Abstract
The first three sections of this chapter critically assess Edward Bond’s politically informed reenactment of King Lear in Lear and graphically embodied representation of Shakespeare’s last years in Bingo. The fourth focuses on Heiner Müller’s Hamletmachine, a landmark product Western cultural history, which it densely references and explodes in eight outspoken pages of text. For Bond, as for Müller, “We have not arrived at ourselves if Shakespeare writes our plays.” Shakespeare for our own time must be redeployed in a manner that disrupts expectations and denies easy access to escape or evasion. While Bond’s Lear inducts us into a pained moral accountability that cannot be sublimed away, Hamletmachine sustains a negativism that deforms, defies, and opposes whatever the normative order sponsors and supports, Shakespeare included.
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Notes
- 1.
Edward Bond, “Author’s Preface,” Lear (Bond 1983, lxv). All quotations from Lear are drawn from its 1983 Methuen Student Editions printing and will be cited by act, scene, and page number.
- 2.
According to William Gaskill, commenting on two of Bond’s contributions to the Writer’s Group of the Royal Court Theatre in the late fifties, one “was rather Beckett-like and the other rather Brecht-like in style.” Quoted in Malcolm Hay and Philip Roberts (1978, 8). As John Elsom remarks of this “second wave” of British dramatists: “Unlike Osborne, they were surrounded by technical alternatives. They could write in the style of Brecht and no director would quail. They could write Absurdist plays without necessarily being accused of meaningless obscurity … They could write for three basic types of stage—arena, thrust and proscenium—or for no formal stage at all” (1976, 178).
- 3.
For informed accounts of Brecht’s influence on postwar British theater, see Peter Davison (1982), particularly Chapter 3, Elsom (1976), Chapter 7, and Holland (1982).
- 4.
One may wonder whether Bond’s failure to commit himself to a more firmly shaped social or political alternative was affected by the political climate of his times. As John Elsom writes: “For most of the 1960s, a Labour government was in power, and it was hard for left-wing writers to generate the same degree of self-righteous outrage against (say) the Labour government’s tacit support for the American involvement in Vietnam, as had previously been aroused against Suez.” Although, as Elsom remarks, some writers and directors (Elsom specifically names Peter Brook; I would also nominate Bond) “did their best” to express such outrage, “left-wing writers [in general] showed a reluctance to attack the Labour Party and government directly, though they might attack a System which somehow existed above, beyond and surrounding the government” (1976, 179–180). Bond’s depiction of Shakespeare’s implication in a non-historically specific “Goneril-society--with its prisons, work-houses, whipping, starvation, mutilation, pulpit-hysteria and all the rest of it,” in his Introduction to Bingo (1976, 7), suggests his working deployment of just such an all-embracing “System” in Lear as well.
- 5.
Perry Nodelman applauds what he takes to be this apparent disparity between Bond’s practice as a dramatist and his theoretical aims and intentions. Nodelman construes Lear’s act of digging out the wall “a personal gesture Lear makes for himself, a stand taken against the wall-building tendencies of all political philosophies—including Edward Bond’s” (1980, 275).
- 6.
As Elsom remarks, Bond’s “violent scenes provoked two contrasting reactions [in Bond’s original audiences ]: one was that Bond simply likes blood … and the other was that Bond hated cruelty so much that he was determined to bring home to his audiences the full horror of it” (188–189). It is the latter view that “I happen to share” with Elsom.
- 7.
Conversation with Howard Davies , November 1976. Quoted in Hay and Roberts (60).
- 8.
Richard Strier persuasively claims that this is exactly what Shakspeare is doing in this scene. Strier identifies the servant’s resistance to Cornwall as “the clearest articulation and most extreme case in the play of the paradox of service through resistance” (1995, 194).
- 9.
For a wide-ranging account of this phenomenon, see Peter Davison (1982, 128–151).
- 10.
In an outstanding term paper on this subject , a student of mine, Tyler Ault , contends that the ghost of the Gravedigger’s Boy “represents social morality’s grip on Lear” and is, in the end, “revealed as the thing that must die” so that Lear’s reformed consciousness may live. Unpublished paper.
- 11.
I raise (and explore) this same question with specific application to Aimé Cesaire’s Une Tempête in Repositioning Shakespeare (1999, 115–117).
- 12.
Perry Nodelman cogently, but differently, contends that “Lear understands [here] what he did not understand all along—that the world as it is and the people in it are more wonderful than anything one might make them” (1980, 274).
- 13.
