The Re-Imagined Text

Shakespeare, Adaptation, and Eighteenth-Century Literary Theory

Jean I. Marsden

• Publisher: The University Press of Kentucky
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9780813185552
• Topic: Littérature
• Subtopic: Théâtre shakespearien

Shakespeare's plays were not always the inviolable texts they are almost universally considered to be today. The Restoration and eighteenth century committed what many critics view as one of the most subversive acts in literary history—the rewriting and restructuring of Shakespeare's plays.

Many of us are familiar with Nahum Tate's "audacious" adaptation of King Lear with its resoundingly happy ending, but Tate was only one of a score of playwrights who adapted Shakespeare's plays. Between 1660 and 1777, more than fifty adaptations appeared in print and on the stage, works in which playwrights augmented, substantially cut, or completely rewrote the original plays. The plays were staged with new characters, new scenes, new endings, and, underlying all this novelty, new words.

Why did this happen? And why, in the later eighteenth century, did it stop? These questions have serious implications regarding both the aesthetics of the literary text and its treatment, for the adaptations manifest the period's perceptions of Shakespeare. As such, they demonstrate an important evolution in the definition of poetic language, and in the idea of what constitutes a literary work.

In The Re-Imagined Text, Jean I. Marsden examines both the adaptations and the network of literary theory that surrounds them, thereby exploring the problems of textual sanctity and of the author's relationship to the text. As she demonstrates, Shakespeare's works, and English literature in general, came to be defined by their words rather than by the plots and morality on which the older aesthetic theory focused—a clear step toward our modern concern for the word and its varying levels of signification.

Part I
The Re-Imagined Text

1
Radical Adaptation

In 1660, theaters opened in London after an eighteen-year hiatus. The repertoire of these fledgling companies depended heavily on available Renaissance drama, in particular on Shakespeare and Beaumont and Fletcher.¹ Their plays, written at least two generations before, were readily at hand, although somewhat out of date for the new audiences which soon flocked to the theaters. No one denied that these plays had merit,² but they were decidedly old-fashioned, lacking, for example, the female roles made popular by the introduction of actresses. Not surprisingly, the elements which made Restoration plays successful began to appear in the adaptations of Shakespeare, as managers of the new theaters felt that many of Shakespeare’s plays had to be altered in order to make them marketable. Many of these changes are easily discernable attempts to fit Shakespeare into the conventions of Restoration staging, such as the addition of elaborate scenery and special effects,³ or the revision of characters so that they conformed to popular dramatic types.⁴

Moreover, the plays were linguistically out of date. Restoration audiences found their old-fashioned, even “barbaric,” fondness for wordplay distasteful, and playwrights sought to modernize this aspect of Shakespeare as well. Dramatic literature in particular was envisioned as performance, and the treatment of Shakespeare keyed to the effect upon a specifically Restoration audience. Authors such as Shakespeare and Milton might be revered, but their genius was situated not in the words they wrote but in larger issues such as character, plot, and even ideas—and these elements needed a bit of refurbishing so that the overall performance would be more effective.

For Restoration theater managers, Shakespeare’s works presented substantial problems. In the plays, the forces of good appear muddled: a princess uses harsh words to tell her father she loves him; a king behaves in a notably unkinglike fashion; the good and the vicious suffer alike. Bothered by these problems (as we are still today), the adapters used what we see as a radical approach to the problem—they rewrote the plays, reshaped the characters, and, thus, resolved the problems.

Just as subplots and minor characters were cut away to simplify the plot and focus attention on the main action (or what the adapter wanted to present as the main action), the nature of this action and the characters who perform it were also simplified. In this way, characters are clearly identified as either good or bad while the principle of poetic justice informs the outcome of each play. Questions of motivation or of the fine line between good and evil vanish, and, as a result, moral dilemmas disappear. Simple causes motivate these characters; the evil characters scheme because they are evil by nature, while the good characters follow the dictates of love or honor, favorite themes in Restoration heroic drama. The scope of the plays narrows to these two topics as the adaptations become a series of variations on the standard melodramatic theme of good versus evil, where the nature of these two absolutes is never questioned. Consequently, the adaptations devolve into a polarized struggle with no loose ends left untied.

