Shakespearean Echoes

Kevin J. Wetmore Jr., A. Hansen, K. Wetmore Jr.

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781349479085, 9781137380012
• eBook ISBN: 9781137380029
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Film & Video
• Index: Literature

Shakespearean Echoes assembles a global cast of established and emerging scholars to explore new connections between Shakespeare and contemporary culture, reflecting the complexities and conflicts of Shakespeare's current international afterlife.

1

Reviving Cowden Clarke: Rewriting Shakespeare’s Heroines in Young Adult Fiction

Laurie E. Osborne

In December of 1850, shortly after completing her 16-year magnum opus, the first concordance of Shakespeare, Mary Cowden Clarke published the first novella in a series called The Girlhood of Shakespeare’s Heroines. One early reviewer described the new project in The Northern Star and National Trades’ Journal as a novelist’s necessary response to Shakespeare’s ‘rich mine of intellectual wealth – but half worked out and promising inexhaustible mental riches to those who explore it’ and asked ‘who, in Shakespeare’s case, [is] so fitted for the task as Mrs. Cowden Clarke, whose intellect and devotion are so well proved by these Shakespearian works’ (‘Review’, 1850). The ‘modest pamphlet’ about ‘Portia, the Heiress of Belmont’ that earned the reviewer’s praise led to more than 25 published editions of Cowden Clarke’s tales from 1850 to 1925. Although Cowden Clarke’s fictional prequels for Shakespeare’s heroines are not the first novels that expand on Shakespeare’s own life or those of his characters, these narratives are the literary foremothers for the recent burgeoning of young adult (YA) novels – more than a hundred since 2000 – that reimagine the lives of Shakespeare’s characters.

Whereas Cowden Clarke’s novellas may have offered Victorian girls a cautionary education about masculine sexual predation, as George Gross suggests, or even enacted the subversive, pre-feminist exploration of female autonomy that Sara Annes Brown praises (Gross, 1972; Brown, 2005), The Girlhood of Shakespeare’s Heroines also provides a critical context for understanding the distinctive new interactions with the plays that occur in recent Shakespeare-inspired YA novels, especially those targeted at young women. These revisions of Cowden Clarke’s strategies within our cultural moment intersect with Shakespeare’s current role in gender ideology. According to John Stephens and Robyn McCallum, recent retellings of Shakespeare for children advance prevailing cultural values and promote the high culture bard, goals that Cowden Clarke certainly espoused in the 1850s. Although Stephens and McCallum concur with Erica Hateley’s argument that Shakespearean retellings reinscribe patriarchal structures, they also argue that the necessary dialogic relationship that develops between the retellings and the original canonical texts allows these ‘reversions’ to ‘shape those cultural values according to dominant metanarratives through processes of discursive and narrative selection and modification’ (Hateley, 2009; Stephens and McCallum, 1998, p. 255). As they observe, ‘any retelling will be influenced by the cultural context in which it is retold and by the changes in register, narrative tone, and point of view which seek to ensure the accessibility of those cultural values and aspects of social heritage that a text seeks to inculcate’ (Stephens and McCallum, 1998, p. 254). YA Shakespearean fiction reflects recent cultural influences by expanding ‘the changes in register, narrative tone, and point of view’ that start with Cowden Clarke’s Girlhood novellas.

My examination of Shakespearean YA fiction concentrates on novelists who repeatedly draw on Shakespeare. Their novels elaborate the core features that Clarke identified in the plays and extend the narrative and paratexual dimensions that she brought to her adaptations. Like Cowden Clarke in their sustained and reiterative engagement with Shakespeare in YA fiction, these novelists enact richly complex, widely varying, and occasionally subtle negotiations with Shakespeare’s plays.¹ Just as important, similarities in form, strategy, and content across the works of these novelists underscore what Shakespearean cultural capital contributes to current gender ideologies.

Time and Again

On the most basic level, Cowden Clarke’s tales direct our attention to important relationships between fictional time frame(s) and Shakespearean narrative time. Though her vividly imagined childhoods of Ophelia and Lady Macbeth include as many striking invented occurrences for their female protagonists as any twenty-first-century young adult novel, the experiences of Cowden Clarke’s heroines stop when the plays begin. The novellas, which anachronistically describe and ascribe Victorian vicissitudes and ideals of womanhood to characters in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century plays, are thus both safely contained before the plays and positioned to explain their events. Cowden Clarke celebrates Shakespeare as an artistic culmination, to be prepared for but not superseded or changed. She often ends her novellas with the recommendation that the rest of the heroine’s experiences be sought in Shakespeare’s play. The first tale closes with Portia’s opening words to Nerissa that she is ‘aweary of this great world,’ suggesting that the ‘next words are to be found in the second scene of a certain play; where “my master desires to speak with you”’ (Clarke, 1891, Vol. I, p. 111). However, recent novelists write within a cultural moment marked by 400 years of Shakespearean texts and performances and awash in adaptations of all sorts, including Cowden Clarke’s. As a result, YA Shakespeare novels from the last 20 years adventurously expand possible temporal relationships: sequels, prequels, concurrent but contemporary alternative histories, and amalgams of these time frames.