My reading of a presumptive audience’s response to Mother Courage, if not to Bond’s Shakespeare, differs broadly from Brecht’s intentions but possibly helps us understand how and why audiences have experienced sympathy for so expressly unsympathetic a character. As Susan Broadhurst notes, “When [Mother Courage] was first performed at the Zurich Schauspielhaus, the audience was moved to tears by the sufferings of a poor woman who, having lost everything including her three children in war, heroically continued her brave struggle. Brecht was furious at this response and rewrote the play to emphasize the corrupt nature of Mother Courage’s character. Brecht supervised the Berlin production of the play, which was a triumph, but yet again Mother Courage was seen a ‘humanist saint’. Again, hardly anyone had noticed the depravity of Mother Courage. Brecht eventually admitted that the play was not working as he had intended, but claimed it was a fault not on his part but on the part of the audience, who were still enslaved to entrenched habits of emotion” (1999, 22–23).
- 14.
Nicholas Zurbrugg , for example, notes that Wilson’s “interest in verbal repetition and variation seems to be inspired by the speech patterns of autistic children” (1988, 447). Wilson’s artistically formative collaborations with the young autistic poet, Christopher Knowles , are well-known and are the subject of the first chapter of Telory Davies Arendell’s The Autistic Stage (2015), “Thinking Spatially, Speaking Visually: Robert Wilson and Christopher Knowles .”
- 15.
Phrases in quotation were spoken or written by Müller and are quoted in translation by Carl Weber in his prefatory note to Hamletmachine (1984, 50).
- 16.
All quotations from Hamletmachine are drawn from Müller (1984).
- 17.
Müller claimed, intriguingly, that he believed this “sentence contains a truth which wasn’t necessarily known to that girl,” Lynette “Squeaky” Fromme, without, however, indicating what that “truth” might be (1984, 51).
- 18.
As we shall see below, in this book’s last chapter on Annie Dorsen’s “machine-made Hamlet,” Müller underestimated the ability of computers to generate some of the same differences he set out to achieve.
- 19.
Carl Weber notes that “in 1989–1990, [Müller] staged a combination of Hamlet and Hamletmachine at Berlin’s Deutsches Theater,” during whose “rehearsal period the socialist East German republic imploded.” Müller inserted “the text of Hamletmachine into Shakespeare’s play before the final act” in what became an “eight-hour performance” (Weber 2012, 7). Weber adds that “It is unfortunate that we won’t know how Müller’s view of Hamlet might have changed in the vastly different historical landscape of the new century, against evolving events in the Muslim world” (7), an absence that I hope my succeeding chapter might help to fill. Of the same seven and a half hour production, Maik Hamburger contends that though a “powerful text” in its own right, “Hamletmaschine is inadequately staged by its author so that it does not achieve the theatrical force needed to hold its own as a counterpoint to Shakespeare’s play or, indeed, as the intellectual center of the evening” (2002, 350).
- 20.
Zurburgg describes this production in the following manner: “Mixing almost every every theatrical and extra-theatrical trick in the Post-Modern book, it combined classical declamation, parodic classical declamation, autistic anti-declamation, colloquial declamation, cry, whisper, laugh, whimper, tape-recorded screech and mutter, tape-recorded noise, mime, acrobatics, sculptural immobility, videoesque choreography, virtuoso lighting, projected slide-imagery, black-and-white and coloured film-imagery, digitally deconstructed video-image, and an array of musical sound-tracks ranging from the nostalgic tango accompanying the cast’s final bow, to the echoing tones of a piano piece by Lieber and Stoller (composers of Elvis Presley’s Hound Dog)” (443).
- 21.
Müller’s caustic representation of the act of writing in the disaster of the contemporary, “Oozing wordslime in my soundproof blurb over and above the battle,” bears an uncanny resemblance to how Bond has Ben Jonson demonstrate his contempt for writing in Bingo : “Fat white fingers excreting dirty black ink. Smudges. Shadows. Shit. Silence” (53).
- 22.
As Richard Halpern writes, “Not only does Shakespeare’s play empty out its own meaning through constant performance, but in doing so it symbolizes the performance of history, which has become unendurably routinized, and thus caught in the toils of the Hamletmachine” (1997, 273).
- 23.
Jochim Fiebach succinctly captures Müller’s non-dialogic dramaturgy in the following: “Thematizing the disintegration of the subject , of the ‘individual character,’ [Müller’s texts] dispose of essential characteristics of traditional European/Asian dramatic texts such as the dialogue dramaturgy, that means the exchange of lines between clearly delineated fictional characters” (1998, 87).
- 24.
Zurbrugg more uncharitably construes this passage as constituting “a hodgepodge of b-grade protest poetry” that “[recycles] Sartre, Ginsberg, and the angry young Osborne” (1988, 444).
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Cartelli, T. (2019). Ghosts of History: Edward Bond’s Lear & Bingo and Heiner Müller’s Hamletmachine. In: Reenacting Shakespeare in the Shakespeare Aftermath. Reproducing Shakespeare. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-40482-4_3
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