Abstract
Shakespeare in Love, John Madden and Tom Stoppard’s award-winning 1998 film, ends by rhyming paired images: Will Shakespeare writing Viola’s name and her first line in Twelfth Night, ‘What country, friends, is this?’ on a blank parchment page, and Viola de Lesseps’s solitary figure walking on an expansive empty beach. Madden, however, had filmed an alternative ending in which Viola, meeting a Native chief and his squaw, speaks her first line, to which the chief replies, ‘This is America, lady’. Madden also had imagined having Manhattan’s skyline, the World Trade Center Towers prominent, rise (magically, digitally) in the distance, but only Viola’s encounter with Native Americans survives in the archives. When I first wrote about these absent endings, I saw them as cinema’s equivalent of foul papers, as a sly but discarded joke about how America’s cinematic marketplace for Shakespeare has replaced London’s Rose Theatre. After reading (and viewing) these chapters on Performance(s) and the City, revisiting Madden’s absent endings seems especially apt, for the mirage of the city he once imagined has disappeared. It disappeared in a politically brilliant, brilliantly horrible event (a performance?1), leaving behind an unreal, surreal city. Brightness fell from the air; that endemic universal of performance — ‘Someone is dying in front of your eyes’ (Blau: 156) — was played out over and over and over and over again.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Works cited
Blau, Herbert. ‘Universals of Performance: Or, Amortizing Play.’ SubStance 11.4 (1983): 140–61.
Eliot, T. S. The Complete Poems and Plays, 1909–1950. New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1952.
Lentricchia, Frank and Jody McAuliffe. Crimes of Art and Terror. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003.
Madden, John, dir. Shakespeare in Love. Written by Marc Norman and Tom Stoppard. Universal, 1998.
O’Neill, Pat, dir. The Decay of Fiction. Lookout Mountain Films, 2002.
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Copyright information
© 2009 Barbara Hodgdon
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Hodgdon, B. (2009). Afterword: Performing the City — A Wonder Cabinet. In: Hopkins, D.J., Orr, S., Solga, K. (eds) Performance and the City. Performance Interventions. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-230-30521-2_15
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-230-30521-2_15
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
Print ISBN: 978-0-230-30049-1
Online ISBN: 978-0-230-30521-2
eBook Packages: Palgrave Social & Cultural Studies CollectionSocial Sciences (R0)