Reinventing the Renaissance

REINVENTING THE RENAISSANCE

Shakespeare and his Contemporaries in Adaptation and Performance

Edited by SARAH ANNES BROWN ROBERT I. LUBLIN LYNSEY McCULLOCH Reinventing the Renaissance Also by Sarah Annes Brown A FAMILIAR COMPOUND GHOST: Allusion and the Uncanny DEVOTED SISTERS: Representations of the Sister Relationship in Nineteenth-Century British and American Literature OVID: Myth and Metamorphosis THE METAMORPHOSIS OF OVID: From Chaucer to Ted Hughes TRAGEDY IN TRANSITION

Also by Robert I. Lublin COSTUMING THE SHAKESPEAREAN STAGE: Visual Codes of Representation in Early Modern Theatre and Culture Reinventing the Renaissance Shakespeare and his Contemporaries in Adaptation and Performance

Edited by Sarah Annes Brown Professor of English Literature, Anglia Ruskin University, UK Robert I. Lublin Chair of Performing Arts, University of Massachusetts, Boston, USA and Lynsey McCulloch Graduate Teaching Assistant, Coventry University, UK

Palgrave macmillan Introduction, selection and editorial matter © Sarah Annes Brown, Robert I. Lublin, Lynsey McCulloch 2013 Individual chapters © contributors 2013 Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2013 978-0-230-31385-9 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No portion of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, Saffron House, 6–10 Kirby Street, London EC1N 8TS. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The authors have asserted their rights to be identified as the authors of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2013 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Palgrave Macmillan in the UK is an imprint of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan in the US is a division of St Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN 978-1-349-33936-5 ISBN 978-1-137-31940-1 (eBook) DOI 10.1057/9781137319401 This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. Contents

List of Figures vii Acknowledgements viii Notes on Contributors ix

1 Introduction 1 Sarah Annes Brown, Robert I. Lublin and Lynsey McCulloch

Part I Popular Culture 2 Hamlet: Looking Before and After: Why So Many Prequels and Sequels? 17 Ann Thompson 3 Educating for Pleasure: The Textual Relations of She’s the Man 32 Reina Green 4 ‘Brush up your Shakespeare’: Genre-Shift from Shakespeare to the Screen 47 Kinga Földváry 5 Cinematizing Shakespeare 63 Charles Marowitz

Part II Criticism and Creativity 6 Circulating through ‘languages and tales’: Stephen Greenblatt’s Cardenio 77 Theodora Papadopoulou 7 Peter Ackroyd’s Shakespeare the Biography and Stephen Greenblatt’s Will in the World, or Facts and Fiction about William Shakespeare 92 Urszula Kizelbach 8 The Weird Sisters (from The Life and Death of the Brothers Macbeth) 104 Ewan Fernie and Simon Palfrey 9 ‘You kiss like in a movie’: A Contemporary Translation/Adaptation of Romeo and Juliet 122 Pietro Deandrea

v vi Contents

Part III National Responses 10 At the Threshold – Remembrance and Topicality in Recent Productions of The Merchant of Venice in Germany 143 Zeno Ackermann 11 Kabuki Shakespeare: The NINAGAWA Twelfth Night 162 Seiji Furuya 12 ‘Downright unsaxogrammatical’? – Do Postcolonial Adaptations Contest, or Reinforce Shakespeare’s Canonical Status? 174 Jenni Ramone 13 ‘My dream was lengthened after life’: Ghosts in Michael Boyd’s History Cycle 193 Kate Wilkinson

Part IV Visualizing Performance 14 ‘Four legs and two voices’: An Interview with Édouard Lekston 207 Pascale Drouet 15 Shakespearean Visual Semiotics and the Silver Screen 242 Robert I. Lublin 16 ‘Here’s that shall make you dance’: Movement and Meaning in Bern:Ballett’s Julia und Romeo 255 Lynsey McCulloch

Part V Non-Shakespearean Drama 17 The Duchess of Malfi on Film: Peter Huby’s Quietus 271 Rowland Wymer 18 The Act of Murder: Renaissance Tragedy and the Detective Novel 286 Esme Miskimmin 19 Fishing at the Swan: Swan Theatre Plays and the Shaping of an Interpretive Community 301 Laura Grace Godwin

Select Bibliography 318 Index 320 List of Figures

1 Édouard Lekston, Mon ami William/My Friend William 211 2 Édouard Lekston, Mon ami William/My Friend William 212 3 Édouard Lekston, Mon ami William/My Friend William 213 4 Édouard Lekston, Mon ami William/My Friend William 214 5 Édouard Lekston, Mon ami William/My Friend William 215 6 Édouard Lekston, Family Gathering 217 7 Édouard Lekston, The Swing (Richard II) 219 8 Édouard Lekston, The Swing (Richard II) 220 9 Édouard Lekston, The Swing (Richard II) 221 10 Édouard Lekston, The Swing (Richard II) 222 11 Édouard Lekston, Family Gathering 224 12 Édouard Lekston, Family Gathering 224 13 Édouard Lekston, Family Gathering 225 14 Édouard Lekston, Family Gathering 226 15 Édouard Lekston, Family Gathering 226 16 Édouard Lekston, Family Gathering 227 17 Édouard Lekston, Une île pleine de bruits/An Isle Full of Noises 228 18 Édouard Lekston, Une île pleine de bruits/An Isle Full of Noises 230 19 Édouard Lekston, Une île pleine de bruits/An Isle Full of Noises 231 20 Édouard Lekston, Family Gathering 233 21 Édouard Lekston, Family Gathering 234 22 Édouard Lekston, Une île pleine de bruits/An Isle Full of Noises 235

vii Acknowledgements

We would like to thank all of the participants of the Scaena 2008 conference. A discussion of modern adaptations and performances of Shakespeare and his contemporaries illuminates the world in which we live, and the innovation and quality of the research presented at the conference moti- vated the publication of this volume. Our thanks are also due to Anglia Ruskin University for hosting and supporting the event. Sarah Annes Brown would like to thank all the students, colleagues, and speakers who helped make Scaena 2008 such a successful and enjoyable event, and all the contributors to the volume for their patience during the editing process. Robert I. Lublin would like to thank Sarah and Lynsey for inviting him to join them on this project. It has been a pleasure to have the chance to work with you! I would also like to thank the University of Massachusetts Boston and particularly my department, Performing Arts, for providing me with an exciting place to work, teach, and learn. Final thanks are owed to my wife Elina Cymerman for her patience while I spent weekends writing and editing, and my whole family for their support throughout my career and, indeed, my life. Lynsey McCulloch thanks her fellow editors for their great ideas, hard work, and good humour. Thanks, too, go to Cathy Marston for supplying me with a film version of her ballet, Julia und Romeo, and for humouring my attempt to unpack her brilliant work. I’m also grateful to colleagues at Anglia Ruskin University and Coventry University for their support and I’d like to dedicate this – my first full-length book – to my family and to Rob Tovey. They’ve shown infinite patience!

