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Sonya Loftis SHAKESPEAREAN SURROGATIONS: MODERN DRAMATISTS REWRITE RENAISSANCE DRAMA by SONYA FREEMAN LOFTIS (Under the Direction of Frances Teague) ABSTRACT This study uses performance theory to examine modern dramatic adaptations of Renaissance plays, arguing that modern and postmodern dramatists rewrite the literary past in an act of cultural and theatrical surrogation. The first chapter addresses modern playwrights’ need to destroy and replace their Renaissance forbearers. Presenting the human body, especially the body of the actor or playwright as an “effigy of flesh” that contains cultural memory and embodies the literary canon, these playwrights work metaphorical violence on corpses that represent the literary corpus. The second chapter focuses on Bernard Shaw’s life-long struggle to present himself as a cultural surrogate for Shakespeare, through the performance of his public persona as G.B.S., through his Shakespearean criticism, and through his appropriation of King Lear in Heartbreak House. Shaw’s need to destroy Shakespeare’s corpse and corpus leads to a battle against aestheticism and pessimistic passivity. The third chapter examines Brecht’s adaptation of Marlowe’s Edward II and argues that the alienation effect can be understood as a “surrogation effect,” focusing on images of violent skinning in Brecht’s play, as his characters enact surrogation by tearing the flesh from both corpse and corpus. The fourth chapter explores surrogation as cannibalism in Müller’s Hamletmachine and Shakespeare’s Hamlet, interpreting the father’s corpse and the mother’s womb as symbols for literary adaptation in Müller’s play. The fifth chapter deals with Beckett’s Endgame and Happy Days, reading Endgame as an adaptation of The Tempest and arguing that the disembodied characters in Happy Days represent the erasure of the Shakespearean past. The final chapter focuses on Stoppard’s Shakespeare in Love and Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, concluding that Stoppard’s screenplay appropriates Shakespeare in the style of Shaw, constructing Stoppard’s persona as Shakespeare’s surrogate, while Stoppard’s adaptation of Hamlet draws the audience into an encounter with the theater’s role as haunted “memory machine.” Ultimately, this dissertation explores the central role that responding to Renaissance drama played in the creation of individual modern dramatists’ canons and theories of theater, and the ways that the theater, as a vessel for cultural memory, engages the ghosts of previous plays and playwrights. INDEX WORDS: Surrogation, Surrogate, Shakespeare, Shakespearean adaptation, Performance theory, Memory, Body, Shaw, Brecht, Müller, Beckett, Stoppard SHAKEPEAREAN SURROGATIONS: MODERN DRAMATISTS REWRITE RENAISSANCE DRAMA by SONYA FREEMAN LOFTIS B.A., North Georgia College and State University, 2005 A Dissertation Submitted to the Graduate Faculty of The University of Georgia in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY ATHENS, GEORGIA 2009 © 2009 Sonya Freeman Loftis All Rights Reserved SHAKESPEAREAN SURROGATIONS: MODERN DRAMATISTS REWRITE RENAISSANCE DRAMA by SONYA FREEMAN LOFTIS Major Professor: Frances Teague Committee: Christy Desmet Hugh Ruppersburg John Vance Electronic Version Approved: Maureen Grasso Dean of the Graduate School The University of Georgia August 2009 iv DEDICATION For Matt who shares in everything I do and who stood beside me every step of the way v ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS First, I must thank my major professor, Fran Teague, who offered invaluable support and guidance. I am also indebted to the members of my dissertation committee for the time they spent commenting on chapters in progress. Special thanks to Lisa Ulevich, who was an insightful reader of drafts, and to Jessica Walker, who was my constant companion during the writing process. Finally, I must thank my parents, David and Susan Freeman. They instilled in me a passion for books, and they drove me faithfully to the public library once a week, every week, until my sixteenth birthday. I am grateful to both of them for their patient guidance and words of wisdom during my many years as a student. vi TABLE OF CONTENTS Page ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS.............................................................................................................v CHAPTER 1 Attacking the Canon through the Corpse: The Grave Robbers of Modern Drama .......1 2 Shakespeare, Shotover, Surrogation: ‘Blaming the Bard’ in Heartbreak House ........22 3 History Smells like Blood: Tearing the Skin off of Edward II ...................................53 4 “A MOTHER’S WOMB IS NOT A ONE-WAY STREET”: Re-entering the Shakespearean Womb of Hamletmachine...............................................................87 5 “Some Remains”: