Abstract
This chapter summarizes the book’s eight chapters and outlines its rationale, premises, and preferred terminology. Aftermath is construed here as a performative space and condition of awareness wherein all things Shakespearean are available for reassembly and reenactment. Reenactment signifies both an undoing and a redoing, above all a doing differently of what continues to be enacted as the same. This transformational approach to models of the past is rooted in the modernist avant-garde and is carried forward by theater artists and filmmakers whose work this book assesses and explores. The chapter concludes with case studies of the richly textualized stagings of Hamlet Joyce transacts in two episodes of Ulysses and of Asta Nielsen’s cross-gendered displacement of canonical Shakespeare in her silent film Hamlet.
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- 1.
The difficulty of determining what counts or what doesn’t, where to start and where to end, in a study of experimental or avant-garde Shakespeare is put on prominent display in Susan Bennett’s recent essay, “Experimental Shakespeare ,” which restricts its gaze to the last 50 years and to “three separate, but not unrelated, constellations of ‘experimental’ activity” in an effort to “introduce some precision to an appellation that has become anything but precise” (2017, 14).
- 2.
The idea of “doing Shakespeare slant” represents an early, formative stage of my thinking about reenactment in/and the Shakespeare aftermath . See Cartelli (2010).
- 3.
The authority of this phrase, with its identification of authorial possession, has, incidentally, been eroded by the play’s recent editors who see Pericles as the product of collaborative authorship with George Wilkins , to whom the first two acts of the play are often attributed.
- 4.
I suppose this is one of the reasons Mel Gussow , in his New York Times review of the production, wrote that “This is one ‘Pericles’ for which Shakespeare would have disclaimed authorship,” and opined that “Mr. Robertson has outdone himself, and has done in Shakespeare” (1983). Gussow had good reason to be dismissive, but in so doing, he makes my point: This was not Shakespeare “as you like it.”
- 5.
See, for example, my account (below, in the next chapter) of the hostile audience response accorded the 2012 Wooster Group/RSC collaborative production of Troilus and Cressida in Stratford-upon-Avon.
- 6.
I refer here to the recapture or rediscovery of Shakespearean playtexts (whose provenance can be traced to their First Folio or earlier quarto iterations ) from the revised/redacted forms in which many nominally Shakespearean plays—such as Colley Cibber’s version of Richard III —served as scripts for performance, roughly from the Restoration period to the late nineteenth century and, in some cases, beyond. The actor Henry Irving was one of the pioneers of this recovery process, which was soon institutionalized by a like-minded group of scholar-editors.
- 7.
Piñeiro is a thirty-something Argentine filmmaker with an established fixation on Shakespeare’s romantic comedies . His latest films, The Princess of France , a free variation on Love’s Labor’s Lost , and Hermia & Helena , had their premier screenings at the New York Film Festival in October 2014 and 2016, respectively. See my “Essentializing Shakespeare in the Shakespeare Aftermath ” (2017) for an extended discussion of Piñeiro’s Viola . For broader commentary on Piñeiro’s other Shakespeare inspired films, see Burnett (2017).
- 8.
Jestrovic is summarizing here formulations of Viktor Shklovsky —regarding the concept of ostranenie , defamiliarization , estrangement —and of Broder Christiansen , regarding the “divergence quality ,” adding that “Deformation and distortion of the familiar establishes the divergence quality , which enables the sensation of difference … detectable against the backdrop of given norms and conventions” (2006, 33).
- 9.
Rebecca Schneider asks “If we consider performance as of disappearance, of an ephemerality read as vanishment and loss, are we perhaps limiting ourselves to an understanding of performance predetermined by our cultural habituation to the logic of the archive?” (2011, 98), implying that the remains of performance constitute a fluid archive of their own.
- 10.
All quotations from Shakespeare are drawn from The Norton Shakespeare 3 (2016), Gen. ed. Stephen Greenblatt, 3rd ed. (New York: W. W. Norton, 2016), cited parenthetically.
- 11.
Rebecca Schneider observes that “the scandal of performance relative to the archive is not that it disappears … but that it remains in ways that resist archontic ‘house arrest’ and ‘domiciliation’” (2011, 104–105).
- 12.
Rosalind was played as a (sort of) woman by a very tall male Jack Laskey, Orlando by a very short female Bettrys Jones , Celia by a deaf, hand-signing, and brilliantly expressive Nadia Nadaraj , Dukes Frederick and Senior by Helen Schlesinger , while Tanika Yearwood helped turn Hymen’s brief appearance (and disappearance) into a wonderful coup de théâtre. See the admiring reviews of the Globe As You Like It and of Michele Terry’s artistic direction by Stig Abell in TLS (25 May 2018) and Matt Wolf in The New York Times (31 May 2018).
- 13.
See Carson (2017) and Kennedy (2017) for pertinent commentary on the Globe to Globe and World Shakespeare Festivals and on global Shakespeare generally, and the collection of essays edited by Carson and Susan Bennett (2013) for analyses and reviews of specific Globe to Globe productions.
- 14.