viii Notes on Contributors

Zeno Ackermann is a Researcher and Lecturer in English Studies at Frankfurt’s Goethe University. He has published on poetics and ideology in nineteenth-century American literature, the remembrance of the National Socialist past and the Holocaust in Germany, and the reception of Shakespeare in twentieth- and twenty-first-century culture. Currently, he works on the interrelationships between the (British) novel and the mass media. Sarah Annes Brown is Professor of English Literature at Anglia Ruskin University, Cambridge, UK. Her publications include The Metamorphosis of Ovid: From Chaucer to Ted Hughes (1999), Devoted Sisters: Representations of the Sister Relationship in Nineteenth-Century British and American Literature (2003) and A Familiar Compound Ghost: Allusion and the Uncanny (2012). Pietro Deandrea is Associate Professor of English Literature at the University of Torino, Italy. He has published works on postcolonial literature (‘Fertile Crossings: Metamorphoses of Genre in Anglophone West African Literature’, 2002) and is a literary translator. He has recently edited ‘The Journal of William Beckford in Portugal and Spain’. Pascale Drouet is Professor at the University of Poitiers, France. She is the author of two monographs: Le vagabond dans l’Angleterre de Shakespeare, ou l’art de contrefaire à la ville et à la scène (2003) and Mise au ban et abus de pouvoir. Essai sur trois pièces tragiques de Shakespeare (2012). She has edited Shakespeare au XXème siècle: Mises en scène, mises en perspective de Richard II (2007), The Spectacular In and Around Shakespeare (2009) and co-edited ‘The True Blank of Thine Eye’: Approches critiques de King Lear (2008) and Le ban- nissement et l’exil en Europe aux XVIe et XVIIe siècles (2010). She is the editor of the online journal, Les Cahiers Shakespeare en devenir (http://shakespeare. edel.univ-poitiers.fr). Ewan Fernie is Professor of Shakespeare Studies at the Shakespeare Institute, University of Birmingham, UK. He is General Editor (with Simon Palfrey) of the Shakespeare Now! series. His latest book is The Demonic: Literature and Experience. Kinga Földváry is a senior lecturer in the Institute of English and American Studies at Pázmány Péter Catholic University, Hungary. Her main research interests include William Harrison’s Description of Britain, Shakespearean tragedy, problems of genre in film adaptations of Shakespeare’s plays, together with twentieth- and twenty-first-century British literature.

ix x Notes on Contributors

Seiji Furuya is Professor of English Literature at Seinan Gakuin University, Japan and Permanent Director of Fukuoka Japan–British Society and Chairperson of Kyushu Shakespeare Society. His publications include Present Researches on Shakespearean Productions in Japan (in Japanese, Fubaisha, 2010), and a translation of Shakespeare: The Basics by Sean McEvoy (2000) into Japanese (Osaka Kyoiku Tosho, 2007). Laura Grace Godwin teaches theatre history at Christopher Newport University, Virginia. While completing degrees from Ball State University, the Shakespeare Institute in Stratford-upon-Avon, and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, she was active as a stage manager and dra- maturg. She has held positions at New Mexico State, Parkland College, and with Midwestern State University’s British Studies Program. She has published in Theater Journal and Shakespeare Bulletin. Reina Green is an Associate Professor of English at Mount Saint Vincent University, Halifax, Canada, where she teaches Renaissance and contemporary drama. She has published in Early Modern Literary Studies, Studies in English Literature, English Studies in Canada, Theatre Research in Canada, Canadian Theatre Review, and two edited collections by Ashgate. Urszula Kizelbach is based in the Department of English Literature and Literary Linguistics at Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznan´, Poland. She was awarded her PhD in English Literature in 2011. She specializes in literary pragmatics; in particular a pragmatic analysis of Shakespearean drama. She is a review editor of Studia Anglica Posnaniensia: An International Review of English Studies, a quarterly journal issued by the Faculty of English, Adam Mickiewicz University. Robert I. Lublin is Chair of Performing Arts at the University of Massachusetts, Boston. He is the author of Costuming the Shakespearean Stage: Visual Codes of Representation in Early Modern Theatre and Culture (2011) and has published a number of articles on Early Modern English theatre and contemporary drama. Charles Marowitz is a theatre director, playwright and critic. He worked with Peter Brook to produce the Theatre of Cruelty season at the RSC in 1964. His works include a number of free adaptations of Shakespeare’s plays, published collectively as The Marowitz Shakespeare. Marowitz’s other publications include Recycling Shakespeare (2000), The Roar of the Canon (2002), and Murdering Marlowe (2005). Lynsey McCulloch is a Graduate Teaching Assistant in the Department of English and Languages at Coventry University, UK. Her current research focuses on the role of art within literature and the reinterpretation of Renaissance texts as dance works. She is currently developing a monograph Notes on Contributors xi on the figure of the animated statue in Early Modern drama and has recently published an essay on Edmund Spenser’s The Fairie Queene. Esme Miskimmin teaches at the University of Liverpool, UK. She has research interests in Crime Fiction and Shakespeare and occasionally combines the two. Simon Palfrey is Professor of English Literature at Oxford University and Fellow of Brasenose College. His books include Late Shakespeare: A New World of Words (1997), Doing Shakespeare (2005; revised second edition 2011), Shakespeare in Parts (2007, with Tiffany Stern), Romeo and Juliet (2012), and two forthcoming monographs, Shakespeare’s Possible Worlds and Strange Mutations (Chicago). He has written a play, Demons’ Land, inspired by Spenser’s Faerie Queene, and is the founding editor (with Ewan Fernie) of the Bloomsbury series Shakespeare Now! Theodora Papadopoulou completed her PhD at Royal Holloway, University of London, UK in 2010. Her thesis focuses on the subjectivity of Stephen Greenblatt’s critical work and argues for the value of subjectivity in criticism. Theodora has taught at Royal Holloway and the University of Cyprus. She is co-editor of Shakespeare and I (2012) and is currently working on a monograph based on her PhD thesis. Jenni Ramone is the author of Postcolonial Theories (2011), Salman Rushdie and Translation (2013), and co-editor of The Richard & Judy Book Club Reader (2011). She is Senior Lecturer in Postcolonial Studies at Nottingham Trent University, UK. Her research interests include translation theory, the public and digital performance of literature, and postcolonial literature and theory, particularly the literature of South Asia, the Middle East, and their diasporas. She is currently engaged in research on postcolonial women’s life-writing. Ann Thompson is Professor of English at King’s College London and has previously taught at Roehampton University and at the University of Liverpool. She is a General Editor of the Arden Shakespeare series and has edited all three texts of Hamlet for that series. She has also edited The Taming of the Shrew for Cambridge and has published books on Shakespeare’s Chaucer and on Shakespearean metaphor. She is currently editing Cymbeline for Norton and working on a book on Shakespearean metonymy. Kate Wilkinson is an Associate Lecturer at Sheffield Hallam University, UK. She was awarded her PhD in 2010 for a thesis on Shakespeare’s history plays in performance. She has published a number of scholarly articles and performance reviews. She has a note forthcoming on allusions to Nathaniel Richards’s Tragedy of Messalina in Shakespeare’s Richard II, and has a chapter on the performance history of Richard III forthcoming in Richard III: A Critical Guide to be published by Continuum. xii Notes on Contributors