On a larger scale, the distrust of ambiguity during this period can be tied both to an overwhelming concern with drama’s effect on the audience and to a fear of disorder outside of literature, in the public mind and in the body politic. Not surprisingly, the polarization of good and evil within the plays parallels the political polarization which resulted in the formation of political parties. Good defines itself in opposition to evil just as the Tories defined themselves in opposition to the Whigs, who were themselves the party of the opposition. In each case, lines are drawn and ambiguities dissolved.

The scope of these developments is particularly noticeable when the adaptations are compared not only with Shakespeare but with a larger range of Renaissance literature. Writers of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries delighted in enigmas and conundrums; as such verbal games indicate, puzzling, mystifying, even tricking the reader was part of the pleasure. In the Renaissance, the assumption that ambiguity was a readily acceptable literary tool permeated writing on all levels. In contrast to the adaptations, with their painstaking linguistic simplicity, Renaissance literature abounds with puns and sometimes elaborate conceits, literary figures which by their very nature promote ambiguity by adding an additional layer of meaning.⁵ By the time of the Restoration, these literary attitudes had changed as the radical instability of the recent civil war, coupled with political struggles and social upheavals, made permanence a desired virtue. Creating hierarchies helped establish a sense of order, and classifying literature and people, and thus controlling any incipient disorder or anarchy, became crucial.⁶ The social class system developed along with theories concerning hierarchies of genre which established qualities that should separate comedy from tragedy. The popularity of neoclassical theory, with its rigid definitions of genre and its focus on the psychological underpinnings of audience response, indicates a suspicion of social and literary uncertainty. Writers, and subsequently critics, questioned the audience’s ability to decipher ambiguity, fearing the possible confusion it might foster and the moral as well as political problems such confusion could create. Questions such as these, which might seem to narrow the scope of literature, are paradoxically tied to belief in its affective power, based as they are on the assumption that literature can sway a reader or auditor to action. Theater became a subject of particular concern because its emotional power could impact large groups of people.

The belief that the enticing power of literature can lead an audience astray necessitates resolution of the threat of ambiguity; thus improper lessons are neither learned nor acted upon. The conservative politics of most of the adaptations, where instability becomes an ideological evil, intensifies this tendency. These changes are particularly striking when we consider that the reconfiguration of Shakespeare occurred at the same time that the most “immoral” of the Restoration comedies appeared on the stage. While libertinism and morally questionable motives might go unpunished within the confines of comedy and the social world familiar to the audience, similar qualities could not be tolerated in the more precarious and politically charged climate of Shakespeare’s plays, where the moral stakes loomed larger. It is not surprising that one exception to this pattern of adaptation appears in the D’Avenant/Dryden Tempest in its guise as a Restoration sex comedy. Thus, while the Homers and Dorimants of contemporary comedy could prosper, the characters in Shakespearean drama had to be carefully corralled within the controlled environment of poetic justice.

The group of plays I have termed “radical adaptations” were written between 1660 and 1737, from the reopening of the theaters to the enactment of the Licensing Act. The broadness of this time frame is deceptive—almost half of the twenty-three adaptations written during this time appeared between 1678 and 1682, between the Popish Plot and the union of the King’s and the Duke’s companies (see appendix). Only six were written after 1703, and of these only one was performed more than ten times.⁷ Most appeared during the last decades of the seventeenth century. During the time these plays were written, Shakespeare’s works were found more often in the theater than on the printed page, and thus the Restoration audience’s emphasis was on Shakespeare as performance rather than as text. This conception of Shakespeare shaped the form adaptation took as the revisions were necessarily tied to visual representation.

In addition to the simplification of Shakespeare’s complex linguistic and moral ambiguities, issues of gender and politics also played a role in the Restoration adaptations as playwrights restructured Shakespeare’s plays in order to adapt them to topical events, such as the new practice of actresses on the stage, or political upheaval (particularly true of the plays written between 1678 and 1682). My discussion of the adaptations focuses on these three topics. Representations of gender and politics provide a paradigm of the ways in which the adaptation of Shakespeare was affected by two very different issues: the portrayal of women shows the ways in which Shakespeare’s works were altered in order to survive in a theater which had adapted to a changed social climate; the repoliticization of the plays reflects the direct influence of changes in the world outside the theater.⁸ The changes to Shakespeare’s language, at once the simplest and the most fundamental of all alterations, begin the process of alteration which culminates in the widespread application of poetic justice to the plays, emphasizing the didactic and providing a comforting sense of closure in an unstable world. As the scope of these alterations suggests, theater-goers may have venerated the idea of Shakespeare—but not his text.

