Studying Shakespeare Adaptation

From Restoration Theatre to YouTube

Pamela Bickley, Jenny Stevens

• Publisher: The Arden Shakespeare
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781350068643
• eBook ISBN: 9781350068650
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism of Shakespeare
• Index: Literature

Shakespeare's plays have long been open to reimagining and reinterpretation, from John Fletcher's riposte to The Taming of the Shrew in 1611 to present day spin-offs in a whole range of media, including YouTube videos and Manga comics. This book offers a clear route map through the world of adaptation, selecting examples from film, drama, prose fiction, ballet, the visual arts and poetry, and exploring their respective political and cultural interactions with Shakespeare's plays. 36 specific case studies are discussed, three for each of the 12 plays covered, offering additional guidance for readers new to this important area of Shakespeare studies. The introduction signals key adaptation issues that are subsequently explored through the chapters on individual plays, including Shakespeare's own adaptive art and its Renaissance context, production and performance as adaptation, and generic expectation and transmedial practice. Organized chronologically, the chapters cover the most commonly studied plays, allowing readers to dip in to read about specific plays or trace how technological developments have fundamentally changed ways in which Shakespeare is experienced. With examples encompassing British, North American, South and East Asian, European and Middle Eastern adaptations of Shakespeare's plays, the volume offers readers a wealth of insights drawn from different ages, territories and media.

1

Titus Andronicus

If part of the pleasure of adaptations comes from the disruption of the familiar, then Titus Andronicus, one of the least known of Shakespeare’s plays, is a brave choice for adapters. Focusing primarily on the role of Aaron, this chapter considers how three artists, each working in a different century, have risen to this recreative challenge.

Edward Ravenscroft, Titus Andronicus, or the Rape of Lavinia (1678)

Ravenscroft’s Titus Andronicus first appeared on the stage in 1678, contributing to an already well-established area of the Restoration theatre repertoire: the Shakespearean adaptation. In the 1660s, William Davenant had initiated the Shakespearean revival with The Law Against Lovers (1662), a mash-up of Measure for Measure and Much Ado About Nothing, followed by radically altered versions of Macbeth (1664) and The Tempest, or the Enchanted Island (1667), written with John Dryden. As theatrical conditions recovered from the dark days of the interregnum and confidence returned to the dramatist community, so playwrights began to turn their attention to some of Shakespeare’s then (and still now) less popular plays, with Thomas Shadwell’s Timon of Athens, the Man-Hater and Dryden’s Troilus and Cressida, or Truth Found Too Late both appearing within a year or so of Ravenscroft’s Titus. The paratexts of the first published edition of Ravenscroft’s Titus (1687) provide valuable insights into the era’s theatrical tastes and its approach to adaptation. The playwright’s address to the reader has proven especially interesting to scholars:

I have been told by some anciently conversant with the Stage, that it was not Originally his, but brought by a private Author to be Acted, and he only gave some Master-touches to one or two of the Principal Parts or Characters; this I am apt to believe, because ’tis the most incorrect and indigested piece in all his Workes; It seems rather a heap of Rubbish then [sic] a Structure.

Here, the blame for Titus’ perceived infelicities is placed on an unspecified ‘private Author’, at once protecting the good name of Shakespeare and sparking off an authorship debate which continues still. As Barbara Murray observes, second-generation Restoration adapters refer to Shakespeare ‘almost always with respect’ (xxv), a tendency exhibited in a Prologue to Ravenscroft’s Titus that the author claimed had been lost in the feverish days of the Popish Plot. First brought to light in Gerard Langbaine’s survey An Account of the English Dramatick Poets (1691), the Prologue declares:

To day the Poet does not fear your Rage,

Shakespear by him reviv’d now treads the Stage:

Under his sacred Lawrels he sits down

Safe, from the blast of any Criticks Frown.

Like other Poets, he’ll not proudly scorn

To own, that he but winnow’d Shakespear’s Corn;

So far he was from robbing him of’s Treasure,

That he did add his own, to make full Measure.

(Langbaine 465)

Although of uncertain provenance, the Prologue’s depiction of the adapter as having merely ‘winnow’d Shakespear’s Corn’ is in accord with Ravenscroft’s relatively conservative treatment of the Shakespearean text, at least in the first half of the play.