Just as significant, comparisons between what interested a mid-Victorian critic about Shakespeare’s women and what inspires current writers for youthful audiences provide a crucial gauge of how fictionalizing Shakespeare and his works has evolved. As in Cowden Clarke’s novellas, questions implicit within the plays about Lady Macbeth’s children, Ophelia’s mother (and indeed so many Shakespearean mothers), Rosaline’s resistance to Romeo, and so forth still inspire the fictional reconstruction of Shakespeare’s characters for young adults, but these issues now often inspire after-narratives or sequels to the plays. For example, Celia Rees’s The Fool’s Girl (2010) plays out what kind of revenges Malvolio might wreak upon the successful lovers in Twelfth Night. More important, interpretive concerns now generate alternative narratives that reconfigure women’s roles and choices in terms of later cultural conditions and pave the way for using but moving beyond Shakespeare.² Novelists now elaborate, circumvent, and often surpass the patriarchal versions of female identity for which Shakespeare is one source.

Young adult novelists also simultaneously echo and outdo Cowden Clarke in the complex array of Shakespearean characters that intrigue them. Cowden Clarke alternately embraced the most theatrically popular heroines of her era (Portia, Juliet, Ophelia, Lady Macbeth, and Imogene) and less central, more potentially troubling Shakespearean heroines, including the two that are deeply implicated in bed tricks, Helena from All’s Well that Ends Well and Isabella from Measure for Measure. In recent novels, Ophelia and Lady Macbeth predominate, and Juliet is easily the most popular current YA heroine, featured in subgenres ranging from time travel tales like Saving Juliet (2009) by Suzanne Selfors and The Juliet Spell (2011) by Douglas Rees, to vampire/zombie fiction, in Claudia Gabel’s Romeo and Juliet and Vampires (2010) and Isaac Marion’s Warm Bodies (2011). At the same time, however, YA novelists take up characters like Miranda and Hermia, whom Cowden Clarke ignores, and flesh out the stories of minor or even invisible characters in Shakespeare’s plays. Grace Tiffany’s The Turquoise Ring (2006) privileges Jessica’s (and Leah’s) girlhoods over Portia’s from The Merchant of Venice, as does Marjam Pressler’s Shylock’s Daughter (2000).³ Lisa Fiedler’s Romeo’s Ex: Rosaline’s Story (2006), Rebecca Serle’s When You Were Mine (2011), and Melinda Taub’s Still Star-Crossed (2013) empower Rosaline, the unseen first beloved of Romeo in Romeo and Juliet. Often these narratives ‘reveal’ the hidden story lurking behind the public events of the play. Narrating the girlhoods of less elaborated and celebrated female characters in Shakespeare frees these novelists to empower their heroines while pushing against the repressive structures in the plays. In their novels, choosing Shakespeare establishes an overt patriarchal context that their heroines critique and challenge.

The YA novelists who follow Cowden Clarke’s lead in repeatedly returning to Shakespeare’s works showcase best the several different approaches and genres now available for re-envisioning Shakespeare. For example, the Australian author Sophie Masson has foregrounded the YA tendency to blend sources in her adaptations of Shakespeare in five different YA novels since 1998, identifying them as ‘The Shakespeare Collection’ on her website (http://www.sophiemasson.org/books.html). Cold Iron (Malkin) (Masson, 1998) blends elements from Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream with folk tales related to Cinderella. She incorporates Shakespearean contexts into The Madman of Venice (Masson, 2009) by drawing tangentially on The Merchant of Venice and Romeo and Juliet and brings Shakespeare’s theatre and The Tempest into The Tempestuous Voyage of Hopewell Shakespeare (Masson, 2003). While these three novels have recognizable but not central Shakespearean dimensions, Masson’s work also records the impulse to build beyond Shakespeare plays, specifically when she, like Celia Rees, explores the aftermath of Twelfth Night in Malvolio’s Revenge (Masson, 2005). Her most recent novel, The Understudy’s Revenge (Masson, 2011), offers both a strong heroine and a theatrical context for the novel’s exploration of Hamlet. Masson argues that her approach in blending Shakespeare with other sources responds to his enabling of imagination. She insists on Shakespeare’s strong links with fantasy and embraces what she calls ‘his lonely originality … his storytelling and folkloric and spiritual sides, the aspects of him which were communal, populist, uncertain, even unfashionable’ (Masson, 2002). Masson’s novels illustrate in a single author’s works how widely YA Shakespearean fiction now ranges in approach beyond the comparatively straightforward third-person fictional pre-histories that Cowden Clarke penned.