LINGUISTIC AND MORAL SIMPLIFICATION

On the most basic level, the Restoration adapters changed the words of Shakespeare’s text as they refitted his plays for the new theaters. This act of rewriting was the foundation for all other changes made to Shakespeare’s text. The adaptations of the Restoration and early eighteenth century rarely used the original language of Shakespeare’s plays, replacing it instead with a more “refined” and modern English. Some playwrights made relatively few changes, updating expressions, removing archaic words, and cutting out long stretches of figurative language. Others completely rewrote the plays, substituting their own words for Shakespeare’s. Though playwrights and audiences were perfectly capable of appreciating Shakespeare’s poetry, they did not see his language as an essential part of his genius which they regarded as moral or mimetic. Unlike readers in the twentieth century, playwrights and audiences in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries felt that Shakespeare’s diction was often flawed, a by-product of the barbaric age in which he lived rather than a foundation on which all his other beauties rested.

With the exception of Thomas Rymer, playwrights and critics were eager to assert Shakespeare’s genius; they did not, however, believe it resided in the words he used to express his ideas—hence the rewriting. Because playwrights did not see Shakespeare’s language as an intrinsic element of his genius, they were able to treat his works as a plastic material which could be reshaped at will. As the adaptations prove, when a literary text is not seen as fixed, any number of changes can be made. Revered though Shakespeare was, his works were not yet canonized—changes could and would be made. The industry of publishing Shakespeare’s works (made profitable by the growing reading public) had not yet taken hold,⁹ and his genius was perceived in general terms more compatible with theater performance than reading.

This disregard for the Shakespearean text appears particularly strongly in the earliest adaptations. These plays, written between 1660 and 1682, translate Shakespeare’s Elizabethan English into the language considered proper for a self-professedly more sophisticated and literate age. Like most adapters of this time, Sir William D’Avenant (author of the two earliest published adaptations) substantially rewrote the plays he adapted, providing a model for subsequent playwrights to follow. His plays, especially Macbeth (1664), often appropriate whole scenes from the original, including soliloquies, dialogues, even brief snippets of conversation, but the words themselves are D’Avenant’s own. At times he retains the Shakespearean end-rhymes—but rewrites every other part of the couplets. His most frequent changes involve removing words unfamiliar to the Restoration audience and making Shakespeare’s figures of speech less obscure. Thus, Macbeth’s:

Come seeling night,

Scarf up the tender eye of pitiful day,

With thy bloody and invisible hand

Cancel and tear to pieces that great bond

Which keeps me pale! Light thickens, and the crow

Makes wing to th’ rooky wood;

Good things of day begin to droop and drowse,

Whilse night’s black agents to their preys do rouse.

Thou marvel’st at my words, but hold thee still:

Things bad begun make strong themselves by ill. [III.ii.46–55]

becomes:

Come dismal Night.

Close up the Eye of the quick sighted Day

With thy invisible and bloody hand.

The Crow makes wing to the thick shady Grove,

Whilst Night’s black Agent’s to their Preys make hast,

Thou Wonder’st at my Language, wonder still,

Things ill begun strengthen themselves by ill. [III.iii.47–54]

Here D’Avenant modernizes Shakespeare’s diction, getting rid of words such as “seeling” and “scarf.” He also simplifies Shakespeare’s personification of night by eliminating the second half of the image, “cancel and tear to pieces that great bond/Which keeps me pale!” Night puts out its hand to close Day’s eyes—a simple metaphor. The passage cannot be misconstrued; no archaisms or subtleties such as the indirect reference to Banquo’s life (“that great bond”) are left to complicate the sense.¹⁰ These linguistic simplifications have larger ramifications, acting to simplify the characters who speak the words, as wel...