Shakespeare's Surrogates

Rewriting Renaissance Drama

S. Loftis

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781349469260, 9781137352538
• eBook ISBN: 9781137321374
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: European Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Shakespeare's Surrogates contends that adapting Renaissance drama played a key role in the development of modern drama's major aesthetic movements. Loftis posits that playwrights' reactions to Shakespeare and his contemporaries worked to create their public personas, inform their theoretical writings, and influence the development of new genres.

CHAPTER ONE

“Blaming the Bard”: Shaw, Shakespeare, Shotover

If one has the capacity always to see before one a vivid play and to live continually surrounded by crowds of ghosts, then one is a poet; if one feels the drive to transform oneself and to speak out of other bodies and souls, then one is a dramatist.

—Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy

The halls of Heartbreak House reverberate with dead men’s words. Shaw’s most haunted play, Heartbreak House represents a cultural space in which the past attempts to destroy the present. The play’s constant tension between what is remembered and what is forgotten, between the old generation and the new, between the past and the present, gives special resonance to the voices of the cultural and literary dead. Though echoes from Chekhov and Wilde reverberate, it is the voice of Shakespeare that looms over all.¹ Indeed, the Shakespearean echoes in Heartbreak House would later haunt the 93-year-old Shaw, who in his antagonistic puppet play, Shakes versus Shav, would point to Heartbreak House as his rewriting of King Lear; a rewriting that the puppet representing Shaw uses as the climax of his assault against the puppet representing Shakespeare. Rewriting the past, it would seem, is a superior Shavian weapon. Indeed, Heartbreak House represents the climax in a lifetime spent speaking for the literary dead, a culmination in Shaw’s ongoing attempts to present himself, both in his criticism and in his drama, as a cultural surrogate for Shakespeare. Shaw performed his role as Shakespeare surrogate through his public persona, in which he attempted to associate himself with Shakespeare, through his Shakespearean criticism, in which he tries to attack Shakespeare, and through his dramatic adaptations of Shakespearean plays, in which he struggles to alter and replace elements of Shakespeare’s works. For Shaw, Shakespeare was always an icon of the past, a symbol of the old canon that prevented creative and artistic evolution, a force that bound a passive society to conventional morality. In Heartbreak House, he is equated with aging father figures, men whose wisdom cannot save the younger generation. Caesar and Cleopatra denounces him as a source of passive romanticism, while Cymbeline Refinished accuses him of perpetuating conventional morality. In Shakes versus Shav, he is an egotistical figure who demands that his plays live forever—even at the expense of the artistic future. Focused on the body of the father, the body of the lover, and the body of the hero, Shaw’s Shakespearean adaptations form an artistic extension of the blatant attacks in his Shakespearean criticism.

Speaking for the Dead: G.B.S. as Shakespeare Surrogate

In many ways, Shaw’s performance of his G.B.S. persona is an example of dramatic surrogation. Surrogation is a process in which “repetition is change”: the society remembers its cultural and artistic past through the surrogate, while the change in figures leads cultural evolution in a new direction.² Celebrities and other cultural figures are in special need of surrogates: “celebrity . . . holds open a space in collective memory” that surrogates must struggle to fill.³ Shakespeare maintains his celebrity as chief dramatist, a title to which Shaw continually aspired. Throughout his life, G.B.S.’s attacks on Shakespeare became so famous that one of his defining attributes in the mind of the public was that he understood himself and his drama in opposition to Shakespeare. In the pages of The Saturday Review, Shaw presented the authorial G.B.S. as a writer filled with shocking pronouncements about his dramatic forerunner. Shaw was eager to admit that this witty, outrageous, and egotistical persona was a fiction, making comments such as “The celebrated G.B.S. is about as real as a pantomime ostrich . . . I have never pretended that G.B.S. was real: I have over and over again taken him to pieces before the audience to shew the trick of him.”⁴ G.B.S. is not a person, but a public performance, a pantomime of false identity.⁵ In fact, a key element in the complex performance of G.B.S. is the act of destroying Shakespeare and replacing him with Shaw. Surrogation often focuses on the bodies of the dead, sometimes making use of “the folkloric tradition that regards with special awe and dread a corpse that has been dismembered, disturbed, or improperly laid to rest.”⁶ More than a mere case of literary influence, Shaw’s use of Shakespeare points not only to the anxieties of the appropriator as he reworks the artistic past, but also to the larger cultural process through which the dead are replaced. In “Blaming the Bard,” Shaw attacks both Cymbeline and Shakespeare, threatening to defile Shakespeare’s body, “to dig him up and throw stones at him, knowing as I do how incapable he and his worshippers are of understanding any less obvious form of indignity.”⁷ The focus on symbolically destroying a physical body has powerful significance for surrogation, in which the human body is a vessel for cultural memory: Shakespeare’s body is an effigy, and the destruction of a cultural effigy leaves room for a new surrogate.⁸

