Teenage Encounters with Shakespeare 1944-2012. Darragh
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The Master of the Rebels: Teenage Encounters with Shakespeare 1944-2012. Darragh Martin Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy under the Executive Committee of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY 2013 © 2013 Darragh Martin All rights reserved Abstract--The Master of the Rebels: Teenage Encounters with Shakespeare, 1944-2012. Darragh Martin This dissertation tells the story of Shakespeare’s role in the invention of the teenager and teenagers’ roles in re-inventing Shakespeare. In post World War II England, Australia, and the United States, Shakespeare’s plays became one arena where competing versions of teenage identity were defined, with Shakespearean characters and teenage subjects cast as rebels or romantic consumers. I argue that a narrow canon of School Shakespeare has emerged, with Hamlet and Romeo and Juliet recast as plays about romantic consumption, limiting the political roles of teenagers to onlookers rather than rebellious actors. Attending to what I term double reply, I contend that teenagers can resist their interpellation as romantic consumers, carving a powerful alternative discourse through parody and non-verbal performance. Table of Contents Introduction: Shakespeare and Teenagers, 1944-2012. 1 Chapter One. 30 Supposing a Blackboard to be a Bear: Touring Shakespeare to Teenagers. Chapter Two. 75 Excellent Dumb Discourse: Shakespeare in Perimillennial Classrooms. Chapter Three. 114 “Youth to itself rebels”: Teenage encounters with Hamlet. Chapter Four. 157 Kissing Beyond the Book: Romance and Rebellion in Romeo and Juliet. Afterword. 212 The Moons of Miranda and the Orbit of Teenage Shakespeare. Bibliography 218 YouTube Filmography 247 i List of Illustrations Figure 1: Balthasar (Jesse Bradford) and Romeo (Leonardo di Caprio) in 5.1. 192 Figure 2: Balthasar (Jesse Bradford) in 3.1. 195 Figure 3: Benvolio (Dash Mihok) in 3.1. 196 Figure 4: Balthasar (Jesse Bradford) in 3.5. 198 Figure 5: Romeo (Leonardo di Caprio) and Juliet (Claire Danes) in 3.5. 198 Figure 6. Juliet (Claire Danes) and Romeo (Leonardo di Caprio) in 5.3. 198 Figure 7: Balthasar (Keith Skinner) and Romeo (Leonard Whiting) in 3.5. 202 Figure 8: Fig 8. Balthasar (Keith Skinner) in 3.5. 202 Figure 9: Ferdinand (Reeve Carney) and Miranda (Felicity Jones) in 4.1 212 Figure 10. Opening credits, The Tempest (2010). 214 Figure 11. Miranda (Felicity Jones) in The Tempest (2010). 214 ii 1 Introduction: Shakespeare and Teenagers, 1944-2012. Verona, Italy 1873. A new starlet shines in Verona. Fourteen year old Eleonora Duse has opened as Juliet in the same town in which Shakespeare’s play is laid, is hailed for her fresh talent and remarkable speaking voice. No neophyte she, Eleonora was born in Lombardy on parent’s theatrical tour, carried to her christening in a gilded property box. Critics predict a gilded career. Simple and unaffected, the young actress adores goat-milk colas and, when not engaged in rehearsals or performances, wears plain hoop skirts, just like every other teen- age girl (“Teens in the News” 112). I just don’t see what’s so marvelous about Sir Laurence Olivier, that’s all. He has a terrific voice, and he’s a helluva handsome guy and he’s very nice to watch when he’s walking or dueling or something, but he wasn’t at all the way D.B. said Hamlet was. He was too much like a goddam general, instead of a sad, screwed-up type guy (Salinger 117). As the term “teenager” stretched its legs in Post-World War II American culture, vying with other terms to describe a new generation of 13-19 year olds with increased autonomy, cultural sway and discretionary income, Shakespeare was called upon to play a subtle but significant role in defining what this new noun meant.1 For Seventeen magazine, “teenager” described a budding consumer citizen and from its launch in 1944, the magazine helped to sculpt this definition, using their market research to invent Teena, the typical teenage girl who “wants to look, act and be just like the girl next door” (Seventeen Promotional Flier). The inclusion of Eleonora Duse as one of Teena’s ancestors in their segment “Teens in the News” drew on Shakespeare’s cultural capital - Duse was known for playing Shakespearean heroines and was exclusively associated with Juliet here - to situate Teena’s habits within a wider history of skirt-buying, cola-slurping and conformist consumerism.2 Holden Caulfield, the alienated narrator of J.D. Salinger’s The 1 The first recorded use of “teen-ager” was in Popular Science Monthly in 1941, though, the comic, Harold Teen, circulated in the 1920s; other contenders included the terms “sub-deb,” “bobby-soxer,” “teener,” and “teenster.” See Jon Savage’s Teenage: The Creation of Youth Culture (442-465). 2 “Teens in the News” was a playful feature which refashioned other historical figures, including John Keats, Cleopatra, Pocahontas and Mozart, as contemporary teenagers. 