Rowland Wymer is a Professor of English at Anglia Ruskin University, Cambridge, UK. His publications include Suicide and Despair in the Jacobean Drama (1986), Webster and Ford (1995), and Derek Jarman (2005), as well as a number of co-edited collections of essays, including Neo-Historicism (2000), The Accession of James I: Historical and Cultural Consequences (2006), and J. G. Ballard: Visions and Revisions (2012). He is currently working on a book on science fiction and religion, and editing The Witch of Edmonton for the Oxford edition of The Collected Works of John Ford. 1 Introduction Sarah Annes Brown, Robert I. Lublin and Lynsey McCulloch

Entering the twenty-first century, the plays of Shakespeare and his contemporaries continue to find enthusiastic new audiences. Companies perform Shakespearean drama around the globe, new movie versions appear regu- larly, and emerging genres, new social media for example, find fresh ways of making Shakespeare their own. At a glance, this seems counterintuitive; as the Western Canon has expanded to include a range of voices that were previously excluded, one would expect the prevalence and importance of 400-year-old plays to diminish, making room for other works. Instead, the plays of Shakespeare and his contemporaries have found new articulation, and have provided a medium through which the concerns and experiences of our own age can be expressed. Contemporary artists, including writers, directors, scholars, and more have made the works of Shakespeare and his contemporaries the material out of which they construct their own artistic projects, boldly and liberally reshaping the past to address the present, reinventing the Renaissance so that it speaks with purpose to the contemporary moment. To make sense of this cultural phenomenon, the third Scaena conference, held at Anglia Ruskin University in 2008, was begun with the express purpose of exploring Shakespeare and his contemporaries in adaptation and performance. Drawing and building upon the best work presented at this conference, this collection aims to map out the extraordinary range of approaches that mark the recent history of Shakespearean appropriation. The chapters included in this volume reveal the multiplicity of ways in which early modern English drama has been deployed in order to address the needs of specific artistic, historical, and social moments. During the late twentieth century, this practice took on a particular significance as artists turned with increasing frequency to these works, establishing their importance even as they took liberties with their form and content. Moving into the twenty-first century, this practice has expanded to include new approaches, new media, new directions, and new challenges. A study of recent adaptations of Shakespeare and his contemporaries, therefore, provides a special window into the workings of culture, for these fresh

11 2 Reinventing the Renaissance responses mark developments in the society that creates and consumes these new works.

Part I Popular Culture

In any discussion of cultural transmission, the issue of popular appeal provokes debate but the canonical status of Shakespeare further complicates our understanding of the popular; accusations of crass reductionism – the Shakespearean text as commodity – are set alongside the benefits of improved access to culture and the interaction of whole communities, including online groups, with the literature of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Distinguishing the champions of popular culture from their critics is far from straightforward. As the chapters in Part I demonstrate, even those committed to raising the level of engagement with Shakespeare and his contemporaries – within both pedagogy and the wider culture – often struggle with the implications of consumerism and the methods used to render these literary texts ‘popular’. Yet the sheer energy and variety of today’s more popular responses to early modern English drama reflect a genuinely dynamic tradition, and one which contains the potential for intriguing cultural collisions. The chapters in Part I examine the transmission of early modern texts within contemporary popular culture, asking whether the appeal of Shakespeare and his peers lies in their continued relevance or rather in their potential for cooption by more pragmatic, and presentist, agendas. The four contributors to Part I also demonstrate the variety of critical engagement with issues of Shakespearean adaptation in the twenty-first century. No longer the realm of the dedicated performance critic, literary ‘afterlives’ now attract a wealth of discursive and artistic response, a development this volume is keen to celebrate. Ann Thompson, one of the United Kingdom’s foremost textual scholars, uses her recent editorial work on Arden Shakespeare’s ground-breaking tripartite edition of Hamlet as the basis for her discussion of the play’s prequels and sequels. By contrast, Charles Marowitz – a dramatist, director and critic – harnesses his experience of creative practice to explore the twentieth century’s cinematization of Shakespeare. Reina Green and Kinga Földváry also discuss cinema’s fas- cination with early modern drama and both use their study of Shakespeare on film to explore new areas of reception and citation, including paratexts (posters, trailers, and DVD extra features) and genre shifts. All four writers, in keeping with Part I’s focus on the popular, consider issues of audience identity, expectation, and influence. The role of the consumer in the recreation of early modern texts is also acknowledged, a shift in cultural ownership made possible by the new media revolution. The emergence of blogging, user-generated content, and social networking on the Internet has created new opportunities for accessing culture and for producing it. This volume traces these recent developments, but without neglecting the Introduction 3 historical appeal to popularity made by Shakespeare’s adaptors via fiction, drama, biography, radio, television, and film. Ann Thompson in Chapter 2, ‘Hamlet: Looking Before and After: Why So Many Prequels and Sequels?’ examines nineteenth-, twentieth-, and twenty- first-century reimaginings of Shakespeare’s Hamlet, describing the play as ‘an itch we simply cannot stop scratching’. Hamlet’s prequels and sequels have been explanatory, revisionary, derogatory, and even, in the case of Lincoln Phifer’s automatic-writing exercise Hamlet in Heaven, supernatural in origin. The gaps, riddles, and inconsistencies of Shakespeare’s text(s) offer tantalizing opportunities to the creative mind and Thompson is alert to these ellipses and the varied works – good, bad and indifferent – they have inspired. Selecting several examples from writers eager to imagine a pre- and/or post-Hamlet reality, Thompson looks at the different ways in which Shakespearean prequels and sequels have diverged from their source material. Rejecting the play’s revenge motif, these works subvert its generic identity, an act of explicit infidelity to the playwright. Their audience need have no respect for the Bard either; Mary Cowden Clarke’s The Girlhood of Shakespeare’s Heroines provides ‘two levels of meaning – one for those who haven’t read Shakespeare’s play and one for those who have’. While adaptations are commentaries on their sources for some consumers, they are alternatives to them for others. Thompson’s valuable research also encompasses ‘local’ Shakespeare, the employment of early modern drama by modern communities in a civic context, such as centennial events, amateur dramatics, and reading groups, an area of reception typically excluded from readings of Shakespeare and the popular. In Chapter 3, ‘Educating for Pleasure: The Textual Relations of She’s the Man’, Reina Green extends Thompson’s discussion of Shakespearean communities to include online networks and fan fiction. Social networking sites, such as Facebook and YouTube, allow enthusiasts to provide commentary on adaptations of early modern texts but also to produce their own editions of the plays. Fan authorship as a collective act, one facilitated by the interactive possibilities of the Internet, represents a fascinating new cultural phenomenon and locus of enquiry for performance and reception scholars. Green’s chapter follows recent critical trends in examining the appropriation of Shakespeare in cinema aimed at young people, but her analysis of teen films – specifically Andy Fickman’s 2006 loose movie adaptation of Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night, She’s The Man – is strengthened by her inclusion of supplementary materials provided by film studios in the form of DVD extra features, trailers, and other marketing tools. It also includes a crucial discussion of the way in which teen cinema intersects with additional contemporary film genres and other media, such as anime, manga, gaming, and pop music. Citing Emma French’s description of the attitude towards Shakespeare in cinema as one of both ‘veneration and irreverence’,1 Green asks whether referencing Shakespeare is a help or a hindrance in the 4 Reinventing the Renaissance