Naturally, the public often responded with outrage to Shaw’s attacks on Shakespeare, which frequently hinted at his superiority over his dramatic predecessor. The nomination of a new surrogate is always disturbing, and such cultural disruptions require the replacement figure to prove his legitimacy by crafting stories of origin and myths of authenticity.⁹ Throughout his dramatic career, Shaw manufactured and spread myths of Shakespearean origin with impunity. One way that Shaw aligned himself with Shakespeare was by frequently making statements that suggested biographical similarities between his life and the Bard’s, comments that often seemed to suggest that G.B.S. was the reincarnation of William Shakespeare.¹⁰ For example, Shaw claimed, “Like Shakespear again, I was a born dramatist.”¹¹ This quote demonstrates “the theme of reincarnating Shakespeare” that would appear throughout Shaw’s letters, prose, and plays.¹² In the preface to Immaturity, Shaw claimed to be descended from Macduff, a lineage “as good as being descended from Shakespear, whom I had been unconsciously resolved to reincarnate from my cradle.”¹³ In Shakes versus Shav, the Shakespeare puppet claims that the Shaw puppet is an “imposter” who is trying to “reincarnate my very self” (187).¹⁴ In the preface to the puppet play, Shaw even claimed that he “came to regard [Stratford-upon-Avon] almost as a supplementary birthplace of my own” (186). Shaw shows that G.B.S. is Shakespeare “reincarnated” not just by claiming it, but by frequently pointing out parallels between his life and Shakespeare’s.¹⁵ For example, in the preface to Shakes versus Shav, Shaw claims that Shakespeare’s “circumstances interest me because they are just like my own” (186). In the preface to The Dark Lady of the Sonnets, Shaw says “I am convinced that he [Shakespear] was very like myself: in fact, if I had been born in 1556 instead of in 1856, I should have taken to blank verse and given Shakespear a harder run for his money than all the other Elizabethans put together.”¹⁶ As part of his performance as Shakespeare surrogate, Shaw created myths of Shakespearean origin at every turn. Specifically, Shaw’s writings demonstrate a contradictory impulse in which Shaw attempts to legitimate himself as cultural surrogate for Shakespeare by simultaneously suggesting both that Shakespeare gave birth to Shaw and that Shaw gave birth to Shakespeare. Strangely, both claims are somewhat true. Shaw claimed that “Shakespeare was like mother’s milk to me.”¹⁷ Shaw suggests that Shakespeare nourished him in an intimate and parental manner. He also claimed, “When I began to write William was a divinity and a bore. Now he is a fellow creature.”¹⁸ In other words, Shaw claims that he created the modern conception of Shakespeare.¹⁹ Thus, Shaw asserts that his criticism worked to popularize the Bard even as he argues that his own work is legitimated by Shakespeare’s.

Yet Shaw’s writings about Shakespeare often display the paradox central to surrogation: repetition as change. While Shaw attempts to associate himself with Shakespeare thorough legitimizing myths, he simultaneously attempts to distinguish himself from Shakespeare and to show that his plays are different in style and purpose from those of his dramatic predecessor. Yet people cannot perform identity without simultaneously distinguishing themselves from others—they must also perform who they are not.²⁰ Not only did Shaw attempt to set G.B.S. up as a potential Shakespeare surrogate, but he also wrote extensively about Shakespeare in his prose criticism and adapted Shakespearean plays throughout his life. In some ways, Shaw’s Shakespearean criticism and dramatic adaptations mirror his public performance as Shakespeare surrogate. Shaw’s writings show G.B.S. simultaneously performing Shakespeare and yet performing what Shakespeare is not.

Shaw’s repeated attacks on his predecessor’s canon attempt to erase elements of the Bard’s works with which the later playwright disagreed. When the surrogate erases, he also replaces. In Shaw’s case, the erasure involved a sustained attack in his theatrical reviews on Shakespeare’s style, followed by dramatic rewritings that attempted to rectify the troubles that Shaw found in King Lear, Antony and Cleopatra, and Cymbeline. Under the thin veneer of provocative hyperbole, undeniable egoism, and outrageous metaphor, Shaw’s Shakespearean criticism consistently attacks what he saw as the primary problems of Shakespeare’s canon: aestheticism, fixed morality, romantic ideals, and the passivity that Shaw equated with pessimism.²¹

