Reinventing the Renaissance

Shakespeare and his Contemporaries in Adaptation and Performance

S. Brown, R. Lublin, L. McCulloch, S. Brown, R. Lublin, L. McCulloch

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781137319401
• Topic: Literatur
• Subtopic: Moderne Literaturkritik

The plays of Shakespeare and his contemporaries has inspired interpretations in every genre and medium. This book offers perspectives on the ways in which practitioners have used Renaissance drama to address contemporary concerns and reach new audiences. It provides a resource for those interested in the creative reception of Renaissance drama.

1

Introduction

Sarah Annes Brown, Robert I. Lublin and Lynsey McCulloch

Entering the twenty-first century, the plays of Shakespeare and his contemporaries continue to find enthusiastic new audiences. Companies perform Shakespearean drama around the globe, new movie versions appear regularly, and emerging genres, new social media for example, find fresh ways of making Shakespeare their own. At a glance, this seems counterintuitive; as the Western Canon has expanded to include a range of voices that were previously excluded, one would expect the prevalence and importance of 400-year-old plays to diminish, making room for other works. Instead, the plays of Shakespeare and his contemporaries have found new articulation, and have provided a medium through which the concerns and experiences of our own age can be expressed. Contemporary artists, including writers, directors, scholars, and more have made the works of Shakespeare and his contemporaries the material out of which they construct their own artistic projects, boldly and liberally reshaping the past to address the present, reinventing the Renaissance so that it speaks with purpose to the contemporary moment. To make sense of this cultural phenomenon, the third Scaena conference, held at Anglia Ruskin University in 2008, was begun with the express purpose of exploring Shakespeare and his contemporaries in adaptation and performance. Drawing and building upon the best work presented at this conference, this collection aims to map out the extraordinary range of approaches that mark the recent history of Shakespearean appropriation.

The chapters included in this volume reveal the multiplicity of ways in which early modern English drama has been deployed in order to address the needs of specific artistic, historical, and social moments. During the late twentieth century, this practice took on a particular significance as artists turned with increasing frequency to these works, establishing their importance even as they took liberties with their form and content. Moving into the twenty-first century, this practice has expanded to include new approaches, new media, new directions, and new challenges. A study of recent adaptations of Shakespeare and his contemporaries, therefore, provides a special window into the workings of culture, for these fresh responses mark developments in the society that creates and consumes these new works.

Part I Popular Culture

In any discussion of cultural transmission, the issue of popular appeal provokes debate but the canonical status of Shakespeare further complicates our understanding of the popular; accusations of crass reductionism – the Shakespearean text as commodity – are set alongside the benefits of improved access to culture and the interaction of whole communities, including online groups, with the literature of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Distinguishing the champions of popular culture from their critics is far from straightforward. As the chapters in Part I demonstrate, even those committed to raising the level of engagement with Shakespeare and his contemporaries – within both pedagogy and the wider culture – often struggle with the implications of consumerism and the methods used to render these literary texts ‘popular’. Yet the sheer energy and variety of today’s more popular responses to early modern English drama reflect a genuinely dynamic tradition, and one which contains the potential for intriguing cultural collisions. The chapters in Part I examine the transmission of early modern texts within contemporary popular culture, asking whether the appeal of Shakespeare and his peers lies in their continued relevance or rather in their potential for cooption by more pragmatic, and presentist, agendas.

The four contributors to Part I also demonstrate the variety of critical engagement with issues of Shakespearean adaptation in the twenty-first century. No longer the realm of the dedicated performance critic, literary ‘afterlives’ now attract a wealth of discursive and artistic response, a development this volume is keen to celebrate. Ann Thompson, one of the United Kingdom’s foremost textual scholars, uses her recent editorial work on Arden Shakespeare’s ground-breaking tripartite edition of Hamlet as the basis for her discussion of the play’s prequels and sequels. By contrast, Charles Marowitz – a dramatist, director and critic – harnesses his experience of creative practice to explore the twentieth century’s cinematization of Shakespeare. Reina Green and Kinga Földváry also discuss cinema’s fascination with early modern drama and both use their study of Shakespeare on film to explore new areas of reception and citation, including paratexts (posters, trailers, and DVD extra features) and genre shifts. All four writers, in keeping with Part I’s focus on the popular, consider issues of audience identity, expectation, and influence. The role of the consumer in the recreation of early modern texts is also acknowledged, a shift in cultural ownership made possible by the new media revolution. The emergence of blogging, user-generated content, and social networking on the Internet has created new opportunities for accessing culture and for producing it. This volume traces these recent developments, but without neglecting the historical appeal to popularity made by Shakespeare’s adaptors via fiction, drama, biography, radio, television, and film.