For an in-depth discussion of the Brook controversy, see James Harding’s chapter, “Brechtian Aesthetics and the Death of the Director in Peter Brook’s The Mahabharata ,” in Ghosts of the Avant Garde (2013).
- 15.
See Guy Lodge , “Romeo + Juliet at 20,” The Guardian , November 1, 2016. https://www.theguardian.com/film/2016/nov/01/romeo-juliet-baz-lurhmann-leonardo-dicaprio-claire-danes-20th-anniversary. Accessed August 3, 2018.
- 16.
In a double review of the recent Globe As You Like It and Hamlet productions, Stig Abell suggests that comedy “is somehow more accessible to our age than tragedy, which always seems to be striving to reach a register to which we are increasingly less attuned” in the process of noting “a common failing in Shakespeare productions, especially at the Globe, that laughter is more readily sought from an audience than sighs of empathy” (2018, 20).
- 17.
Oregon’s “Play on!” project has specifically “commissioned 36 playwrights to create what it is calling line-by-line modern English translations of the plays.” By contrast, the ASC’s “Shakespeare’s New Contemporaries ” scheme “invites writers to submit plays inspired by each of Shakespeare’s.” Rather than encouraging “straight retellings,” ASC is “looking for … wider-ranging riffs that might include sequels or prequels; plays focused on minor characters or on the first productions of one of Shakespeare’s dramas; or plays that feature modern characters interacting with those from Shakespeare” (Schuessler 2017).
- 18.
The ranks of the textually indifferent include Emma Rice , former artistic director of Shakespeare’s Globe , who before being forced out “had drawn headlines for … an oft-circulated statement that she became ‘very sleepy’ when trying to read Shakespeare’s plays” (Shea 2017). It wasn’t, however, her avowedly drowsy approach to reading Shakespeare that cost Rice her job; it was more likely her innovative approach to casting and staging, particularly, her perceived “overuse” of technology at an institution generally committed to “original practices.”
- 19.
See the splendid chapter on parodic appropriations of Shakespeare in Popular Shakespeare (2009) in which Stephen Purcell discusses everything from a televised sketch of Pyramus and Thisbe performed by the Beatles “broadcast on 6 May 1964 as part of the television special Around the Beatles ” (114–116) to the Reduced Shakespeare Company’s performances of The Complete Works of William Shakespeare ( abridged ) (116–119) to a touring production of The Comedy of Errors mounted by the Flying Karamazov Brothers (132–135) to productions of Cymbeline performed by Kneehigh and Cheek by Jowl , respectively, with short takes in between to consider performances that range from Beyond the Fringe and Monty Python to Brecht (95–138). Purcell offers a particularly acute assessment of the Karamazovs’ Comedy of Errors , noting that their “production perhaps marks the beginning of a form of Shakespearean appropriation which is defiantly disregarding of cultural categories in its intertextuality, … one which coincides with a more general cultural shift” (134–135).
- 20.
A recent New York Times review compared a conceptually promiscuous but dialogically faithful production of As You Like It with a variation on Measure for Measure that dispensed with both Shakespeare’s language and most of its plot. This is the reviewer’s assessment: “Fidelity is a tricky thing. You can find it in exquisitely researched ‘original practices’ productions like the all-male ‘Twelfth Night ’ led by Mark Rylance … and in much freer adaptations, like ‘10 Things I Hate About You,’ the deliciously caustic teen rom-com movie based on ‘Taming of the Shrew.’ But fidelity doesn’t always make for good theater. So maybe it’s not such a surprise that ‘Arden/Everywhere,’ a well-intentioned, textually trusty exploration of ‘As You Like It,’ as seen through the lens of the refugee crisis, has all the verve of a deflated soccer ball. And that ‘Desperate Measures,’ a bad-joke travesty of a problem play, is such a hoot” (Soloski 2017, C5).
- 21.
Sleep No More had its start in London in 2003, was reinvented and expanded for performance in a refurbished school in Brookline, Massachusetts, in concert with Cambridge’s American Repertory Theatre in 2009, and has since become institutionalized at its Manhattan site where it has been running nonstop since March 7, 2011. A Shanghai branch of the production opened in 2016 and is set in a 5-story building that has been named the McKinnon Hotel.
- 22.
Polly Findlay’s 2018 RSC production of Macbeth in Stratford-upon-Avon supplies several cases in point. It substitutes little girls dressed in pink and wearing white rubber boots for gnarly old witches and keeps the Porter onstage throughout to keep score and motivate the clueless murderers of Banquo, novelties introduced for the sake of novelty, resulting, once again, in a general replication of the same.
- 23.
Quoted in Hay and Roberts (1980, 107–108). Orig. Gambit 17, 24 (22 January 1970).
- 24.
The phrases in quotation are Jacques Rancière’s. They are drawn from Les scènes du peuple: Les Revóltes logiques , 1975/1985 (Paris: Horlieu, 2003), 8, as translated by Peter Hallward .
- 25.
