Performing Shakespeare's Women

Playing Dead

Paige Martin Reynolds

• Editorial: The Arden Shakespeare
• Año: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781350002616
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: Literature
• Categoría: Shakespeare Drama

Shakespeare's women rarely reach the end of the play alive. Whether by murder or by suicide, onstage or off, female actors in Shakespeare's works often find themselves 'playing dead.' But what does it mean to 'play dead', particularly for women actors, whose bodies become scrutinized and anatomized by audiences and fellow actors who 'grossly gape on'? In what ways does playing Shakespeare's women when they are dead emblematize the difficulties of playing them while they are still alive? Ultimately, what is at stake for the female actor who embodies Shakespeare's women today, dead or alive? Situated at the intersection of the creative and the critical, Performing Shakespeare's Women: Playing Dead engages performance history, current scholarship and the practical problems facing the female actor of Shakespeare's plays when it comes to 'playing dead' on the contemporary stage and in a post-feminist world. This book explores the consequences of corpsing Shakespeare's women, considering important ethical questions that matter to practitioners, students and critics of Shakespeare today.

1

Performing Death and Desire in Othello

Once she is dead, Desdemona has some time on her hands. And she has some hands on her body. As she lies lifeless (yet lovely) for the lengthy final scene, Desdemona’s body is repeatedly bothered, jabbed and jostled. In my experience playing the role, being Desdemona’s corpse can feel like an afterlife of its own kind – presence without power, cognizance without control, sensation without speech. In some way, Desdemona’s conspicuous corpse may figure forth what it means for a woman to put her body on the stage in Shakespeare’s plays. This is, in the end, how it all began. Since ‘Othello is thought to be the first of Shakespeare’s tragedies staged during the Restoration’,¹ as Ayanna Thompson notes, the first paid female performer of Shakespeare, as the story goes, played Desdemona. Though it is unprovable, this ‘unnamed woman’ who ‘took to the stage of the Vere Street Theatre’ in December of 1660 ‘may well be the first Englishwoman to play Desdemona’, according to Clare McManus, ‘prompting reflections on the play’s relationship to the history of women in theatre’.² McManus demonstrates how Othello’s concern with ‘the risk of allowing women into public spaces’ aligns with ‘the unknown actress’s move into the public theatre’.³ I would like to expand this point further, suggesting another thing Desdemona has in common with the first woman who played her, along with the legacy of female performers who have followed her: she must play dead. That is, in the way that being a corpse – along with all of the vulnerability and voyeurism it invites – is a defining condition for the character in Othello, being a corpse is, on some level, a defining condition of being a female performer in Shakespeare’s plays.

When I portrayed Desdemona in 2011, the rehearsal during which we staged her murder was the first time I considered how long I was going to have to be dead onstage (in bed, in a nightie, in a spotlight). But once she is dead, there must the ‘divine Desdemona’ stay (2.1.73). The enduring image she leaves with the audience (and critics) may have more to do with her post-murder posture than any other aspect of her performance, as reflected in Henry Jackson’s frequently cited observation that the Desdemona of a 1610 production moved the audience ‘more after she was dead, when, lying on her bed, she entreated the pity of the spectators by her very countenance’.⁴ Jackson’s description has become something of a prescription – indeed, it reads almost like a casting call in the context of the play’s performance history. That is, until she is dead, the actor portraying Desdemona has seemed doomed to be … well, lifeless. The ostensible inevitability of being upstaged by one’s own corpse presents an actor with a special sort of predicament. An additional ethical challenge is embedded in the language of Jackson (and many other critics and practitioners to follow). Desdemona is most compelling not because of what she says or does while alive, but how she looks – her ‘very countenance’ – after she has been brutally murdered and is ‘lying on her bed’ (in a nightie, in a spotlight, perhaps). The play’s ending thus exemplifies Dympna Callaghan’s assertion that ‘female corpses are constructed as focal points for ocular inspection by other characters on stage and by the audience in a way that male bodies are not’.⁵ Desdemona’s (the actor’s) body is scrutinized, covered, uncovered, touched, groped, kissed and sweated upon as the remainder of the plot unravels.

Since the plot demands that the actor be simultaneously passive and active (and remain alluring while doing both), playing a dead Desdemona almost parodies playing a living one. Further, in a play that is, as Carol Chillington Rutter asserts, ‘constructed out of narratives: tales, stories, reports, news, gossip, prattle’,⁶ Desdemona dies because of the stories the men in her life tell about her. Defying a world in which her body was ‘made to write “whore” upon’, Desdemona’s death in performance reveals her subjectivity in a way that unsettles the male-constructed narratives that lead to her demise in the first place (4.2.73). Even so, the tales most often told about Desdemona (by critics, spectators and practitioners) remarkably reiterate the stories the play’s male characters tell about her. Such narrative reproduction is worth interrogating – especially since the conclusion of Othello works to deconstruct the Desdemona stories its misguided men have authored. In what follows, this chapter surveys and unpacks the various narrative strategies that critics, spectators and practitioners often deploy to describe Desdemona, strategies that echo the men of Othello, rendering Desdemona dead before she even begins.

