The Afterlives of Shakespeare's Tragedies a DISSERTATION
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The Afterlives of Shakespeare’s Tragedies A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL OF THE UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA BY Caitlin Jeanne McHugh IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY Dr. Katherine Scheil, co-adviser Dr. John Watkins, co-adviser June 2016 Copyright 2016 by Caitlin Jeanne McHugh i Acknowledgments Without a doubt, this project would not have come to fruition without the support of my co-advisors, Katherine Scheil and John Watkins. Their expertise, professionalism, and generosity are unparalleled. They truly are my dream-team, and I am humbled to have worked with them both. I also thank the two other members of my committee: Nabil Matar and Shirley Nelson Garner. Nabil led some of the most inspirational and moving classes I have ever witnessed. Shirley has a deep understanding of what it means to be a graduate student today; this understanding and the resulting support are unequalled in my experience. I would also like to thank my “unofficial committee member,” Rebecca Krug, for her honest criticism, professional guidance, and delightful afternoon teatimes. Several organizations and communities also made this project possible. The University of Minnesota granted me the support of a Doctoral Dissertation Fellowship, as well as several travel grants. The Folger Shakespeare Library and the Centre for Research Collections at the University of Edinburgh provided access to the Smock Alley Promptbooks. I could not have completed this project without this generosity. The 2014 Mellon Academy for Advanced Study of the Renaissance and its organizers, Edward Muir and Regina Swartz, provided expert guidance, generosity, and support. My Academy cohort provided friendship and inspiration: Jessica Apolloni, Stephen Cummins, Penelope Geng, Charles Keenan, Bianca Lopez, Colin Rose, Aaron Shapiro, James Sommerville, Elizabeth Tavares, Leila Watkins, and Marshelle Woodward. You are all always in my thoughts. E ii latrocinio patrocinium. My parents gave me the foundation on which to start: I am lucky enough to have four of them. My mother, Jennifer, and my father, Mark, for both pursuing graduate degrees and countless years of professionalization. No matter what the roadblock, neither of them ever gave up. That kind of example is priceless. My stepfather, Jim, and my stepmother, Pam, are independent in a way I find inspirational, both professionally and personally. I am fortunate to know both of you. I can’t imagine a better set of role models. I am also indebted to my cohort, both official and unofficial. The Medieval and Early Modern Research Group, as well as the departmental reading group, developed and sustained by Rebecca Krug, were constant sources of inspiration and solace for me. My “unofficial cohort” includes Michael Rowe, Bomi Yoon, and Michael Phillips: three people there for me whenever I needed them. My official cohort, Valerie Bherer, Stacey Decker, and Ben Utter, provided hours of succor, company at the gym, walks around the neighborhood, and delightful office conversations. I must extend special thanks to two colleagues, Katie Sisneros and Stephen McCulloch. Katie and I were always destined to be friends. Our professional work is as closely related as our personal lives. Katie taught me to meld these interests. She taught me about trivia. She taught me about pizza rolls. She is the Helena to my Hermia, and I hope I will always be her little acorn. Stephen gifted me not only with one of my most enduring nicknames, but also one of my most enduring friendships. The Truth is (Always) Out There. Our iii methodization could not be farther apart, yet our support for each other as colleagues could not be closer. Finally, I must thank my husband, Jonathan, who has endured more hours of hardship, tears, excitement and joy than any other person in my life. His patience, unconditional love, and unending support have shaped me into the scholar I am today. iv Dedication To all of my past teachers and professors, with much gratitude, for their inspiration and guidance. v Table of Contents Acknowledgements .............................................................................................. i Dedication ............................................................................................................ iv Introduction .......................................................................................................... 1 Chapter One “Perswasion must be joyn’d to Force”: Sir William Davenant’s Macbeth ......... 16 Chapter Two “This language, Sir, adds yet to our Affliction”: Nahum Tate’s King Lear ........ 52 Chapter Three “Proved most royal”: Cutting Hamlet .................................................................. 