One aspect of Ravenscroft’s adaptation that is far from preservative, however, is its foregrounding of the role of Aaron (spelled Aron in the printed text). Where Shakespeare’s Moor stands on stage as a mute prisoner for much of the first act, Ravenscroft’s loses no time in winning the confidence of the emperor, enabling him and the queen to plot their vengeful strategies as court insiders. Nonetheless, Ravenscroft underscores how Aaron’s Moorish identity renders him vulnerable to the white majority, his consciousness seemingly moulded by their racism:

Hence abject thoughts that I am black and foul,

And all the Taunts of Whites that call me Fiend,

I still am Lovely in an Empress Eyes,

(2.1, p. 15)

Jonathan Bate reads these invented three lines as introducing ‘the possibility that [Aaron’s] villainy is a cry for attention, that […] stems from a desire to be loved’, drawing a parallel with the Bastard in Shakespeare’s King Lear (Bate, Titus 50). While the parallel might hold true psychologically, the rhetorical force of Edmund’s cry for attention, especially in his memorable first soliloquy, is nowhere matched by Ravenscroft’s Aaron, not least because some of his most linguistically powerful lines in the pre-text have been omitted, stripping him of the eloquence associated with his biblical namesake. Aaron’s periphrasis depicting the sun’s movements is cut, along with his exuberant promise to ‘be bright, and shine in pearl and gold’ (Tit 1.1.518), an omission which denies him the glittering energy of his Shakespearean forerunner; instead, as if confined by his own physical nature, he becomes a ‘black threatning Cloud’ (2.1, p. 15). If, as Ayanna Thompson argues, Ravenscroft’s attenuation of Aaron’s verbal prowess is ‘a type of linguistic and theatrical castration’ (Performing 60), it is also a means of making Shakespeare’s words ‘fit’ for a late-seventeenth-century audience. If Ravenscroft had no qualms about exposing Lavinia to the spectator’s gaze with ‘[l]oose hair, and Garments disorder’d as ravisht’ (3.1, p. 26), as promised in the play’s titillating subtitle, he protects the perceived sensibilities of the Restoration ear through a selective phrasal fumigation, excising, for example, several of Aaron’s obscene puns and metaphors; he makes no reference to ‘steal[ing] a shive’ from ‘a cut loaf’ (Tit 1.1.587) when planning the rape of Lavinia, nor to ‘trimming’ her body after it (Tit 5.1.94).

Close on a century separates Ravenscroft’s Titus from Shakespeare’s, years in which the transatlantic slave trade had become an established part of England’s colonial ambitions. As Virginia Mason Vaughan explains, ‘[d]uring the 1670s the average Londoner was exposed frequently to people of color’, a developing familiarity which brought with it fears of the ‘biological pollution that accompanied overseas ventures’ (Performing 141, 147). Certainly, Ravenscroft’s drama throws a disturbing light on the consequences of miscegenation. Responses to the ‘Babe of darkness’ (5.1, p. 53) are noticeably more damning than in Shakespeare’s script, with the infant repeatedly defined solely in terms of colour. But if the bi-racial figure of a ‘black Imp’ (5.1, p. 39) born to a white mother ‘Tup’d by a Goat’ (5.1, p. 51) disturbed and alarmed Ravenscroft’s audiences, the brutal killings of child and father, enacted almost simultaneously, seem designed to put any such feelings to rest. Aaron is tortured on a rack and burnt to death on stage, a dramatic horror which exploited to the full the tastes and affordances of Restoration theatre. As Anthony Barthelemy remarks:

[t]echnical advances in stage properties as well as architectural changes in the theaters themselves made possible the staging of spectacles. Whether it was because of these technical advances or the love of spectacle […] popular tastes in the 1670s and 1680s favored plays that depicted brutal tortures and grotesque murders. This accounts, in part, for Aaron’s being racked and immolated.

(102)

Exactly how such a grim spectacle would have been mounted remains, and is likely to remain, a matter for conjecture (see B. Murray 469), though it is surely the apex of the adaptation’s textual ‘infidelity’ and the chief reason why early-twentieth-century commentators, intent on upbraiding those who had dared to tamper with the works of the national poet, accused Ravenscroft of piling on ‘extra horrors’ (Odell, vol.1, 46), adding to ‘the gruesomeness of a play already nauseously bloody’ (Kilbourne 127).