marketing of youth culture and queries the suppression of key elements from the plays, such as the homoerotic, in their filmic presentation. Kinga Földváry’s study of genre within cinematic and televisual representations of Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew argues in Chapter 4, ‘Brush up your Shakespeare’: Genre-Shift from Shakespeare to the Screen’, like Green’s chapter, that contemporary media and generic forms have more influence over Shakespearean adaptation than any early modern constructs. In keeping with the presentist approach that informs current critical practice, it is the synchronic aspects of Shakespearean film-making, rather than the diachronic, that establish a movie’s generic identity. Although some productions, notably those by the British Broadcasting Corporation (a public broad- caster), reference Shakespeare to legitimate their offering, others flagrantly discard the Bard in their efforts to reach audiences and popularize early modern drama. Földváry concludes, with Green, that DVDs – via their packaging and extra video features – offer most proof of Shakespeare’s presence, but even the BBC’s ShakespeaRE-Told series, a project that explicitly celebrates Shakespeare, minimizes his contribution, reducing the heterogeneous genres implicit within Shakespearean comedy to the homogenous, single genre of TV (soap opera) drama. Charles Marowitz acted as assistant director and dramaturge on Peter Brook’s seminal 1962 production of Shakespeare’s King Lear for the Royal Shakespeare Company and his considerable theatrical experience and sub- stantial work in criticism make him a valuable contributor to this volume. In Chapter 5, ‘Cinematizing Shakespeare’, Marowitz’s assessment of Brook’s film version of King Lear as a failure – both as cinema and as Shakespearean adaptation – offers a useful insight into the translation of theatre into cinema, and Marowitz is ideally placed to trace that conversion and its various complexities. Setting the ‘plot rip-offs’ of films such as 10 Things I Hate About You, a teen version of The Taming of the Shrew, and the avant-garde fantasies of directors such as Peter Greenaway against the staid and ‘faithful’ reproductions of other movies, Marowitz asks whether the middle ground of Shakespearean film is all that is left available for potential adaptors. Like the other contributors to Part I, he considers whether ‘infidelity may well be the more honorable course’, especially considering the ambiguities and ambivalences of the source material, and examines whether cinematizing Shakespeare is the same as popularizing it.

