Shakespeare and Celebrity Cultures

Jennifer Holl

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN:
  9781032050591
• eBook ISBN:
  9781000422214
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: World History

This book argues that Shakespeare and various cultures of celebrity have enjoyed a ceaselessly adaptive, symbiotic relationship since the final decade of the sixteenth century, through which each entity has contributed to the vitality and adaptability of the other.

In five chapters, Jennifer Holl explores the early modern culture of theatrical celebrity and its resonances in print and performance, especially in Shakespeare's interrogations of this emerging phenomenon in sonnets and histories, before moving on to examine the ways that shifting cultures of stage, film, and digital celebrity have perpetually recreated the Shakespeare, or even the #shakespeare, with whom audiences continue to interact.

Situated at an intersection of multiple critical conversations, this book will be of great interest to scholars and graduate students of Shakespeare and Shakespearean appropriations, early modern theater, and celebrity studies.

1 Stars in deed

DOI: 10.4324/9780367808976-2

Amid the sumptuous display and elaborate pageantry of Anne Boleyn’s coronation procession in Act 4 of Shakespeare and Fletcher’s Henry VIII (All Is True), a group of unnamed gentlemen gathers to marvel at the illustrious individuals parading before them. With “the list/ Of those that claim their offices this day” in hand (4.1.14–15), the onlookers narrate the noble march across the stage with unbound glee:

SECOND GENTLEMAN: A royal train, believe me. These I know.

Who’s that that bears the sceptre?

FIRST GENTLEMAN: Marquis Dorset.

And that, the Earl of Surrey with the rod.

SECOND GENTLEMAN: A bold brave gentleman. That should be

The Duke of Suffolk?

FIRST GENTLEMAN: ‘Tis the same: High Steward.

SECOND GENTLEMAN: And that, my lord of Norfolk?

FIRST GENTLEMAN:

Yes.
(4.1.37–42)

When the Second Gentleman finally spies Anne, he cries out, “Heaven bless thee!/ Thou hast the sweetest face I ever looked on” (4.1.42–43), before inquiring about the duchess, barons, and countesses fortunate enough to travel alongside her. Enraptured by the dazzling spectacle, he proclaims, “These are stars indeed” (4.1.54), to which his cynical companion adds, “And sometimes falling ones” (4.1.55).

This brief but highly charged exchange between raptly attentive gentlemen spectators offers a provocative point of entry into Shakespeare’s long and dynamic relationship with celebrity—most notably, in the remarkable, two-word construction the gawking gentlemen employ in designation of the noble entourage: stars indeed. While the term star as denoting “a very famous or popular actor, singer, or other entertainer” emerged only in 1751, the term had long functioned as a signifier of exceptional renown, tracing its roots to the classical notion that the gods could transform certain exalted mortals’ souls, after death, into new stars (OED Online n.d.(c), s.v. star, n. 4c, 1d). In Book 15 of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, for example, Jupiter commands Venus to fetch the soul “from Caesar’s murdered corpse” in order to:

make it a bright star,

So that great Julius, a god divine,

From his high throne in heaven may ever shine.

(Ovid, 838–841)

Chaucer revivified this classical tradition in The House of Fame when the narrator, pondering what seems his imminent death, asks if Jove will “stellifye” him (Chaucer, 586), to which his eagle companion quickly assures, “Joves is nat theraboute […] To make of thee as yet a sterre” (597, 599). Shakespeare, too, makes regular employ of this classical trope: in 1 Henry VI, Bedford mourns the death of King Henry V and declares, “A far more glorious star thy soul will make/ Than Julius Caesar” (1.1.55–56); the Chorus’s epilogue in Henry V apologizes for its imperfect tribute to “This star of England” (Ep. 6); Pericles proclaims on word of King Simonides’ death, “Heav’n make a star of him!” (22.102); and at the conclusion to Henry VIII, Cramner predicts the baby Elizabeth’s glorious reign and eventual demise by prophesizing that upon her death, she will “star-like rise as great in fame as she was, /And so stand fix’d” (5.4.46–47).

In the early English tradition, then, as in Ovid, the label star functioned not only as a marker of brilliant renown, but a strictly posthumous honor as well.¹ Thus, the Second Gentleman’s assignation of stars upon the mobile and very much in-the-flesh parading nobles of Henry VIII offers up a strangely polytemporal and metatheatric twist on an otherwise fairly consistent trope. For the play’s 1613 theatrical audience, many of the individuals enacted in the royal procession might well have been considered stars in the classical sense: their lives extinguished, their names and exploits continued to decorate the annals of English history. The Duke of Suffolk, Charles Brandon, for example, was a two-time commander of the English army and, according to the seventeenth-century antiquarian William Dugdale, “a person comely of stature and high of courage” (Dugdale 1675, 299). But the First Gentleman’s sly addendum that these stars are “sometimes falling ones” complicates these figures’ easy categorization as stars in the classical sense. For Ovid, and generally for Shakespeare as well, the honor was an indissoluble one: Jupiter places Caesar in the heavens so that he may “ever shine,” and Cramner’s prediction about the newborn Elizabeth later in the play stresses the permanence of her celestial positioning, as she will “so stand fix’d.” To the contrary, the First Gentleman calls attention to the liquid nature of the nobles’ fame, though he can only do so by stepping outside the diegetic space of the play to acknowledge a historical reality unavailable within. With a rhetorical wink to his contemporary playgoers, his quip calls up the eighty-year historical span between the 1553 event and its 1613 theatricalization, during which several of the processional nobles would descend quite sharply from their elevated positions to become relegated to the margins of English history. The “bold brave” Earl of Surrey, Henry Howard, would be accused of treason and generally regarded as a proud fool; he fell swiftly out of the king’s favor and was beheaded at his order in 1547. Queen Mary would likewise have the Marquis Dorset’s head for treason in 1554. Of course, the procession’s most luminous star, Anne, enjoyed a complicated legacy during the play’s initial staging, as her reputation remained haunted by charges of adultery while she was simultaneously hailed as the mother of one of England’s most beloved monarchs.² All of these figures’ stars, unlike the baby Elizabeth’s, are unfixed and, in fact, quite certain to decline from their processional peak.