One way that Shaw differentiates himself from Shakespeare is by accusing his dramatic predecessor of what he considered to be the ultimate artistic sin: unadulterated aestheticism. In his theater reviews, Shaw constantly dismisses pure “word-music” and argues for purposeful drama. Shaw wrote to The Daily News that “Shakespear’s power lies in his enormous command of word-music, which gives fascination to his most blackguardly repartees and sublimity to his hollowest platitudes,” but that “Shakespear’s weakness lies in his complete deficiency in that highest sphere of thought, in which poetry embraces religion, philosophy, morality, and the bearing of these on communities.”²² Playing on a line from Hamlet, and subverting not only Hamlet’s meaning, but also critiquing Shakespeare simultaneously, Shaw remarked that “the play is not the thing, but its thought, its purpose, its feeling, its execution.”²³ In a typical Shavian diatribe against the worship of style, G.B.S. claimed that “the man of letters, when he is more than a mere confectioner is a prophet or nothing. But to listen for a writer’s message, even when the fellow is a fool, is one thing: to worship his tools and his tricks, his prose and his style, is an abomination.”²⁴ Shaw claims that Shakespeare wrote drama for the purposes of entertainment rather than instruction; because Shakespeare does not address concrete social and political problems, Shaw finds what he considers to be Shakespeare’s favoring of manner over matter artistically repugnant.²⁵ Comparing Shakespeare to Ibsen, Shaw argued: “A Doll House will be flat as ditch water when A Midsummer Night’s Dream will be fresh as paint; but it will still have done more work in the world; and that is enough for the highest genius, which is always intensely utilitarian.”²⁶ Again and again, Shaw’s dramatic criticism associates Shakespeare with aestheticism, which Shaw dismisses on moral grounds.

In addition, Shaw’s Shakespearean criticism frequently represents the Bard as a symbol of cultural stagnation, which Shaw suggests is the artistic and moral death of the human race. Shaw argues that drama should present morality: specifically, he suggests that drama presents morality by subverting or questioning the preconceived notions of the audience. In his preface to The Irrational Knot, Shaw distinguishes between what he considers to be art of the first order and art of the second order. Art of the first order is that in which “the morality is original and not readymade.” He declares Shakespeare to be of the second order because his “morality is a mere reach-me-down.”²⁷ Because of Shakespeare’s position as an artistic icon and his connection with “ready-made” morality, Shaw viewed him as representing a sterile and repetitive culture. The trouble with Shakespeare’s plays is that they are all music—but to present the kind of purposeful drama that Shaw envisions one needs to combine music with persuasive content.

Furthermore, Shaw accuses Shakespeare of espousing a romantic worldview and creating characters who uphold a romanticized dichotomy of personality.²⁸ Indeed, Shaw describes Shakespeare’s characters as “masterfully drawn from the romantic-commercial point of view . . . as to faith, hope, courage, conviction, or any of the true heroic qualities, you find nothing but death made sensational, despair made stage sublime, sex made romantic, and barrenness covered up by sentimentality.”²⁹ Shaw also claimed that in Shakespeare, “if the villain does not tell them [the audience] for five solid minutes that he is a villain and glories in his views, someone else in the play does. Everything is cut and dried.”³⁰ For Shaw, this is a false dichotomy—offstage, there are no clear villains or heroes. This attack against romantic characters extends to any unrealistic idealization—including the idealization of romantic love. In the preface to Three Plays for Puritans, Shaw attacks Shakespeare’s idealization of sexual infatuation: “Let realism have its demonstration, comedy its criticism, or even bawdry its horselaugh at the expense of sexual infatuation, if it must; but to ask us to subject our souls to its ruinous glamor, to worship it, deify it, and imply that it alone makes life worth living, is nothing but folly gone mad erotically.”³¹ Sexual attraction, like aestheticism and Shakespeare himself, is a misplaced idol, an inappropriate object of worship. As always, the iconoclastic Shaw maintains that the worship of superficial idols leads to a passive response and thus hinders growth. In short, one of Shaw’s main objections to Shakespearean texts is the Bard’s glorification of romance and his romantic treatment of characters.

Another area for Shavian assault on Shakespeare is the pessimism that Shaw connects with passivism, Shaw arguing that Shakespeare’s tragedies are pessimistic plays that suggest the futility of human action.³² From the viewpoint of a creative evolutionist, a pessimistic world in which people believe events are controlled by gods instead of men is one on the brink of stagnation and destruction. Creative evolution suggests that human beings must work with the life force to create a better world; pessimism and despair, waiting for providence to act instead of taking action oneself, then become the surest way to slow the evolutionary process.³³ In the prefa...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Chapter 1 “Blaming the Bard”: Shaw, Shakespeare, Shotover
• Chapter 2 Tearing the Skin Off of History: Brecht and the Early Modern Body
• Chapter 3 “To face my dead at last”: The Personal and Literary Ghosts of Long Day’s Journey into Night
• Chapter 4 “Some remains”: Forgetting Shakespeare in Endgame and Happy Days
• Chapter 5 “Blood is compulsory”: The Player’s Death in Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead
• Chapter 6 “A MOTHER’S WOMB IS NOT A ONE-WAY STREET”: Reentering the Shakespearean Womb of Hamletmachine
• Afterword
• Notes
• Index