Part II Criticism and Creativity

Infidelity in adaptation is not of course a new phenomenon. Before the end of the seventeenth century, Restoration playwrights, such as Dryden and Davenant, freely adapted the plays of an earlier generation for political, artistic, and commercial reasons. A similar range of motives has inspired some of the most recent creative adaptations of these plays. Writers, film-makers, Introduction 5 and other creative artists have been driven by feminism, postcolonialism, postmodernism – and the bottom line. Texts such as Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, Jane Smiley’s 1000 Acres or Peter Greenaway’s Prospero’s Books are, as a direct result of their links with Shakespeare, included on many university syllabuses. And since the establishment of English as an academic discipline, with Shakespeare at its centre, there has been no shortage of critical engagement with these responses. But recently, critical and creative responses to Shakespeare have begun to merge. The boundaries between the two activities, within the discipline as a whole, not just Shakespeare studies, seem to have become more perme- able. We normally think of a creative piece as an object of critical scrutiny but it may also function as a critical intervention in its own right, and this potential is being increasingly acknowledged and articulated. One reason for this shift is the increasing prominence of creative writing within the university sector. The growing commodification of creative writing as a subject of study, of educational consumption, has led to its greater intersection with academic English and to an awareness or perception that creative writing can itself be classed as ‘research’. The growing popularity of PhDs in creative writing and the impulse to include the many creative practitioners working in English departments in the UK’s research assessment exercises are two pragmatic factors behind this reconsideration of the way the relationship between criticism and creativity has been viewed over recent years. This greater fusion between criticism and creativity has impacted most noticeably on practitioners, as it is they who have been encouraged to ‘pro- fessionalize’ their practice, and demonstrate why their novel or play should be classed as a form of research in its own right, not simply an object for someone else’s research. But the movement hasn’t all been one way, and the pieces included in Part II of Reinventing the Renaissance, devoted to ‘Criticism and Creativity’, demonstrate the willingness of critics to inhabit, or at least be influenced by, creative forms. Included here are two chapters on the role of creativity in the writings of one of the most celebrated and influential Shakespeare scholars working today, Stephen Greenblatt. The first, Chapter 6, Theodora Papadopoulou’s ‘Circulating Through “languages and tales”: Stephen Greenblatt’s Cardenio’, takes as its subject Greenblatt’s most obviously ‘creative’ project, his imaginative recreation of Shakespeare’s missing play Cardenio, co-authored with Charles Mee. Although in fact, as Papadopoulou points out, it might more accurately be described as an imaginative response to the idea of the missing play rather than a reconstruction or pastiche. The way the play flouts any attempt at historical accuracy, the writers’ apparent willingness to face up to the gap between their own (post)modern moment and Shakespeare’s time, presents an intriguing contrast with Greenblatt’s critical practice. He is famous as a new historicist, but perhaps a presentist message can be detected in the play. The (inevitable) gap between this Cardenio and its missing Shakespearean source seems to 6 Reinventing the Renaissance mirror the less obtrusive but no less escapable gaps between a critical text, a modern reading, and its own ‘source’, the text it aims to illuminate. As Papadopoulou demonstrates, the new Cardenio is brazenly inauthentic and includes many strongly personal touches reflecting the authors’ own cir- cumstances, such as the inclusion of a character, Melchiore the cook, who is based on an Italian chef hired by Greenblatt and Mee. But there is perhaps something authentically Shakespearean about such a move. Shakespeare was apparently happy to drop a reference to a local pub into a play which was supposedly set in Medieval Denmark. ‘Go get thee to Yaughan, fetch me a stoup of liquor’, demands the first gravedigger, in what is usually thought to be an anachronistic and destabilizing reference to some local innkeeper. The gaps in Shakespeare’s biographical record have proved tempting to several creative writers. Ulysses includes an extended speculative account of the effect of the playwright’s family dynamics on the plays. His life has been alchemized into speculative fictions by writers such as Anthony Burgess, who wrote a novel, Nothing Like the Sun, about Shakespeare’s love life, and by Marc Norman and Tom Stoppard, co-authors of the screenplay for the 1998 film Shakespeare in Love. Because Shakespeare is simultaneously so elusive and so iconic, it is not surprising that some creative responses to his life have verged on the fantastic. ‘The Shakespeare Code’, an episode from the long-running British science fiction series Dr Who, depicts a Shakespeare whose wonderful words have the power to summon alien beings to earth – and to banish them. Neil Gaiman’s graphic novel sequence, ‘The Sandman’, invents a supernatural inspiration for Shakespeare’s two most magical plays, A Midsummer Night’s Dream and The Tempest, and suggests that Shakespeare’s genius was a gift from the god Morpheus. But it is difficult even for writers of more conventional biographical accounts of Shakespeare to remain completely uncontaminated by fiction and fantasy. Stephen Greenblatt’s 2004 biography of Shakespeare, Will in the World, is the focus of Urszula Kizelbach in Chapter 7, ‘Peter Ackroyd’s Shakespeare the Biography and Stephen Greenblatt’s Will in the World, or Facts and Fiction about William Shakespeare’. Here she compares Greenblatt’s book with Peter Ackroyd’s Shakespeare: The Biography which was published the following year. Biography as a genre is inherently hybrid as it invites a creative, novelistic approach, even though it presents itself as a work of fact. It might be assumed that a punctiliously scholarly biography would be more valuable and convincing than one that was too creative. But there is a particular kind of ‘authenticity’, or effect of authenticity, which only a creative approach can provide. Kizelbach demonstrates that although Ackroyd, the novelist, is predictably more ‘novelistic’ in his approach, it is in fact Greenblatt who is the more speculative and the more inclined, like Shakespeare in his own history plays, to insert a psychologically convincing detail or conjecture whenever a gap in Shakespeare’s life calls for further explanation. Greenblatt, Kizelbach notes, Introduction 7 builds on the possibility that Shakespeare witnessed a masque at Kenilworth, attended by Queen Elizabeth, which may have involved a mechanical dol- phin, and spins this slight and dubious fact into an influence behind allusions to dolphins in Twelfth Night and A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Greenblatt’s enthusiasm for the Kenilworth story seems to spring from the same kind of impulse which drove Gaiman to confect his more obviously magical ‘back- story’. There is an artistic satisfaction in bringing Shakespeare and Elizabeth together and in seeming to identify the ‘source’ of some of Shakespeare’s images. And other biographical responses to Shakespeare reveal similarly novelistic, or creative, impulses at work. Some of these seem to hinge on a longing for the life of such a momentous figure to have a punchline, for him to be the centre of some strange conspiracy, to be a Catholic or even an Arab, to be some other person completely, to be Queen Elizabeth herself. If Greenblatt’s biography has been enriched – or contaminated – by fiction, other critics of Shakespeare have embraced creativity more wholeheartedly as an alternative means of illuminating his works. On one level Chapter 8, ‘The Weird Sisters (from The Life and Death of the Brothers Macbeth)’, co-authored by Simon Palfrey and Ewan Fernie, is a sequel to Macbeth, taking up the story where the play ends. But it is also a phantasmagoric revisioning of the play which responds to the source text’s atmosphere of obscene disorder through a new fiction which is equally disruptive and transgressive. Echoes of Macbeth itself, its past (the child Gruoch seems to be an avatar of the dead Lady Macbeth), and its future are fused together. The voices from the play’s future are of particular interest. (The novel is full of echoes of later responses to the demonic or apocalyptic by Dostoevsky, Cormac McCarthy, and Wagner.) Rather than simply identifying Macbeth’s affinities with other plays by Shakespeare or its influence upon later works, The Life and Death of the Brothers Macbeth instantiates these links, creating a fictional world whose instability, and permeability to influences from the past and future, complements the uncanniness of the original play. Macbeth’s mysterious son, Ross, is a synthesis of numerous figures of guilt and exile including Philoctetes, the Fisher King, and Edgar as Poor Tom. A potentially dryly academic study of sources and influences is thus transformed into a creative text which mirrors the play’s own preoccupation with cyclicality, prophecy, and fate. The Life and Death of the Brothers Macbeth acknowledges and embraces the fact that we read past writers in the light of our own age’s preoccupations and with a full awareness of all the intervening influences a writer such as Shakespeare has inspired. We cannot simply recuperate an ‘authentic’ reading of Shakespeare any more than Shakespeare could offer us a fully ‘authentic’ Rome or Athens. This question of a more complex, ‘presentist’ authenticity is also of concern to Pietro Deandrea in Chapter 9, ‘“You kiss like in a movie”: A Contemporary Translation/Adaptation of Romeo and Juliet’. By contrast with Fernie and Palfrey, he is a creative practitioner, a translator, reflecting here on his own 8 Reinventing the Renaissance practice in translating Romeo and Juliet for a recent Italian production by Teatro Stabile Torino. This was an inter-cultural, as well as inter-linguistic, adaptation, for the central characters were transformed into ‘kidults’ in their early thirties, reflecting the way today’s society has led to an increasingly prolonged period of adolescence. Different kinds of adjustments and compensations came into play when translating the actual text. Translations have a cumulative quality, reflecting various layers of a text’s reception, as well as more general cultural and linguistic shifts. Many translations of classical texts, for example, include passing allusions to Shakespeare, reversing the direction of influence between, say, the Oresteia and Hamlet. A text’s critical as well as its creative proliferation can also have an impact on its subsequent presentation, and Deandrea discusses the influence on the new translation of studies drawing out the play’s homoerotic overtones, result- ing in, for example, the addition of new lines for Mercutio expressing his aversion to the idea of a married Romeo. This aspect of the translation is an example of the way in which creative and critical responses to Shakespeare often develop in step with one another, partly because they are the products of the same cultural moment, partly because they feed off one another, rein- forcing certain interpretive paths.