Serializing Shakespeare

Bearing out Masson’s insistence about Shakespeare’s strong links with fantasy, Shakespeare-inspired YA novelists who embrace the currently popular magical/urban fantasy mode also foreground Shakespeare’s role in current YA serial publications. In these series, Shakespeare’s supernatural worlds and characters often serve as the preconditions for non-Shakespearean teen female protagonists who explore their own identities in the contexts of emergent magical powers. Leslie Livingston, for example, uses the Shakespearean worlds and characters of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Romeo and Juliet, and The Tempest in her urban fantasy trilogy centering around a teenaged Shakespearean actress whose stage roles resonate with her magical life. Likewise, Lisa Mantchev centers her trio of YA novels around Beatrice Shakespeare Smith and the Theatre Illuminata where she grew up. Livingston and Mantchev both create Shakespeare-inflected fantasy narratives that invoke theatrical contexts and insert Shakespearean characters into the ‘real’ world of the narrative. Their serially published Shakespearean novels contrast with Cowden Clarke’s individually articulated stories because they treat Shakespeare’s plays principally as a resource available for borrowing and bricolage, but they adopt her strategy of strongly establishing their youthful heroines as the central figures.

Livingston reimagines the changeling boy from A Midsummer Night’s Dream as Auberon’s [sic] foster son, giving the changeling narrative presence and romantic hero status. More important, she decisively re-genders the narrative focus by casting as the series’ true protagonist the fairy girl exchanged for the boy. Kelley Winslow, whom Puck steals from Auberon [sic] as a substitute for the stolen Sonny, is an unwitting fairy princess who discovers her powers and literally experiences the Shakespearean roles that she plays for her off-Broadway Shakespeare troupe. Her role as understudy for Titania in Dream becomes all too real in the first novel, Wondrous Strange (Livingston, 2009), and Darklight (Livingston, 2009), the second novel, recounts her star-crossed romance with Sonny as she plays the female lead in Romeo and Juliet. Livingston completes Kelley’s simultaneous theatrical and magical careers in Tempestuous (2010). Although this serial use of Shakespearean characters recalls Cowden Clarke’s successive novellas by invoking a separate, suitable play for each novel, Livingston concentrates her readers’ attention on the young actress grappling simultaneously with her place in the (Shakespearean) theatre and her mixed magical powers as they emerge despite her human disguise: the plays support her growth and development whereas Cowden Clarke’s girlhoods serve as introductions to Shakespeare’s heroines.

Lisa Mantchev’s Theatre Illuminata trilogy also follows a single heroine, starting with Beatrice Shakespeare Smith’s plans to adapt Hamlet so she can stay in the theatre, her home since her abandonment as a baby. Though the all-important Book in the Theatre Illuminata includes plays other than Shakespeare’s, his works prove crucial to Beatrice’s identity: she was named for the bard and for Beatrice from Much Ado by the wardrobe mistress and turns out to be the daughter of Ophelia, conceived and born after that character escaped the theatre to pursue a less watery and lugubrious life outside ‘her’ play. The three novels abound in wide-ranging Shakespearean allusions, establish the lesser fairies from Dream as her loyal comic companions, and cast Ariel from The Tempest as one of her two love interests. As in Shakespeare’s play, Ariel’s principal desire is his freedom, which Beatrice ultimately arranges, once she becomes the wordsmith who creates powerful theatrical performances. Her metanarrative powers, grounded in her unusual relationship with the mostly male theatre company and the Book, support John Stephens and Robyn McCallum’s claim that retellings are largely ‘androcentric, ethnocentric, and class-centric … To induct audiences into the social, ethical, and aesthetic values of the producing culture’ but also leave open the possibility that such narratives ‘may develop interrogative positions’ (Stephens and McCallum, 1998, p. 253). In Mantchev’s trilogy Beatrice takes Prospero’s role by liberating Ariel and supplants Shakespeare himself by becoming the wordsmith whose writing creates realities.

