Intermedial Shakespeares on European Stages

A. Mancewicz

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781137360038
• eBook ISBN: 9781137360045
• Topic: Mezzi di comunicazione e arti performative
• Subtopic: Arte generale

Intermedial Shakespeares argues that intermediality has refashioned performances of Shakespeare's plays over the last two decades in Europe. It describes ways in which text and author, time and space, actor and audience have been redefined in Shakespearean productions that incorporate digital media, and it traces transformations in practice.

1

Drama: Intermedial Texture

HAMLET: Suit the action to the word, the word to the action

Hamlet, 3.2.17–18¹

PROSPERO: Hast thou, spirit,

Performed to point the tempest that I bade thee?

The Tempest, 1.2.193–4

An investigation of intermedial transformations in Shakespearean staging begins with drama and dramaturgy. Not because the text ought to be privileged, but because its form, function, and status are central to the understanding of the playwright and his work. The debate whether Shakespeare focused on print or performance, and whether one medium offers a better insight into his imagery and ideas than the other, has been as heated as the controversy whether he himself wrote the plays.² The dispute has shown not only how problematic it is to assess Shakespeare’s approach to playwriting through the lens of contemporary stage practice, but it has also revealed common assumptions about drama and theatre. While a playtext is seen as polished, fixed, and reproducible, performance tends to be described as spontaneous, elusive, and ephemeral; each is defined as distinct from the other, but their relationship is a key issue in theatre practice and scholarship.³

What characterises Shakespeare’s plays is that they foreground a complementary relationship between poetry and performance. The eloquence of Shakespeare’s dramas equals if not excels his lyrical works, while their dramaturgy capitalises on the conditions of contemporary staging, owing to the playwright’s direct experience with theatre making. Hamlet and The Tempest illustrate this claim particularly well. In both, the action evolves around book-loving intellectuals who script and stage their scenarios of revenge; comparing their function in the plot, Heiner Müller described Prospero as ‘the undead Hamlet’ (2001, p. 121). The Danish prince dramatises his father’s murder as well as oversees its theatrical representation. His advice to the Players suggests that the effect of ‘The Mousetrap’ on Claudius depends on the eloquence of the script as much as on the force of its delivery; drama and performance are complementary, and they ought to ‘suit’ each other. Similarly, Prospero is eager to know if Ariel has followed his staging instructions ‘to point’. The execution of the revenge rests on the correspondence of the spell with the spectacle. As Jan Kott suggests, ‘All that happens on the island will be a play within a play, a performance produced by Prospero’ (1967, p. 243), who occupies a double role of dramatist and director.

The reciprocal relationship between text and theatre along with the insistence on a faithful performance of revenge scripts in these passages points towards two problems of staging drama that have been confronted by intermedial performance of Shakespeare. How might directors ‘suit the action to the word, the word to the action’ when words are integrated into other media within the network of intermedial interrelations? How important is it that the script be ‘performed to point’, when in digital culture the overall text is neither stable nor fixed? With the advance of intermedial theatre, the very meaning of Shakespeare and his plays has taken a new direction, leading to the development of intermedial texture as a new manner of incorporating the verbal text into performance. Defined against technological transitions and recent performance theories, the concept is illustrated in this chapter with two contemporary continental adaptations of Hamlet and The Tempest.

Intermedial texture

The concept of ‘intermedial texture’ refers here to the composition of performance through reflexive interweaving of digital and non-digital media with the Shakespearean verbal text. The complex nature of intermedial texture is reflected in the multiplicity of meanings that contribute to this compound term. Its reflexivity owes to the historical evolution of Shakespearean print and performance, as well as to the nature of theatre as a hypermedium which stages other media (Kattenbelt, 2008; 2010). The interweaving of text and media into a fabric of plural and overlapping meanings emphasises the temporal, spatial, and sensory nature of performance production and presentation. Finally, intermedial texture underscores the importance of the ‘original’ Shakespeare text, pointing to issues of authority, authorship, and fidelity to the script that underlie Shakespearean performances.

By changing modes of production, preservation, and transmission of scripts and stage works, new technologies have reinforced a complementary and reflexive relationship between drama and performance. Such a shift has been particularly notable in the reception of Shakespeare’s plays. Not only has it underscored the inherent interconnections between literary and theatrical qualities within the dramas, but it has also become part of a several-century-long evolution in the status of Shakespeare’s texts and their theatrical versions.