2 Catcher in the Rye (1951), was no reader of Seventeen and used Shakespeare to reflect a different vision of teenage identity: the counter-cultural rebel. Seeing a smack of Hamlet in himself rather than Sir Laurence Olivier, Holden imagined the disaffected Dane as a “sad, screwed-up type guy” out of joint with the material world that Seventeen celebrated. These two versions of teenage identity, the consumer and the rebel, are useful in mapping out teenagers’ encounters with Shakespeare in the United States, England and Australia; Shakespeare,” as “author-function” in Foucault’s terms (125), became an arena where competing versions of teenage identity jostled, with many adult-mediated uses of Shakespeare generating a vision of teenagers as what I call romantic consumers, teenagers encouraged to use the romantic glamour of consumerism in service of a heterosexual romance that would sustain consumer culture.3 A narrow canon of School Shakespeare helped to shape this definition with two plays, Romeo and Juliet and Hamlet, especially influential in sculpting a teenage identity that emphasized the personal and the romantic over the political. However, if Shakespeare serves as a disciplinary force, as a master of the rebels, teenagers can also resist the subject position of romantic consumer, rebelliously talking back to Shakespeare to use Martha Tuck Rozett’s term, through parody and performance.4 I argue that by making Shakespeare a space of revelry, teenagers expand their encounters with Shakespeare beyond ones that interpellate them as 3 In The Romantic Ethic and the Spirit of Modern Consumerism (1987), Colin Campbell argues for a link between Romanticism and consumerism: I use “romantic consumerism” here independently of this argument and of the Romantic movement. 4 Rozett principally discusses student responses to Shakespeare in a classroom setting in Talking Back to Shakespeare, but also recognizes a connection between adaptation and teenagers, describing an adaptation as “like an assertive adolescent, visibly and volubly talking back to the parent in iconoclastic, outrageous, yet intensely serious ways” (5). 3 romantic consumers and move towards a definition of teenagers that allows for political expression. Teenagers’ exposure to consumer culture and Shakespeare is especially pronounced in the perimillennial period, a term that Denise Albanese uses to describe the years around 2000 (5). My use of the term refers to the years 1989 - 2012 as the educational, cultural and technological changes in this period enable the talking back to Shakespeare by teenagers that I wish to explore.5 “English for Ages 5-16,” the report by Brian Cox in 1989, enshrined Shakespeare’s status as the only compulsory writer in the new National Curriculum in the United Kingdom, ensuring compulsory encounters between Shakespeare and teenagers in England (Irish 10). Moreover, the performance-based pedagogies that the Report endorsed, coupled with the growth of Education Departments in theatre companies, meant that the way in which teenagers encountered Shakespeare in the classroom shifted. The enormous success of Bell Shakespeare Company’s Education Department in Australia, and the federal funding it received, marks a similar shift in Australia. This perimillennial period also saw the emergence of a small canon of Shakespearean films and young adult novels which capitalized upon this teenage market as well as significant technological changes, most especially the expansion of the internet and the emergence of “participatory culture” (Kavoori 5), which changed the manner in which teenagers responded to Shakespeare. My project is limited to countries where English is a first language, as Shakespeare in translation offers fascinating but very different challenges for educators. Using a case studies model, I examine teenagers’ interactions with Shakespeare in three countries: 5 The publication of the Cox Report, following the Education Reform Act of 1988, makes 1989 a sensible starting point for my definition of perimillennial. I have chosen 2012 as an end date as the Shakespeare Reloaded project which I discuss in Sydney serves as a useful bridge to an alternative model of pedagogy (Shakespeare Reloaded originally ran from 2008-2010, but was extended for another two years). Certainly, some trends which I discuss as perimillennial will likely continue beyond 2012. Equally, this period could be sub-divided based on the different modes of encounter: much of the canon of Shakespearean adaptations in young adult novels that I discuss was published after the millennium. 4 Australia, the United States and England. My inclusion of Australia is an important contribution to the field: as an early site for touring companies for teenagers, Australia has a crucial but neglected position within the wider history of Shakespeare in Education. Though my primary focus is on the perimillennial period, I also consider some earlier examples of Shakespeare’s encounters with teenagers as a way of foregrounding Shakespeare’s evolving role in the creation of teenage consumer culture.