“CHRONICLES OF OUR TIME:” FEMINISM AND POSTCOLONIALISM IN APPROPRIATIONS OF SHAKESPEARE’S PLAYS Jennifer Flaherty A dissertation submitted to the faculty of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of PhD in the Department of English and Comparative Literature. Chapel Hill 2011 Approved by: Jessica Wolfe Mary Floyd Wilson Inger Brodey Marsha Collins Pamela Cooper ©2011 Jennifer Flaherty ALL RIGHTS RESERVED ii ABSTRACT JENNIFER FLAHERTY: “Chronicles of Our Time:” Feminism and Postcolonialism in Appropriations of Shakespeare’s Plays (Under the direction of Jessica Wolfe) My dissertation argues that dramatic revisions of plays by Shakespeare address key theoretical debates in theatrical forums. My approach to Shakespeare’s reception moves beyond ‘reader response’ to ‘writer response,’ suggesting that adaptations reveal the underlying possibilities and problems that resonate with successive generations as they read Shakespeare’s plays. My primary focus is on the critical style of adaptation that emerged in the late twentieth century after playwrights such as Ionesco and Stoppard began appropriating Shakespeare. By making distinct alterations in iconic texts, these authors rely on an audience’s foreknowledge of Shakespeare’s plays to establish what I call ‘creative dissonance:’ identifiable changes that illustrate the author’s social agenda. Just as postcolonial and feminist critics of Shakespeare focus on characters who have been marginalized by previous generations, these playwrights liberate marginalized characters from their texts and place them at the center of new dramas. Using feminist and postcolonial criticism, I argue that authors who rewrite Shakespeare’s female characters and Shakespeare’s cultural ‘others’ (for example, Caliban, Othello, and Shylock) address and affect theories of biological and social difference. My first section examines the shifts in appropriations of Shakespeare’s heroines that take place with the rise of feminist criticism of Shakespeare. I give iii particular attention to the transformations of Desdemona and Juliet in chapters on Ann- Marie MacDonald’s Goodnight Desdemona (Good Morning Juliet) and Paula Vogel’s Desdemona: A Play about a Handkerchief. In the second section, I examine the ways that changing concepts of otherness, as exemplified by postcolonial theory, have impacted revisions of characters such as Othello, Shylock, and Caliban. I devote two chapters to adaptations of The Tempest: Aimé Césaire’s Caribbean Une Tempête and Raquel Carrió’s Cuban Otra Tempestad. As a recognizable medium through which playwrights articulate their own social commentary, these plays function as key indicators of the ideals and biases of a particular cultural moment. iv ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would like to thank my family and my friends for all of their encouragement and support. I am also grateful to my advisor, Jessica Wolfe. v TABLE OF CONTENTS SECTION I: Introduction....................................................................................................1 SECTION II: Gender and Resistance in Feminist Transformations of Shakespeare Introduction..................................................................................................................24 Chapter I: Ann-Marie MacDonald: Goodnight Desdemona (Good Morning Juliet)...69 Chapter II: Paula Vogel: Desdemona: A Play about a Handkerchief..........................86 SECTION III: Race and Rebellion in Postcolonial Transformations of Shakespeare Introduction................................................................................................................102 Chapter I: Aimé Césaire: Une Tempête.....................................................................140 Chapter II: Raquel Carrió: Otra Tempestad...............................................................157 SECTION IV: Conclusion...............................................................................................173 BIBLIOGRAPHY............................................................................................................180 vi SECTION I INTRODUCTION For the past four hundred years, readers of Shakespeare have recreated his plays in their own images through criticism, performance, and adaptation. Even for people who are not in academia, Shakespeare has become part of our daily vocabulary, and we use Shakespeare to articulate our own particular worldviews. It is important to look at the critical and cultural reception of Shakespeare to understand not just how Shakespeare has been read by each generation or nation, but how Shakespeare has been used to read key issues in contemporary society. With feminist and postcolonial critics of Shakespeare focusing their attention on