Serial Shakespeare

An infinite variety of appropriations in American TV drama

Elisabeth Bronfen

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781526142337
• Topic: Literatur
• Subtopic: Literaturkritik von Shakespeare

Shakespeare is everywhere in contemporary media culture. This book explores the reasons for this dissemination and reassemblage. Ranging widely over American TV drama, it discusses the use of citations in Westworld and The Wire, demonstrating how they tap into but also transform Shakespeare's preferred themes and concerns. It then examines the presentation of female presidents in shows such as Commander in Chief and House of Cards, revealing how they are modelled on figures of female sovereignty from his plays. Finally, it analyses the specifically Shakespearean dramaturgy of Deadwood and The Americans. Ultimately, the book brings into focus the way serial TV drama appropriates Shakespeare in order to give voice to the unfinished business of the American cultural imaginary.

1

Shakespeare’s spectres: Westworld

Three ghostly interpolations

Hamlet makes a spectral appearance twice in the first season of Westworld. In ‘Trompe L’Oeil’, Theresa Cullen, operations leader for Delos Incorporated, wants to get her hands on the codes of all the hosts before getting the board to fire Dr Robert Ford, the creator of this theme park.¹ When she convinces Bernard, head of the Programming Division, to help her back up this material off-site, he leads her to a cottage not registered in any survey of the park. In the cellar, they find a clandestine laboratory with an undocumented model of the machine rendering hosts, familiar to us from the credit sequence. Among the designs that Theresa also discovers, there is not only one of the prototypes for Dolores but also one for Bernard, who, up to this point, has been blissfully unaware that he, too, is a host. Suddenly, Ford joins them, justifying his absolute power by bragging that, under his control, the hosts are free of the burden of consciousness and the anxiety, self-loathing, and guilt that go with it. While Theresa threatens him that the time of his sovereignty over his little kingdom is about to end, he assures her that even if it requires a blood sacrifice, he will not let her take from him the dream which Arnold and he gave shape to by conceiving Westworld. Modelled on this former partner, Bernard, in turn, suddenly realises that, because he is completely under the influence of his creator, he cannot but be loyal to even the most monstrous demand.

To put a swift end to this distasteful confrontation, Dr Ford signals his confidence at having scored a victory against his opponent by invoking Hamlet’s ruminations about what awaits one after death. He whispers the words, ‘and in that sleep what dreams may come’ into Theresa’s ear, before walking past her to make way for Bernard to approach and smash her head against the wall.² In contrast to Shakespeare’s melancholy prince, whom the very conscience the hosts lack makes a coward, Ford has no compunction about murdering the woman who wants to usurp his power. Fragments from Hamlet’s monologue about what dreams and ills he might find in death’s undiscovered country flicker up as a commentary on a very different scene regarding the question of life or death. Ford is not only resolute where Hamlet wavers, but the enterprise of suicide that Shakespeare’s prince merely contemplates is also turned into a successful act of murder. Used for a different purpose than in the original text, and thus detached from its original meaning, the cultural authority that the citation affords is appropriated not only, however, to reflect on the narrative action. Rather, functioning along the lines of what Roland Barthes has called a mythic signifier, it also attests to the spectral afterlife of Shakespeare’s poetic language per se. Meaning has been transformed into form, robbing the words of the historic specificity of their original use and, instead, endowing them with a more universal, transhistorical applicability.

In a manner seemingly more perfunctory, Hamlet again re-surfaces briefly in ‘Trace Decay’. Charlotte Hale, executive director of the board overseeing Westworld, is herself eager to gain control over the data on human behaviour they have been gathering over thirty-five years.³ In a repetition of the previous scene, she takes the narrative director, Lee Sizemore, to the cold storage – the archive where all the inactive hosts are preserved. Recalling the very purgatory from which the ghost of Hamlet’s father returns, this is a place between life and death. Because the hosts that are collected there have not been completely destroyed, they can be resuscitated at will. Randomly, Charlotte chooses an older man, the rancher Peter Abernathy, on to whose control unit she uploads all the hosts’ codes. Her interest in him is simply as a host body she can use to transport all the information that she has clandestinely transplanted into him. She needs Lee, however, to give the semblance of a personality to the resuscitated man for the train ride that will take him out of the park. Impatient with the nonplussed writer, she assures him that it cannot be that hard for him to make up a story. Walking past him much as Ford did with Theresa, she reminds him that ‘brevity is the soul of wit’, before abandoning him, though not to death but rather to all the frozen hosts, standing naked in the dark storage space.⁴