Part III National Responses

Shakespeare is often invoked as an icon of Englishness yet his works have proved conspicuously portable. The chapters in Part III, devoted to ‘National Responses’, reflect the many different ways in which contemporary responses to the plays from different countries and cultures negotiate their relationship with the source material. National identity, and the struggle between different identities, is at the heart of several of the plays, and many writers and other adapters have used these texts as a way of interrogating new instantiations of ethnic or cultural tension. Titus Andronicus has proved a suggestive vehicle for exploring hos- tilities between South Africa’s warring communities, for example,2 and Silvio Purcarete has used the long and futile war presented in Troilus and Cressida as a spur to reflection on Europe’s East/West divide.3 But whereas some productions inventively translate Shakespeare’s loci of conflict into entirely new contexts, modern German productions of The Merchant of Venice cannot escape from the play’s original context, conflict between Christians and Jews. In Chapter 10, ‘At the Threshold – Remembrance and Topicality in Recent Productions of The Merchant of Venice in Germany’, Zeno Ackermann explores post-war productions of the play in Germany, demonstrating how it has served as a seminal object for confrontations with the Holocaust. Productions of Shakespeare’s play have initiated, foregrounded, or complicated cultural negotiations between conflicting – and frequently combined – processes of repression, forgetting, and remembrance. Introduction 9

Seiji Furuya’s topic in Chapter 11, ‘Kabuki Shakespeare: The NINAGAWA Twelfth Night’, is the relationship between Shakespeare and kabuki. Kabuki theatre, with its all-male cast, emphasis on cross-dressing and disguise, and reliance on music and singing, is an appropriate medium for a revisioning of Twelfth Night. Ninagawa’s kabuki Twelfth Night exploits these latent par- allels between Shakespearean comedy and kabuki yet also, like the Teatro Stabile Torino’s Romeo and Juliet,4 has to make dramatic adjustments to Shakespeare in order to ensure that the effect on the audience is ‘authentic’. Thus Andrew Aguecheek’s character, by a process of cultural substitution, becomes comically rotund rather than lean and lanky. But the most strik- ing change is that (in accordance with the kabuki tradition whereby an actor demonstrates his flexibility by playing both female and male roles in quick succession) Viola and Sebastian are played by the same actor. Furuya discusses the ways in which this particular instance of cultural translation offers an enriching and inventive new perspective on Shakespeare’s own exploration of gender and identity. Very different from the confident cultural distinctness which allows kabuki to co-opt Shakespeare unembarrassedly, postcolonial responses to the plays have tended to see them as sites of anxiety. Jenni Ramone in Chapter 12, ‘“Downright unsaxogrammatical”? – Do Postcolonial Adaptations Contest, or Reinforce Shakespeare’s Canonical Status?’, investigates different strategies that writers have used to disrupt or interrogate Shakespeare’s canonical status, and evaluates their varying degrees of success. She identifies a correlation between the projection of a strong narrating voice, or presence, in an adaptation and the ability of that adaptation to resist Shakespeare’s hegemony. In his short story ‘Yorick’, Salman Rushdie stamps his own authority on his text by borrowing a technique from colonialism itself, the reinvention of the past, to challenge the legitimacy of Hamlet, offering us scenes from the prince’s past which subvert Shakespeare’s own version of events. Tim Supple’s 2003 television production of Twelfth Night also makes use of an extended back story, which has the effect of disrupting Shakespeare’s authority. Even though the production at first seems comparatively faithful, subtle adjustments to the original text allow the adapter’s ‘voice’ to displace that of Shakespeare. In the final chapter in Part III, Chapter 13, ‘“My dream was lengthened after life”: Ghosts in Michael Boyd’s History Cycle’ by Kate Wilkinson, we return to England, and the use of ghosts in Michael Boyd’s 2006–8 staging of Shakespeare’s histories. One of the effects created by this production’s many ghosts is of heightened metatheatricality, as their presence encourages the audience to see the plays as ‘history’ plays with the past infiltrating not just the present of the play world but also the present of the real world. The haunted protagonists, as they compete for power and seek occasion for war, haunt us in their turn, and the fact that the productions formed part of a season titled ‘This England’ invites the audience to extend the cycle’s ironic repetitions into our own historical moment. 10 Reinventing the Renaissance