characters who have been ‘marginalized’ by previous generations, playwrights have taken it upon themselves to liberate these characters from their texts and place them at the center of new dramas. I argue that these transformations of Shakespeare’s plays address critical issues in a creative format, filtering important theoretical debates through original drama. Feminist and postcolonial influences in criticism and adaptation have established Shakespeare as a global language through which issues of gender and race can be addressed. The idea that individuals or social groups could customize Shakespeare through interpretation or appropriation is a relatively recent phenomenon. In 1971 anthropologist Laura Bohannan published an article entitled “Shakespeare in the Bush.” In the article, Bohannan recounts her attempt to tell the story of Hamlet to the tribal elders of the Tiv in West Africa. She begins her story “quite sure that Hamlet had only one possible interpretation, and that one universally obvious” (Bohannan 25). The Tiv elders quickly disprove her theory by enthusiastically supporting the marriage of Gertrude and Claudius because a man should make sure that the wife of his dead brother is provided for. They dismiss the ghost of Hamlet’s father as a zombie, and they pity Hamlet because they believe that his madness must be the result of witchcraft. When Bohannan takes issue with their interpretations, insisting that they are getting the story wrong, the Tiv elders respond: It is clear that the elders of your country have never told you what the story really means…You must tell us some more stories of your country. We, who are elders, will instruct you in their true meaning, so that when you return to your own land your elders will see that you have not been sitting in the bush, but among those who know things and who have taught you wisdom. (Bohannan 31) By telling the story of Hamlet to the Tiv, Bohannan attempted to prove that literary texts, particularly Shakespeare’s, are universal by establishing that a single text is interpreted in one way across cultures. Bohannan and many of her readers would argue that her experiment proves that the opposite is true—that literature cannot be universal if different individuals or cultures can have wildly different interpretations of the same text because of their own customs, ideas, and biases. As a scholar working on the worldwide reception of Shakespeare’s plays, I find that I have a different definition of what makes a text ‘universal.’ Rather than searching for the ‘one’ Shakespeare—the perfect form of Shakespeare that readers or actors can ‘get right’—my dissertation explores a multiplicity of ‘Shakespeares’ in a variety of formats. One of the reasons that Shakespeare’s plays continue to have a global impact four hundred years after their first performances is that 2 readers and audience members from all over the world can interpret and transform the plays to suit a particular cultural milieu. I believe the greatest testament of Shakespeare’s universal appeal is the infinite variety of critical and creative interpretations of Shakespeare that have accumulated over the past four hundred years. This vast body of work, which includes plays, poems, novels, short stories, films, performances, music, artwork, and copious amounts of literary criticism, is commonly known as Shakespeare’s “Afterlife.” To study Shakespeare’s Afterlife is to examine the ways that Shakespeare has bridged historical and national boundaries as each successive generation has made his plays their own. As an anthropologist, Bohannan states that her objective in the experiment was to use Shakespeare to prove that “human nature was pretty much the same the world over” (Bohannan 25). A study of Shakespeare’s Afterlife indicates that the instinct to interpret and re-make cultural expressions in our own image might be a shared human response that inadvertently reveals cultural differences as well as similarities. Studies in Shakespeare’s Afterlife are about more than just interpreting Shakespeare—they are about interpreting interpretations of Shakespeare. Critical and cultural responses to Shakespeare can be read in dialogue with Shakespeare’s texts themselves. Afterlife studies are therefore tied to the study of reception theory and literary history. Reception theory began with the work of Hans Robert Jauss, who in 1967 argued that “the quality and rank of a literary work result neither from the biographical or historical conditions of its origin, nor from its place in the sequence of the development of a genre alone, but rather from the criteria of influence, reception, and posthumous fame” (Jauss). Jauss’ argument does not directly translate to studies of Shakespeare’s 3 Afterlife; such