Ann Thompson in Chapter 2, ‘Hamlet: Looking Before and After: Why So Many Prequels and Sequels?’ examines nineteenth-, twentieth-, and twenty-first-century reimaginings of Shakespeare’s Hamlet, describing the play as ‘an itch we simply cannot stop scratching’. Hamlet’s prequels and sequels have been explanatory, revisionary, derogatory, and even, in the case of Lincoln Phifer’s automatic-writing exercise Hamlet in Heaven, supernatural in origin. The gaps, riddles, and inconsistencies of Shakespeare’s text(s) offer tantalizing opportunities to the creative mind and Thompson is alert to these ellipses and the varied works – good, bad and indifferent – they have inspired. Selecting several examples from writers eager to imagine a pre- and/or post-Hamlet reality, Thompson looks at the different ways in which Shakespearean prequels and sequels have diverged from their source material. Rejecting the play’s revenge motif, these works subvert its generic identity, an act of explicit infidelity to the playwright. Their audience need have no respect for the Bard either; Mary Cowden Clarke’s The Girlhood of Shakespeare’s Heroines provides ‘two levels of meaning – one for those who haven’t read Shakespeare’s play and one for those who have’. While adaptations are commentaries on their sources for some consumers, they are alternatives to them for others. Thompson’s valuable research also encompasses ‘local’ Shakespeare, the employment of early modern drama by modern communities in a civic context, such as centennial events, amateur dramatics, and reading groups, an area of reception typically excluded from readings of Shakespeare and the popular.

In Chapter 3, ‘Educating for Pleasure: The Textual Relations of She’s the Man’, Reina Green extends Thompson’s discussion of Shakespearean communities to include online networks and fan fiction. Social networking sites, such as Facebook and YouTube, allow enthusiasts to provide commentary on adaptations of early modern texts but also to produce their own editions of the plays. Fan authorship as a collective act, one facilitated by the interactive possibilities of the Internet, represents a fascinating new cultural phenomenon and locus of enquiry for performance and reception scholars. Green’s chapter follows recent critical trends in examining the appropriation of Shakespeare in cinema aimed at young people, but her analysis of teen films – specifically Andy Fickman’s 2006 loose movie adaptation of Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night, She’s The Man – is strengthened by her inclusion of supplementary materials provided by film studios in the form of DVD extra features, trailers, and other marketing tools. It also includes a crucial discussion of the way in which teen cinema intersects with additional contemporary film genres and other media, such as anime, manga, gaming, and pop music. Citing Emma French’s description of the attitude towards Shakespeare in cinema as one of both ‘veneration and irreverence’,¹ Green asks whether referencing Shakespeare is a help or a hindrance in the marketing of youth culture and queries the suppression of key elements from the plays, such as the homoerotic, in their filmic presentation.

Kinga Földváry’s study of genre within cinematic and televisual representations of Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew argues in Chapter 4, ‘Brush up your Shakespeare’: Genre-Shift from Shakespeare to the Screen’, like Green’s chapter, that contemporary media and generic forms have more influence over Shakespearean adaptation than any early modern constructs. In keeping with the presentist approach that informs current critical practice, it is the synchronic aspects of Shakespearean film-making, rather than the diachronic, that establish a movie’s generic identity. Although some productions, notably those by the British Broadcasting Corporation (a public broadcaster), reference Shakespeare to legitimate their offering, others flagrantly discard the Bard in their efforts to reach audiences and popularize early modern drama. Földváry concludes, with Green, that DVDs – via their packaging and extra video features – offer most proof of Shakespeare’s presence, but even the BBC’s ShakespeaRE-Told series, a project that explicitly celebrates Shakespeare, minimizes his contribution, reducing the heterogeneous genres implicit within Shakespearean comedy to the homogenous, single genre of TV (soap opera) drama.

Charles Marowitz acted as assistant director and dramaturge on Peter Brook’s seminal 1962 production of Shakespeare’s King Lear for the Royal Shakespeare Company and his considerable theatrical experience and substantial work in criticism make him a valuable contributor to this volume. In Chapter 5, ‘Cinematizing Shakespeare’, Marowitz’s assessment of Brook’s film version of King Lear as a failure – both as cinema and as Shakespearean adaptation – offers a useful insight into the translation of theatre into cinema, and Marowitz is ideally placed to trace that conversion and its various complexities. Setting the ‘plot rip-offs’ of films such as 10 Things I Hate About You, a teen version of The Taming of the Shrew, and the avant-garde fantasies of directors such as Peter Greenaway against the staid and ‘faithful’ reproductions of other movies, Marowitz asks whether the middle ground of Shakespearean film is all that is left available for potential adaptors. Like the other contributors to Part I, he considers whether ‘infidelity may well be the more honorable course’, especially considering the ambiguities and ambivalences of the source material, and examines whether cinematizing Shakespeare is the same as popularizing it.