O, these men, these men!

After Othello has called her a ‘Devil’, physically assaulted her in public, verbally assaulted her in private and ‘so bewhored her’, to use Emilia’s phrase, ‘that true hearts cannot bear it’, Desdemona cries out to her female companion in a rare intimate exchange between the two: ‘O, these men, these men!’ (4.1.239; 4.2.117, 119; 4.3.59). Such a theatrical moment is extraordinary on many levels. For one thing, the scene is notable for its ‘unique privacy’ between women, especially in the hyper-masculine world of the play, since, as Rutter asserts, it ‘privileges women’s talk, women’s bodies, women’s thoughtful work upon the cultural imperatives that organize their lives’.⁷ A centrepiece of this scene is, after all, Emilia’s famous declaration that women have ‘affections’, ‘desires for sport’ and ‘frailty’, just like their husbands do (4.3.99–100). Before Emilia’s bold speech, however, in this line – ‘O, these men, these men!’ – Desdemona insinuates an indictment that reaches beyond Othello (and Othello). In the lines that follow, she turns to the implications of the accusations levelled against her, imploring Emilia to tell her if she ‘in conscience’ believes ‘that there be women do abuse their husbands’ through infidelity (4.3.60–1). But first, Desdemona issues a charge of her own. Both character and actor may reveal in this line an awareness of ‘these men’ who determine Desdemona’s destiny, ‘these men’ who dictate which bodies are ‘made to write whore upon’ (4.2.73), ‘these men’ who craft the cultural stories about women. And maybe even ‘these men’ whose gaze will soon find delight in the beauty of a dead Desdemona, ‘lying on her bed’. That is, it’s not just ‘these men’ (the ones driving the drama that will lead to her death), it’s these men (the ones simply watching it).

The repetition of ‘these men’ anticipates the reiterative strategies of narrative about Desdemona’s death that can only reproduce that which has come before. Even if Desdemona does not fully realize she is damned from the start, the actor playing her undoubtedly does. Desdemona’s ‘O, these men, these men!’ is thus not only evocative in its convergence of performer and character but also provocative in its protest of misogynistic patterns both within the world of the play and beyond it. Lynda E. Boose claims that to watch Othello is to enter a ‘world of images centered upon the availability of Desdemona’s body’, which is ‘the voyeuristic object that the language of the play has endlessly invited the audience to violate’.⁸ Asserting the resonance of the play with contemporary pornography, Boose explains:

Pornography in its original literary manifestation is by definition male-authored and subscribed – not only authored by a male but subscribed by a culture which deprecates the feminine and invests the masculine with sexual desire accompanied by fear, guilt and loathing of female sexuality … the primary job that pornographic literature fulfills … is providing a medium for reconstituting and circulating the society’s norms about male power and male dominance.⁹

Boose explains Desdemona’s extreme subordination and passivity as a product of ‘the only erotic fantasies the culture knows how to construct’.¹⁰ Indeed, Desdemona is constructed by most of the play’s men, out of their ‘fantasies’ and for their benefit. And, if the production history of Othello is to be believed, it seems that audience reception and critical perception have not simply responded to the play’s stories ‘about male power and male dominance’, but have had a hand in ‘reconstituting and circulating’ them. ‘O, these men, these men!’ is an outburst that signals Desdemona’s alertness to the play’s precarious pornographic imperatives even as it confronts the violent impulses of the voyeurs who make it work – both onstage and off, again and again.

Iago’s Desdemona

Iago spins the play’s earliest tales about Desdemona, and, to be sure, they are the stuff of the cultural dreams Boose discusses. The first representation of Desdemona that Iago creates is an image of her having sex with Othello meant to scandalize the unsuspecting Brabantio: ‘even now, now, very now, an old black ram / Is tupping your white ewe!’ (1.1.87–8). Iago’s subsequent descriptions are equally animalistic, aggressive and suggestive: he tells Brabantio that Desdemona is currently ‘covered with a Barbary horse’ and that she is ‘making the beast with two backs’ with ‘the Moor’ (1.1.110; 114–15). Brabantio, it turns out, is not so unsuspecting after all. He responds to the allegations of Iago and Roderigo by admitting, ‘this accident is not unlike my dream’ (1.1.140). The uneasy spectre of a father dreaming about his daughter ‘making the beast with two backs’ thus pollutes the air of the play’s first scene alongside Iago’s other constructions of Desdemona’s sexuality. The crudeness of Brabantio’s dreams notwithstanding, it makes sense to conclude that Iago uses such outrageous imagery for shock value here specifically to appall the defied father into action. Searching for Iago’s authentic view of Desdemona, however, is a tricky task since he so often fashions his speech to simultaneously agitate and titillate his listeners. At times he does so by provoking the desire to possess and penetrate Desdemona’s body; he tells Cassio she is ‘a land carrack’ that Othello ‘hath boarded’, for example (1.2.50). At other times, he does so by implying the transgressive yet tantalizing voracity of Desdemona’s sexual appetite, such as his assurance to Roderigo that when she is ‘sated’ with Othello’s ‘body’, she will be once again available to him because ‘she must have change, she must’, along with his later reiteration that ‘her eye must be fed’ (1.3.351–2; 2.1.223). And still at other times, as with Brabantio at the play’s beginning, he arouses his audiences with animalistic images of Desdemona in the sexual act. When Othello demands that he show him proof that his wife is sleeping with Cassio, for instance, Iago generates such evidence simply by asking Othello if he would ‘grossly gape on’ to ‘behold her topped’, adding that such an opportunity would be hard to come by, even if she and her lover were ‘as prime as goats, as hot as monkeys’ (3.3.398–9; 406). Mission accomplished.