The complex task of judging the relative bloodiness of Titus in the Renaissance and Restoration versions involves weighing up the extent to which audiences witness the mutilation of sentient bodies or the gruesome insentient aftermath. Such an evaluation reveals how, in Ravenscroft’s adaptation, the live black body in pain is more the object of spectatorial gaze than any white counterpart: Titus’ hand is severed off-stage, and while it is true that the audience sees ‘the heads and hands of Dem. and Chir. hanging up against the wall’ (5.1, p. 54), it is shielded from the sight of their throats being cut while they are still very much alive (‘He cuts their throats’, Tit 5.2). And while in the printed Shakespearean texts Titus ‘Unveils Lavinia’ (Tit 5.3) before killing her, the Restoration script directs that her veil be removed only after she has died, thereby concealing her death pangs. Furthermore, as Ayanna Thompson explains:

Titus does not find it necessary to torture (either onstage or off) the two rapists, Chiron and Demetrius. […] Titus reads their white skins as transparent. In other words, their whiteness, their ability to blush and reveal the ‘close enacts and counsels of [their] hearts’ (4.2.120), renders them translucent and easy to understand. The onstage torture of Aaron demonstrates the fear of the opacity of blackness[.]

(Performing 63)

So if in the early stages of the play Saturninus raises the possibility that the black body is not essentially opaque (‘Dark is the Case, but thro’t a noble light / There Shines’, 2.1, pp. 10–11), any such possibility has been firmly rejected by the drama’s end.

If, as Thompson suggests, the racking of Aaron is a way to subject him to the ‘white/right gaze’ (Performing 64), it is also a means of testing and underlining his humanity. Ravenscroft follows Shakespeare in portraying Aaron’s love for his child as affecting proof of his capacity for tender feeling, and nowhere is this more explicitly demonstrated than in the torture scene:

MARCUS

Let any then forbear to move from’s place

’Till we have heard the Moors confession.

Though he laughs upon the Wheel and mocks our torments,

Yet I will try another Experiment.

[Marcus holds the Child as if he wou’d Kill it.]

Give me the Hellish infant: Moor, now speak

Or the young Kid goes after the Old Goat.

ARON

Save but the Child l’le tell thee wondrous things.

That highly may advantage you to hear.

TAMORA

Moor, speak not a word against my honour

To save the World.

ARON

Yes Empress to save that childe I will.

(5.1, p. 54)

Where the physical torments of the rack fail to force Aaron to confess his powerful secrets, the threat of harm to his son prompts him to offer them up unhesitatingly. Ultimately, though, the father fails to save his offspring. Strapped to the rack, he has no choice but to witness the murder of his son by its own mother – a violence in some ways as disturbing, if less remarked upon, as that inflicted upon the rack. If the killing of a baby on stage was by no means unprecedented (take, for example, the strangling of infants in John Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi) and – as far as we know – enacted with a doll rather than a live figure, it was nonetheless a dramatic act guaranteed to provoke a strong reaction from spectators. How far Ravenscroft’s audiences were surprised by the baby’s violent end is questionable. Whereas Shakespeare’s Tamora rejects her offspring, ordering Aaron, via the ill-fated Nurse, to ‘christen it with thy dagger’s point’ (Tit 4.2.72), Ravenscroft elects that the child die at the mother’s own hand. What makes the murder especially cruel is Tamora’s feigning of maternal affection in order to inflict one final act of revenge:

I have now no other Son, and shou’d

Be kind to it in Death, let it approach me then,

That I may leave with it my parting Kiss. –

[The Child is brought to the Empress, she Stabs it.]

Dye thou off-spring of that Blab-tongu’d Moor.