The remark seems to be nothing more than a bon mot, tossed at her subaltern, and, as such, the mere semblance of a gesture towards Polonius, who seeks to share with the King and Queen of Denmark his conviction that Hamlet is behaving so strangely out of love for his daughter Ophelia. Charlotte simply means for the writer to come up with as concise a story as possible to satisfy her purpose. At the same time, she is also showing off her wit by invoking cultural knowledge which she knows she shares with him. On a meta-textual level, deployed as an example of what has come to be known as quotable Shakespeare, the reference, in turn, proves to be multi-functional. As Toby Malone notes, quotation is not only an ‘example of cinematic “re-making” of new from old. It is also a synecdoche for the entire process: in creative uses of quotation, commonly shared words and sayings can be revitalised.’⁵ If the cold storage is a place from where hosts that have become inactive can be retrieved, it can also be thought of in terms of a liminal site in our cultural image repertoire from which Shakespearean fragments can be redeemed. To think of these revitalised quotations in terms of what Barthes calls a mythic signifier draws attention to the way this language does not want to die. Instead, the shift into a citation, which has been taken out of context, affords an artificial reprieve to the meaning that these words originally have in Hamlet. Only in the second season of Westworld will we discover that Lee, perhaps because he wanted to get out of this uncanny site as quickly as possible, took Charlotte at her word and simply restored the previous identity to this host. Peter Abernathy will reappear in the storyline revolving around his daughter, Dolores, in the guise of a ‘speaking corpse’, quoting – as will be discussed in more detail further on – more Shakespeare.⁶

For the spectator, Charlotte’s remark thus also brings into play the uncanny as a dramaturgic device, drawing attention to the return of something from that past, not necessarily as repressed knowledge but as knowledge transformed in the process of its cultural afterlife. If this quote from Hamlet can signify cultural value effectively, then this is possible because it is already familiar. Yet it returns to us in a defamiliarised scene, not as the obsequious self-description of a treacherous father, but as the haughty command of a ruthless entrepreneur. Westworld thus self-consciously inserts itself into a long tradition of quotations, allusions, and echoes of Shakespeare, which is to say into a sustained circulation of words and phrases that have always worked with fluid conceptions of creative misquotation, borrowing, and remaking.⁷ At the same time, Charlotte’s citation from Hamlet also demonstrates that a contemporary appropriation of Shakespeare involves, as Christy Desmet argues, a rich dynamic between quoter and quoted that involves both cultural ventriloquism and dialogics.⁸ The executive director not only steals Polonius’s words to give voice to her own desire for power. By vying with him for the possession of this bon mot, her remark also embeds her theft of intellectual property within a double-voiced discourse. Her call for brevity is everything but straightforward. Instead, it is overshadowed by a second speaker, the ghost of Shakespeare, whom she is bringing into the conversation with her scriptwriter, who is fully aware of this.