In the most inspired work yet done on Joyce’s treatment of Shakespeare in Ulysses, Andrew Gibson writes in a clearly apposite vein: “Emulation, imitation , simulation, admiration, degradation, domination: all are aspects of what Joyce does with Shakespeare” (2002, 76).
- 26.
Note the resemblances between Stephen’s Hamlet-inspired performance in the National Library and Haider’s politically charged performance of antic disposition in Vishal Bhardwaj’s film Haider , both being aggressively engaged in throwing off the yoke of colonialism, as described in Chapter 4 of this book.
- 27.
As culturally and politically specific as Stephen’s engagement with Shakespeare is throughout Ulysses—variably staging him as ally and antagonist, figure of respect and target of ridicule, inspirational model and colonizing agent—Joyce’s understanding of Shakespeare’s life and work relied heavily on the uniformly laudatory biographical and interpretive work of the Irish-born Edward Dowden and Frank Harris , the Briton Sidney Lee (born Solomon Lazarus Lee), and Danish scholar Georg Brandes (born Morris Cohen), among others whose numbers include the even more obvious outlier, Walt Whitman . Given the painstakingly detailed work of Brandes and Lee in particular, it might well have seemed to Joyce that the world’s understanding of Shakespeare’s life and of the creative arc of his work had reached critical mass, after which all that remained was speculation, making Shakespeare seem, as Haines dismissively quips in Wandering Rocks, “the happy hunting ground of all minds that have lost their balance” (10.248).
- 28.
Cf. Joseph Roach (1998: 27). What Roach says elsewhere of the effects of Thomas Betterton’s acting may also be applied to Stephen’s performance in the Library: “To act well is to impart the gestures of the dead to the living, to incorporate, through kinesthetic imagination, the deportment of once and future kings” (1986, 80).
- 29.
Observing that “this hybrid Shakespeare addresses himself not to Stephen, the aspiring artist and Hamlet-theorist, but Bloom,” Richard Halpern notes that “Bloom is repeatedly reflected in or associated with mirrors in the course of Ulysses, a fact that pertains to his status as Jew and to his role as the uncanny double of Shakespeare” (1997, 170). As for what Stephen’s Hamlet lecture has done to Shakespeare, Halpern writes: “Stephen’s Shakespeare soon disintegrates under the combined assaults of interruption , interrogation, and skepticism, until Stephen is forced to admit that even he doesn’t believe in his own theory” (176).
- 30.
Halpern’s chapter “Hamletmachines” begins with a discussion of W. S. Gilbert’s 1892 stage-satire The Mountebanks which featured “the two world renowned lifesize clockwork automata, representing Hamlet and Ophelia,” which are made to seem “so realistic that they [are] detained by the police at Palermo for lack of passports” (227). As Halpern writes, “The clockwork Hamlet of The Mountebanks satirically literalizes the problem of cultural repetition that afflicted Victorian productions of the play … Gilbert proposes a radically new, if merely farcical, solution to the antagonism between novelty and mechanicity; he produces a ‘fresh’ Hamlet not by making him more lifelike or ‘human,’ but by deepening the cultural petrification that has already settled over him” (235). See also Halpern’s discussion of Müller’s Hamletmachine (268–276) and my own discussion of an actorless Hamlet in Chapter 8.
- 31.
See Richard Brown (2015) for a consideration of the ways Joyce’s work may have come under the influence of Marinetti and Italian Futurism during his years in Trieste.
- 32.
Julie Allen writes that though “Critics protested that Nielsen’s female Hamlet would desecrate Shakespeare … Nielsen insisted that her Hamlet adaptation was not based on Shakespeare … Although the film’s narrative is a pastiche of Saxo, Vining , Shakespeare, and Nielsen’s own notions, her insistence on an original Danish source for her retelling of Hamlet is significant. Hamlet is an iconic text for the perception of Danish identity in the Western world, and in choosing to play Hamlet, Nielsen positioned herself as representative of Denmark” (2013, 190). This comment appears in a book intriguingly devoted to two “outliers” of Danish national identity who came to be closely associated with Denmark after their deaths: Nielsen and Georg Brandes , the Danish-born, Jewish literary scholar, internationalist, and close friend of Nielsen’s for over twenty years, who, like Nielsen, spent most of his professional life in Germany. As noted above, Brandes’s two-volume Shakespeare biography exerted a profound influence on Joyce’s understanding of Shakespeare.
- 33.
In one of the more uncanny tracings of what Harding calls “vanguard ghosting ,” we may further note that Nielsen’s Hamlet’s setting fire to the drinking party anticipates Bhardwaj’s Gertrude surrogate, Ghazala, blowing herself and her son’s enemies to bits at the end of Haider . The line of women “contaminating” Hamlet by injecting their own formidable points of view notably includes contemporary directors Elizabeth LeCompte and Annie Dorsen, whose work is addressed in detail in later chapters of this book.
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Cartelli, T. (2019). Reenacting Shakespeare in the Shakespeare Aftermath. In: Reenacting Shakespeare in the Shakespeare Aftermath. Reproducing Shakespeare. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-40482-4_1
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