Forgetting Shakespeare in Endgame and Happy Days ................117 6 “A bit of Shakespeare”: The Playwright and the Player in Stoppard’s Shakespearean Adaptations............................................................................................................147 AFTERWORD.............................................................................................................................172 WORKS CITED ..........................................................................................................................177 1 Chapter One Attacking the Canon through the Corpse: The Grave Robbers of Modern Drama Our work is raising the dead; the theater troupe is recruited from ghosts. -Heiner Müller, “Raising the Dead” What is remembered in the body is well remembered. -Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain Modern drama is overrun with ghosts, an era and an art in special need of ritual exorcisms. Embodying the remembered dead in the body of the living actor, the theater is a particularly haunted cultural space, the drama an especially haunted art form.1 The modern is so peculiarly bound up in reliving its own past that some theorists have found the obsessive return to its own monuments a hallmark of the movement. At the crossroads between a ghostly art and an era obsessed with the past, playwrights central to the evolution of modern and postmodern drama often found themselves cast in the role of the grave robber, returning at key moments in their writing careers to the remains of the Renaissance. For playwrights such as Bernard Shaw, Bertolt Brecht, Heiner Müller, Samuel Beckett, and Tom Stoppard, Shakespearean appropriation was central both to the creation of their public personas as playwrights and to the development of their own dramatic canons. Using metaphors of bodily violence to interrogate their relationship with their Renaissance forerunners, cannibalizing Shakespeare’s corpse and corpus in order to present themselves and their texts as potential surrogates, they frequently refashioned the major plays of the Renaissance. Recognizing the body of the actor as a vessel for cultural memory and yet figuratively attacking that body in an attempt to destroy, to dismember, and to forget, their adaptations of Renaissance plays often presented physical violence as a figure for history and a 2 metaphor for literary adaptation. Examining modern and postmodern drama, this study focuses on the intersections between performance theory and Shakespearean appropriation, between cultural memory and the human body that remembers and embodies it.2 Using performance theory to examine modern dramatic adaptations of Renaissance plays, this dissertation argues that modern and postmodern dramatists rewrite the literary past in an act of cultural and theatrical surrogation. The chapters that follow explore the central role that responding to Renaissance drama played in the creation of individual modern dramatists’ canons and examines how their violent reactions to Shakespeare and his contemporaries worked to create their public personas and to inform their theoretical writings. Recently, performance theorists such as Joseph Roach, Marvin Carlson, and Alice Rayner have focused on the haunted nature of live performance, the way in which living actors embody the dead, evoke cultural memory, and haunt future performances and performers. Although the idea of “surrogation” has not commonly been applied to Shakespearean adaptations, theorizing the haunted nature of theatrical performance explains why modern dramatists became obsessed with Shakespearean remains and illuminates the nature of the adaptations they produced.3 Roach defines performance as an ongoing process of “surrogation,” “the enactment of cultural memory by substitution” (Roach, 80). In performance, both performer and audience practice surrogation: “the process of trying out various candidates in different situations—the doomed search for originals by continuously auditioning stand-ins” (Roach, 3). While each appearance of a play is an act of repetition, in that it will use the same actors, props, and text that appeared on stage the night before, it is simultaneously a unique event that cannot be repeated: the performance can never be identical to the now lost performance that preceded it. Roach explains that in performance, “no action or sequence of actions may be performed exactly the same way twice; 3 they must be reinvented or recreated at each appearance. In this improvisatorial behavioral space, memory reveals itself as imagination” (Roach, 29). On a larger scale, Marvin Carlson has termed the paradox of performance in which “repetition is change” as “ghosting,” a term that he applies to all elements of dramatic performance that commonly repeat themselves: the recycled script,
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