Both Livingston and Mantchev use the serial format to explore their heroines’ emergent identities in the context of mysterious pasts and problematic current romantic choices, both of which originate in Shakespeare. Since Kelley Winslow and Beatrice Shakespeare Smith are both apparently orphans, their quest for identity necessarily involves uncovering who their parents are. Their inheritance from these long lost parents – including both social place and magical powers – anchors the plots, trials, and successes of these heroines to their unknown, yet empowering pasts. The rough analogy to Shakespeare as that valuable yet unknown past becomes quite literal when Kelley discovers that she is the daughter of Auberon [sic] and Queen Mab, with Puck/Bob as a guardian figure, and Beatrice Shakespeare Smith realizes that Ophelia is her mother. These heroines’ fantastic origins appear as the simple past, much as Cowden Clarke presents the early fictional biographies of her chosen Shakespearean heroines as straightforward narrative accounts of their origins.

With the addition of their heroines’ difficult romances – Kelley’s love for Sonny and Beatrice’s for Ariel – these two trilogies recount a magical alternative present that dislocates the corollary Shakespearean characters as thoroughly as Cowden Clarke relocates her Ophelia, Lady Macbeth, and Beatrice within early Victorian gender constructions. Whereas Cowden Clarke framed her fictions to prepare readers for ‘our great poet-teacher’ (Clarke, 1887, rpt. 1997, p. 101; see also Barber, 2013), the fantasy novels of Livingston and Mantchev feature contemporary or quasi-contemporary heroines who interact with the Shakespearean world as the past from which they must win their identities and the current context for their power to shape their own futures. These two series treat Shakespeare as a malleable source that can pervade past, present, and future while the heroines increasingly become the most important agents in the action.

Sequence and Surpassing

For Stacey Jay’s pair of novels based on Romeo and Juliet, intersections between past, present, and future become the key sites for female self-knowledge and empowerment that in turn disempower Shakespeare’s play. Together these two novels delve into the complexities of temporal interconnection at the heart of narrative revision in YA adaptations from Cowden Clarke forward. Whereas Cowden Clarke’s novellas actively surrender their heroines to Shakespeare’s versions of their adult selves with supposed chronological ease, Jay immediately challenges Shakespeare’s characterization of the young lovers with both pre-history and aftermath. She literally and narratively splits the titular couple into two novels: Juliet Immortal (Jay, 2011) and Romeo Redeemed (Jay, 2012). In these sequel narratives, Juliet on her deathbed has been recruited as an Ambassador of Light, intermittently charged to take over a girl’s life in order to rescue true soulmates from the Mercenary of the Apocalypse, usually Romeo, who tempts those soulmates with eternal life if only they will kill their beloveds. As a result, both Jay’s novels interrogate the Shakespearean text and contrast with Cowden Clarke who, as Sarah Barber persuasively argues, constructs Shakespeare as the ideal father figure for the young girl reader (Barber, 2013).⁴

Juliet Immortal simultaneously exploits and dismantles Shakespeare’s play on several interconnected levels. The opening scene utterly upends the play’s iconic love: Juliet awakens in the body of Ariel Dragland and soon discovers that the dead body of Ariel’s would-be rapist now houses Romeo. Moreover, Romeo/Dylan immediately tries to kill her, as this Juliet believes he did originally. When Shakespeare’s tragedy itself comes up, Juliet briskly debunks its idealization of suicide for love as one of Romeo’s tricks:

That horrible play. That contemptible, lying play [that Romeo] helped Shakespeare pen all t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Notes on the Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Reviving Cowden Clarke: Rewriting Shakespeare’s Heroines in Young Adult Fiction
• 2 ‘Give me my sin again’: Disco Does Shakespeare
• 3 Echoes of Romeo and Juliet in Let the Right One In and Let Me In
• 4 The Immortal Vampire of Stratford-upon-Avon
• 5 Cliché ‘By any other name …’ Or Romeo and Juliet, the Telenovela
• 6 Shakespearean Reverberations: from Religion to Responsibility in Roberta Torre’s Sud Side Stori
• 7 Othello’s iPad
• 8 Echoes of The Tempest in Tron: Legacy
• 9 Cursing the Queer Family: Shakespeare, Psychoanalysis and My Own Private Idaho
• 10 History as Echo: Entertainment Historiography from Shakespeare to HBO’s Game of Thrones
• 11 ‘This is not the play’: Shakespeare and Space Opera in Lois McMaster Bujold’s Vorkosigan Saga
• 12 The Tempest’s ‘Standing Water’: Echoes of Early Modern Cosmographies in Lost
• Notes
• References
• Index