Much as the tropes, idioms, and practices of the British Variety tradition shape the comedy of Eric Morecambe and Ernie Wise, all-things-Shakespeare consistently serve their comic needs for over 40 years. Addressing those needs in their 1981 dual autobiography, Eric and Ernie direct actors to keep moving or television audiences ‘think you’re dead,’ indicating,Here discussing a characteristic adaptation of the playwright’s work, the needs and standard practices of two consummate Variety artistes emerge clearly. Layering revised text, traditional wardrobe, and a comic ‘hole in the tights,’ Britain’s most successful double-act (TI, 24/3/19; Cornell et al., 1996) synthesizes usefully disparate materials and expertly engages a professional practice that, arguably, ‘always gets a laugh.’ Embracing such laughter, Britain’s most studied playwright diegetically validates Ernie’s comic ‘treatment’ in a characteristically surreal fashion. Morecambe & Wise thus parody the claim that thespians performed his plays ‘this way since’ Shakespeare’s ‘day,’ deploying interpretive conflict as comic material.
Eric Morecambe: Of course, they turn ‘round and say, ‘Shakespeare didn’t want it like that. It has been done this way since his day.’
Ernie Wise: We say, ‘That’s why it’s so boring.’
EM: And Ernie says, ‘Shakespeare doesn’t mind it being done this way, he was contacted only this morning’ … and he’s happy with Ern’s treatment. Just put a hole in the tights, that always gets a laugh. (M&W, 1981, 52–53)
Going to the source for approval, Eric (1926–1984) and Ernie (1925–1999) comically contrast two interpretive traditions within this Shakespop iteration, that is, the popular adaptation of Shakespeare. Rather than vesting authority with performers, here the writers emerge dominant, eliciting Shakespeare and Ernie’s combined ‘author function.’ Appropriating Michel Foucault’s terms (1980), Harry Berger, Jr., defines the author function as ‘a principle of closure, of semiotic inhibition, employed in the conflict of interpretations to privilege certain readings and control “unruly meanings”’ (2005, 112; cf. Wrothen, 1997). Neither using Shakespeare to ‘privilege certain readings,’ nor seeking ostensibly ‘authentic’ meanings, Eric and Ernie position ‘the conflict of interpretations’ to engender the comic itself. In this imaginative fantasy, Shakespeare approves of ‘unruly meanings’ because they serve comedy. Rather than a ‘boring’ writer, as some British comedians hold (e.g., Powles, 10/3/2018; Davidson, 1/3/10; Curtis, 22/12/2007; Wright, 22/5/1998; Bye, 4/12/1994; Dyson, 27/9/1994–2014, 4/10/1994–2014; Croft, 1/12/1989; Graef, 22/12/1979), Shakespeare functions as a Variety artiste making audiences laugh through Ernie’s revisions. Ernie and Eric, known as ‘the Boys,’ here wrest interpretive authority from ‘legitimate’ actors, yet in other comic fictions they favour thespians; such a promiscuous approach to Shakespeare remains, moreover, their norm.
As a notable part of their highly popular comedy, the Boys deployed distinct aspects of Shakespeare, his plays, and other Shakespeareana more than 125 times and coded sexual humour innumerable times on television, on radio, on stage, and in their written work. Alongside Monty Python’s Flying Circus (B, 1969–1974) and Spitting Image (I, 1984–1996), in fact, the popular work of Morecambe & Wise provides some of the most varied appropriations of Shakespeare in British comedy. Over the course of a 44-year career (1940–1984; McCann, 1999, 57), Morecambe & Wise appropriated snippets of verse, scenes, and other play elements from Antony and Cleopatra , The Comedy of Errors, Hamlet , Henry V, Henry VI, Julius Caesar, King Lear , Love’s Labour’s Lost, Macbeth , The Merchant of Venice, The Merry Wives of Windsor, A Midsummer Night’s Dream , Much Ado About Nothing , Othello , Richard III , Romeo and Juliet , and The Taming of the Shrew (Kiss Me Kate).