Part IV Visualizing Performance

In the introduction to their collection Early Modern Visual Culture, Peter Erickson and Clark Hulse make a telling observation about the scope of visual culture. They note that that ‘if visual culture is the study of the social construction of visual experience, then equally it is the study of the visual construction of social experience.’5 This duality has significance, for it intro- duces the idea that visual studies encompasses more than the study of the social aspects of the visual. It also contains within its purview the visual construction of the social, the ways that artists (and non-artists) render into images the historical and cultural moments in which they live. Three chapters in this collection undertake this project, examining the very different ways that Shakespearean texts, engaged with particular social moments, have found visual articulation. The significance of the visual articulation of Shakespearean texts becomes apparent when we note that it directly taps into W. B. Worthen’s notion of the ‘force’ of modern performance. Worthen finds it reductive to examine modern performances of Shakespeare (or other authors for that matter) merely as iterations of the written text. He states that ‘[a] stage performance is not determined by the internal “meanings” of the text, but is a site where the text is put into production, gains meaning in a different mode of production through the labor of its agents and the regimes of performance they use to refashion it as performance material.’6 The essays in this volume that are devoted to the visual aspects of Shakespeare explore the diverse ways that the plays have been put into particular forms of production, creating images that, in turn, reveal the cultural forces engaged by the artists. The first chapter in this section, Chapter 14, ‘“Four legs and two voices”: An Interview with Édouard Lekston’ by Pascale Drouet, immediately departs from typical studies of modern productions of Shakespeare by examining Édouard Lekston’s graphic novels. Shakespeare illustration is not a common or fashionable practice (it is usually associated with children’s editions) yet Lekston employs the form to create complex pieces worthy of close analysis. Significantly, he builds on some of the sophisticated and creative strategies film-makers have used to produce the effects of Shakespeare’s language in a visual medium. Thus Lekston is as likely to depict Shakespeare’s imagery as events from the surface action of the play, or else to fuse these two together as he does in the illustration depicting the banished Bolingbroke returning to the ‘peaceful bosom’ of England. Bolingbroke is presented kneeling on the huge figure of an old man, simultaneously the personified England and Bolingbroke’s angry interlocutor, York. Here and elsewhere, the preoccupations of the plays’ critics find their way into Lekston’s creative response to Shakespeare. The illustration of Prospero, his cloak depicting the tempest itself, reflects the common association between Prospero and Shakespeare made by readers and critics. A more subtle detail is another example of the Introduction 11 way in which any new creative response to Shakespeare may bear traces of various intervening works. Lekston explains that he deliberately made his Prospero resemble Marlon Brando in order to suggest a link with the character of Kurtz in Francis Ford Coppola’s 1979 film Apocalypse Now. Many critics have offered postcolonial readings of The Tempest and anal- ysed the presence of the play in texts by Caribbean writers such as Derek Walcott. Lekston pursues a rather different project, as he seems to be creating rather than identifying such a link. Although strictly literary scholars of Shakespeare might balk at such creative choices, Lekston owns them and creates discrete works of art that draw upon Shakespeare but are distinc- tively of their own time. Chapter 15, ‘Shakespearean Visual Semiotics and the Silver Screen’ by Robert I. Lublin, considers the topic of costuming, noting that the visual presentation of characters onstage has far-reaching implications for the construction of meaning in performance. As Stephen Orgel has noted, on the early modern London stages, ‘clothes make the woman, clothes make the man: the costume is of the essence’.7 And yet it is problematic, Lublin argues, to simply costume Shakespearean productions today as they were originally staged. We might, with considerable effort, get close to creating the costumes that were worn in a play’s original production, but the audience viewing the show today would not see the same thing that audiences saw in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Modern audiences lack insight into the visual semiotics whereby apparel was understood during the plays’ original performances. To investigate the nature of costume and the historically constructed practice of seeing, Lublin examines the ways in which three significant movie versions of Shakespeare have employed costumes. What becomes clear is that the very notion of ‘historically accurate costuming’ must be more thoroughly theorized and the practice of costuming productions should be more seriously considered. The third chapter examining notions of the visual, Chapter 16, ‘“Here’s that shall make you dance”: Movement and Meaning in Bern:Ballett’s Julia und Romeo’ by Lynsey McCulloch, explores the practice of render- ing Shakespeare into dance, an activity that demands the reinvention of Shakespeare for modern performance. Looking specifically at the 2009 pre- miere of the British choreographer Cathy Marston’s Julia und Romeo at the Bern:Ballett, McCulloch notes the long history of refiguring Shakespearean texts as dance, and the way in which this medium has embraced variety in both choreography and ideology. Germaine Greer has described ballet as ‘cultural cancer’ – a bourgeois and enervated theatre characterized by gender types, set steps, and the crippled bodies of its principal dancers. In her chapter, McCulloch argues that Marston’s production provides a potent challenge to Greer’s overarching thesis. By concentrating on Julia/Juliet as the memorial reconstructor of the ballet’s action and employing a hybrid use of classical and contemporary influences, Marston’s production proffers 12 Reinventing the Renaissance a notion of gendered identity that challenges the sexist aspects that Greer considers endemic to ballet and actually forwards feminist ideology.

Part V Non-Shakespearean Drama

Shakespeare is an industry, and the study of his works is mandated in many countries, ensuring that any mainstream adaptation of a familiar play will do good business at the box office. By contrast, the plays of his contemporaries, even if they are comparatively well known, lack this canonical, and thus financial, cachet. Perhaps this is why adaptations of plays by other Elizabethan and Jacobean dramatists often have a counter-cultural edge. Films such as Jarman’s Edward II and Alex Cox’s Revengers Tragedy (sic) self- consciously set out to shock and subvert. The (perceived) divide between ‘safe’ Shakespeare and his edgier contemporaries is articulated by Alex Cox in an online interview in which he claims that, whereas Shakespeare’s work ‘was constrained by the reactionary politics of his time’, the author of The Revenger’s Tragedy was writing in the freer atmosphere of Jacobean England.8 (Cox fails to acknowledge that many of Shakespeare’s plays were themselves Jacobean.) Although we may question whether Shakespeare was so self- evidently more reactionary than some of his contemporaries, it is certainly the case that non-Shakespearean dramas have sometimes caught the imagi- nation of those who choose to position themselves at the margins of our own culture, rather than at its centre. The three chapters in Part V all, in different ways, engage with or reflect the less canonical status of the non-Shakespeareans. In Chapter 17, ‘The Duchess of Malfi on Film: Peter Huby’s Quietus’, Rowland Wymer addresses the unconventional cinematic responses Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi has attracted, which range from Alex Cox’s (unrealized) plan to set the film ‘in a post-holocaust world with people slithering around in the ruins’, to Mike Figgis’s violent and shocking adaptation of the play in his metacinematic Hotel. But the main focus of Wymer’s chapter is Peter Huby’s Quietus (2002), a loose adaptation of Webster’s play set in seventeenth-century Yorkshire, which has never been commercially released. Like Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead (1966), it offers us a double re-enactment of its source, for we see The Duchess of Malfi being rehearsed by travelling players, even as it is more subtly echoed in the film’s main plot. Esme Miskimmin in Chapter 18, ‘The Act of Murder: Renaissance Tragedy and the Detective Novel’, examines the relationship between Jacobean revenge drama and the often marginalized genre of detective fiction. Significantly, the allusions she uncovers frequently function as clues. Readers who are familiar with the (comparatively little known) plays of the period will be far more likely to guess the murderer’s identity. This strategy, for practical reasons, would work less well with a Shakespearean intertext – the familiarity of, say, Hamlet, would make the puzzle too easy. In one novel, P. D. James’s Cover Her Introduction 13