William B. Worthen distinguishes three stages of this evolution, adopting the language of digital coding (2010, pp. 2–8). ‘Shakespeare 1.0’ refers to the treatment of plays as a material designed primarily for performance rather than print. In Shakespeare’s time, dramatic texts circulated mostly as manuscripts, hand-copied into parts and often unpublished. Seen as ephemeral artefacts of performance, many plays from this period are considered as lost. The development of print in the seventeenth century led to ‘Shakespeare 2.0’, that is the notion of the text as a fixed physical object that exists independently from performance. The transition from manuscripts to printed plays was signalled by the publication of Ben Jonson’s collected drama in 1616 and Shakespeare’s in 1623. By the early nineteenth century, the focus on performance gave way to a literary perspective, which underlined stability, reproducibility, and preservation of a dramatic work. Technological developments in the past few decades have revolutionised this approach, altering the very forms of drama and performance. The rise of ‘Shakespeare 3.0’ has meant digital coding and distribution of texts across a range of mobile platforms; both texts and performances have been transformed into virtual scripts that can be accessed in any time and place.

The development of digital technology has thus introduced a new type of relationship between print and performance. Worthen notes, ‘Digital Shakespeare, Shakespeare 3.0, releases performance from a single platform of production and from a single site of consumption; at the same time, though, digital Shakespeare also dramatizes our investments in earlier technologies – the page and the stage – and how we model their relationship’ (2010, p. 7). Rather than assuming that the play is subsidiary to the stage (as in Shakespeare 1.0), or that theatre is a vehicle for representation of drama understood as the absolute expression of the author’s intention (as in Shakespeare 2.0), digital Shakespeare combines text, theatre, and digital technology in a non-hierarchical relationship that encourages a reflexive staging of media by each other. This reflexivity manifests itself in ways in which digital devices have revised and to some extent reversed the defining characteristics of print and performance.

The emergence of hyperlinks, instant messages, blogs, and Internet forums has significantly adjusted the post-Gutenberg idea of the text as a material and fixed artefact that is accessed in a linear mode. It was challenged by a postmodern notion of an interactive network, a virtual labyrinth, a perfect epitome of the Derridean différance that defers meanings through an interplay of differences. According to N. Katherine Hayles, in a virtual space, words function temporally and spatially: ‘Less an object than an event, the digital text emerges as a dance between artificial and human intelligences, machine and natural languages as these evolve together through time’ (2006, p. 187). In theatre, on a three-dimensional stage and within the temporal framework of a live event, a digital text may become part of performance material. Projected live on surfaces, objects, and bodies, words become incorporated into the performance as actions and gestures.

Parallel to making texts part of performance material, digital technologies have turned live actions into virtual scripts. Detached from their temporal and spatial context, performed sequences are available to viewers across the globe through video-sharing websites, such as YouTube or Vimeo, or through online archives, such as The Global Shakespeares Archive, MIT (2010). As soon as live scenes are transformed into files with digital chapters, they can be replayed, paused, and accessed any time, enabling an experience comparable to accessing a book, since at that point they have become a ‘readily readable, rereadable, citable document, an instrument of criticism and pedagogy with perdurable and disseminated existence’ (Worthen, 2010, p. 6). Similarly, Douglas Lanier notes that a printed text has found its counterpart in a performance recording:

Even as we have hailed the death of the monolithic text in favor of performative variants, the technological apparatus that has encouraged this theoretical revolution – the VCR – has been subtly re-establishing, at another level, a new monolithic and stable ‘text’ – the ideal performance, recorded on tape, edited and reshaped in post-production, available for re-viewing. (1996, pp. 203–4)

Registered theatre productions acquire stability, reproducibility, and accessibility – attributes that in the modern era were identified with printed texts. Distributed as virtual files, digitalised performances cease to be exclusive and ephemeral events within a clearly delineated temporal and spatial framework. Losing those characteristics that Peggy Phelan saw as constituting the very ontology of the theatre medium (1993), they become digital scripts that preserve ‘the ideal performance’ in a fixed form.

The reversal of roles between print and performance contributes to the expansion of intermedial texture, affording reflexive ways of incorporating words and video recordings into live theatre. With the text becoming part of performance material and with performance functioning as a digital script, the relationship between writing and staging becomes more marked and self-conscious. This in turn changes the role of drama and the entire dramaturgy of performance, leading to the intermedial integration of live and digital media within theatre seen as a ‘hypermedium’, that is ‘a space where the art forms of theatre, opera and dance meet, interact and integrate with the media of cinema, television, video and the new technologies; creating profusions of texts, inter-texts, inter-media and spaces in-between’ (Kattenbelt, 2006, p. 24).