The First Gentleman’s playfully sardonic, yet indisputable observation warrants a brusque “No more of that” from his companion (4.1.57), as his cold dousing of historical certitude dampens the Second Gentleman’s otherwise unrestrained delight in the pageantry. Played off as an unsavory joke, the pointed rejoinder also calls attention to the gentlemen’s liminal position both within and beyond the spectacle, at once both the onstage contemporaries to the marvelous procession they behold and, as evidenced by the First Gentleman’s prescient foreknowledge, the savvy contemporaries to the theatrical audience with whom they share information unavailable to the onstage processors. It is from this temporal and theatrical limbo that the Second Gentleman proclaims the parading nobles to be stars indeed, adding a fitting qualifier to Shakespeare’s only reference to live, staged individuals as stars. For as much as indeed may function adverbially to affirm the assessment—that is, these are truly and assuredly stars—it also simultaneously subverts the designation by declaring these stars to be in deed, or “in action, in actual practice” (OED Online n.d.(a), s.v. deed, n. 5b). Here, the modifying indeed assigns a definitionally impossible vitality to a strictly posthumous, fixed honor, but one particularly compatible with the stars’ fleshly, mobile presence and mutable legacies. Unlike Ovid’s, the procession’s stars are yet active, motile, and fluid, with the First Gentleman’s barbed retort all but negating the affirming potential of indeed with the irrefutable historical realities of in deed. ³ In pairing these linguistic incompatibilities, stars indeed, much like our contemporary living legend, becomes an oxymoron, allowing the Second Gentleman to enthusiastically exclaim in self-conscious contradiction what no existent word can aptly denote: a living star.

In The Invention of Celebrity, Lilti notes that long before the term celebrity, as denoting famous persons, made its nineteenth-century lexical debut, the “topic of celebrity,” if not the specific title, emerged discursively through various media to “testify to a collective effort to think about a new phenomenon and provide the foundations, narrative or linguistic, with which individuals tried to navigate the strangeness of the social world” (Lilti 2017, 7–8). Lilti locates the dawn of this “new phenomenon” in the eighteenth century, but as I offer here, stars indeed provides one of many early modern examples of a discourse on the topic of celebrity. To be sure, the topic of celebrity, even and perhaps especially in the absence of a ready signifier to encapsulate it, is a complex and sprawling concept that speaks to a conflation of social, cultural, and economic interactions and developments that meet in the body of a famous individual. However, the concise, two-word construction stars indeed and the highly theatrical context within which it is spoken isolate and juxtapose a few particularly salient strains of its early modern theatrical incarnation: namely, the magnified and exalted presence of stars, the striking contemporaneity and fluidity embedded within their in-deed status, the theatrical context of the proclamation, and the vital role that the audience of gentlemen plays in their assignation. In its reorientation of a posthumous designation of eternal renown to a contemporary assessment of living, momentarily spectacularized individuals, stars indeed restructures a paradigm of enduring, celestial distinction into one of fleeting, terrestrial fame.

As this chapter explores, the oxymoronic construction, stars indeed, participates in a long tradition in the discourse of celebrity in its juxtaposition of competing tensions in order to capture through aggregate a process that resists easy definition. Like Alberoni’s “powerless elite” (Alberoni 1962), Schickel’s “intimate strangers” (Schickel 1985), or Van Krieken’s “democratized aristocrats” (Van Krieken 2012, 8), Shakespeare and Fletcher pair incongruous elements in order to capture a special convergence of forces that transforms live, mortal bodies into stars. In this way, stars indeed holds a mirror to a larger cultural junction of competing forces taking place on the stage and proliferating beyond it—a momentary fusion of tensions that both enraptures and collectivizes an audience around the amplified significance of a spectacularized individual. This chapter aims to demonstrate and distill the aggregated theatrical dynamics that stars indeed both responds to and names: the dazzling presence that enraptures, the wonder and speculation such presence provokes, the intimacy of audience-actor exchange, and the manner by which audiences collectivize in their communal experience in the presence of their contemporary stars. As this chapter asserts, stars indeed is part of a wide-ranging early modern conversation on the topic of celebrity taking place on and around Shakespeare’s theater.

Star presence/star absence

When the term star, as denoting famous performers, first appeared in print in the mid-eighteenth century, it arose from the English stage, specifically in the context of the “Theatric star” (OED Online n.d.(c), s.v. star, n. 4c). In 1761, David Garrick was hailed as “a Star of the first magnitude” (Victor 1761, 62), and again in 1765 as a “bright star” who “flew with the rapidity of lightning through the town” (Memoirs 1765, 224). Embedded within the designation of person as star is a forceful assertion of presence that outshines others in the star’s midst—an exuded presence more lustrously magnified, more powerfully magnetic, and more keenly felt by audiences. “Being a star,” writes Richard Schechner in Performance Theory, “is to be a person whose very presence transcends whatever activity s/he may be absorbed in” (Schechner 1988, 232). The theatrical celebrity’s pr...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1. Stars in deed
• 2. A commodity of good names
• 3. The celebrity's two bodies
• 4. A Shakespeare that looks like Shakespeare
• 5. #Shakespeare
• Index