Theatre came in large measure from the presentation of traditional Shakespeare through radically new artistic media, but there were also aspects of Hamlet’s scepticism and alienation that worked well with modernist themes and values. For similar reasons, Shakespeare was a major presence in early twentieth-century German expressionist experiments, fascinating Brecht, for example, throughout the several phases of his long career and serving as a precedent for the epic theatre and its celebrated aeffect (Brecht 1964b). In America, Orson Welles was probably the best known ‘modernizer’ of Shakespeare, especially through his 1936 production of Macbeth set in a voodoo-haunted Haiti and his use of Fascist uniforms for many of the characters of his 1937 Julius Caesar. These were appropriately political shock tactics aesthetically allied to earlier modernist experiments. Such examples are only a sample of a much larger number of modernistinfluenced productions of Shakespeare in the twentieth century.

From modernism to postmodernism

By the 1950s, however, modernism started to become institutionalized, in new museums and in a newly expanded educational system and lost much of its shock-value. Partly this was a matter of familiarity and the passage of time. As the masterpieces of the teens and twenties aged, they were no longer ‘modern’, at least in chronology, and the term ‘modernist art’ arose to indicate that this art had become a chapter in art and literary history that had come to a close; it could no longer simply be ‘modern’.

However, the new forms that had arisen after the Second World War, which were perceived as no longer the same as what sometimes was called ‘high modernism’ (meaning the masterpieces of the early days, in literature the works of Joyce, Eliot, Pound, Yeats, Woolf, and Faulkner, for example), needed a name of their own, and slowly, unevenly, the term ‘postmodern’ arose to describe a highly eclectic group of art works no longer modernist, but lacking any obvious unifying features to suggest a more assertive name. By the 1980s postmodernism had become a common term, and a body of theory describing some of its main features had developed.¹ These developments initiated a debate over whether a second aesthetic revolution, related to but surpassing the earlier modernist revolt, had occurred in the twentieth century. Was modernism superseded by a new set of aesthetic practices which everyone seemed pleased to call by the name of postmodernism, whether they agreed it existed or not?

To help clarify such issues of periodization, I developed a concept I call the aesthetic paradigm, a term intended to merge the aesthetic theory of Theodor Adorno (and other Frankfurt School practitioners) with the pragmatic sociology of science of Thomas Kuhn (Grady 1991: 8–27, 74–86). Precisely because the Frankfurt School texts tend to speak of ‘modern art’ as a unitary practice from the Enlightenment to the twentieth century, without much regard for the traditional periodizations of cultural history, I thought it needed refinement to account for the shifts in aesthetic form from neoclassicism to the present. A distinction is especially important to make between long-term modernity (in force since at least the eighteenth century) and twentieth-century modernism, which acts, as we saw previously, both as the fulfilment of and as a fundamental challenge to modernization and modernity.

First, the Frankfurt School component: for Adorno and his colleagues, modern art emerged in a series of fundamental cultural dissociations enacted by the Enlightenment² and constituting long-term modernity (Adorno 1992 and 1997). Art had an antagonistic, or at least potentially critical, relation to the rest of modernity from its beginnings; it was a development marked by the epochal replacement of pre-modern cosmology and myth by Enlightenment rationality. Crucially for Frankfurt theory, however, modern rationality is ‘split’ or differentiated into separate, mutually independent spheres: the technical or instrumental, the ethical, and the aesthetic, as Habermas put it in summarizing and developing Horkheimer and Adorno’s theory (Habermas 1979). In this scheme, then, aesthetics is a potential space of critical rationality in opposition to the dominant technical or instrumental reason of economics and politics.

For Horkheimer and Adorno, instrumental reason was the most dynamic and most problematic form of rationality within modernity; it denoted the shared, value-free rationality characteristic of modern scientific technology, positivist social science, Machiavellian and Leninist politics, and the profit-motivated decision-making of capitalism (1977: 3–42). In the absence of the constraints (religious, mythical, material, and social) which in pre-modern cultures had held all of these systems in check or prevented them from becoming self-subsisting, modernity emerged as that era of human history in which a whole new logic of human oppression had arisen. It was a new kind of social order dominated by impersonal systems and institutions which held sway over the societies which had created them.³ The result was, as Marx put it, like the predicament of the sorcerer’s apprentice: society had created forces it was unable to control (Marx and Engels 1974: 72).

As twentieth-century history developed, Horkheimer’s and Adorno’s earlier hopes for an emancipatory working-class revolution faded. Art, along with critical rationality more generally, became for them the chief remaining locus of resistance within modernity to what their successor Habermas has termed the colonization of daily life by the impersonal systems of modernity. Art – sensuous, passionate, complex, multivalent and polysemous, resistant to reduction and instrumentalization – was constituted in early modernity as a kind of reservoir of the meaning-giving, emotion-imbued rituals and practices of pre-modern culture. Thus, art in modernity is in many ways archaic and paradoxically anti-modern. But unlike pre-modern religious rituals or mythical artifacts, modern art is secular and autonomous from the surviving religious and political ideologies; it is a sphere of a fragmented modernized culture and thus capable of preserving and containing utopian counter-memories hostile to the dynamics of instrumental reason and capitalist economics – although it is equally capable of serving as an ideological justification of and/or harmless escape from the society which creates it (Adorno: 1992 and 1997).

This Frankfurt analysis is a powerful one, but, as I indicated previously, it needs to take into account the dynamics of art that have given it a history of constant change and development over the last four centuries. The Frankfurt theory, in short, needs to be differentiated to account for the differences as well as the similarities of the inter-related major post-Enlightenment art movements. Changing styles and forms in art, in fact, are a necessity within the dynamics of modernity. On the one hand the capitalist market, with its demands for the ever-new, creates one kind of powerful stimulus for change. On the other hand, there is the desire to assert new kinds of dissent and rebellion as older forms age and become contained. In short, Frankfurt aesthetic theory requires modification to do justice to the dynamics of change characteristic of aesthetic forms in the West after the Enlightenment. And it is in this connectio...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contributors
• General editor’s preface
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1. Modernity, Modernism and Postmodernism In the Twentieth-Century’s Shakespeare
• 2. ‘To Kill a King’: The Modern Politics of Bardicide
• 3. The Problem of Professionalism In Twentieth-Century Stagings of Hamlet
• 4. Translation At the Intersections of History
• 5. Women’s Work and the Performance of Shakespeare At the Royal Shakespeare Company
• 6. Shakespearean Performativity
• 7. Heresies of Style: Some Paradoxes of Soviet Ukrainian Modernism
• 8. ‘Lice In Fur’: The Aesthetics of Cheek and Shakespearean Production Strategy
• Bibliography