Face, a recognition of the Websterian source may actually point to a different solution to the murder mystery, not the ‘canonical’ solution offered, it would seem, by James herself. The conventions of murder mysteries, the assumption that we will be given the correct answer, are subverted for those who know The Duchess of Malfi. In Chapter 19, ‘Fishing at the Swan: Swan Theatre Plays and the Shaping of an Interpretive Community’, Laura Grace Godwin analyses the way in which Marlowe’s The Jew of Malta was positioned as an explicitly ‘Ortonesque’ text by the Swan Theatre edition of The Jew of Malta which accompanied Barry Kyle’s 1987 revival of the play. In the introduction to this edition, Christopher Trussler maps the life of Christopher Marlowe (a supposed subversive and sex- ual outsider whose death was untimely and violent) on to the glittering, but brief career of playwright Joe Orton. The links between Orton, whose Loot was one of the last plays to be censored by the Lord Chamberlain, and Marlowe, some of whose works were burnt by order of the Archbishop of Canterbury, are suggestive, even irresistible, yet also potentially misleading or distorting. Once again the non-Shakespearean figure is being cast as the counter-cultural alternative to Shakespeare, ‘a subversive presence only just contained by the cultural respectability of the Royal producing organization and its house dramatist’, as Godwin puts it. This is part of Godwin’s larger exploration of the Swan Theatre play series and their place within the tradition of performance editions and memorial books documenting important revivals. Reinventing the Renaissance explores a wide range of cultural practices using a variety of critical approaches. And yet, these studies are tied together by their shared endeavour to make sense of the present by examining recent productions, adaptations, and appropriations of Shakespeare and his contemporaries. There is no indication that interest in these dramatic works will abate or even subside in the future. This book represents a significant critical intervention into our understanding of the relationship between the plays of Shakespeare and his contemporaries and the world in which we live, work, and create art. Neither ‘influence’ nor ‘reception’ does justice to the many subtle and varied negotiations traced here between our culture(s) and Shakespeare’s own. Today’s Shakespeare is inevitably viewed through the lens of the present, yet that present itself has been stamped by the works of Shakespeare and his contemporaries.

Notes

1. Emma French, Selling Shakespeare to Hollywood: The Marketing of Filmed Shakespeare Adaptations from 1989 into the New Millennium (Hatfield: University of Hertfordshire Press, 2006), 2. 2. In the Antony Sher–Gregory Doran 1995 production of Titus Andronicus at the Market Theatre, Johannesburg, the Romans were cast as nationalist Afrikaners and the Goths as black township gangsters. 3. This production was performed at the Katona Theatre, Budapest, in 2005. 14 Reinventing the Renaissance

4. The subject of Pietro Deandrea’s essay in this volume. 5. Peter Erickson and Clark Hulse, Early Modern Visual Culture: Representation, Race, and Empire in Renaissance England (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001), 1. 6. W. B. Worthen, Shakespeare and the Force of Modern Performance (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 23. 7. Stephen Orgel, Impersonations: The Performance of Gender in Shakespeare’s England (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 104. 8. http://www.alexcox.com/dir_revengerstragedy.htm Part I Popular Culture 2 Hamlet: Looking Before and After: Why So Many Prequels and Sequels?1 Ann Thompson

Why does Hamlet have prequels and sequels? Is it unusual in inviting readers, and more especially writers, to speculate about what might have hap- pened both before and after the events of the play? I’ll begin by citing a few moments in the text that have proved particularly inviting. First, the closet scene: Hamlet, in reply to Gertrude’s calling the murder of Polonius ‘a bloody deed’, says ‘A bloody deed? Almost as bad, good mother, / As kill a king and marry with his brother’, to which she replies ‘As kill a king’, and he says ‘Ay lady it was my word’ (3.4.25–8).2 The tone of Gertrude’s response is not indicated by punctuation, such as a question mark or an exclamation mark, in either of the ‘good’ texts, the Second Quarto and the First Folio, and the topic is not pursued. Interestingly, in the so-called ‘bad’ First Quarto, the Queen asks for an explanation: ‘Hamlet, what mean’st thou by these killing words?’ and goes on to deny the accusation: ‘But, as I have a soul, I swear by heaven, / I never knew of this most horrid murder’. It would seem that whoever compiled this text felt the need for a clarification of this important point, and many others have followed, arguing the case both for and against Gertrude with enthusiasm and ingenuity.3 Secondly, the graveyard scene: tossing up old skulls from the grave he is digging for Ophelia, the Gravedigger identifies one of them as that of Yorick, providing an opening for a kind of flashback to Hamlet’s boyhood, an opening that many have exploited, including of course Kenneth Branagh in his 1996 film. Thirdly, and perhaps most famously, in the last scene, Hamlet implores Horatio not to kill himself but to remain alive, at least for a time, in order to ‘tell my story’. Perhaps this is one reason why Horatio seems very important for those tempted to write prequels and sequels: some of them see themselves explicitly as taking on the role of Horatio and attempting to make a better job of it than he does in his admittedly vague and general account. It even becomes a joke in ‘The Mysterious Affair at Elsinore’, a 1949 radio talk by Michael Innes, where Horatio’s long-awaited six-volume Life and Letters of Hamlet the Dane has proved to be a great disappointment on publication, merely obfuscating the truth.4

17 18 Popular Culture

The play, then, raises important questions that it does not answer. It also contains an unusual amount of reflection and repetition, including the dumb show and the play within the play. Hamlet’s story is mirrored by those of Laertes, Fortinbras, Pyrrhus, and ‘one Lucianus, nephew to the king’ (3.2.237). Perhaps this structure provokes further repetitions and variations as writers extrapolate characters from the play and either try to explain inconsistencies or invent additional narratives for them. Most, but not all, of the prequels and sequels that I intend to discuss (a small selection from an enormous field) reject Hamlet’s genre as a dramatic tragedy and choose instead the short story, the novel, the radio talk, or even the personal mythology. Some of them reject or question the revenge motif and many find fault with the play’s gender politics. Some are playful and self- conscious, perfectly well aware that they are indulging in the kind of specu- lation that modern scholars would deplore, while others are quite serious about taking on and perhaps criticizing one of the most famous works in the English literary canon, not always seeing its enormous influence as benign.

Prequels

I shall start with four very different prequels, all of which attempt to explain the events of the play by providing ‘back stories’ for some of its leading characters. One of my own favourites (but one which is usually disliked intensely by students taking my MA course on ‘Hamlet and its afterlife’) is Margaret Atwood’s brisk four-page rewriting of the closet scene from the Queen’s point of view in ‘Gertrude Talks Back’ in her collection of short pieces called Good Bones.5 In this version of the dialogue (which is actually a monologue), Gertrude responds wearily:

Yes, I’ve seen those pictures, thank you very much. I know your father was handsomer than Claudius […] but I think it’s about time I pointed out to you that your Dad just wasn’t a whole lot of fun. Noble, sure, I grant you. But Claudius, well, he likes a drink now and then. He appreciates a decent meal. He enjoys a laugh, know what I mean? (p. 16)

She tries to warn Hamlet off Ophelia: ‘If you ask me there’s something off about that girl. Borderline. Any little shock could push her right over the edge. Go get yourself someone more down-to-earth’ (p. 17). Finally she addresses the main point:

Oh! You think what? You think Claudius murdered your Dad? Well, no wonder you’ve been so rude to him at the dinner-table! If I’d known that I could have put you straight in no time flat. It wasn’t Claudius, darling. It was me. (p. 18)