Remarkably, Iago gets away with eroticizing Desdemona to her face, as when he playfully tells her and Emilia that they ‘rise to play, and go to bed to work’ (2.1.115). So effective is Iago’s sexualization of Desdemona that even his attempts to emphasize her benevolence become somehow sensual. When he tells the humiliated and outcast Cassio that ‘she is of so free, so kind, so apt, so blest a disposition that she holds it a vice in her goodness not to do more than she is requested’, he manages to articulate another of those culturally constructed ‘erotic fantasies’: a woman who is not only subservient, but driven to gratify through her service by doing ‘more than she is requested’ (2.3.315–17). Later in the same scene, Iago reveals in soliloquy that he knows ‘th’ inclining Desdemona’ to be ‘framed as fruitful / As the free elements’ (2.3.335–7), resonating with Othello’s earlier description of how Desdemona did ‘seriously incline’ to hear his tales (1.3.147). Even as Iago vows to ‘turn her virtue into pitch’, the implications of ‘inclining’ come into focus – an inclining Desdemona will inevitably give way to a reclining one (2.3.355). In the end, however, whether Iago honestly holds Desdemona in high regard is beside the point. He remains relentlessly responsible for her sexual objectification throughout the play, regardless of his motives for doing so.

Cassio’s Desdemona

As they anxiously await the arrival of Othello in Cyprus, Cassio tells Montano that Desdemona is

a maid

That paragons description and wild fame;

One that excels the quirks of blazoning pens

And in th’ essential vesture of creation

Does tire the inginer.

(2.1.61–4)

He stands by his claim that she ‘excels the quirks of blazoning pens’, and instead of itemizing the particular features of her splendour, he describes its ability to seduce even the strongest natural forces:

Tempests themselves, high seas, and howling winds,

The guttered rocks and congregated sands,

Traitors ensteeped to clog the guiltless keel,

As having sense of beauty, do omit

Their mortal natures, letting go safely by

The divine Desdemona.

(2.1.68–73)

The truth is that Cassio need not detail the awe-inspiring ‘beauty’ of Desdemona because the audience has already seen her (and the actor embodying her) in the flesh. Cassio’s emphasis on Desdemona’s beauty, however, is a new element at this point in the play. That is, although such physical charms have long been assumed in the casting of Desdemona, her attractiveness is actually authored by Cassio – after she has already asserted herself, quite capably, in the play’s first act. The beauty of Cassio’s ‘divine Desdemona’ is a dominant (and dominating) force, commanding not only the deadly enemies of travellers on the open sea – ‘tempests’, ‘high seas’, ‘howling winds’, ‘guttered rocks and congregated sands’ – but also Othello himself, as Cassio makes clear to Montano when he terms her ‘our great captain’s captain’ (2.1.74). Significantly, Cassio’s last mention of Desdemona just before she enters is an echo of Iago’s previous sexualization of her, one of the ‘images centered upon the availability of Desdemona’s body’ to which Boose refers:

Great Jove, Othello guard,

And swell his sail with thine own powerful breath

That he may bless this bay with his tall ship,

Make love’s quick pants in Desdemona’s arms …

(2.1.77–80)

Othello making ‘love’s quick pants in Desdemona’s arms’ conjures, though more gracefully, a vision of the same business Iago earlier calls ‘making the beast with two backs’ (1.1.113–15). Admittedly, Iago’s phrasing lacks the poetry of Cassio’s, but then, both men seem to know this about one another. It is Iago who claims that Cassio’s ‘prattle’ excels his ‘practice’, while Cassio asserts that Iago ‘speaks home’ and is more of a ‘soldier’ than a ‘scholar’ (1.1.25; 2.1.165–6). What Cassio shares with Iago, despite the differences in their language, is the urge that both men have not only to imagine Desdemona having sex with Othello but to inspire their listeners – Brabantio, Montano, the audience – to imagine it with them.

Cassio’s flare for romantic rhetoric continues to flourish in his subsequent characterizations of Desdemona, a notable contrast to Iago’s tendency to talk dirty, especially evident in the conversation the two have about her in Act 2, Scene 3. Iago’s first attempt at inci...