(5.1, p. 55)

Aaron responds to his child’s death in six blunt monosyllables: ‘Give it me – I’le eat it’ (5.1, p. 55), judged variously by critics as ‘the most remarkable line in this play’ (Friedman 12); ‘bizarre’ (Bate, Titus 52); ‘sublimely evil, supremely funny’ (Hughes 24); ‘one of the most remarkable turnabouts in all literature’ (Vaughan, Performing 140). How this outlandish line stands in relation to Aaron’s fatherhood and, by association, his humanity is an intriguing matter for speculation. Does it play into contemporary audiences’ stereotypes of African anthropophagy? Is it simply Aaron’s futile attempt to compete with the woman who has ‘out-done’ him in his ‘own Art’ (5.1, p. 55)? Or is it more psychologically complex: a kind of reverse birth, whereby the father takes into his own body for safekeeping a child born from the flesh of a mother who subsequently treats him as a tool for vengeance? While the Restoration rewriting eliminates the uncertainty which surrounds the child’s fate in Shakespeare’s version, the diverse meanings that radiate from Aaron’s outlandish response to its certain death linger at the play’s close, suggesting that Ravenscroft did not want his villain to entirely disappear in the bonfire’s punitive flames.

If nowadays Shakespeare’s Titus holds an increasingly secure foothold in theatrical repertoires, the same could not be said for its Restoration predecessor. In Woza Titus!, an account of producing Shakespeare’s Titus at the Market Theater, Johannesburg, Antony Sher recalls:

Greg read somewhere that a version of Titus exists with a happy ending! God knows what this entails – they sew back the hands? Tamora is vegetarian? – but anyway it was written by the Restoration playwright Edward Ravenscroft, who said of the original Shakespeare play: ‘More a piece of rubbish than a structure’.

(Sher and Doran 116)

Given that the ending of the Restoration Titus is anything but ‘happy’, Greg Doran appears to be confusing it with Nahum Tate’s cheerful revision of King Lear (1681). Such confusion suggests that while Ravenscroft’s adaptation is now firmly within the purview of academic critics, it resides more within the realm of theatrical myth for theatre practitioners.

Ira Aldridge as Aaron on the Victorian stage

A browse through most modern scholarly editions of Titus Andronicus will quickly discover a portrait of the African American actor, Ira Aldridge, in role as Aaron (see, for example, Bate, Titus 56). Typically placed between the Peacham drawing and a photograph of Peter Brook’s 1955 staging in introductory accounts of the play in performance, this 1850s engraving, developed from a daguerreotype, stands as one of relatively few iconic representations of Shakespeare’s first tragedy. The image is a striking one: Aaron stands in what could be read as a defensive pose, seemingly alert to any dangers that might threaten the life of the tiny infant sleeping at his feet; costumed in earrings, turban and animal skins, performative of an exotic alterity, he wields a scimitar almost half the length of his body, thereby connecting the actor’s stance directly with the textual quotation that stands at the foot of the engraving: ‘He dies upon my scimetar’s [sic] sharp point, / That touches this my first-born son and heir!’ This suturing of image and playtext encourages the viewer to accept what they see as a moment in theatrical time, captured with the scientific accuracy of photography; to do so, however, would be to overestimate the technological capabilities of photography in the mid-nineteenth century. While the exposure period required for the daguerreotype reduced rapidly over time (it was estimated to be between fifteen and thirty minutes in 1839, the year of its invention), it remained an obstacle to capturing an image instantaneously; add to this the unwieldy, heavy equipment required for the process itself and it becomes obvious that the Aldridge picture does not depict a ‘live’ stage moment. As the theatre historian David Mayer points out:

[m]any, indeed most, theatrical photographs before 1901 were made in a portrait photographer’s studio. What we see in the portrait is, at best, a reenactment, not a performance. Actors, by and large, brought their own stage costumes to the studio, but hand properties, apparent stage furnishings, and painted backcloths, some of which may appear to us as if they are appropriate to the role in question, are from the photographer’s studio and, especially before 1885, infrequently from the stage production in question.

(227)

Those readers leafing through current editions of Titus Andronicus need, then, to possess a knowledge of early photography if they are not to mistake a simulacru...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Contents 
• About this book
• Introduction
• 1 Titus Andronicus
• 2 Richard III
• 3 A Midsummer Night’s Dream
• 4 Romeo and Juliet
• 5 The Merchant of Venice
• 6 Hamlet
• 7 Othello
• 8 King Lear
• 9 Macbeth
• 10 Cymbeline
• 11 The Winter’s Tale
• 12 The Tempest
• Afterword
• References
• Index
• Imprint