In addition to play texts, the Boys comically appropriate an array of elements connected to Shakespeare, his life, and the institutions dedicated to him. These include Shakespearean actors, adaptations, and auditions; interpretive authority over his work; his birth and birthplace; the Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC ), the National and the Shakespeare Memorial Theatres; co-writing his plays; Shakespeare as contemporary; the authorship ‘controversy’; Shakespearean conventions, props, roles, and wardrobe; ‘new’ biographical ‘facts’; his garden; Anne Hathaway; Shakespeare’s supposed homosexuality; his manuscripts and masterpieces; his sobriquet, ‘the Bard’; his status as a national figure; the Sonnets ; the putative ‘immortality’ of his works; and both new and apocryphal works. The Boys’ samplings also include ‘directing’ Shakespearean performance, impersonating Shakespeare, posing as him in print images, and representing his characters. Such Shakespop iterations notably neither automatically denigrate nor blindly deify him, his work, or his reputation. Very few scholars, moreover, engage the Boys’ comic approach to Shakespeare and sexual humour. In fact, contemporary work on Morecambe & Wise is far more narrowly focused than this study (e.g., Roberts, 2018, 280–283; Archer, 2017, 36–44; Geddes, 2017, 100–101).
Contextualizing the duo’s work within traditions of British comedy, Shakespeare criticism, the history of sexuality, and their own historical moment, Shakespeare and Sexuality in the Comedy of Morecambe & Wise offers the first sustained examination of the twentieth century’s most successful double-act, providing analysis of those appropriations of Shakespeare seen by the largest number of British viewers. In addition to the Boys’ performative brilliance capturing those viewers (cf. Boon, 2004; Crowther, 1987; Tynan, 1975; Priestley, 1975), Morecambe & Wise achieved great success by adaptively working through the medium of televised British Variety and by fashioning a kinder, more inclusive world within their comedy, reaching family audiences on multiple levels. Rejecting claims that they offer only nostalgic escapism, this chapter establishes the situated nature of the Boys’ work, analysing them within their contemporary political and professional contexts.
Imagined Pasts
For many, Morecambe & Wise’s appeal lies in the ostensibly ‘clean’ or ‘family-friendly’ nature of their work. Although a strategic overstatement, claims that ‘they were never “blue”’ or dirty (GM, 1987, 10; GM, 2013, 109) helps maintain the Boys’ hard-won reputation as ‘family’ comedians (Saville, 2018; Burton, 2008; Ellis, 2005). Further sustaining that reputation, their comedy has also unfortunately been regularly dehistoricized. Much as elite writers interpreted early Variety comedy as not specific to one class (Phillips, 2002; Faulk, 2001; Rutherford, 1986; cf. Higgins, 2015), most twentieth- and twenty-first-century critics misrepresent the Boys as transcending contemporary concerns, including class. In contrast to the more accurate cultural histories of the 1970s emerging in the last decade (Sandbrook, 2016; Moran, 2013; Beckett, 2009; Turner, 2008), such misguided, often ‘nostalgic,’ approaches to Morecambe & Wise cloud understanding of their coded humour and their situated complexity.
The Boys’ comedy sits firmly within its moment, yet reductive decontextualization continues to misrepresent their work. Whether defining them as the quintessential double-act, Americanized romantics, apolitical nostalgia peddlers, conservative yet liberating comics, low comedians, populist proponents of the working class, or traditional seaside entertainers (Lloyd, 10/1/2019; Roberts, 2018; Archer, 2017; Geddes, 2017; Seaton, 2017; Bramley, 2016; Sandbrook, 2010; Smith, 2000; Banham, 1984; McGrath, 1981; Midwinter, 1979; TL, 4/1/70), a range of writers continue to deploy Eric and Ernie as emblematic of a simpler time separated from the tumultuous 1960s and 1970s when the Boys enjoyed their greatest popularity. John Ellis suggests, however, that this kind of ahistorical segregation misconstrues the nature of television. ‘Television programmes,’ as Ellis indicates, ‘were made for a particular moment in time and for a huge audience’ (2005, 41–42). Despite the laughter still created through...