Part II Criticism and Creativity

Infidelity in adaptation is not of course a new phenomenon. Before the end of the seventeenth century, Restoration playwrights, such as Dryden and Davenant, freely adapted the plays of an earlier generation for political, artistic, and commercial reasons. A similar range of motives has inspired some of the most recent creative adaptations of these plays. Writers, film-makers, and other creative artists have been driven by feminism, postcolonialism, postmodernism – and the bottom line. Texts such as Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, Jane Smiley’s 1000 Acres or Peter Greenaway’s Prospero’s Books are, as a direct result of their links with Shakespeare, included on many university syllabuses. And since the establishment of English as an academic discipline, with Shakespeare at its centre, there has been no shortage of critical engagement with these responses.

But recently, critical and creative responses to Shakespeare have begun to merge. The boundaries between the two activities, within the discipline as a whole, not just Shakespeare studies, seem to have become more permeable. We normally think of a creative piece as an object of critical scrutiny but it may also function as a critical intervention in its own right, and this potential is being increasingly acknowledged and articulated. One reason for this shift is the increasing prominence of creative writing within the university sector. The growing commodification of creative writing as a subject of study, of educational consumption, has led to its greater intersection with academic English and to an awareness or perception that creative writing can itself be classed as ‘research’. The growing popularity of PhDs in creative writing and the impulse to include the many creative practitioners working in English departments in the UK’s research assessment exercises are two pragmatic factors behind this reconsideration of the way the relationship between criticism and creativity has been viewed over recent years.

This greater fusion between criticism and creativity has impacted most noticeably on practitioners, as it is they who have been encouraged to ‘professionalize’ their practice, and demonstrate why their novel or play should be classed as a form of research in its own right, not simply an object for someone else’s research. But the movement hasn’t all been one way, and the pieces included in Part II of Reinventing the Renaissance, devoted to ‘Criticism and Creativity’, demonstrate the willingness of critics to inhabit, or at least be influenced by, creative forms. Included here are two chapters on the role of creativity in the writings of one of the most celebrated and influential Shakespeare scholars working today, Stephen Greenblatt. The first, Chapter 6, Theodora Papadopoulou’s ‘Circulating Through “languages and tales”: Stephen Greenblatt’s Cardenio’, takes as its subject Greenblatt’s most obviously ‘creative’ project, his imaginative recreation of Shakespeare’s missing play Cardenio, co-authored with Charles Mee. Although in fact, as Papadopoulou points out, it might more accurately be described as an imaginative response to the idea of the missing play rather than a reconstruction or pastiche. The way the play flouts any attempt at historical accuracy, the writers’ apparent willingness to face up to the gap between their own (post)modern moment and Shakespeare’s time, presents an intriguing contrast with Greenblatt’s critical practice. He is famous as a new historicist, but perhaps a presentist message can be detected in the play. The (inevitable) gap between this Cardenio and its missing Shakespearean source seems to mirror the less obtrusive but no less escapable gaps between a critical text, a modern reading, and its own ‘source’, the text it aims to illuminate. As Papadopoulou demonstrates, the new Cardenio is brazenly inauthentic and includes many strongly personal touches reflecting the authors’ own circumstances, such as the inclusion of a character, Melchiore the cook, who is based on an Italian chef hired by Greenblatt and Mee. But there is perhaps something authentically Shakespearean about such a move. Shakespeare was apparently happy to drop a reference to a local pub into a play which was supposedly set in Medieval Denmark. ‘Go get thee to Yaughan, fetch me a stoup of liquor’, demands the first gravedigger, in what is usually thought to be an anachronistic and destabilizing reference to some local innkeeper.

The gaps in Shakespeare’s biographical record have proved tempting to several creative writers. Ulysses includes an extended speculative account of the effect of the playwright’s family dynamics on the plays. His life has been alchemized into speculative fictions by writers such as Anthony Burgess, who wrote a novel, Nothing Like the Sun, about Shakespeare’s love life, and by Marc Norman and Tom Stoppard, co-authors of the screenplay for the 1998 film Shakespeare in Love. Because Shakespeare is simultaneously so elusive and so iconic, it is not surprising that some creative responses to his life have verged on the fantastic. ‘The Shakespeare Code’, an episode from the long-running British science fiction series Dr Who, depicts a Shakespeare whose wonderful words have the power to summon alien beings to earth – and to banish them. Neil Gaiman’s graphic novel sequence, ‘The Sandman’, invents a supernatural inspiration for Shakespeare’s two most magical plays, A Midsummer Night’s Dream and The Tempest, and suggests that Shakespeare’s genius was a gift from the god Morpheus.

But it is difficult even for writers of more conventional biographical accounts of Shakespeare to remain completely uncon...