This new manner of incorporating the script with digital and non-digital media in intermedial performance might be described as intermedial interweaving. The concept refers to the multiplicity of media that simultaneously reflect, revise, and redefine each other within a spatial and temporal framework. It introduces the texture of the weft, which in turn affords a sensual experience of media operating together in the event of performance. It also evokes Barthes’s notion of the Text as a ‘woven fabric’, ‘network’, ‘process’, and ‘play’.

Similarly to the Text, an intermedial texture refers to the image of ‘a woven fabric’ that relies on ‘the stereographic plurality of its weave of signifiers’ (Barthes, 1977, p. 159). This implies ‘not a co-existence of meanings but a passage, an overcrossing’ (Barthes, 1977, p. 159). In the same vein, Hans-Thies Lehmann insists that in performance ‘a texture is not composed like a wall out of bricks but like a fabric out of threads’; he observes that the relationships among individual elements depend on the significance of the whole (2006, p. 85). The image of interweaving involves thus overlaying and combining different threads, which then remain visible in the final fabric.

The notion of intermedial texture resonates also with the Barthesian image of the Text as a network, in which different elements are interconnected in a non-hierarchical spatial and temporal arrangement. It emphasises a process that ‘is experienced only in an activity of production’ (Barthes, 1977, p. 157). This feature of the Text is particularly appropriate for the description of performance that is created and experienced over a period of time. It also underscores the shift from product to process that has been characteristic of avant-garde performance practices of the past few decades in Europe and North America. Finally, both the Text and intermedial texture involve an element of the play. Barthes evokes several meanings of this term that could be relevant for analysing performance. In intermedial dramaturgy, it might specifically (though not exclusively) refer to the interplay of liveness and mediatisation that involves the creativity and enjoyment of artists and audiences.

It is through interconnections between live and mediatised elements that intermedial texture constructs a new type of dramaturgy, since according to Liesbeth Groot Nibbelink and Sigrid Merx ‘intermediality allows for particular ways of structuring the stage, employing aesthetic strategies such as montage (spatial, simultaneous), collage, doubling, difference, framing or interactivity’ (2010, p. 223). In Shakespearean performance in particular, intermedial texture refers to such combinations of texts and technologies that interchange and exchange their characteristics, in order to interrogate the relationship between drama and performance, whilst not necessarily abandoning a close link with the script. The concept does not imply that the play loses its importance or even centrality – on the contrary, while intermedial artists appear to take liberties with Shakespeare’s ‘original text’, they typically aim to activate it afresh through an intense engagement with it from a novel perspective.

An intermedial texture illustrates thus not only a technological and cultural shift in the role of print and performance, but also a transition in the approach to drama that has occurred in the Western avant-garde over the past few decades. Different theoretical frameworks were introduced to account for this phenomenon: Lehmann’s notion of ‘postdramatic theatre’, Erika Fischer-Lichte’s ‘performative turn’, and Bonnie Marranca’s ‘mediaturgy’.⁴ All these concepts are helpful in grasping recent transformations in Shakespearean staging, as they probe the status of the dramatic script and ‘dramatic theatre’, while affirming the expansion of the use of new media in contemporary staging.

Investigating innovative performance practices in Europe and North America that have developed since the late 1960s with the rise of new media, Lehmann identified productions that are no longer concerned with a faithful and mimetic representation of the dramatic text as the main source of staging. Instead, they focus on such forms of theatrical presentation as music, movement, and set design, involving the audience in the process of constructing patterns in the performance. Lehmann’s investigation of postdramatic forms of theatre has been complemented by Fischer-Lichte’s research on performativity, which emphasised the enhanced role of the audience and the event-like character of performance. Examining the work of Western avant-garde artists, she has indicated a performative turn in theatre experimentation of the past decades which involves a transition from fixed textuality towards flexible and variable forms of performance, in response to increasing mediatisation of our culture. Similarly, Marranca has noted that contemporary performers frequently rely on embedding media rather than following a written script; she defined this practice as mediaturgy. Evolving from her earlier work on visual theatre, introduced in The Theatre of Images (1977), the term underlines the centrality of media in the work of New York experimental performance artists, such as Marianne Weems from the Builders Association or John Jesrun. Its application, however, may be much wider, as it indicates changing patterns of communication and cultural production.

What distinguishes productions of Shakespeare from those of contemporary playwrights, and what calls for the notion of...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Series Editors’ Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Drama: Intermedial Texture
• 2 Time and Space: Intermedial Stratigraphy
• 3 Actors and Audiences: Intermedial Mirror
• 4 New Media as Old Media
• 5 Digital Intermediality without Digital Technology
• Conclusion
• Appendix: Table of Performances
• Notes
• References
• Index