88 Chapter Four “Usurpation, tho’ it thrive a while, will at last be punish’d”: Othello as a Villain Play ......................................................................................................................125 Conclusion ..........................................................................................................163 Bibliography ..........................................................................................................165 1 Introduction Several years ago, I was attending a production of Macbeth at the Guthrie Theater with some friends and colleagues. We were socializing before the show, casually discussing Shakespeare, and they turned to me asking, “So, we can’t remember: are the witches responsible for Duncan’s death or was Macbeth?” Shakespeare’s play is, of course, ambiguous about this issue. These kinds of interpretive questions have plagued audiences since the seventeenth century. This level of ambiguity has become something scholars revere about Shakespeare: his brilliant metaphors, his endless versatility. At the same time, scholars of adaptation theory recognize that each production of Shakespeare is an interpretation. Not every ambiguity can survive; some decisions must be made in order to bring Shakespeare’s plays to life. How a producer or an adapter chooses to answer those questions ultimately has bearing on whether we consider an adaptation to be Shakespeare. Margaret Jane Kidnie addresses this problem using two examples: one performance which is received as Shakespeare, and one which is not: The Doran All’s Well projected an illusion of work stability as the reassuring effect of performance by seeming deliberately to turn away from a very specific form of adaptive practice at a heightened moment in the RSC’s institutional history. By contrast, the self-consciously innovative Warchus Hamlet challenged in key ways expectations of the work, so prompting a debate about the essence of Hamlet that serves no less effectively than the Doran instance to highlight how critical assessment of the particular instance produces, rather than meets or fails to meet, the criteria of identity by which the work is defined.”1 1 Margaret Jane Kidnie, Shakespeare and the Problem of Adaptation (London: Routledge, 2009), 34. 2 Her point is that the cultural moment of the adaptation has a great deal to do with whether it is received as Shakespeare; that is, whether or not that particular production or version of the play has made appropriate interpretive decisions regarding the ambiguities in the playtext. This seems like a modern problem, given the development of entertainment and new mediums, film, television, etc., over time. But it is not. Sir William Davenant’s adaptation of Macbeth (1664), for instance, locates the origins of evil strictly within the world of men. There is no space for powerful witches in his version and that fact had little to do with the belief in the existence of supernatural figures. His peers had lived through the English Civil Wars. They knew the horror of political ambition all too well. Like today’s audiences, these late-seventeenth century adapters of Shakespeare’s tragedies, such as Davenant, did everything they could to present clear interpretations of Shakespeare’s plays. They did so not in an attempt to fix something that was broken, but in a quest to present Shakespeare’s original intent to their audiences.2 This desire, 2 The interpretation of Davenant’s patent is debated. First, it is questioned whether or not Davenant was legally required to alter Shakespeare. This issue is initially discussed by John Freehafer who argues that Davenant was under obligation to revise the plays (“The Formation of the London Patent Companies in 1660,” Theatre Notebook 20.6 (1965), 27). Gunnar Sorelius later questions this claim, though he comes to accept it (see The Giant Race Before the Flood: Pre-Restoration Drama on the Stage and in the Criticism of the Restoration (Uppsala, Stockholm: Almqvist & Wiksell, 1966), 41; “The Early History of the Restoration Theatre: Some Problems Reconsidered,” Theatre Notebook, 33 (1979): 52–61). Hume accepts Freehafer’s position in Development of English Drama (Robert D. Hume, The Development of English Drama in the Late Seventeenth Century (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976), 20-1). Jean I. Marsden suggests that “making fit” did not always involve major revision (The Re-Imagined Text: Shakespeare, Adaptation, and Eighteenth-Century Literary Theory (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1995), 160, n. 1). Barbara Murray suggests that because the patent does not require that Davenant remove obscenities and like matter, it means that Davenant only needed to rework the plays for his particular company (Restoration Shakespeare: Viewing the Voice