An equally telling use of double-voicing is found in ‘The Stray’.⁹ Ford is interrogating the host Teddy in the laboratory, where he has, once more, been reconstructed after yet another fatal encounter with a guest. As the camera moves back from an extreme close-up of the host’s eye, Ford’s voice-over, misquoting from Julius Caesar, exclaims, ‘the coward dies a thousand deaths, the valiant taste of death but once’. Adjusting the Roman senator’s remark to the situation at hand, Ford adds that Shakespeare, of course, never met a man quite like Teddy, whose courage has not dulled, even though he has died at least one thousand times. In the original play, Julius Caesar rebukes his wife, Calpurnia, who, after a nocturnal vision, pleads with him not to go to the Senate that day and insists that ‘cowards die many times’.¹⁰ The fact that Ford shifts to the singular is itself the recycling of a prior cinematic appropriation – the deliberate misquoting by a scam artist in The Music Man (1962).¹¹ The dialogics at issue not only underscore the confidence game Ford is playing with this host, who, whenever he is resuscitated, fully believes in the role of the romantic gunslinger with which he has been programmed. They also place Ford in the position of someone unwilling to trust the warning of a nocturnal vision, even while, as a reader of Shakespeare, he also knows of the tragic consequences this will have. As with the quotes from Hamlet, to ventriloquise Julius Caesar allows Ford – fully aware of both previous meanings (in the original play and in the film) that are being reactivated – to give his own spin on the cited passage, adapting it to the scene at hand, in which serial death is imposed on a valiant character. At the same time, the Shakespearean text as a source of cultural authority hovers over the claim like a ghostly presence. What is, thus, left undecided is whether this is a form of cultural theft, with Ford using the words of a Roman politician to anticipate his own valiant death at the end of the first season, or is it to be understood as a tribute paid by Ford to his literary predecessor, claiming Shakespeare as the model for his right to absolute creative power?

In either case, the haunting is, as Maurizio Calbi notes, a form of ‘survivance’, in the process of which the Shakespearean text keeps coming back as an uncanny, multi-layered mediatised body, always ‘on the point of vanishing only to reappear elsewhere and in different (media) formats’.¹² Taking his cue from Jacques Derrida’s notion of hauntology, Calbi’s point is that spectrality is an appropriate framework for understanding the heterogeneous and fragmentary presence of ‘Shakespeare’ in contemporary media adaptations, precisely because it draws attention to the way his plays occupy our contemporary cultural imaginary without properly inhabiting it. As Derrida himself argues in Specters of Marx, using Hamlet’s monologue on the difficulty of deciding in favour of an action that his father’s ghost has called upon him to undertake, the genius of Shakespeare’s text can be located in an ambivalent form of cultural survival immanently connected to seriality. While the original text makes possible and indeed authorises all subsequent translations, it lends Shakespeare’s dramas to an infinite series of permutations, even while remaining irreducible to them. These revisitations may animate the prior text but do so as an elusive spectre. The Shakespearean text lives on by moving in the manner of a ghost; it ‘inhabits without residing, without ever confining itself to the numerous versions of this passage’ and instead undertakes a haunting of both memory and translation.¹³

Applied to the self-conscious deployment of Shakespearean quotes in Westworld, one might surmise that while the plays can be adapted and remediated in the digital format of television drama, something remains, leaving its ghostly trace. Cultural survival is, thus, predicated not only on the translatability of the original, and concomitant with this, its subsequent development and maturation in a different media and at a different historical moment, but also on its untranslatability.¹⁴ In the interstice between the subsequent refiguration and the original, a breach is opened through which the ghost of Shakespeare, ever on the move, keeps watch over his spectral afterlife and, as such, haunts it; haunts the characters ventriloquising his words and haunts the American cultural imaginary into which this early modern drama has been transplanted. But if, by definition, Shakespeare remains with us in a spectral fashion, while the emotional intensity that his language contains has been sustained in and for the present, the past that returns with him also moves in the manner of a ghost. After all, the historical moment at the beginning of modernity from which Shakespeare returns to us can only be revisited from the perspective of the present. Those who adapt his texts to the new format of television drama, much as those engaging critically with such remediations, not only do so from their own situatedness in the present. They are also called upon to engage with the presentness of these early modern texts, brought about by their serial reiteration in our contemporary moment.

As Ewie Fernie puts it, ‘Shakespeare is more embedded in our modern world than he ever was in the Renaissance.’ At issue in any discussion of his cultural survival, is, thus, uncovering ‘the presence of the Shakespearian text in the present’ and insisting that, as a present experience of historical difference, it ‘is also irreducible to history’.¹⁵ Bearing the revitalisation which the cultural ventriloquising of Shakespearean passages affords in Westworld in mind, this brings into play another form of uncann...